Most small sites don’t lose traffic to one dramatic mistake. They lose it to dozens of small ones: a missing description here, a broken link there, a page that competes with another page for the same search. None of them looks urgent on its own, which is exactly why they pile up.

This on-page SEO checklist covers the 16 checks OnPage Agent runs on every page, every day. You can run them yourself with a crawler and a spreadsheet. The point is to run them often, because WordPress sites change every time someone publishes, edits a menu or installs a plugin.

Metadata

  1. Missing title tags. Without a title, Google invents one from your page, usually badly. Every indexable page needs a title that says what the page is about.
  2. Missing meta descriptions. Google often rewrites descriptions anyway, but a good one still shapes the snippet and the click. Aim for one or two sentences that describe the page honestly.
  3. Duplicate titles. When several pages share a title, Google can’t tell them apart in results. This often happens with paginated archives and templated pages.
  4. Titles over 60 characters. Long titles get cut off in results. Put the words people search for first and the brand name last.

Links

  1. Broken internal links. Links to pages that return errors waste crawl budget and frustrate visitors. Point them at the closest live page instead.
  2. Dead URLs that still get links. When an old page is gone but other pages still link to it, a redirect to the most relevant live page keeps that value.
  3. Redirect chains. A link that bounces through two or three redirects is slower for visitors and for crawlers. Update the link to the final address.

Indexing

  1. Noindexed pages in the sitemap. Your sitemap tells Google “please index these”, and the page itself says “don’t”. Pick one.
  2. Sitemap URLs that don’t return 200. Redirects and errors in the sitemap waste crawls. The sitemap should only list live, final URLs.
  3. Missing canonical tags. Without a canonical, URL variants with tracking parameters can compete with the real page.

Content

  1. Missing or multiple H1s. Most themes already print the post title as the H1. A second H1 inside the content muddies what the page is about.
  2. Keyword cannibalization. Two pages targeting the same search split the clicks and often both rank worse. Merge them, or make each one clearly about something different.
  3. Thin pages. Pages under about 300 words rarely answer a search well. Expand them, merge them into a stronger page, or keep them out of the index.

Images and speed

  1. Images over 300 KB. Large images are the most common reason mobile pages load slowly. Resize to the size they’re shown at and use a modern format like WebP.
  2. Missing alt text. Screen readers depend on it, and so does image search. Describe what the image shows in a short sentence.
  3. Slow server response. If the server takes more than about 800 ms to respond, everything else waits. Caching and better hosting usually fix it.

What to do first

Fix anything that stops pages being found before anything cosmetic: broken links, dead URLs, sitemap errors and missing titles. Then work through duplicates and cannibalization, which need a decision about which page should win. Image and description fixes come last because they’re safe to do in bulk.

If you’d rather not run this by hand every week, OnPage Agent does it daily and fixes the safe ones through the WordPress plugin, with every change logged and reversible.