WordPress SEO Checklist: What to Set Up Before You Pay for Tools

Before paying for any SEO tool, a WordPress site needs 14 things set up and checked, and none of them needs a paid tool: search visibility, permalinks, one SEO plugin, titles and descriptions, a sitemap in Search Console, robots rules, HTTPS, speed, mobile layout, headings, internal links, a weekly blog, a Google Business Profile and a monthly maintenance hour. As of July 2026 the free version of Yoast SEO covers titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps and schema, Screaming Frog’s free crawler checks up to 500 URLs per crawl with no sign-up, and Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools cost nothing. Below is the checklist in order, then what the free checks catch against what paid audit tools add.

Disclosure: some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we would genuinely use.

How SEO works on a WordPress site

WordPress stores posts and pages in a database and assembles an HTML page each time a person, or Googlebot, requests a URL. Google crawls that HTML, decides whether to index it, and ranks it against everyone else’s pages; it never sees the admin screens. So WordPress SEO is three jobs: let Google crawl and index every page you want found; make each page say clearly what it is about through its title, description, headings and structured data; and keep it fast and usable on a phone. A plugin helps only with the second. Our SEO tools hub covers the tools; this checklist covers what comes before them.

The Luckywebs homepage covers what we do as a London SEO and web agency, including the WordPress sites we build and rebuild; this post covers what you can check and fix yourself, without a paid tool, before an agency is needed. Our founder ran WordPress workshops at Google Campus London from 2012 and we still rebuild WordPress sites, though most new client sites we now build on Astro as static HTML. WordPress remains a reasonable choice where a client needs to edit content heavily, so we recommend per client rather than by default; our walkthrough on starting a WordPress blog in 2026 ends with the cases where it is the wrong tool.

The checklist: visibility, permalinks and one plugin

1. Confirm search engines are allowed in. WordPress has a single checkbox that asks search engines not to index the site. Developers tick it during the build and forget to clear it at launch, and while it is ticked nothing else on this list matters. Then check the homepage source for a noindex tag a theme or plugin may have added.
2. Use word-based permalinks. A URL made of words tells a reader what the page is before they click it; a numeric ID tells them nothing. Set this once, at the start. On an established site, changing the structure breaks every URL Google already knows, so leave it alone unless you will redirect every old address.
3. Install one SEO plugin, not three. As of July 2026 the free version of Yoast SEO covers the four jobs that matter: page titles, meta descriptions, the XML sitemap and schema markup. Rank Math and All in One SEO are the usual alternatives; we have not compared their features here and will not guess. Run one, never two.

Titles, meta descriptions, sitemap and robots

4. Write a title and a meta description for every page that matters. There is no official Google length limit for descriptions: as of July 2026 Google truncates by pixel width, roughly 920 to 985 px on desktop (about 150 to 160 characters) and about 680 px on mobile (about 120 characters), vendor measurements, not Google’s. Our meta description length guide has the studies and a free pixel checker.
5. Submit the XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Your SEO plugin generates it. Verify the site (by DNS record or HTML file), submit the sitemap address, and Search Console reports which submitted pages are indexed and which are excluded, with the reason. It also keeps 16 months of query, click and impression data, free: the only ground truth about how Google treats the site.
6. Check robots.txt and noindex rules make sense. Read your robots.txt file. It should not block the whole site, the theme’s stylesheets or your images. Then open Search Console’s Pages report to see what Google has excluded and why; a page you meant to be found but marked noindex is one of the most common WordPress findings we see.

HTTPS, one hostname, speed and mobile

7. Serve everything over HTTPS on one hostname. Type the four versions of your address (http and https, with and without www) into a browser. Three should redirect to the fourth in one hop. If two versions both load, the same page sits on two addresses and Google has to choose which one to show, a choice better made by you with a redirect.
8. Run PageSpeed Insights on the homepage and one inner page. It is free, unlimited, from Google, and reports Core Web Vitals. On WordPress the usual culprits are oversized images uploaded straight from a phone, no page caching, and a plugin stack that loads scripts on every page. Compress images before upload, turn on caching at the host, and deactivate what you do not use.
9. Check the mobile layout with your own thumb. Open the site on a phone: text readable without zooming, buttons tappable, no sideways scroll, the phone number and enquiry form reachable from the first screen.

Headings, internal links and a weekly blog

10. One H1 per page, then H2s in order. Exactly one H1, the page’s headline; section headings in H2 and sub-sections in H3, reading like a table of contents. Themes and page builders sometimes put the site name in an H1 on every page, so check the page source. Keep FAQ answers expanded in the HTML rather than hidden behind a script, so Google can index them.
11. Link your pages to each other, in sentences. Internal links are free and routinely neglected. Every service page should link to the posts that support it and back again. Use anchor text that says what the destination is, and never link the same address twice on one page with the same words.
12. Publish on a weekly rhythm, or an honest fortnightly one. A blog that gained three posts in 2023 and nothing since tells Google and readers the same thing. Pick a day and write about the questions customers actually ask. Our DIY SEO guide for UK small businesses sets out a 90-day plan, and our post on finding keywords in Search Console shows where the next topics come from.

