WordPress powers everything from brochure sites to publishers — and SEO outcomes depend heavily on theme quality plus which SEO plugin (if any) owns titles, canonicals, and sitemaps.
A WordPress audit looks beyond the homepage: category and tag archives, author pages, attachment URLs, and conflicting plugins that output duplicate Open Graph or JSON-LD are where rankings quietly erode.
Common WordPress SEO failures
Indexable tag, author, and date archives
Default permalinks expose thin archive templates that compete with real posts. Many sites never noindex or remove these from the XML sitemap.
SEO plugin vs theme fighting for meta output
Themes that hardcode title tags alongside Yoast or Rank Math create duplicate or empty meta. The live HTML often differs from what the plugin preview shows.
Media and attachment pages in the index
Uploading images can create attachment URLs with almost no content. They waste crawl budget and dilute topical focus.
Stale plugins slowing TTFB and LCP
Page builders, sliders, and unused caching plugins stack render-blocking CSS/JS. WordPress homepage audits frequently fail performance before content checks.
WordPress-specific checklist
WordPress SEO is a plugin-and-taxonomy problem as much as an on-page one. Generic audits miss archive indexation and conflicting meta generators.
- Confirm one SEO plugin owns titles, canonicals, and sitemaps — disable theme SEO modules that duplicate them.
- Noindex or remove thin taxonomies (tags, authors) from the XML sitemap if they lack unique value.
- Redirect or disable attachment pages; serve images from the media library without indexable wrappers.
- Check robots.txt and security plugins are not blocking /wp-content/uploads/ needed assets.
- Validate Organization/WebSite schema once — not once per plugin.
- Review homepage H1: page builders often bury or duplicate headings.
Run a free homepage scan
Paste your WordPress URL on the homepage for a free preview of titles, meta, canonicals, security headers, and more — then unlock a full-site crawl when you need every template checked.