The audit your
SEO pluginwon't do

The WordPress-specific checklist

These are the findings that recur on WordPress and almost nowhere else. An SEO plugin handles the first two lines of on-page work well; everything below is outside what a plugin can see, because it is a property of the rendered page rather than the post record.

1. 1

   Plugin assets loading everywhere

   The default plugin behaviour is to enqueue its CSS and JavaScript on every page, not just the ones using it. A contact-form plugin, a slider and a social-share plugin between them commonly add several hundred kilobytes to pages containing none of those things. Check what each page actually loads, then dequeue per template.

2. 2

   Full-size images from the Media Library

   WordPress generates sized thumbnails on upload, but a theme or block that references the full-size URL bypasses them entirely. A 4000-pixel photograph displayed at 800 is our most common single finding on WordPress. Confirm the rendered srcset offers sizes near the display width, and convert to WebP on upload.

3. 3

   What the SEO plugin claims versus what shipped

   Yoast and RankMath report on the post record, not the response. A canonical overridden by the theme, a noindex left from staging, or schema emitted twice by plugin and theme all look correct in the editor. Read the served HTML rather than the plugin panel.

4. 4

   Render-blocking theme CSS

   Most themes ship one large stylesheet loaded in the head, so nothing paints until it arrives. Inlining the rules used above the fold and deferring the rest is usually the single largest first-paint improvement available on a WordPress site.

5. 5

   Uncached PHP on every request

   Without page caching, every visit runs the full PHP and database cycle. This is what puts Time to First Byte over a second, and because everything else waits on TTFB, no amount of front-end work compensates. Page caching plus object caching is the fix, and shared hosting is frequently the real limit.

6. 6

   hreflang from WPML, Polylang or TranslatePress

   Multilingual plugins generate hreflang automatically and get the reciprocity wrong often enough to be worth checking: every page in a set must point at all the others including itself, and the return links must match.

7. 7

   WooCommerce product schema

   WooCommerce emits Product markup, but price and availability drift from what the page displays when a caching layer sits in front. A mismatch between marked-up and visible price is grounds for losing rich results entirely.