I’ve been building WordPress sites since before I even got into SEO, probably 13 or 14 years now. I’ve watched it evolve from a basic blogging platform into the powerhouse CMS it is today, and I’ve learned every trick in the book to make it perform for search.
The thing about WordPress that keeps me coming back is just how flexible it is for SEO. Unlike those templated website builders that lock you into their way of doing things, WordPress gives you near-total control over every aspect that matters for search performance.
I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with clients who built their site on Wix or Squarespace or (God forbid) GoDaddy, and now they’re wondering why they’re invisible in search results. They typically like how their site looks, but they’re getting nothing from Google. That’s when we start talking about WordPress as the solution.
What makes me laugh is that WordPress actually has a bit of a reputation for being complicated. And yeah, there’s definitely a learning curve if you’re starting from scratch. But once you’ve got it set up properly, it’s dead simple for clients to use, even the ones who are properly technophobic. They can easily add pages, blog posts, and make basic edits without breaking anything important on the SEO side.
In this guide, I’m going to walk you through everything I’ve learned about optimising WordPress for search. Not the basic “install Yoast and you’re done” rubbish you’ll find on most sites, but the actual strategies that make a real difference to rankings and traffic.
Before we dive into the specific techniques, let’s get something clear: WordPress absolutely demolishes those drag-and-drop website builders when it comes to SEO capabilities.
When you’re using platforms like Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy’s website builder, you’re essentially renting space in someone else’s house. You can rearrange the furniture a bit, but you can’t knock down walls or rewire the electrics. They’re built to be easy, not powerful.
WordPress, on the other hand, gives you the keys to the entire building. You can customise literally everything, from the URL structure to the server response times, from schema markup to image compression methods. This level of control is absolutely crucial for serious SEO.
I regularly see sites switching from these platforms to WordPress and experiencing traffic jumps of 30%, 50%, sometimes even 100% or more with the same basic content. The difference is just that stark.
Even with a completely standard installation, WordPress has some solid SEO advantages:
First off, its core architecture is relatively clean and crawler-friendly. Search engines like Google can easily understand the structure of a WordPress site.
The built-in permalink options let you create SEO-friendly URLs right from the start. None of that meaningless string of numbers and letters you sometimes see on other platforms.
WordPress also handles basic content hierarchy pretty well through its pages, posts, categories, and tags system, which helps establish topical relevance.
But here’s where the magic really happens, WordPress is infinitely extensible through plugins, themes, and custom code. You’re never stuck with the default options.
The WordPress plugin repository has over 59,000 plugins, with thousands specifically designed for SEO purposes. This means whatever SEO challenge you’re facing, someone has probably already built a solution for it.
Need to optimise image alt text in bulk? There’s a plugin for that. Want to automatically generate and submit XML sitemaps? Plugin. Looking to implement complex schema markup without writing code? Yep, plugin for that too.
The fact that there’s genuine competition between plugin developers also means these tools are constantly improving. When Google rolls out an algorithm update, the major SEO plugins typically adapt within days or weeks.
This extensibility means your WordPress site can evolve alongside search engine algorithms without requiring a complete rebuild, something that’s often necessary with more limited platforms.
I always tell clients that SEO isn’t just about content and keywords, the technical foundation of your site is absolutely crucial. Think of it like building a house: you can have the most beautiful interior design in the world, but if the foundations are shaky, the whole thing’s going to collapse.
Your hosting choice has a massive impact on your site’s performance, and by extension, its SEO. I’ve moved clients between hosting providers and seen their page speed literally cut in half overnight, with immediate improvements in rankings.
Cheap shared hosting might seem attractive, but when your site is crammed onto a server with hundreds of others, performance suffers. And Google absolutely notices.
I personally prefer hosts that specialise in WordPress, like WP Engine, Kinsta, or SiteGround’s WordPress-specific plans. They’re a bit pricier than basic hosting, but they’re optimised specifically for WordPress performance.
Look for hosts that offer:
I moved a client’s site from a generic budget host to a WordPress-specific provider last year, and their mobile page speed scores jumped from the 40s to the 80s. Their traffic increased by 34% over the next three months, without changing anything else.
It amazes me how many WordPress sites I audit have fundamental settings completely wrong. These take minutes to fix but can have a huge impact.
