WordPress technical SEO.

Technical SEO service to get your website ready for investing in on- and off-page SEO.

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Want your site to be faster? I can help you with that.

Technical optimisation for WordPress is all about ensuring your site is ready for additional SEO investment.

The last thing you want to do with your website is spend money on SEO when it is not technically optimised.

Poor technical optimisation hinders your site rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) because Google (et al.) wants to make sure its users get a good on-site experience and therefore don’t deliver traffic to webshites.

This service is about making sure your site’s build and functions are as good as they can be, and it takes more than a caching plugin to do this.

SEO Tip – Technical optimisation should be in your SEO expert’s toolkit. If they can’t do this and have to outsource to someone else, look for another SEO.

Does your WordPress site suffer from poor technical SEO?

If you feel your SEO efforts are getting you nowhere, give me a call, and I can take a look at your technical SEO to see if it needs improvement.

Call Dave: WordPress technical SEO expert

What happens during technical optimisation?

There is a straightforward process for technical optimisation.

First, there’s the SEO audit, which will highlight the issues.

You need this to determine what needs fixing and what are the priorities.

Once you have the audit, your technical SEO expert will work through these to improve your site’s score.

This can take time, as some issues can be tricky to fix.

We are looking to achieve excellent scores in all the website auditing tools, so we know that the site is in tip-top condition before we embark on other SEO.

You will be wasting money if you don’t technically optimise your site before tackling on- and off-page SEO.

What does technical SEO cover?

Here’s a list of the most common aspects of technical SEO. I will run through all of these on your site.

Site visibility.

Sounds obvious, but checking that the search engines can actually see your site is the first step of the process – it’s easy to forget this step and wonder why you are not ranking.

There is an option in WordPress > Settings > Reading where your installation can prevent search engines from indexing the site.

This is often left on during site builds; sometimes, people forget to turn it off.

Crawl check.

If your site can be indexed, I also check that it can be crawled, and nothing prevents bots from accessing your content.

The tool for this is generally Google’s search console, but I also use tools like Screaming Frog and ahrefs.

Again, this checks the basics, but it takes minutes and is always worth checking.

Security: HTTPs.

Google wants your site to be secure for the visitors it sends, so an SSL certificate is an absolute must.

The good news is that most hosting companies now provide free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt.

If your website is not secure, Chrome and other browsers will display a warning to visitors when they try to access your site: you don’t want that.

Broken links.

It could be considered as on-page SEO, but it also comes under the technical banner.

Finding and fixing any broken links on your site improves your internal linking and makes sure you are not externally linking to 404 pages.

URL structures.

This is a biggy. If your website has poorly structured URLs, these can hurt SEO.

You want your URL structure to be like this:

www.your-domain.com/services/service-name

Not like this:

www.your-domain.com/?p=12343

The second example tells the search engines nothing, the first tells them everything they need to know.

Duplicate content URLs.

This is where multiple versions of the same URL are available on your site.

Here’s an example:

https://www.your-domain.com/services/service-name/
http://www.your-domain.com/services/service-name/

Here, we have a secure and non-secure URL available.

https://www.your-domain.com/services/service-name
https://www.your-domain.com/services/service-name/

This example shows we are missing a trailing slash, which will result in a 301.

Responsiveness (mobile-friendly).

Google indexes the website mobile-first, so even if your entire audience is desk-based, you need a proper working site on mobile.

I’ll check this using Google’s tools and ensure everything is correct.

Note that this covers more than just what your site looks like on a phone.

Site speed and TTFB.

Your site must be as fast as possible, so I use various tools to check its loading speed and Time To First Byte.

These tests ensure that visitors and bots get a fast website experience and can improve SEO.

One of the main things that slows your site down is cheap hosting.

Orphaned pages.

I will check your site to see if you have pages that are not linked to by other pages.

This is called orphaned content and means that Google will not index the page as it thinks you don’t care about it enough.

You don’t want orphaned content on your site, but luckily, it’s an easy fix.

Internal links.

Again, potentially one for the on-page SEO list, but I think internal linking is critical if you want your site to rank well.

Never automate this process – it’s so important that it must be done manually.

Luckily, I invented and built a very handy SEO plugin to do this for you.

Schema.

Certain content on your site can be marked up with schema to help the search engines.

Yoast and other plugins automatically add schema to your pages, so it’s important not to overdo schema and ensure it is implemented correctly to avoid causing more harm than good.

Robots.txt file.

Your robots’ text file should be optimised to ensure that bots can access everything they need.

I will check this for you and make sure it is correctly configured.

Malware checks.

Hackers love targeting WordPress sites, so I always run a malware check using several different apps to ensure that your site is not infected.

Your site can be hacked without you knowing about it, so this is a worthwhile check and only takes a few minutes.

Content delivery networks.

Serving up your content from servers closer to your visitor’s location can improve your site’s speed, so if you don’t use a CDN, I can set one up.

CDNs are not free, but they are worth the money you pay for the service.

Caching & GZIP.

Most decent hosting companies compress your code and provide good caching solutions for your site, but if not, this is something you should get sorted out on your site.

This can take time to sort out, but it’s more than worth the investment needed.

Cloudflare.

Moving your DNS hosting to Cloudflare is also a great way of improving your site’s speed and caching.

Again, this is not free, but if you are investing in SEO then it’s a worthwhile addition to your site.

Important considerations for technical SEO on a WordPress site.

