What is a WordPress technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit for WordPress digs into the mechanical side of your site: can Google crawl it properly, are pages being indexed correctly, is the server responding fast enough, and is the HTML structured in a way search engines can parse without guessing.
This is different from a content audit. You might have great articles that nobody finds because WordPress is generating thousands of thin archive pages that dilute your crawl budget, or because a misconfigured plugin is blocking entire sections from indexation.
What should a WordPress SEO audit cover?
Five areas. Each one surfaces a different class of problem, and they tend to stack on top of each other the longer a site runs without maintenance.
1. Crawlability and indexation
Pull up your XML sitemap. Is it bloated with tag archives, author pages, and date-based URLs that add nothing? Check robots.txt for accidental blocks. Look at Search Console’s index coverage report for pages stuck in “Discovered, not indexed” limbo. WordPress generates a lot of URLs by default. Most of them should not be in your sitemap.
2. Site structure and internal linking
Run a crawl and look at click depth. If important pages sit 4+ clicks from the homepage, crawlers deprioritize them and users never find them. Check for orphaned pages (zero internal links pointing to them). Verify breadcrumbs match your actual URL hierarchy and are outputting valid BreadcrumbList schema.
3. Core Web Vitals and performance
Open Chrome DevTools, run a Lighthouse audit, and check field data in Search Console. The usual WordPress culprits: oversized hero images without width/height attributes (CLS), render-blocking stylesheets from plugins you forgot about (LCP), and undeferred JavaScript that blocks interaction (INP). Server-side issues like slow TTFB from shared hosting compound everything.
4. Schema and structured data
Validate schema using the Schema Markup Validator or check the Rich Results status report in Search Console. Common issues on WordPress sites: duplicate schema from running both an SEO plugin’s auto-generated markup and manually coded JSON-LD, missing required properties that prevent rich results from firing, and Organization schema pointing to the wrong URL. Every page should have exactly one schema graph with no conflicts.
5. Security and HTTPS configuration
Check for mixed content warnings (HTTP resources loaded on HTTPS pages). Verify security headers are present: HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options at minimum. Run your domain through securityheaders.com. Google confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal back in 2014, and mixed content can cause crawling issues on top of the security implications.
How often should you run a technical audit?
Quarterly for a full audit. Monthly for quick checks on Core Web Vitals and index coverage. And immediately after any major change: theme swap, plugin overhaul, hosting migration, PHP version upgrade. Problems introduced during these changes compound silently if nobody checks.
If you want someone experienced to handle this, our SEO consulting service starts with a full technical audit as the first deliverable in every engagement.