First up, go to Settings → Reading and make absolutely sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unchecked. You’d be shocked how often this box stays ticked after the site goes live, effectively making the entire site invisible to Google.
Next, sort your permalinks out. Go to Settings → Permalinks and choose “Post name” or a custom structure that includes the post name. The default setting (with the question mark and numbers) is terrible for SEO. If you’re changing this on an existing site, you’ll need to set up redirects from the old URLs, but it’s worth it.
Then check if your site is using www or non-www, and stick to one version consistently. Same goes for http vs https (always use https these days). Set your preferred domain in Settings → General for both WordPress Address and Site Address.
One trick I’ve used successfully: If you’re trying to rank for location-based terms, consider adding the location in your permalink structure, like /%category%/%postname%/ for a categorical site or /%location%/%service%/ for a service-based business targeting multiple locations.
If your WordPress site isn’t using HTTPS in 2025, you’re basically waving a red flag at Google saying “Don’t rank me!”
Beyond being a direct ranking factor, sites without HTTPS tend to show security warnings in browsers, massively increasing bounce rates. And higher bounce rates lead to lower rankings.
Most decent hosts now offer free SSL certificates through Let’s Encrypt. If yours doesn’t, it’s probably time to change hosts.
After installing your SSL certificate, you need to ensure your WordPress settings are updated to use https:// instead of http:// in the WordPress Address and Site Address fields under Settings → General.
Then you’ll want to set up a permanent 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. This can usually be done through your hosting control panel or by adding code to your .htaccess file.
With the technical foundations sorted, it’s time to focus on what most people think of when they hear “SEO”, optimising the actual content on your pages.
Everyone bangs on about keyword research, but most WordPress site owners I work with are doing it all wrong. They find a couple of high-volume terms and then wonder why they can’t rank for them.
The secret with WordPress is to leverage its flexibility to target the full keyword spectrum, from high-competition head terms to super-specific long-tail phrases.
For each core topic your site covers, you should be creating:
I use a mix of tools for this, SEMrush and Ahrefs for the data, but also Google’s own autocomplete and “People also ask” sections to understand the questions people are asking.
What’s brilliant about WordPress is how easily you can organise this content through categories, tags, and custom taxonomies. This creates a logical site structure that Google loves.
I worked with an interior design client last year who was trying to rank for “kitchen renovation” (good luck with that one) and getting nowhere. We restructured their content to target long-tail variations like “Victorian terrace kitchen renovation ideas” and “kitchen renovation under £15,000” and saw their traffic increase by 210% in six months.
The WordPress block editor (Gutenberg) gets a lot of stick, but from an SEO perspective, it’s actually brilliant. The block-based approach makes it much easier to create well-structured content that both users and search engines love.
Use the heading blocks properly, H1 for the main title, H2 for major sections, H3 for subsections, and so on. This hierarchical structure helps Google understand the relationship between different parts of your content.
The block editor also makes it easy to add other elements that improve engagement and reduce bounce rates, like:
One trick I’ve been using lately: Create reusable blocks for your FAQ sections, complete with FAQ schema markup. These can be dropped into any page where relevant questions arise, increasing your chances of grabbing those featured snippet positions.
Images are one of the most neglected aspects of WordPress SEO, which means they’re also one of the biggest opportunities for gaining an edge.
WordPress makes it easy to optimise images properly:
I increased a photography client’s organic traffic by 43% just by properly optimising their image alt text and filenames, they were getting almost nothing from Google Images before that.
There are thousands of WordPress plugins claiming to improve your SEO, but in my experience, you only need a handful to cover all the important bases.
The big debate in WordPress SEO circles is always Yoast SEO vs Rank Math. I’ve used both extensively, and here’s my honest take:
Yoast has been around forever and is rock-solid reliable. It’s like the Ford of SEO plugins, not the most exciting, but you know exactly what you’re getting. The free version covers most essentials, while the premium version adds useful features like internal linking suggestions and redirect management.
Rank Math is the newer, flashier option that packs more features into its free version. It’s more lightweight in terms of performance impact, and its interface is a bit more intuitive for beginners. I particularly like its schema implementation, which is much more comprehensive than Yoast’s.
