WordPress is the most widely used website creation CMS in the world, by far. It is often said that having a WordPress site is essential for good SEO. However, without a few tips to properly structure your WP site, this could actually be a disadvantage. For example, an article assigned to a category creates another WordPress page with the category name referencing all articles. This is not the ideal approach for good internal linking.
Regardless, we are going to look at everything you need to optimise your site’s SEO with WordPress!
Do not worry — we will also discuss the best SEO plugins to install on WordPress.
WordPress site configuration to be SEO Friendly
Use the right permalinks, slug
Permalinks determine the URL structure (slug) of your articles and pages on your WordPress site. The “post name” or “Publication title” format is generally considered the best for SEO as it immediately makes the topic of the page obvious and keeps URLs short to avoid truncation in search results.
However, if you are already using a different permalink structure, changing to “Publication title” may cause broken links. If so, do not hesitate to download a redirection plugin or consult my guide on 301 redirects.
Do not allow attachment file pages to be indexed
Every time you upload an image to WordPress and insert it into a post or page, it creates a separate attachment file page that hosts the image. If you are not careful, Google could start indexing these pages, which can be harmful since they have no value. They can appear in your search results, waste your crawl budget and cause other problems.
Do not wait for this to happen. The Yoast SEO extension offers a redirect option to fix this problem. Simply go to SEO > Search Appearance, click on the Media tab, then enable the “Redirect attachment URLs to the media itself” option.
Exclude low-value content from indexing
As briefly mentioned at the beginning of the article, WordPress creates category pages when a category is created. It does the same in other contexts.
Tag pages and category archives are generally not considered useful for SEO (and can actually be harmful), so it is preferable to exclude them from indexing.
To do this, go to SEO > SEO Settings > Taxonomy and disable the “Show Categories in Search Results” option.
Repeat the same step for category archives.
Organise pages into subfolders for a clear URL structure
For better URL structure, it is recommended to group pages into subfolders. By using a permalink format based on the post name, your page and article URLs will look like this:
domain.com/article-name domain.com/page-name
If, for example, you are a digital marketing agency offering three different services (SEO, PPC and social media marketing), here is how you can structure your content:
- Create a “Services” homepage that lists all the services you offer.
- Create individual pages for each service.
- Create links to these service pages from your “Services” page.
By default, your URL structure will look like this:
domain.com/services/
domain.com/seo/
domain.com/sea/
domain.com/website-creation/
However, it is even better to organise these individual pages under the “Services” parent page.
domain.com/services/
domain.com/services/seo/
domain.com/services/sea/
domain.com/services/website-creation/
This can easily be done in WordPress using the “Parent Page” dropdown menu in the page editor and selecting the “Services” page.
You can also use the Permalink Manager plugin.
Moreover, if you combine a WordPress SEO plugin such as RankMath or Yoast with Permalink Manager, it will handle the breadcrumb structured data relative to your URL structure organisation. And this can be considered a very good SEO recommendation.
Page experience, speed optimisation and Core Web Vitals on WordPress
Google uses various indicators collectively called “page experience signals” to evaluate the relevance of a website. This is one of the major pillars of technical SEO optimisation.
This overall factor for better SEO takes into account:
- Loading speed
- HTTPS
- Responsive design
- Site security
- Pop-ups
- Core Web Vitals (CLS, LCP, TBT…)
Core Web Vitals are a series of key page experience measurements, defined by Google, that measure the quality of user experience on a website. They include indicators such as page load speed (LCP), stability of visible content (CLS) and site responsiveness (TBT).
Let us look together at how to apply these best practices to your WordPress site.
HTTPS on WordPress and preferred domain
It is important to choose a preferred version for your website to ensure a consistent experience for visitors and to avoid duplicate content for search engines.
Google treats “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” separately, so you will need to choose the version you prefer for your site using WordPress settings.
If your site is accessible through both URL versions, it is preferable to use the one with the most backlinks, which can be verified using an analysis tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.
Finally, WordPress offers the option to automatically redirect the other version to the chosen one, ensuring that search engines and visitors only access your site through the defined solution.
