WordPress SEO audit: what breaks, and how to find it
The problems WordPress creates for itself, and the ten minutes it takes to find them.
WordPress runs a large share of the web, and most of its SEO problems come from the same place: a theme and two plugins each convinced they own the <head>. The result is a site that looks fine in the editor and arrives at Google with two titles, no description and a canonical pointing at a page nobody meant to promote.
This is what an AuditOpti crawl looks for on a WordPress site, why each one matters, and what to change. Everything here is checkable on your own site in the next few minutes — several of the checks are free tools on this site.
What goes wrong on WordPress sites
Two plugins writing the same tag
An SEO plugin writes a title, the theme writes another, and a page-builder adds a third. Search engines pick one, usually not the one you wrote. It shows up as duplicate title and description tags on pages that look correct in the plugin's own preview.
Attachment pages nobody asked for
WordPress generates a page for every uploaded image. On a media-heavy site that is thousands of near-empty URLs competing with your real content and soaking up crawl budget. Yoast and Rank Math can redirect them to the parent post; it is one setting and it is off by default in older installs.
Tag and category archives with nothing on them
Every tag creates an archive page. Tags used once produce a page with one excerpt on it, which is the textbook definition of thin content, and they are usually indexable by default. Either use tags deliberately or noindex the archives.
Blocked CSS and JavaScript in robots.txt
Old hardening advice told people to disallow /wp-includes/ and /wp-content/plugins/. Google renders pages before judging them, so blocking those folders means it sees a broken layout and can't confirm the page works on mobile.
Plugin weight in the critical path
Fifteen plugins each adding a stylesheet and a script is the most common cause of a poor Largest Contentful Paint on WordPress. The fix is rarely a caching plugin; it is removing what isn't used and loading the rest after the page paints.
Pagination canonicalised to page one
Several themes canonicalise /page/2/ back to the archive root. That tells Google the deeper pages don't exist, and anything only linked from them gets orphaned. Paginated pages should be self-canonical.
What an AuditOpti crawl looks for
- Every page's title and description, with duplicates grouped rather than listed one by one
- Attachment pages, tag archives and other auto-generated URLs that are indexable
- robots.txt rules that block assets Google needs to render the page
- Canonical tags across templates, so you see the pattern rather than one page
- Core Web Vitals on mobile for the homepage and the most linked pages
- Internal links pointing at redirects or 404s, which plugin churn creates constantly
Check part of it right now, free
These read a live page and tell you what a search engine sees. No signup, no email.
Meta tag checker
Every tag in the head of your page, read back to you the way a crawler sees it.
robots.txt checker
One file, read carefully — because the expensive mistakes all live in it.
SEO score checker
Score one page against the checks that actually move rankings.
The issues behind this
Each has a full entry in the issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
Duplicate title tags
Several pages share one identical title.
Missing meta description
No summary text for the search result snippet.
Thin content
The page has too little text to be useful.
robots.txt blocking resources
The site blocks the files needed to render its own pages.
Slow largest contentful paint
The main content takes too long to appear.
Questions
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Every WordPress problem, plus a catalogue that multiplies them.
Blog
Most blogs don't have a content problem. They have an archive problem.
Shopify
Most Shopify SEO problems are the platform's defaults, not your mistakes.
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