Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines reach, understand and trust your pages. On WordPress most of it is a handful of settings and a few good habits.
Crawling and indexing
- In Settings → Reading, confirm “Discourage search engines” is off.
- Use post-name permalinks and keep URLs short and stable.
- Submit your XML sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Check the Pages report in Search Console for “Excluded” URLs you actually want indexed.
Robots and noindex
A robots.txt rule stops crawling; it does not remove a page from results. To keep a page out of the index, use a noindex directive and leave the page crawlable so engines can see it.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Measure with real-user data in Search Console, then use Lighthouse to diagnose. Fix the template that affects the most visits first.
| Metric | Good threshold | Usual WordPress culprit |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | ≤ 2.5 s | Unsized hero image, slow hosting, render-blocking CSS |
| INP | ≤ 200 ms | Heavy scripts from sliders, chat widgets and ad tags |
| CLS | ≤ 0.1 | Images without dimensions, late-loading fonts and banners |
Structured data
Use one source of schema. If your theme and an SEO plugin both print Article markup you will get duplicates. Validate with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.
Maintenance
Update plugins, remove ones you do not use, and recheck after every major change. A short monthly review of Search Console errors is worth more than a once-a-year panic.
