WordPress will publish almost anything you ask it to, and quite a lot you never asked for: tag archives, attachment pages, author pages, internal search results and whatever a plugin decides to add. This page is for UK businesses whose website runs on self-hosted WordPress and who want its SEO configured properly and the clutter cleared away. If your site has crawling or structural problems that have little to do with the platform, my technical SEO service is the better starting point. If you sell through WooCommerce, the shop side is covered by WooCommerce SEO for online stores.
What WordPress SEO fixes
A typical WordPress site is put together from a theme, often a page builder, an SEO plugin and a dozen or more other plugins, each written by a different developer. Any of them can add URLs, change what sits in the page head or load scripts on every page. Nobody checks how they behave together, so the site looks fine to visitors while sending Google mixed signals: two canonical tags on one page, a sitemap listing pages set to noindex, or hundreds of thin archive pages competing with the pages you actually want found.
The work puts one set of rules in charge. When it is done, each page has a single title, description and canonical tag, the sitemap lists only pages you want in Google, low-value archive URLs are out of the index, and your main templates load quickly on a phone. For you, that means Search Console reports you can trust, and a written record of the set-up that makes it far easier to keep the site tidy when someone installs the next plugin.
Who it suits, and who it does not
It suits UK businesses on self-hosted WordPress (the version installed on your own hosting, sometimes called WordPress.org), from a ten-page site for a local trade to a publisher with thousands of posts. It fits well if a developer or agency built the site but does not specialise in search, or if you run the site yourself and want someone to set it up properly and explain each setting.
It is less useful if your problem is what the pages say rather than how WordPress serves them. In that case on-page SEO for your existing pages will do more. It is also the wrong job if you are about to rebuild or change platform, because tuning a site you are replacing is wasted money. There, website migration SEO protects what you have built while you move.
What the work covers
SEO plugin set-up and conflicts
Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO and SEOPress all do broadly the same job. Problems start when two are active at once, or when the theme or page builder also writes titles, social sharing tags or structured data. I check what actually appears in the page source rather than what the settings screens claim, choose one plugin to be in charge, and configure its title templates, archive settings, breadcrumbs and social tags.
Archives, attachments and other thin URLs
Category and tag archives, author pages on a single-author site, date archives, paginated blog pages, media attachment pages and internal search results can all end up in Google. Some are worth keeping, since a well-written category page can rank in its own right. Many are near-empty, which is how a site with a few dozen real pages ends up with hundreds of URLs known to Google, a problem called index bloat. I decide what each archive type is for, then noindex, redirect or remove it. Attachment pages have been switched off by default on new installs since WordPress 6.4, but older sites often still serve them.
Sitemaps and search engine settings
Since version 5.5, WordPress has generated its own XML sitemap, and most SEO plugins switch it off and replace it with theirs. When that handover goes wrong, a site has two sitemaps listing different URLs, sometimes both submitted in Search Console. I make sure there is one sitemap containing only indexable pages, and that robots.txt and the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box under Settings, Reading are set the way you intend. That box left ticked after launch is one of the simplest reasons a WordPress site never appears in Google.
Themes, page builders and speed
Heavy themes and page builders such as Elementor, Divi and WPBakery can load large amounts of CSS and JavaScript on every page, along with sliders, icon fonts and widgets nobody uses. I measure your key templates against Core Web Vitals, using real-visitor data where Google has enough of it, then deal with the WordPress-specific causes: caching, image sizes and formats, scripts that only one page needs and plugins that load their files everywhere. Some fixes are settings, some need a developer, and occasionally the honest answer is that the theme itself is the obstacle. A site whose speed problems go deeper than WordPress, such as slow hosting or heavy third-party scripts, needs a dedicated speed project rather than this clean-up.
Headings, structure and internal links
Themes often get the HTML basics wrong: the site name wrapped in an H1 on every page, headings chosen for their font size, no breadcrumbs, and important pages reachable only from the menu. I get the templates corrected so each page has one H1, set up breadcrumbs, and tidy permalinks and categories so the URL structure reflects how your services or topics are actually organised. Where you need structured data beyond what the plugin produces, I plan it as part of my schema markup service.
Spam, hacks and plugin hygiene
Some SEO problems on WordPress are really security problems. Abandoned plugins, spam comments, spam search URLs and infections such as the Japanese keyword hack can put pages you never wrote into Google under your domain. I look for these in Search Console and in Google itself, flag plugins that are outdated or no longer maintained, and tell you plainly when the job needs a security specialist rather than an SEO consultant.
How I run a WordPress SEO engagement
- Access. You create a separate WordPress user for me and add me to Google Search Console and Google Analytics. I never need your own login, and you can delete my account when we finish.
- Audit. I crawl the site, compare what Google has indexed with what you want indexed, read the source of each template and list every plugin alongside what it adds to the site.
- Plan. You get a prioritised list split three ways: settings I can change in the dashboard, tickets for your developer, and habits to stop.
- Test. Changes go onto a staging site first where your host provides one, and a full backup is taken before anything touches the live site.
- Release and check. After each release I recrawl, check the page source again and watch the Page indexing report in Search Console to confirm Google is seeing what we intended.
Problems I check for first on UK WordPress sites
- “Discourage search engines” still ticked after launch, or a staging copy of the site indexed on a subdomain.
- Two SEO plugins active, or a plugin and the theme both printing canonicals and schema.
- Tag archives holding one or two posts each, indexed by the hundred.
- Attachment pages and internal search results showing in Google.
- Plain permalinks such as ?p=123, or a permalink change made without redirects from the old addresses.
- Form thank-you pages, theme demo content and plugin post types such as portfolios or testimonials published with public URLs nobody meant to share.
- A cookie consent plugin, needed for UK GDPR and PECR, loaded in a way that delays the main content or covers it on mobile.
What you receive
You receive a written audit of the WordPress set-up, with each finding explained in plain English and ranked by likely impact and effort. Alongside it comes a settings record showing what was changed in which plugin and why, so the next person who works on the site does not undo it by accident. Anything needing code arrives as a developer ticket with a clear test for when it is done. Once changes are live, I send a before-and-after check of indexing and Core Web Vitals so you can see what moved.
If you would like continuing support, I can review the site after major plugin and theme updates, which is when WordPress settings most often drift back.
Next step
The quickest way to find out whether WordPress itself is holding your site back is a free SEO audit of your website. Send me your web address and I will tell you which of these problems your site has and what I would fix first. If you would rather talk it through, book a call and we can go through your dashboard together.