Google Business Profile and the monthly routine

13. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. For a local business it matters more than most website work early on. It is completely free, it drives the map results where most local buying decisions happen, and per Google’s own published guidance the local pack rewards relevance, distance and prominence. Our field-by-field Google Business Profile optimisation guide gives the order to work in, and the wider local SEO checklist covers citations and location pages.
14. Set a monthly maintenance hour. Back up, then update WordPress core, the theme and every plugin. Crawl the site for broken links. Read Search Console’s Pages report for new exclusions and its Core Web Vitals report for new failures. The site installed with enthusiasm and left alone for two years is the one we most often find; an hour a month prevents it.

Free checks vs paid audit tools: what each catches

Here is what the free checks catch against what a crawler or audit platform adds, all as of July 2026.

What you want to know	Free, by hand or with free tools	Crawler or audit platform
Is the page indexed	Search Console’s Pages report, from Google’s own records	A crawler reports its own crawl, not Google’s decision; SE Ranking and Semrush both connect Search Console to bring that data in
Broken links and redirect chains	Screaming Frog free: 500 URLs per crawl, no sign-up	The £199 a year licence removes the cap; SE Ranking and Semrush return a categorised, prioritised issue list
Missing, duplicate or overlong titles and descriptions	Plugin previews, page by page; Screaming Frog flags descriptions over 985 px	SE Ranking’s meta tags category, with a health score per crawl
Speed and Core Web Vitals	PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, free and unlimited	SE Ranking’s audit includes Core Web Vitals; Screaming Frog leaves you to bring your own
Content loaded by JavaScript	Not rendered by the free Screaming Frog crawl	Licence adds JavaScript rendering; SE Ranking’s audit renders it too
Structured data errors	Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator, one URL at a time	Included in Semrush’s 140+ checks, sitewide
Breadth	About a dozen checks, by hand	SE Ranking: 115+ checks in 13 categories, 250,000 pages a month on Core; Semrush: more than 140 checks

Which tools to add once the free checks are done

For a small WordPress site, the free layer is enough for a long time, and we say that as an agency that sells SEO. Add tools in this order.

• Still £0: Bing Webmaster Tools (Site Scan audits up to 10,000 pages per site, and Bing’s index feeds ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot), Ahrefs Free (Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project per month across 170+ issue types, for verified owners) and a free Semrush account (100 audited pages a month), all as of July 2026. Our roundup of free SEO tools that are actually free lists every free tier’s exact limits.
• £199 a year: a Screaming Frog licence, about £16.60 a month, once the site passes 500 URLs or you need JavaScript rendering and saved crawls (as of July 2026).
• From £76 a month: SE Ranking Core, £95 a month or £76 a month billed annually as of July 2026, when you want a categorised, prioritised audit alongside daily rank tracking; the 14-day trial needs no card. Semrush’s entry SEO plan, $139 (about £102) a month as of July 2026, runs more than 140 checks and suits a larger site. Our ranked list of SEO tools for UK small businesses covers the wider field.

Beyond this checklist, our one-hour technical SEO audit workflow covers crawl settings (crawl as Googlebot, respect robots.txt) and how to triage the findings. On a new WordPress retainer we work through the 14 items above in the first hour, then read the audit platform’s prioritised list against what we found; much of what it reports on a neglected install (plugin bloat, stray URL parameters, legacy redirects) turns up by hand, and the rest is what the platform is for.

Try SE Ranking Free for 14 Days

Frequently asked questions

How does SEO work on WordPress?

WordPress builds an HTML page for every post and page, and Google crawls, indexes and ranks that HTML like any other site. SEO on WordPress means letting Google crawl and index the right pages, giving each a clear title, description and headings, keeping it fast on a phone, and publishing useful content regularly. A plugin handles the tags; settings and habits handle the rest.

Do you need an SEO plugin for WordPress?

Yes, and only one. WordPress on its own gives you no easy way to write a meta description, set a page title separately from the headline, or add schema markup. As of July 2026 the free version of Yoast SEO covers those three and the XML sitemap; Rank Math and All in One SEO are the common alternatives. Never run two; duplicate tags mean duplicate titles and sitemaps.

Is WordPress good for SEO out of the box?

Adequate, not finished. A fresh install produces crawlable HTML but ships with no meta descriptions, no schema, no caching, and a permalink setting worth changing once before you publish. It can also leave the whole site hidden from search engines if someone ticked the visibility box during the build. The 14 checks in this post are the difference between adequate and good.

How often should a WordPress site be maintained for SEO?

Monthly, for an hour, plus a weekly publishing slot. The monthly hour covers backing up and updating WordPress core, the theme and every plugin, crawling for broken links, and reading Search Console’s Pages and Core Web Vitals reports. The weekly slot is a post answering a real customer question. Expect first movement in 4 to 8 weeks for local searches and 3 to 6 months for website pages.

What is the first thing to fix for WordPress SEO?

Confirm the site is allowed to be indexed. WordPress has a single checkbox that asks search engines to ignore the site, meant for sites under construction, and it is left ticked on live sites surprisingly often. Check it, then check Search Console’s Pages report for pages excluded by noindex or robots.txt. Everything else is wasted effort on a site Google has been told not to read.