Most WordPress sites that struggle in search are not missing a clever trick. They are missing the basics, or the basics broke quietly during a redesign. This checklist is the one we run before a site goes live and again every few months. Each item takes minutes, and together they cover what search engines need to find, understand and show your pages.
1. Let search engines in
Start with the switch that hides everything. In Settings › Reading, make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is off on the live site. It is often left on after a staging copy goes live.
Then check that every page you care about returns a 200 status, is not marked noindex, and has a canonical URL that points to itself. A canonical that points to the staging domain, or to the home page, tells Google to ignore the page.
2. Submit a sitemap
WordPress has generated an XML sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5. Open it, confirm it lists your pages and posts, and submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Google’s sitemap overview explains what belongs in it.
Keep thin pages out: tag archives with one post, author pages on a single-author site, cart and checkout pages. They waste crawl attention and rarely answer a search.
3. Write a title and description for every page
The title is the clickable line in search results. Put the main topic first, keep it under about 60 characters, and make each one unique. The meta description does not change rankings, but it is often used as the snippet under the title, so it decides whether people click. Aim for one or two plain sentences, about 150 characters, that say what the page gives the reader.
Google may rewrite either of them when it thinks another line fits the query better. A title that matches the page’s main heading is rewritten less often.
4. One H1, then a clear outline
Each page should have one H1 that says what the page is about. Below it, H2 and H3 headings should read like a table of contents. Skipping levels for styling, or using headings for decoration, makes the outline harder for screen readers and for search engines to follow.
5. Link your own pages to each other
Internal links help visitors move on and show search engines which pages matter. Link from new posts to related older ones, and from guides to the product or service they mention. Use descriptive anchor text (“multilingual SEO guide”) instead of “click here”. An orphan page with no links pointing at it is hard to discover, even if it is in the sitemap.
6. Describe images
Give every meaningful image a short alt text that says what it shows. Use a descriptive file name, serve WebP or AVIF where you can, and set width and height so the layout does not jump while images load.
7. Add structured data
Structured data tells search engines what a page is: an organization, an article, a product, a breadcrumb trail. It can make a page eligible for rich results, although Google does not guarantee them. Start with Organization and WebSite on the home page, Article on posts and BreadcrumbList everywhere. Google’s introduction to structured data lists the supported types, and you can test a page with the Rich Results Test.
8. Make sharing look right
Open Graph tags control the title, description and image shown when someone shares your link on WhatsApp, LinkedIn or Facebook. A 1200×630 image and a clear title make a shared link look trustworthy.
9. Check speed on a real phone
Page experience is part of how Google ranks pages, and slow pages lose visitors before they rank. Measure the three Core Web Vitals and fix the largest problem first. Our Core Web Vitals guide for WordPress walks through each metric.
10. Recheck after every big change
Theme switches, plugin updates and migrations are where SEO breaks. After each one, look at a few key pages: title, description, canonical, robots tag and structured data. Then watch Search Console’s Pages report for a sudden drop in indexed pages.
How FluxWP handles the list
Flux SEO, our WordPress SEO plugin, covers items 2, 3, 7 and 8 with sensible defaults: titles and descriptions per page, canonical and robots tags, Open Graph with a 1200×630 share image, Organization, WebSite, Article and BreadcrumbList schema, sitemap clean-up and IndexNow pings. Its SEO check lists every page with a missing description, a long title, no featured image or no internal links, so the rest of this checklist becomes a to-do list. If your site has more than one language, read our multilingual SEO guide next.
