Content earns rankings, but technical SEO decides whether the content gets a fair hearing. On WordPress the fundamentals are very achievable — the platform is SEO-friendly by default — but a handful of settings and habits separate a clean site from one quietly sabotaging itself.
1. Control what gets crawled and indexed
Not every URL WordPress generates deserves an index entry. Date archives, tag pages with one post, attachment pages, internal search results — these thin pages dilute the crawl and compete with your real content. Use your SEO plugin to noindex the page types that add nothing, and make sure the reading setting “Discourage search engines” is OFF on production (and on for staging — both mistakes happen constantly).
2. One canonical URL per piece of content
The same content reachable at multiple URLs — http and https, with and without www, with tracking parameters — splits your ranking signals. Force one scheme and host with a 301, and let your SEO plugin emit a self-referencing canonical tag on every page. When content legitimately exists in two places, the canonical tag tells Google which one earns the credit.
3. Structured data and clean architecture
Schema markup (Article, Product, FAQ, Organization, Breadcrumb) helps machines understand pages and unlocks rich results. Just keep it truthful — markup must match visible content. Pair it with a flat, logical structure: important pages within three clicks of the homepage, descriptive slugs, and internal links that concentrate authority on what matters.
4. Sitemaps and Search Console
Submit your XML sitemap (your SEO plugin generates it) in Search Console, then actually read the Indexing report monthly. “Crawled — currently not indexed” and “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” are Google telling you precisely where the technical problems are. It is a free audit most site owners never open.
5. Speed is a ranking input
Core Web Vitals fold performance into technical SEO. A site failing LCP or CLS in field data competes at a handicap on every query. The fixes are their own discipline — we cover them in our performance guides — but the checklist item is simple: pass the Core Web Vitals assessment in Search Console, not just a lab test.