Take this opportunity to also switch your site to HTTPS if you have not already done so. This is one of Google’s criteria grouped under the “Page Experience” signal.
Install an SEO-friendly theme
Almost all WordPress themes are designed to be mobile-compatible and are therefore “responsive”, complying with a page experience criterion.
However, you need to make sure you choose a theme with good performance. If a theme is loaded with unnecessary features and code, this can slow down your site, which is bad for your Google ranking since page load speed has been an important Google criterion for several years.
When choosing a theme, it is preferable to read its description to understand what it includes. If a theme offers many features you will never use, it may not be the right choice. You can also test a theme’s demo version on PageSpeed Insights to get an idea of its performance.
It is also important to note that a lesser-known or hand-coded theme can easily be poorly built and thus ignore semantic HTML markup, among other things.
So, I recommend these three themes:
- (with the Hello theme)
If your design needs are not particularly high or if you are a front-end developer, I strongly recommend GeneratePress, which is the best theme for performance and therefore SEO.
Choose a good WordPress host
I only recommend Kinsta to my clients for WordPress hosting. Why? They specialise exclusively in WordPress hosting, and since we are trying to optimise our WordPress site, that is already a solid foundation.
Here are some advantages of using one of the best WordPress hosts in the world:
- Highest performance: Kinsta uses a state-of-the-art infrastructure based on the Google Cloud Platform (the fastest available) to guarantee fast load times and reliable uptime.
- Integrates HTML / CSS code minification.
- Integrates server-side cache directly.
- Integrated Cloudflare CDN
- Edge Caching
- …
Furthermore:
- Enhanced security: Kinsta implements strict security measures to protect your site from attacks and vulnerabilities, and also performs daily backups for you (no configuration needed), allowing you to quickly restore your site if needed. You can also create a backup with a single click.
- Quality technical support: Kinsta offers 24/7/365 chat and ticket support, with WordPress experts ready to help you with all your hosting needs. User-friendly interface: Kinsta provides an easy-to-use interface to manage your hosting account and site, without requiring server management knowledge.
- Eco-friendly infrastructure: Kinsta is committed to sustainability by using energy-efficient technologies and offsetting the carbon footprint of its data centres.
(Everything is included in any plan)
In summary, if you are looking for reliable, super fast, high-performance and secure WordPress hosting, with quality technical support and a user-friendly interface, Kinsta is definitely the option for you.
Use speed performance SEO plugins
Here are the three best WordPress plugins to optimise your website’s speed:
- WP Rocket is the best page load speed optimisation plugin for WordPress. It performs a number of automatic optimisations to improve your site’s performance, such as page caching, CSS and JavaScript file compression, request minimisation and browser cache management. Using WP Rocket, you can easily speed up your site without having to make complex modifications or know the technical details of speed optimisation.
- Imagify: an image optimisation solution for WordPress that reduces image file sizes without compromising quality. By optimising images, this improves website performance, speeds up load times and reduces storage costs. Imagify offers several compression levels, as well as bulk compression options to process large quantities of images.
- Perfmatters: a WordPress plugin developed to optimise website performance. It offers a variety of features to improve performance, including removing unnecessary scripts, disabling speed-related resources, script caching, modifying cache headers and managing resource minification. Most importantly, it can disable plugins that activate on every page when they are only used on one, such as a slider plugin or a contact form plugin.
WordPress SEO plugins
This guide has already shown you Yoast SEO in use on several occasions. But there are other WordPress SEO plugins such as:
- Rank Math
- All in one SEO
- (Yoast SEO)
Rank Math is a very strong competitor to Yoast SEO. I think it is the best plugin in 2023. However, being still relatively young, WP users may be reluctant to adopt it.
Advanced SEO plugins:
- WordLift
- ahrefs wordpress seo plugin
SEO on WordPress, the classics
This article refers in most cases to the relevant WordPress manipulation. This article illustrates for most cases the related WordPress manipulation.
Structured data & FAQ
Adding structured data to your web pages allows crawlers to better understand your website. For example, by including your company address, it saves them having to look for it. That is its main advantage: better understanding by search engines.
