Things start to get scary pretty quickly when the phrase technical SEO comes up for building a well-positioned website. But actually, it’s not all that complex, and once broken into manageable chunks, you’ll find it is systematic and essential. For users of WordPress, knowing the ins and outs of technical SEO can turn just another webpage into a powering, rank-climbing machine.
This book takes you through the most basic of technical SEO for WordPress to get the point across; be a beginner wanting to know the very basics or advanced, looking for a robust checklist to steer your WordPress site optimized, this article has it. Let’s start! Here is how to get started.
1. What is Technical SEO and Why is it Important?
Technical SEO refers to the process of making optimization to your website that would allow search engines such as Google to crawl, index, and rank it with efficiency. This may be seen as a kind of ‘laying foundation’ for your site; without appropriate technical setup, even the best content may not reach its full ranking potential.
Why does this matter for WordPress? WordPress is a fantastic CMS which provides you with flexibility-but with flexibility comes responsibility. WordPress sites need to be optimized for speed, security, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability. The three put together not only aid in your ranking but also enhance the experience of the user.
You may have the best content ever created, but if solid technical SEO doesn’t back you up, it’s useless. Your competition will out rank you.
2. The Technical SEO Checklist for WordPress
Let’s break down technical SEO into core pieces you should pay attention to, making sure your WordPress site is search-engine-ready.
2.1. Ensure Your Website is Crawlable
When optimizing your WordPress site, first of all, try to make sure that search engines can crawl your website without any restrictions. A couple of essential checks:
Robots.txt File: The robots.txt file is what blocks, or doesn’t block, crawlers from crawling on your site. Make sure primary content doesn’t accidentally get blocked. Access this file by going to yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
Example
txt
Copy and paste this code
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Sitemap: This is an XML sitemap, which acts like a roadmap to your website for the search engines. Ensure your XML sitemap is well structured. For WordPress sites, plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math can create automatic sitemaps.
2.2. Optimize Website Speed and Performance
Website speed is a very critical technical SEO factor. You will lose users and make them bounce away, which is an indicator to Google that you maybe have no relevant value to be placed before the internet population.
Here is how you can make your website on WordPress faster.
Image Optimization: Large images are the main culprits behind a slow website. Use an image compression tool like TinyPNG or use a plugin like Smush to reduce the image size without losing quality.
Use Caching: Sites like WordPress make use of caching, that stores static versions of your website. It reduces the site load time drastically and is popular for improving the speed of a WordPress site with WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
Content Delivery Network: A CDN spreads out your website’s files across multiple servers worldwide. So, when the user downloads your site, they’re downloading from a server closer to them, speeding up the load time. Of course, two other amazing CDNs are Cloudflare and StackPath.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: Removing unnecessary characters from your code helps improve page speed. Plugins like Autoptimize take care of this for you on WordPress sites.
2.3. Mobile Friendliness
Today, almost 50 percent of internet traffic is already coming from mobile devices. A web design that would be friendly to mobile use will then be a priority. WordPress themes are generally responsive unless you specifically set them not to be. It’s always a good idea to check out how your site will look and work on different devices.
Mobile-Friendly Test: Use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool to check if your WordPress website is optimized for mobile viewers. If the result is unfavorable, use a responsive theme or further optimize your existing theme.
2.4. Use HTTPS (SSL Certificate)
Security is another Google ranking factor, ranking HTTPS over HTTP. An SSL certificate only creates a secure connection between your site and its users. Getting an SSL Certificate is relatively easy for websites in WordPress. You can get one from your hosting providers or even get one free from Let’s Encrypt.
After you have installed your SSL certificate, your site URL should be:
https://jiatechsolution.com rather than http://jiatechsolution.com
2.5. Fix Crawl Errors
When the search engine can’t penetrate some pages, crawl errors occur. They can be quite disastrous for your SEO. Run a report within Google Search Console for crawl errors. When you receive 404 errors or issues with specific URLs, look at them quickly by either redirecting broken pages or solving server problems.
