WordPress SEO guide

The archives nobody chose

By default WordPress creates category, tag, author and date archives, and makes them indexable. On a typical site these are thin, near-duplicate listings that dilute internal linking and consume crawl budget.

If an archive is genuinely a useful browsing page with an audience, keep it. If it exists because WordPress made it, set it to noindex. Author and date archives on a single-author site are almost never worth keeping.

Plugins are the usual speed problem

Most long-running WordPress sites carry plugins that load scripts on every page and are no longer used by anyone. Auditing what each one loads, and on which pages, is typically the largest available performance improvement.

Adding a caching plugin on top of the problem is the common response and treats the symptom.

Your SEO plugin is not your SEO

Yoast and RankMath both do the job. Neither decides your rankings, and switching between them changes essentially nothing. What matters is whether the settings were ever configured rather than left at defaults.

The settings worth checking: which post types and archives are indexable, whether titles follow a sensible pattern, and whether the sitemap includes only pages you want indexed.

Page builders

Most page builders emit heavy, deeply nested markup and a great deal of CSS and JavaScript. That is a real cost, paid on every page view. It does not make ranking impossible; it does make Core Web Vitals harder and raises the floor on page weight.