Having a non-production environment for some of this stuff can be very helpful.

Doing technical SEO on a WordPress site often involves changing code, installing plugins and testing things, so doing it on a live website is not always a good idea.

If you don’t have a staging environment for your site, I can clone it to one of mine to do some work before moving it back to the live environment.

The last thing you want is downtime while trying to improve your site. I generally advise clients to do this.

If this requires a lot of effort (a busy WooCommerce site, for example), we can do it in the live environment, provided your site has backups and one-click restores.

If the worst happens, the site can then be reverted quickly.

Expectations.

I am a WordPress SEO expert, not a magician, so it’s important to understand some of the limitations of technical SEO before you start.

If your site is badly built with a bulky theme and loads of plugins, getting top scores in page speed tests will be hard.

It may be the case that your site is so bad that 30/100 is the best that can be achieved.

To this end, I will quickly look at your site and let you know what I think I can do for you.

Need help with your technical optimisation?

I’ve worked on 100s of WordPress sites to improve the technical SEO and increase the chances of ranking higher in the search results.

If you want some help with your site, get in touch, and we can have an initial chat.

Get help with technical SEO

WordPress technical SEO FAQs

I’ve covered some of the most commonly asked questions about technical SEO below. If you have a different question, get in touch.

How long does technical SEO take?

I’m not being obtuse, but as long as it needs to be. If your site is large and complex, it can take a long time, whereas if it’s a ten-pager with five plugins, it’s not going to take as long, but you should be looking at hours rather than days of work.

In technical SEO, everything has to be tested, so I change, test the results, and then repeat the process.

If we need to clone your site to do the work, that adds a couple of hours to the process.

What are the results I can expect from technical SEO?

This can vary as it’s only one aspect of SEO and needs to be done before you do anything else.

You should expect to see green lights on all of Google’s speed tests, which can benefit your ranking positions.

It’s important to remember to do the technical SEO before doing other SEO so you know that your on- and off-page SEO isn’t suffering because of it.

Can I do my technical SEO myself?

With most SEO work, there are things that I tell my clients they can do themselves. Technical SEO is one where it’s best left to the pros.

There are so many aspects to it and so many things you can do wrong that you want this aspect of SEO done right.

What tools do you use for technical SEO?

I use apps like Google Search Console, SEM Rush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog, as well as SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math.

Some of these are free, and you can use them too; others require a license and are not cheap.

Will there be downtime on my site?

Not if we clone it to a staging server. Where this is not possible, it’s a case of treading softly and being extra careful with the process.

There is always a risk of downtime whenever code changes are involved, but that is why you get a pro to do it.

Do I have to invest in technical SEO?

I will say yes to that, purely because if you skip the technical and then spend money on- or off-page, you may be throwing this cash away.

Doing SEO on a website with poor technical SEO is like walking through a treacle.

Will you need access to my site admin?

Yes, I will. I will also need access to your server control panel and DNS if we are looking into using Cloudflare.

I have a non-disclosure agreement I send to clients to cover the legalities of this access.

Do you guarantee results?

I can guarantee that I will get your site’s performance scores as high as they can get.

Remember that I am working with something that I did not build, so if you insist on using the Slider Revolution plugin, for example, you are never going to get 100/100, as it will prevent that.

Do you really need 100/100?

Sometimes, 95/100 is not enough for some clients.

You know I said I was straight-talking, right?

Often, achieving 100/100 in speed scores is damn near impossible, and in these cases, getting the score as high as it can go without rebuilding the site is all I can do.

If you have a shit website, there’s only so much I can do; as I mentioned earlier, I am an SEO expert, not a magician, so I will do everything I can, but there are limits.

Perfection is the enemy of progress.

When we get your scores as good as possible, it’s time to move onto on-page SEO and stop obsessing over an extra one or two percentage points.

It’s also important to remember that many other factors could prevent your site from ranking higher than whether you score 93% or 95% on the tests.

Get over it and move on to sorting your on-page and content. An extra 2% doesn’t make a difference in ranking 20th or 2nd—it doesn’t.

A lot of SEO does not mean being perfect; it’s about being better than your competitors.

Optimising your WordPress site for Google Page Speed Insights.

Google’s Page Speed Insights is often seen as the de facto score for your site.

To ensure that technical SEO is not letting your site down, getting scores north of 90/100 in Page Speed Insights is not a bad thing.

If your WordPress site is currently scoring poorly, I can help you improve its technical aspects to get better scores.

There is a caveat to this service: If someone else built you a poorly optimised site, I can only do what I can to improve the current site.

If you have low Page Speed scores, I can usually improve these significant, but it might not always be possible to achieve the 90+ scores if the build quality of your current site is crap.

How I work on improving your Page Speed Scores.

I’ll run an audit on your current site to see what I am working with and to get a baseline for the site.

This audit always uncovers some basic stuff that needs sorting first. This stuff is often quite easy to do, so you can do it yourself or pay me to sort it.

Once the basics are out of the way, I will review your theme, plugins, and uploads to see where we can improve.

Once this is all done, I usually add WP Rocket to the site to optimise it further and then install an image optimisation plugin to optimise the images on the site.

If we’re still not getting the scores we need after all these optimisations, it’s time to look into other options, such as hosting and moving your DNS to CloudFlare.

I work incrementally, doing some work and then demonstrating the improvements before moving on to the next step, so you can see what you are getting for your money.