Technical SEO is what makes your content discoverable. If search engines can’t crawl or understand your WordPress site, strong content won’t rank. Google’s Search Central Guidelines offer a good overview of what matters behind the scenes.
If you’re exploring long-term optimization strategies, you can also browse my blog for more tutorials.
1. Establish a clean site architecture
- Use SEO-friendly permalinks like /category/post-name and avoid unnecessary parameters.
- Secure your site with HTTPS: You can secure your site with a free SSL certificate offered by Let’s Encrypt.
- Organize your content clearly with categories and subcategories to keep crawl depth shallow.
- Generate and submit an XML sitemap via your SEO plugin.
- Configure robots.txt carefully – don’t block important content.
2. Configure an SEO plugin
Plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math help you manage titles, metadata and sitemaps.
- Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content.
- Add schema markup for articles, products or FAQs. The Schema.org library is a useful reference.
Enable breadcrumbs and verify your site in Search Console for performance insights.
3. Optimise content and on-page elements
- Do keyword research aligned with user intent.
- Use clean headings and only one H1 per page.
- Compress images, convert to WebP and add descriptive alt text.
- Use internal links to help crawlers discover related content.
If you want help building a clean structure or fixing technical issues, you can check my services.
4. Improve site speed
- Enable caching through your hosting or a plugin.
- Turn on GZIP compression.
- Use a CDN to reduce latency.
- Minify CSS and JS files.
Test performance using PageSpeed Insights for detailed recommendations.
5. Ensure mobile-friendliness
- Use a responsive WordPress theme.
- Run your site through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
- Optimize Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID and CLS.
6. Fix crawl errors and broken links
- Use Screaming Frog or any audit tool to find 404s and redirect chains.
- Set 301 redirects for deleted or moved pages.
7. Implement structured data and canonical tags
- Add structured data with JSON-LD to improve rich result eligibility.
- Canonical tags help indicate the primary version of similar or duplicate pages.
8. Enhance security and user trust
- Keep WordPress core and plugins updated.
- Use strong passwords and two-factor authentication.
- Install security plugins such as Wordfence or Sucuri.
- Create privacy and terms pages.
9. Monitor and maintain
- Check Search Console regularly for indexing and performance insights.
- Run routine audits to catch technical issues early.
- Refresh outdated posts and update links.
- Test critical elements like forms and checkout flows.
Conclusion
Technical SEO keeps your WordPress site fast, crawlable and search-friendly. By improving architecture, speed, mobile responsiveness, structured data, security and ongoing maintenance, you give your content the best chance to rank in 2026 and beyond.
