WordPress gives you a good starting point for SEO, but out of the box it won’t do the work for you. These ten steps cover what makes the biggest difference for most small and medium sites, roughly in the order worth doing them.

Is WordPress good for SEO?

Yes. WordPress produces clean, crawlable pages, creates a sitemap automatically, and lets you control titles, URLs and headings. Most SEO problems on WordPress sites come from how the site is set up and maintained, not from WordPress itself.

1. Make sure search engines are allowed in

In Settings → Reading, check that “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not ticked. It’s often switched on during development and forgotten at launch.

2. Use readable permalinks

In Settings → Permalinks, choose “Post name” so URLs look like /sourdough-classes/ rather than /?p=123. If your site is already live, changing this needs redirects from the old URLs.

3. Install one SEO plugin

Yoast SEO or Rank Math give you fields for titles, descriptions and canonicals, plus a sitemap and basic schema. Pick one. Running two at once causes duplicate tags.

4. Write a real title and description for every page

The SEO title is what appears in search results, and it isn’t always the same as the heading on the page. Put the words people search for first and keep it under about 60 characters. See where to find the SEO title in WordPress.

5. Keep one H1 per page

Most themes print the post title as the H1. Use H2s and H3s for sections inside the content rather than adding another H1.

6. Describe and size your images

Add alt text that describes what each image shows. Upload images at the size they’re displayed rather than straight from a camera; oversized images are the most common reason WordPress pages are slow on mobile.

7. Link your pages together

When a post mentions a topic you’ve covered elsewhere, link to it with a few descriptive words. Make sure every page you care about gets links from related pages, not just from the menu. More in our guide to internal links.

8. Connect Google Search Console

Verify your site in Search Console and submit your sitemap (WordPress creates one at /wp-sitemap.xml, or your SEO plugin provides its own). Search Console shows which pages are indexed, which searches you appear for, and what’s broken.

9. Speed it up

Use a caching plugin or your host’s built-in cache, keep plugins to the ones you need, and make sure images below the fold load lazily. Test your key pages with PageSpeed Insights on mobile.

10. Keep old content and links healthy

Fix broken links when pages move or disappear, and refresh posts that have gone stale before they lose their traffic. Our guide to content decay covers how to do this without losing rankings.

Doing this every week, without doing it by hand

Steps 4 to 10 aren’t one-off jobs: every new post and every edit can undo them. OnPage Agent checks your WordPress site daily and handles titles, descriptions, alt text, internal links, schema, redirects and speed fixes through its plugin, with your approval for anything bigger and one-click undo for everything.