Enter your organisation type — Yoast will thus add structured data to your: <head>
But that is not all — Yoast offers many other schema markup additions.
When creating a page, it is possible to add FAQ markup for example:
Other SEO plugins also allow you to add structured data.
Finally, complete your profile information on WordPress by going to Accounts -> Profile
This will also add structured data.
In this case, adding biographical information to my WordPress admin will allow search engines to see this:
Add internal links to relevant content
Internal linking means linking to other pages and articles on your site. This is important for SEO because it:
- Keeps visitors on your site
- Improves the authority of your other content, helping it rank better.
You can add internal links to your posts and pages in WordPress using the WYSIWYG editor. Select the text you want to use as an anchor, click the “Insert/Edit Link” button and paste the URL of your page or article. You can also use the search function to find internal pages.
Finally, prefer creating links with <a href> rather than <button>. When building your site with a page builder, avoid using buttons for links. This is a classic beginner SEO mistake.
Using an <a href> link is considered more SEO-friendly than using a <button> for several reasons:
- Accessibility: Search engines can easily follow <a href> links to crawl your website content. <button> elements can be used for interactive actions such as form submissions, but they do not provide useful information to search engines.
- Link structure: <a href> links form a clear link structure for search engines, which can help improve understanding of your site structure and establish relationships between pages. <button> elements do not provide this link structure.
- Anchor text: <a href> links can include anchor text — descriptive text associated with a link. This anchor text can help search engines understand the content of the page the link leads to. <button> elements cannot include anchor text.
In summary, <a href> links are considered more SEO-friendly due to their accessibility, their link structure and their ability to include anchor text. <button> elements are useful for interactive actions on the website, but are not considered as good for SEO as <a href> links.
The Title tag
Sometimes incorrectly called the meta title, this tag allows you to display a title of your own choosing in search results. Optimising this tag to attract clicks can be considered a ranking factor.
To modify it, go to Pages -> Edit -> Yoast SEO
The meta description tag
Just like the Title tag, encourage readers to click on your result. The modification procedure is the same as for the title tag.
Generate a sitemap.xml for your site
Sitemaps allow search engines to discover the important pages and articles of your site by listing them.
The Yoast SEO tool can automatically generate a sitemap for you, but make sure the option is enabled.
To do this, go to SEO > General > Features and enable the “XML sitemaps” option.
Note: WordPress normally already creates a sitemap without any plugin, however creating a sitemap via an SEO plugin is a good SEO best practice.
Add and configure your robots.txt
You need to create your robots.txt file at the root of your site. Example: https://my-site.com/robots.txt (and write it correctly)
If you use WordPress, it will be automatically generated upon installation, however you will need to modify it, for example using the Yoast SEO plugin.
Yoast SEO → Tools → File Editor
Sitemap: https://mysite.com/sitemap_index.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
It is possible to further optimise your robots.txt, but the key is to have these elements (make sure to include the link to your sitemap index in your robots.txt)
SEO-friendly URL slug
By default, WordPress uses the full page or article title to determine its URL. However, this is generally not ideal since titles are often long and long URLs get truncated in search results.
For a more SEO-friendly URL, click “Edit”, enter your primary keyword (or a close variation) and replace spaces with hyphens. This will give you a shorter, more relevant URL for SEO purposes.
Use headings to create a hierarchy
Using headings (titles) allows users and search engines to better understand the structure of your content.
This involves always correctly hierarchising your heading tags. You should not start with an H3 heading tag — always start with an H1, then H2, H3 etc.
In WordPress, you can easily add headings to your pages using the WYSIWYG editor. Simply click on the “paragraph” dropdown menu and you will see the six heading options.
If in doubt, you can , and you can also verify that all other elements relating to heading tags are correctly respected.
Add alt text to images
Alternative text is important for several reasons:
- It informs Google about what the image represents, which can improve its ranking in Google Image results.
- It improves accessibility for visually impaired users who use a screen reader.
- It replaces images that fail to load in the event of a broken link.
To add alternative text to an image in WordPress, fill in the “Alternative Text” field when uploading the image.