For most sites, either one will do the job perfectly well. I tend to use Rank Math for new sites and keep Yoast on existing sites that already have it configured. The hassle of switching often isn’t worth the marginal benefits.
The key is not which plugin you choose, but how you configure it. Neither will magically improve your SEO just by being installed.
Here’s what to focus on when setting up your SEO plugin:
What drives me mad is when I audit a site and find they’ve installed an SEO plugin but never actually configured it properly. That’s like buying a Ferrari and never taking it out of first gear.
Site speed is absolutely critical for WordPress SEO now, particularly with Google’s Core Web Vitals being a ranking factor. These performance metrics measure loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
The performance plugins I’ve found most effective are:
WP Rocket, The best all-in-one performance plugin, in my opinion. It handles caching, CSS/JS optimisation, lazy loading, and more. It’s not free, but it’s worth every penny.
ShortPixel or Smush, For image optimisation. Both automatically compress images as you upload them, which saves tons of time.
Perfmatters, A lightweight plugin specifically focused on removing unnecessary WordPress bloat.
Flying Scripts, Allows you to delay non-critical JavaScript, which can dramatically improve initial loading times.
For one e-commerce client, implementing WP Rocket and properly configuring it improved their Core Web Vitals scores enough to get them from page 2 to page 1 for several competitive terms. The traffic increase was worth about 20 times what they paid for the plugin.
You might not immediately think about security when talking about SEO, but trust me, they’re linked. If your site gets hacked and starts serving up malware or spam, Google will drop you like a hot potato.
I’ve seen it happen too many times. A client ignores security best practices, their site gets compromised, and suddenly they’re nowhere to be found in search results. Getting back into Google’s good books after that can take weeks or even months.
At the very minimum, install either Wordfence or Sucuri. Both have decent free versions that’ll keep the basic nasties at bay. They’ll scan your files for malware, block suspicious login attempts, and generally keep an eye on things.
But plugins are just part of the picture. You also need to:
I had a client last year who thought security was “someone else’s problem” until their site got hit. Their organic traffic literally went to zero overnight after Google flagged them for malware. It took us nearly a month to clean everything up and get the security warning removed. During that time, they lost about 15 grand in potential revenue.
Let’s talk about themes. Most people choose a WordPress theme based on how it looks or what fancy features it has. Wrong approach. If you care about SEO, you need to think about performance first.
I’ve seen so many clients drop 60 quid on some fancy ThemeForest theme with all the bells and whistles, only to end up with a site that loads like it’s on a dial-up connection.
These bloated themes are SEO killers. They’re packed with:
I worked with an estate agent who couldn’t figure out why their gorgeous new site wasn’t ranking. When I checked, their theme was loading 83 JavaScript files and 47 CSS files on every single page. The homepage took 13 seconds to load on mobile. No wonder Google wasn’t interested.
Thankfully, there’s been a shift in the WordPress theme world. A new breed of performance-focused themes has emerged, and they’re brilliant for SEO.
My current favourites include:
These themes are built with speed in mind. They load only what’s needed, use clean code, and still give you enough design control to create beautiful sites.
I moved a solicitor’s site from a heavyweight theme to GeneratePress last year. Their mobile page speed scores went from the 40s to the 80s almost overnight. Three months later, they were ranking for terms they’d been chasing unsuccessfully for years.
The great thing about these lightweight themes is they give you a solid foundation, and then you can add just the specific features you actually need. It’s like starting with a fast car and then adding only the extras you’ll use, rather than buying a slow car loaded with stuff you don’t want.
Page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Divi give you amazing control over your design. But that power comes at a cost: performance.
If you absolutely must use a page builder (and sometimes clients insist), here’s how to minimise the damage:
But honestly? For pages where rankings really matter, I recommend sticking with the native WordPress block editor. It’s gotten really good in recent years, and it’s far lighter than any third-party page builder.
I had a client who switched from Elementor to the native block editor for their main service pages. Their Core Web Vitals scores improved dramatically, and they saw ranking improvements within weeks.
Google now looks at your mobile site first when deciding where to rank you. It’s not just “mobile friendly” that matters anymore, it’s the whole mobile experience.
Let me guess… you checked your site on your phone, everything looked okay, and you thought “great, it’s mobile friendly!” That’s not enough anymore.
