Guides
WordPress SEO Audit Checklist: From Settings to Rendered HTML
A WordPress audit should find template-level faults, plugin conflicts, and unnecessary archives—not produce a list of generic green checks.
Starte ein frisches DomainLens-Audit und nutze den Report als Prioritätenliste.
Capture the WordPress environment before changing it
Record WordPress, theme, PHP, caching/CDN, active SEO plugin, page builder, multilingual plugin, ecommerce plugin, and deployment workflow. The same symptom can have different owners: a duplicate canonical may come from the theme and SEO plugin; a slow LCP may come from the builder or image CDN.
- Back up files and database before plugin or permalink changes.
- Use a staging copy for destructive tests, but keep staging blocked from indexing.
- Select sample URLs for posts, pages, categories, products, media, pagination, and custom post types.
Rule out accidental index blocking
WordPress documents the search visibility setting in Site Health , but a plugin, server header, or stale cache can still make the published response disagree.
- 1Open Settings → Reading and confirm “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not enabled on production.
- 2Check the live robots meta and X-Robots-Tag, not only the WordPress checkbox.
- 3Inspect robots.txt for blocks on public content, CSS, JavaScript, or uploads.
- 4Confirm each important URL returns 200 and the canonical uses the preferred HTTPS host.
- 5Compare the XML sitemap with the pages you actually want indexed.
Decide which WordPress archives deserve URLs
Count indexable URLs by type. If a 200-post site exposes thousands of tags, feeds, attachment pages, parameters, and pagination variants, the solution is a content model decision—not another sitemap submission.
| URL type | Keep indexable when | Otherwise |
|---|---|---|
| Categories | They are curated topic hubs with useful introductions and links | Merge, improve, or noindex |
| Tags | Each represents a real recurring topic and is maintained | Remove empty/one-post tags or noindex |
| Author archives | Multiple authors have meaningful profile/search demand | Disable or noindex on single-author sites |
| Date archives | Users search/browse content by date | Usually noindex or disable |
| Media attachment pages | They contain unique useful context | Redirect to media file or parent content |
| Internal search | Almost never | Noindex and keep out of sitemap |
Inspect templates and plugin output for collisions
View source and rendered HTML after clearing page, object, CDN, and browser caches. Disable suspected output in staging one layer at a time; do not edit generated HTML that the next request will rebuild.
- Exactly one title, meta description policy, robots directive, and canonical should reach the final head.
- The visible post title should be an H1; sidebar and logo headings should not create a competing document outline.
- Article, Product, Breadcrumb, and Organization schema must describe visible content and should not be duplicated by several plugins.
- Pagination pages need crawlable links and self-consistent canonicals; canonicalizing every page to page one can hide deeper posts.
- Multilingual pages need reciprocal hreflang and self-canonicals, not canonicals back to English.
Audit content and internal discovery by template
Export URLs with title, H1, word count, canonical, status, inlinks, and indexability. Group them by post type. Repeated titles and thin intros across location or service pages require editorial consolidation, while orphan posts need links from current hubs—not merely sitemap inclusion.
WordPress performance: trace before adding another plugin
Measure one cold and one cached request. Slow uncached TTFB points toward hosting, PHP workers, database queries, remote calls, or object caching. Slow LCP with fast TTFB points toward the hero request, CSS, fonts, or builder rendering. Poor INP points toward main-thread JavaScript and third parties.
- Remove unused plugins and scripts before installing an optimization bundle.
- Generate correctly sized modern images; do not lazy-load the above-the-fold LCP image.
- Validate cache headers for HTML and static assets and confirm logged-out users receive cache hits.
- Test forms, cart, consent, search, and menus after deferring JavaScript.
Turn the crawl into a release checklist
Use the broader technical SEO checklist to keep WordPress-specific findings in the same deployment order as server, indexing, and content checks.
- 1Prioritize index blocking, wrong canonicals, 5xx/404 paths, and template-wide duplication first.
- 2Apply one controlled change in staging and test representative URLs plus edge cases.
- 3Deploy, purge every relevant cache, and rerun DomainLens on the live pages.
- 4Validate Search Console rendered HTML and sitemap processing.
- 5Monitor index coverage, organic landing pages, and server errors; roll back regressions using the recorded baseline.