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.

What an SEO plugin can audit, and what it cannot

An SEO plugin configures your site. It does not audit it, and that difference matters more than the marketing suggests.

A plugin lives inside WordPress and sees what WordPress knows: your titles, your meta descriptions, your canonical settings, whether a post has a focus keyword. Genuinely useful, and the per-post checklists nudge people into decent habits. But a plugin cannot see what happens outside the admin. It does not know that three redesigns left you with redirect chains, that 47 tag pages are sitting in the index, that your mobile LCP is four seconds on a real handset, or that a page has no internal links pointing to it. Those problems only surface from a crawl that starts at your homepage and follows links the way a search engine does.

The practical split:

Keep the plugin, it does its job well. Just stop expecting it to tell you what is wrong with the site as a whole, because it is structurally unable to see it.

SEO audit, site audit, site health: which one do you need?

The three terms get used interchangeably and they cover different scopes.

A WordPress site health audit is the maintenance view: PHP version, core and plugin updates, database size, backups, security. WordPress ships a Site Health screen covering a good part of it. None of that is about ranking, though a site that falls over under load will cost you rankings eventually.

A WordPress site audit, in the broad sense, usually means both at once: technical maintenance plus search performance. It is what most agencies mean when they propose an audit before taking over a site.

A WordPress SEO audit, the subject of this article, only concerns what affects your visibility in search: indexing, crawl, content, speed as Google measures it, structured data, internal linking. Narrower scope, and the one that moves traffic.

If you inherited a site and have no idea where to start, open the site health screen first: a broken or outdated install makes every other measurement unreliable. Then run the SEO audit properly.

Auditing several WordPress sites without redoing everything

If you look after more than one WordPress site, the value stops being in the audit itself. It is in the audit being identical every time.

Build the check sequence once, in the order of this article, and run it unchanged on every site. That buys you two things a one-off audit never does. You start seeing the pattern, like the same commercial theme causing the same speed problem across four clients. And you can compare a site against itself three months later, which is the only honest way to prove the work paid off. The format matters more than the depth here, the same argument we make in our guide to the SEO audit report.

Worth automating first, in order of tedium: the crawl, the indexed-versus-published comparison, and the speed measurement across templates. Worth keeping manual: judging whether a category page deserves to stay indexed, and deciding what this particular client should fix first.

The 20-minute version, when that is all you have

Short on time, this sequence catches most of the damage.

1. Settings, Reading: is the discourage-search-engines box unchecked? (10 seconds)
2. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google: is the count in the same universe as your real page count? (2 minutes)
3. Search Console, Pages report: what sits in "Crawled, currently not indexed" and "Excluded by noindex"? (5 minutes)
4. Plugins screen: exactly one SEO plugin active, exactly one sitemap submitted. (2 minutes)
5. PageSpeed Insights on the homepage and one post, mobile tab only. (5 minutes)
6. Open a post in a private window and read the browser tab: is that the title you meant to write? (1 minute)

It will not find your orphan pages or your redirect chains. It will tell you within twenty minutes whether you are dealing with a catastrophe or a tuning job.

The WordPress SEO audit checklist

The recap, in the order to run it:

• Discourage-search-engines box unchecked, permalinks set to post name
• Tags, date archives and author pages triaged: keep, improve, or noindex
• Attachment pages redirected to the file or the parent post
• Exactly one SEO plugin active, exactly one sitemap submitted
• Title and meta templates defined per content type, no raw variables showing in the results
• Mobile LCP measured on the homepage, post and page templates
• Unused plugins uninstalled rather than just deactivated
• Images in WebP or AVIF, resized, lazy loading on, alt text where it carries meaning
• Structured data validated, no duplicate schema between theme and SEO plugin
• Full external crawl run, orphan pages and redirect chains listed

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. And if your store runs on WooCommerce, the audit inherits all of these points plus the e-commerce checkpoints: we detailed them in our WooCommerce SEO audit. The logical next step is verifying what those fixes actually change: our guide to measuring SEO results gives you the method.