I see this all the time. A site looks fine on mobile at a glance, but when you actually try to use it, it’s a nightmare:
I worked with a plumbing company whose contact form was completely unusable on mobile. The fields were too small, the submit button was tucked away, and the phone number field kept bringing up the text keyboard instead of the number pad. They were literally losing jobs every day because potential customers couldn’t contact them easily from their phones.
Here’s how to sort out the most common mobile SEO issues with WordPress:
First, make sure your touch targets (buttons, links, menu items) are at least 48×48 pixels. People have fingers, not laser pointers.
For forms, use the right input types to trigger the correct mobile keyboards. Use “tel” for phone numbers, “email” for email addresses, and so on. Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms both support this.
Test your site on actual mobile devices, not just your desktop browser’s mobile view. Better yet, use tools like BrowserStack to test on multiple devices.
Pay special attention to your most important pages, like product pages, service pages, and conversion-focused landing pages. These need to be absolutely flawless on mobile.
I increased a client’s mobile conversion rate by 84% just by fixing their checkout process on phones. The changes took about 2 hours to implement.
Google’s Core Web Vitals are primarily measured on mobile, and they directly impact your rankings. For WordPress sites, the three key metrics to worry about are:
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): This measures loading performance. The culprit is usually huge images at the top of the page. Fix it by properly sizing and compressing your hero images.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): This measures visual stability. It’s when stuff moves around as the page loads. Usually caused by images without dimensions, ads, or embeds. Fix it by always specifying width and height for images in your theme.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): This measures responsiveness. It’s when the page feels sluggish. Usually caused by heavy JavaScript. Fix it by reducing JS or deferring non-critical scripts.
These metrics might sound technical, but improving them makes a real difference to both rankings and user experience.
I worked with a news site that was getting murdered by CLS issues. Their ads and images were causing the page to jump all over the place as it loaded. By setting fixed dimensions for images and restructuring their ad placements, we improved their CLS score from a terrible 0.25 to a good 0.08. Their mobile traffic increased by 22% in the following two months.
Once you’ve got the basics sorted, there are some more advanced techniques that can really set your WordPress site apart.
One of the most powerful WordPress features for SEO is custom post types. They let you create specialised content types beyond just posts and pages.
Say you run a recipe site. Instead of lumping recipes in with regular blog posts, you create a “Recipe” post type with custom fields for ingredients, cooking time, nutritional info, and so on.
This structured approach makes it much easier to implement proper schema markup, which gives you a better shot at rich snippets in search results.
I helped a travel site create a custom “Destination” post type with fields for country, best time to visit, cost level, and other travel details. We used this to generate comprehensive schema markup, and within months they were getting rich results for their destination pages in Google. Their click-through rates nearly doubled.
WordPress taxonomies (categories and tags) are perfect tools for establishing topical authority, but most sites waste their potential.
Instead of just using them to organise content, make your taxonomy pages into valuable content hubs. Write unique, informative introductions for each category and tag page. Link to your best content on that topic. Add FAQs relevant to that category.
A financial advice site I worked with transformed their “Mortgages” category page from a basic post list into a comprehensive resource hub with mortgage calculators, FAQs, and links to their best content. That single page now ranks for dozens of mortgage-related terms and drives tons of quality traffic.
WordPress makes internal linking easy, but most sites still do it poorly. A strategic approach can make a huge difference to both rankings and user experience.
Here’s what works:
Use a plugin like Link Whisper to identify opportunities you might have missed.
Create cornerstone content (comprehensive guides on key topics), then link to them from related posts. This signals to Google that these are your most important pages.
Add contextual links within your content, not just in a “related posts” section at the bottom where nobody looks.
I worked with an e-commerce site selling garden furniture. By implementing a more strategic internal linking structure that guided users from informational content to product pages, they increased their product page conversions by 18%.
If you’re targeting multiple countries or languages, WordPress has excellent solutions like WPML and Polylang.
The key things to get right:
Use hreflang tags to tell Google which version is for which language/region. Both WPML and Polylang handle this automatically.
Don’t just translate content, adapt it. What works in one market might not resonate in another.
Consider using separate hosting in target countries for better load times.
