WordPress SEO Audit — Find What's Hurting Your Rankings
9-category audit tuned for the SEO traps WordPress sites fall into. Free in 60 seconds.
WordPress powers more than 40% of the web, which means it's also the platform with the most SEO landmines: rogue plugins injecting bloat, themes that break Core Web Vitals, and the 'discourage search engines' checkbox that quietly hides your site from Google. SEOGrade scans your live WordPress site, not a generic checklist — we read your real robots.txt, your real schema markup, your real Yoast or Rank Math output, and tell you exactly what's broken and how to fix it for your specific theme and plugin stack.
Common SEO issues on WordPress sites
The 'discourage search engines' checkbox is on
Settings → Reading has a single checkbox that drops a site-wide noindex. Easy to flip during staging and forget. We catch it on the first crawl.
Plugin bloat tanking Core Web Vitals
Page builders (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery) and over 25 active plugins routinely push LCP past 4 seconds on mobile. We measure your real LCP, CLS, and INP via PageSpeed and tell you which scripts to defer.
Yoast / Rank Math configured but not actually rendering
It's common for the SEO plugin's title and description to be overridden by the theme's hardcoded <title> tag. We read what's actually shipped to crawlers, not what's in the dashboard.
Duplicate content from category, tag, and author archives
WordPress generates archive pages for every taxonomy by default. Without explicit canonical or noindex, you get dozens of thin pages competing with your real content.
Missing or broken schema on posts
Most themes ship with no Article or BlogPosting schema. Some Yoast configurations emit Article without the required author or datePublished fields, which Google treats as missing.
How to fix them
Configure a single SEO plugin and disable the rest
Pick one of Yoast, Rank Math, or All in One SEO. Running multiple emits conflicting meta tags. We tell you which is actively rendering on your site.
Switch to a lightweight theme or strip your current one
GeneratePress, Astra, and Kadence ship with under 50KB CSS. If you're on a heavy theme, we flag the specific render-blocking scripts and stylesheets to dequeue.
Set canonical and noindex on archives
In your SEO plugin, noindex tag and author archives unless you actively use them. Set canonical on category archives to themselves to consolidate signals.
Add complete BlogPosting schema
Use a child theme or functions.php to emit BlogPosting JSON-LD with author Person, datePublished, dateModified, and image fields. We give you the exact code.
Audit and remove plugins quarterly
Every plugin is a potential render-blocker, security hole, and database query. We list which of your installed plugins are SEO-relevant and which can go.
Audit your WordPress site free in 60 seconds
Real 9-category audit. No signup, no credit card. Get your overall grade and the three highest-severity issues — then upgrade for every finding plus the exact fix for WordPress.