WordPress Technical SEO Checklist: What Actually Moves Rankings

Technical SEO is the layer between Google and the content on your site. Done well, it lets Google find, understand, and rank what you’ve written. Done badly, even excellent content gets buried. This checklist covers the items that actually affect rankings, with the WordPress-specific implementation notes.

The checklist is ordered by impact — items at the top move the most rankings, items at the bottom are housekeeping.

High-Impact Items

1. Confirm the site is crawlable and indexable.

In robots.txt: confirm you’re not blocking what should be indexed. The default WordPress robots.txt is fine; if a previous developer added Disallow: / to block staging, confirm that’s been removed for production.

In WordPress Settings → Reading: “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” must be unchecked. This is the #1 silent ranking killer — sites that were set to noindex during development and never switched back.

Check Google Search Console → Pages report. Look at Indexed vs Not Indexed. Any important pages in “Not Indexed” with reasons like “Discovered – currently not indexed” or “Crawled – currently not indexed” need attention.

2. Submit a valid XML sitemap.

WordPress core generates /wp-sitemap.xml automatically. Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and other SEO plugins generate enhanced versions. Submit one (not both) to Google Search Console → Sitemaps.

Confirm the sitemap includes all important pages and excludes admin pages, login pages, search results, and any noindex content.

3. Set up canonical URLs.

Every page should have a tag pointing to itself (or to the canonical version if the page is a duplicate). WordPress core handles this for posts and pages; Yoast/Rank Math handles it for archives and taxonomies.

Common WordPress canonical problems:

• Paginated archives (/page/2/) canonical to themselves, not to page 1.
• Tag and category archives that could be duplicate content with the posts they contain.
• WooCommerce product variations creating duplicate URLs.

4. Pass Core Web Vitals.

LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1. Full detail: WordPress Core Web Vitals and WordPress Speed Optimization.

Failed Core Web Vitals don’t sink rankings catastrophically, but they cost rank consistently. Sites passing all three rank better than otherwise-equivalent sites failing them.

5. Internal linking.

Every important page should be linked from somewhere on the site, and pages should link to related content. WordPress’s “Related Posts” widgets help; manual editorial linking helps more.

Common gaps:

• Cornerstone content not linked from prominent navigation.
• Blog posts not linking to product pages or service pages.
• Service pages not linking to supporting articles (the issue the entire pillar-spoke model is designed to fix).

6. Mobile-friendly rendering.

Google indexes the mobile version of the site (mobile-first indexing has been default since 2021). The mobile site must show the same content as desktop, render correctly on small screens, and have tappable interactive elements.

Test with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test (search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly) and check Search Console → Mobile Usability for issues.

Medium-Impact Items

7. Schema markup.

Structured data that helps Google understand the content type. The schemas that matter for most WordPress sites:

• Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage.
• Article schema on blog posts.
• Product schema on WooCommerce product pages (most WooCommerce-aware SEO plugins handle this).
• BreadcrumbList schema on inner pages.
• FAQ schema on FAQ sections.
• Review schema on customer testimonials and product reviews.

Yoast SEO and Rank Math generate most of these automatically. Verify what’s being output using Google’s Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results).

8. Image SEO.

• alt attributes on all images, descriptive (not “image123.jpg”).
• File names that describe the image (“blue-running-shoes.jpg” not “IMG_4823.jpg”).
• Compressed file sizes (covered in WordPress Speed Optimization).
• Width and height attributes to prevent CLS.

9. HTTPS everywhere.

SSL on the entire site, not just checkout. Mixed content (HTTP resources on an HTTPS page) breaks security indicators and confuses Google’s indexing.

Force HTTPS via .htaccess redirect or via WordPress settings (Settings → General → both URLs set to https://).

10. 301 redirects for moved or removed content.

When you delete a post, redirect its URL to the most relevant remaining page. When you change a URL, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new.

Redirection (free plugin) or Rank Math’s redirect manager handle this. Don’t rely on 404s — they bleed link equity and create dead ends for crawlers.

11. URL structure.

Set WordPress Settings → Permalinks to “Post name” (slug-based URLs). The default “Plain” setting (?p=123) is bad for SEO.

For WooCommerce, the default /product/[slug]/ is fine. Don’t add the shop base to product URLs unless you have a specific reason.

Low-Impact / Housekeeping

12. Hreflang for multilingual sites.

If the site has multiple language versions, hreflang tags tell Google which version to serve to which audience. Polylang, WPML, and TranslatePress handle this.

If the site is monolingual, ignore.

13. RSS feed configuration.

WordPress generates an RSS feed automatically. If you don’t use it, don’t worry about it. If you do, confirm it’s not blocked in robots.txt and that posts appear correctly.

14. Pagination tags.

rel="next" and rel="prev" were deprecated by Google in 2019 but still useful as semantic markup. Don’t spend time on this if you have higher-impact issues.

15. Author archives.

If the site has only one author, author archives are duplicate content. Either disable them (most SEO plugins offer this) or canonicalize to the homepage.

What’s Usually NOT Worth Doing

• Obsessing over keyword density. Google figured this out 15 years ago.
• Manually optimizing meta titles for click-through one at a time (do them all in a sweep).
• Building XML sitemaps from scratch when a plugin does it perfectly.
• Adding schema for content types that don’t apply to your site.
• “Optimizing” for Bing or DuckDuckGo at the expense of Google work — they use similar signals and reward similar work.

When to Do This Yourself vs Hire It Out

DIY works when:

• You have the time (40–80 hours total for a real audit and implementation).
• You’re comfortable in WordPress admin, FTP, Google Search Console, and at least one SEO plugin’s settings.
• The site is small enough to audit page-by-page.

A professional audit is more economical when:

• The site has hundreds or thousands of pages.
• You don’t have the time and aren’t going to make it.
• You’ve done the obvious items and rankings aren’t moving.
• The site is ecommerce and has WooCommerce-specific complexity.

Synergetic offers two paths:

• Technical SEO service — done-for-you implementation review for content WordPress sites, fixed price.
• Ecommerce Technical SEO Audit — for stores specifically, sold as one of the reports on the Reports page.

The full Services menu is at /services/. For broader site performance work that’s adjacent to technical SEO, see WordPress Speed Optimization.