WordPress SEO Audit: The 7 Issues Your Site Is Probably Hiding

WordPress powers more than 40% of the web according to W3Techs, and a fair share of those sites carry the same SEO problems around without knowing it. Not because WordPress is bad, but because the CMS automatically generates dozens of pages nobody asked for, and every theme and every plugin layers its own behavior on top. A WordPress SEO audit is a classic SEO audit plus a list of checks specific to the CMS. This article covers exactly that list: the 7 places where WordPress sabotages itself, in order of severity, with the fixes. None of them requires touching code.

Point 1: the checkbox that deindexes everything (a ten-second check)

Start with the all-time classic. Go to Settings, Reading, and look at the checkbox labeled "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".

That box adds a noindex to the entire site. It gets ticked during development (rightly so), and forgotten at launch with impressive regularity. The result: a perfect site, invisible forever. If your site ranks for nothing, not even your own brand name, check this before anything else. And if the box is unchecked but the site still doesn't show up, the full diagnostic lives in why my site is not showing on Google.

While you're in the settings, also check Settings, Permalinks: the structure should be "Post name" (/my-article/), not the default ?p=123 format, which carries zero semantic signal.

Point 2: the ghost pages WordPress generates on its own

This is the most underestimated problem on the list. WordPress automatically creates a page for every tag, every category, every author, every monthly archive, and historically one page per uploaded media file. On a 50-post blog, that can mean 200 extra pages in the index, nearly all of them empty or duplicated.

Here's how to sort them:

Your SEO plugin handles all of this from its content type settings, no code required. The quick test to measure the scale of the damage: type site:yourdomain.com into Google and compare the result count with your actual number of published pieces. A gap above 30% deserves an investigation.

Point 3: one SEO plugin, configured properly

The audit checks three things about your SEO setup.

No duplicates. One active SEO plugin, exactly one. Two plugins living side by side generate duplicate title tags, contradictory canonicals and competing sitemaps. It happens more often than you'd think, typically after a change of agency where the old plugin never got uninstalled.

One declared sitemap. WordPress ships a native sitemap (/wp-sitemap.xml) and your SEO plugin generates its own. Make sure only one of the two is submitted in Google Search Console, and that it's the plugin's version (far more configurable).

Clean tag templates. Default titles and meta descriptions must be defined for every content type, with no broken variables printing %%title%% verbatim in the search results. Check a sample of real pages in Google's results, not just the settings screen.

Point 4: the weight of your theme and plugins

WordPress itself is lightweight. What drags is the stack piled on top: a multipurpose theme loading 15 scripts on every page, a page builder tripling the HTML, and a plugin collection accumulated over the years.

The WordPress-specific speed audit protocol:

1. Measure your mobile LCP on three templates: homepage, post, page. The "good" threshold is under 2.5 seconds.
2. If it's slow, isolate the source: test with a default theme on a staging copy. If the site suddenly gets fast, the culprit is the theme or the page builder.
3. Take inventory of your plugins: the ones you no longer use, the ones duplicating each other, the ones loading scripts everywhere when they only serve one page (contact forms are the usual suspects).
4. Set up page caching and image compression if they aren't in place yet. These are the two fixes with the best effort-to-impact ratio on WordPress.

The detailed thresholds and metrics are the same as for any site; we cover them in the technical SEO audit checklist.

Point 5: images, the neglected goldmine

WordPress media libraries pile up 3 MB images uploaded straight from a phone. The audit checks four things: the format (WebP or AVIF rather than JPEG and PNG), the dimensions (not a 4,000-pixel image displayed at 400), lazy loading (native since WordPress 5.5, so verify no setting has switched it off), and alt attributes on the images that actually carry meaning.

An image optimization plugin converts and compresses your whole back catalog as a background task. It's the most mechanical fix on this list, so automate it.

Point 6: your theme's structured data

Plenty of WordPress themes declare structured data, sometimes well, sometimes carelessly. The audit runs your templates through Google's rich results test and verifies that a post declares a proper Article type with a consistent author and dates, that breadcrumbs are marked up, and above all that there are no duplicate schemas (the theme AND the SEO plugin each declaring their own version of the same entity).

If there's a duplicate, disable the theme's output and keep the SEO plugin's, which is usually more complete and better maintained.

Point 7: the external crawl, the only judge that counts

Everything above can be checked point by point, but the full picture only comes from crawling the site from the outside, the way Google does. The WordPress admin will never show you the orphan pages, the redirect chains inherited from three redesigns, or the 47 indexed tag pages nobody knew existed.

That's exactly what the Bloomwise audit does: it crawls your WordPress site like Googlebot, cross-references it with your real indexing data, and returns the list of problems ranked by impact, ghost pages and contradictory signals included. And since Bloomwise connects to WordPress, the loop closes itself: you can generate and publish content straight from the platform, with tags and internal linking already optimized, no copy-pasting.

The bottom line

A WordPress SEO audit targets the three layers where the problems live: the configuration (visibility checkbox, permalinks, a single SEO plugin), the auto-generated pages (tags, archives and attachments to sort or deindex), and the technical stack (theme, plugins, images). None of these show up in the admin; all of them show up in an external crawl, which is where Bloomwise picks up the work for you. Run through the list seriously once, automate the checks afterwards, and your WordPress site gets back on healthy foundations. The logical next step is verifying what those fixes actually change: our guide to measuring SEO results gives you the method.