I helped a UK business expand into Germany using WPML. Instead of just translating their English content, we researched German-specific keywords and adapted the content to the local market. Within six months, their German site was generating about 40% of the traffic their English site had taken years to build.
While WordPress gives you great control over your on-site SEO, you still need a solid off-page strategy to compete for competitive terms.
Link building isn’t about spammy guest posts or buying links anymore. Modern link building is about creating genuinely valuable content that people actually want to link to.
WordPress gives you several advantages for effective link building:
The blogging functionality makes it easy to create link-worthy content like in-depth guides, original research, and useful resources.
With plugins like TablePress, you can create data-driven content that naturally attracts links from people looking for statistics or comparisons.
WordPress’s SEO plugins help you optimise that content so it actually ranks and gets discovered by potential linkers.
I helped a financial advice site create an interactive mortgage calculator as a custom WordPress template. We reached out to personal finance bloggers to let them know about it, and within three months, the calculator had earned links from over 50 quality domains.
For businesses targeting local customers, WordPress has some excellent tools for local SEO.
Plugins like Yoast Local SEO or Rank Math Pro include features specifically for local businesses:
But plugins are just part of the picture. You also need to create location-specific content. For each area you serve, create a dedicated page with unique content that mentions local landmarks, addresses specific local challenges, and provides genuinely useful local information.
I worked with a restaurant chain that created detailed pages for each of their venues, highlighting the neighbourhood, specific menu items only available at that location, and staff profiles. Their visibility for local searches like “[location] restaurant” improved dramatically, driving a 37% increase in bookings.
All this optimisation is pointless if you can’t measure what’s working. Fortunately, WordPress makes analytics integration straightforward.
Too many WordPress site owners obsess over rankings without connecting them to actual business results. Don’t be that person.
Yes, rankings matter, but they’re a means to an end, not the end itself. Focus on:
Organic conversions: Are visitors from search taking your desired actions? This could be filling in a contact form, making a purchase, or signing up for your newsletter.
Revenue or leads from organic search: The actual business impact of your SEO efforts.
User engagement: Time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate give you insights into how well your content meets user needs.
Core Web Vitals: These directly impact both rankings and user experience.
I worked with a client who was obsessed with ranking for a particular high-volume keyword. When we finally got them to page one, they were disappointed by the lack of business impact. Turned out that term had lots of searches but zero commercial intent. We shifted focus to lower-volume but higher-intent keywords, and their leads from organic search tripled.
Google Analytics and Search Console are must-haves for tracking your WordPress SEO performance. I recommend:
Installing Google’s Site Kit plugin for easy integration of both tools.
Setting up goal tracking for important conversions like form submissions or purchases.
Creating custom dashboards to monitor your most important metrics without getting lost in data.
For e-commerce sites, implement enhanced e-commerce tracking to see which products drive the most organic revenue.
One small business owner I worked with was making decisions based entirely on traffic numbers until we set up proper goal tracking. He discovered that one of his lowest-traffic pages was actually generating the majority of his leads. This completely changed his content strategy.
Based on all my experience optimising WordPress sites, here’s a step-by-step action plan to improve your search performance:
After working with WordPress for over a decade, I’ve seen platforms come and go, but WordPress continues to dominate when it comes to SEO capabilities.
What’s fascinating is how WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging platform into a sophisticated CMS that can power complex websites while maintaining its SEO advantages.
The key to WordPress’s continued SEO dominance is its combination of core strength and extensibility. The foundation is solid, and the ability to extend functionality through plugins and custom development means it can adapt to whatever Google throws at us next.
For businesses serious about their online presence, WordPress remains the platform of choice. Yes, it requires more setup and maintenance than drag-and-drop builders, but the SEO ceiling is incomparably higher.
I still remember my first client site migration from Wix to WordPress back in 2016. Within two months, their organic traffic had doubled with the same content, just properly optimised on a platform that Google could properly crawl and understand. In 2025, that gap hasn’t closed, if anything, it’s widened as Google’s algorithms have become more sophisticated.
If you’re looking to maximise your WordPress site’s search performance, we can help with a customised SEO strategy based on your specific goals, industry, and current performance.
Using our WordPress SEO experience, we’ll identify the highest-impact opportunities for your site and create an actionable roadmap to better rankings, more traffic, and increased conversions.
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