WordPress SEO: how do you optimize your site for search engines?

What is WordPress SEO?

WordPress SEO applies the rules of search engine optimization to a CMS that automates part of them. Google’s SEO Starter Guide (updated on December 10, 2025) mentions CMSs for what they can do for you: submit a sitemap, add a nofollow annotation to user links, offer an alt text field when you upload an image.

The 58.4% figure from W3Techs only covers sites whose CMS is identified. Among the 10,000 most visited sites, the Web Almanac 2025 attributes about 58% of CMS usage to WordPress (July 2025 crawl).

The core handles part of the technical work, but the authors of the Web Almanac 2025 attribute the gaps between WordPress sites to configuration and tooling choices more than to the core. Installing an SEO plugin does not fix everything.

This guide covers self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org). On WordPress.com, the hosted service, installing plugins is only available on the paid Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce plans. WordPress.com’s own SEO tools start with the Premium plan.

What does WordPress do on its own for SEO?

From version 5.3 to 6.8, the WordPress core has added several features that help SEO. The table gives the version in which each feature arrived and the point to check.

The native sitemap is described in the WordPress Core note on version 5.5 (July 22, 2020). For its structure and how to submit it to Google, see our guide to the XML sitemap.

For attachments, the “Changes to attachment pages” note (October 16, 2023) states that an existing site that is updated keeps its attachment pages.

The core has no redirect manager. A changed URL is redirected at server level or with a plugin such as Redirection (2 million+ active installations on October 19, 2026): see our guide to 301 redirects.

What settings should you configure for WordPress SEO?

Seven settings lay the foundations of WordPress SEO, on a new site as on a site you take over. This is the baseline WordPress SEO optimization: most of it is done in the Settings menu, without a plugin.

1. Uncheck the visibility box in production (Settings > Reading). When checked, it adds noindex,nofollow to every page and turns off the native sitemaps.
2. Switch the site to HTTPS. WordPress.org lists it in the recommended configuration, along with PHP 8.3 or higher and MariaDB 10.11 or MySQL 8.0 or higher.
3. Choose permalinks before going live: “Post name”, or a custom structure such as /%category%/%postname%/, which places the post under its category. Changing later means redirecting the old URLs.
4. Decide what happens to archives. Categories, tags, author and date archives create list pages. Keep indexed the ones that answer a real intent, and redirect the others or set them to noindex: one intent, one URL.
5. Check attachment pages on a site installed before version 6.4. They stay active after the update; redirect them to the file.
6. Check comment links. Google asks that every link posted by a user carry a nofollow or equivalent annotation, added automatically by the CMS.
7. Add the site to Search Console and submit a single sitemap there. Google states that submitting a sitemap is not mandatory and that some CMSs do it on their own.

Which WordPress SEO plugin should you choose?

An SEO plugin fills in where the core stops. The French listing of Yoast SEO on WordPress.org, for example, advertises automated meta tags, canonical URLs, XML sitemaps, a breadcrumbs block, Schema.org structured data and management of an llms.txt file. The title and meta description still have to be written page by page, like the other on-page levers. For the Schema graph it produces, see our guide to structured data.

Data recorded on October 19, 2026 from the plugins’ WordPress.org listings and the vendors’ pricing pages. Active installations are tiers rounded by WordPress.org, not an exact count. Elev8 Lab has no commercial relationship with the vendors mentioned.

Three criteria can be checked on each plugin’s listing. Compatibility first: on October 19, 2026, WordPress offered version 7.1.3 for download, and SEOKEY was only tested up to 6.8.11. Update frequency next: six of the seven plugins in the table were updated in October 2026, SEOKEY in July 2025. Finally, the features you actually need. No plugin wins on every site.

Elev8 Lab uses the free version of Yoast SEO, the only SEO plugin on the site (decision of September 23, 2026).

Do you need the paid version?

No, not by default. In the case of Yoast SEO, the free version published on WordPress.org already covers the sitemap, canonicals, breadcrumbs and structured data. Only pay for an identified feature that is missing and that you will use. The lab’s rule points the same way: native WordPress first, then the block editor, the theme, light CSS, a recognized free plugin; no premium plugin without explicit agreement.

Can you run two SEO plugins at once?

Keep a single SEO plugin active. Two plugins that manage the same tags can be spotted in the source code: there should be one <title>, one canonical tag, one robots tag and one declared sitemap.

The same check applies to the theme. On elev8-lab.fr, the theme only adds to Yoast’s graph types that describe visible content, for example Service on the services page.

Theme and performance: where is a WordPress site’s speed decided?

The Web Almanac 2025 (published on January 15, 2026) ranks WordPress among the lowest-scoring CMSs. Its progress over one year is about 4%, compared with 14% for Wix and 11% for Duda, which are more closed platforms. On LCP alone, 53% of mobile WordPress sites get a good score.

The authors explain the gap by configuration and tooling choices (theme, plugins, page builder) more than by the core, which already handles fetchpriority, lazy loading of images and speculative loading.

Three choices are yours: a lightweight theme; few plugins, each one justified; a page cache, provided by the host or by a plugin such as WP Super Cache (free, 1 million+ active installations on October 19, 2026). The Core Web Vitals thresholds are an LCP of 2.5 s or less, an INP of 200 ms or less and a CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, with mobile and desktop counted separately.

On elev8-lab.fr, the theme loads two preloaded self-hosted fonts, converts JPEG and PNG files to WebP on upload, serves a single minified CSS file and only loads a script if the block that uses it is present. No Core Web Vitals measurement of the site is published here: these choices describe the method, not a result.

How does Elev8 Lab configure its WordPress site?

The elev8-lab.fr site runs on WordPress. The table shows its SEO settings as anyone could observe them on October 19, 2026, in the source code, the robots.txt file or with curl -I. This is our choice for an editorial site, not the only valid configuration.

Example check of a category archive:

• curl -I https://elev8-lab.fr/category/seo/
• HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
• Location: https://elev8-lab.fr/seo/

How do you check your WordPress site’s SEO?

Six checks show whether the settings hold. They are done without a plugin, from a browser or a terminal.

• Source code of a page: one <title>, one canonical tag, a robots tag without noindex on pages that should be indexed.
• /robots.txt file: no rule blocking content that should be indexed, a Sitemap line.
• Sitemap: /wp-sitemap.xml or the plugin’s own, a single index, with no noindex page.
• Archives and attachments: curl -I on a category archive and on a media page, to see the returned code (200, 301) or the robots tag.
• Search Console: page indexing report and URL inspection on a page you want indexed.
• Core Web Vitals: Search Console report or PageSpeed Insights, on mobile.

A setting only counts once it has been observed in the code or in Search Console: that is the WordPress SEO checking method this guide follows. For crawling, indexing and logs, see our guide to technical SEO.