Technical SEO audit for WordPress: a 15-point checklist

🔍 What a technical SEO audit is

It is a review of everything a search engine sees below the surface: can it reach a page, understand it and trust it. The result is a list of errors ranked by impact. A general overview of SEO is in SEO for beginners.

✅ The checklist

Indexing

1. "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is turned off.
2. robots.txt does not block important parts of the site.
3. A sitemap exists and is submitted. See XML sitemap in WordPress.
4. Pages that should not be indexed (thank-you pages, internal search results) have noindex.

Structure and addresses

1. Permalinks are clean ("Post name").
2. Every page has a canonical link and one H1.
3. Duplicate content (archives, tags, pages with parameters) is under control.
4. Redirects are 301 and without chains, and 404 errors are fixed.

Security and display

1. The whole site runs on https without mixed content. See SSL and HTTPS.
2. The mobile version is complete. See mobile version.

Speed

1. Core Web Vitals are green on mobile. See Core Web Vitals.
2. Images are in modern formats with correct dimensions.
3. The number of plugins is reasonable and there are no conflicts.

Content and data

1. Titles and descriptions are unique on every page.
2. Structured data is valid. See schema markup.

🧰 Tools

Google Search Console (indexing and Core Web Vitals), PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog (the free version covers up to 500 URLs) and the rich results test for structured data.

🤝 When to bring in a specialist

An audit takes experience to tell errors that really cost rankings from irrelevant ones. We do it as part of SEO optimisation, with a priority list and fixes, and for WordPress also as part of WordPress website development.