404 Errors
The pages which are no longer accessible can be redirected using plugins like Redirection as they allow setting up of 301 redirects directly from your WordPress dashboard.
2.6. Structured Data and Schema Markup
Structured data also known as schema markup is how search engines understand the content of your pages. This could even mean that your website gets rich snippets (more information on search results, which helps in better click-through rates).
For a user of WordPress, for example, Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP includes plugin functionality allowing you to add schema markup to your site without knowing any code.
2.7. Optimize for Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of elements Google has decided to monitor as important for experience. The three primary measurements are:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance.
First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity.
Cumulative Layout Shift: Evaluates visual stability.
Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse can be used in testing your website for Core Web Vitals. These metrics can be improved upon by:
Reducing server response times
Image optimization
Use lazy loading images and videos
Minimise the CSS and JavaScript blocking resources
3. Technical SEO Plugins for WordPress
While WordPress makes it easier to optimize SEO, most of the technical elements can be simplified further with the use of the right plugins. A few of these must-use plugins for optimizing technical SEO for your WordPress site are listed below.
3.1. Yoast SEO or Rank Math
Two of the most widely used SEO plugins for WordPress are Yoast SEO and Rank Math. While the two are alike in terms of their treatment of metadata, the generation of XML sitemaps, integration with Google Search Console, and other features, they do offer on-page SEO recommendations right into the WordPress editor.
3.2. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the strongest caching plugins. It will speed up your website; this might be critical for user experience and SEO. It also has some other nice features, such as lazy loading, database optimization, etc.
3.3. Broken Link Checker
This plugin looks over your site continuously for broken links and 404 errors. These issues should be fixed, which could be of importance both for SEO and user experience purposes.
3.4. Schema Pro
If you’d like to automatically add structured data on your website, then look no further than Schema Pro, which is just an amazing plugin and integrates with various WordPress themes and plugins, allowing implementation of schema markup without writing a single line of code.
4. More Advanced Technical SEO Tactics for WordPress
Once you have practiced the basics, here are some advanced technical SEO tactics that will allow you to squeeze even more juice out of your WordPress site.
4.1. Implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
AMP is the technology by which mobile pages load virtually instantaneously. AMP isn’t something that needs to be added to every site, but it does make a huge difference in your mobile experience and SEO rankings. To add AMP on WordPress sites, you can use the official plugin named AMP for WordPress.
4.2. Leverage Browser Caching
Enable browser caching to store website files locally on a visitor’s browser so they do not need to download the same files every time they visit your site. You can enable it either through your hosting provider or through a plugin such as WP Rocket.
4.3. Optimize Your Database
Over time, your WordPress database will be filled with unnecessary information like post revisions, spam comments, and transient options. Database optimization makes the site perform better. A helpful plugin for this is WP-Optimize.
5. Monitoring and Measuring Technical SEO Success
Once you have applied all the technical SEO measures to your website, the best way is to track whether something works or needs improvement. For tracking and measuring your progress, these tools are really helpful.
5.1. Google Search Console
It can monitor the performance of your website and check out search queries, index issues, and give you a notice whenever it encounters errors on your site.
5.2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to track a trend in visitor behavior, which pages are most popular, and even measure how your SEO effort influences your traffic and engagement.
5.3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
This tool crawls through your website, much like the search engines, reporting broken links, duplicate content, and any metadata problems. It’s a great site when combined to ensure that one really gets a comprehensive technical audit of their WordPress site.
6. Conclusion
Mastering technical SEO for WordPress is not about getting checklists right but understanding under the fundament of how search engines work and tailoring strategies to users as much as the bots. Provided the best tools and plugins and with adherence to requirements, the WordPress website should likely result in a technically sound, optimized for performance ranking high on search results.
But don’t worry, technical SEO is a step-by-step process. Whether or not you make it more crawlable, speed up page load times, or fix broken links, everything you set out to do draws you closer to SEO success. Keep this guide handy as your go-to checklist and you’ll be well on the road to mastering technical SEO for WordPress!
