Setting up SEO in WordPress is one evening of settings that then work for years - provided you do them in the right order. Order matters more here than the settings themselves, because two of these decisions - the URL structure and the choice of domain version - are hard to undo a year later without a pile of redirect work.
This piece is about settings: what to switch on, what to switch off and what not to touch. It is not about writing titles, descriptions or content - that is a separate layer and I set it out in the SEO audit checklist, along with the “can Google see my site at all” diagnostics. Here I assume the site is new or freshly rebuilt and you want to configure it once, properly.
One SEO plugin, not two
The first decision, and the most common problem I find when taking over someone else’s site: two SEO plugins active at once. It looks harmless, because both are “doing something”, and the effect is that the site sends the search engine contradictory signals:
- Two canonical URLs in the code of one page - the search engine gets two conflicting statements about which address is the right one
- Two sitemaps at different addresses, both submitted, both incomplete
- Duplicate description and preview tags, so what shows up on social media is not what you set
- Conflicting noindex rules - one plugin excludes a page, the other includes it
What to do: pick one, and deactivate the other first, then delete it, having exported its settings if it held your titles and descriptions. The popular plugins can import settings from each other - use that rather than retyping everything.
Which plugin: the least important decision in this whole piece. Every serious option does the same things - adds a form for titles and descriptions, generates a sitemap, controls exclusions and outputs tags. They differ in convenience, not in outcome.
One detail: WordPress has generated its own basic sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml for several versions now. SEO plugins usually disable it and substitute their own. If you end up with both, check which one you submitted to Search Console.
Permalinks - set them before you publish anything
Settings → Permalinks. The default on some installs is the post ID, giving /?p=137. Change it to Post name, which gives /yourdomain.com/wordpress-repair/.
Two important points:
- Do it before publishing content. Changing the structure on a site that has been running for a year changes the address of every page at once. You then have to set permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, or the rankings you built disappear. It is the same work as in a migration without losing rankings - doable, but unnecessary if you set it on day one
- Do not put the date in the URL.
/2026/07/wordpress-repair/ages a piece that will still be accurate in two years, and makes updating it awkward
A separate matter is the /category/ segment in category URLs. WordPress lets you rename it in the same screen (the “Category base” field) but will not let you remove it entirely without a plugin. Honestly: it is cosmetic and has a negligible effect on rankings. On a site that is already running, leave it - the redirect cost outweighs the gain.
Keep post slugs short and meaningful: /how-to-speed-up-wordpress/, not /how-to-speed-up-wordpress-in-10-steps-full-guide-2026/.
One version of your address
The same site can be reachable at four addresses: with and without www, over http and over https. To you that is one site; to a search engine it is four addresses with identical content.
The test takes a minute: type all four variants into a browser and check whether each one ends at the same address in the bar. If not:
- In Settings → General set your target address in the WordPress Address and Site Address fields - both identical, both with
https:// - Force
httpsand your chosenwwwvariant with a server-side redirect; most hosting panels have a switch for it - Check all four variants again
If the site runs behind a proxy service such as Cloudflare, set the redirect there and do not duplicate it in the hosting panel - two redirects pointing at each other produce a redirect loop.
What to keep out of the index
WordPress creates more URLs than you need by default. Not all of them belong in a search engine - and here the SEO plugin genuinely saves work, because it is all toggles.
| Type of URL | Decision | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Author archives | exclude on a single-author site | it is a copy of the post list at another address |
| Date archives | exclude almost always | nobody searches for “posts from July 2026” |
| Tags | exclude if you use them loosely | ten tags used once each are ten empty pages |
| Attachment pages | exclude or redirect to the file | a page with an image and no content |
| Internal search results | always exclude | search engines explicitly advise against indexing these |
| Thank-you, cart, account pages | exclude | they have no business in search results |
Tags are only worth keeping in the index if you genuinely organise content with them and each tag has a dozen or more posts plus its own description. Otherwise they just make a mess. Attachment pages are disabled by default on newer WordPress installs but survive on older ones - check by searching site:yourdomain.com and looking for addresses ending in a file name.
Title templates, so you are not typing everything by hand
SEO plugins let you set a title pattern separately for posts, pages, categories and archives - for example “title - site name”. It is a one-off setting that gives every new page a sensible title without your involvement.
Three things worth thinking through:
- Site name at the end, not the start - the first words of a title carry the most weight and should belong to the subject, not to your company
- The home page gets its own title typed manually, because no template handles it sensibly
- Categories and archives get a simple pattern; if you are excluding them from the index anyway, do not spend time on them
A template is a starting point, not a licence to stop thinking: on your most important pages you override the title by hand.
Sitemap and Search Console
The order here is not negotiable:
- Check the sitemap works - open
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xmlor/sitemap_index.xmland confirm it loads and contains no addresses you excluded from the index - Add the site in Search Console. DNS record verification is the most durable, because it survives theme and plugin changes. The alternative is the verification tag pasted into the field in your SEO plugin’s settings
- Submit the sitemap in the sitemaps section of Search Console
- Check the pages report a few days later - it is the only place that tells you what the search engine actually did with your settings
Step 4 is the one people skip. Settings without checking the result are faith, not configuration - and the most common reason someone spends six months with a site excluded from the index without knowing it.
Social media previews
When somebody pastes your address into Facebook, LinkedIn or a messenger, the title, description and image come from tags in your code. By default there is often nothing there and the link looks dead.
Two things to set once in your SEO plugin:
- A default image for the whole site - a logo or a brand graphic; used wherever a page has none of its own
- A featured image on your most important pages and posts - that is the one that ends up in the preview
It has no effect on rankings. It has an effect on whether anyone clicks the link you sent a client.
Settings people switch on unnecessarily
Four things that tempt you in the plugin panel and hurt more often than they help:
- Automatic redirects that “fix” URLs - they can loop the site after a permalink change
- Bulk AI-generated descriptions for the whole site at once - you get a hundred near-identical sentences; better to write ten by hand for the pages that matter
- Editing
robots.txt“just in case” - the WordPress default is fine; the largest number of pages I have seen dropped from the index came from a manually addedDisallow: / - “SEO booster” plugins alongside your main SEO plugin - see point one of this piece
What an SEO plugin will not do for you
This matters, because a panel full of green dots creates the illusion the job is done. A green dot only says the field was filled in according to a rule, not that the text is any good.
The plugin will not write content that answers a customer’s question, will not decide which pages should exist, will not make the site faster (a separate layer, covered in the piece on speeding up WordPress), will not build internal linking and will not fix your hosting. It will tidy up everything listed above - and that is its real value.
What else is worth checking once the configuration is behind you I listed in the piece on the WordPress site audit. And if you want the site cited by AI assistants too, this same configuration is the foundation - the follow-up is in the piece on visibility in ChatGPT and AI Overviews.
Setup checklist
| Step | Where | Check |
|---|---|---|
| Indexing block off | Settings → Reading | ”Discourage search engines” unticked |
| One SEO plugin | Plugins | the second one deactivated and deleted |
| Permalinks | Settings → Permalinks | ”Post name” |
| One version of the address | Settings → General + hosting | all four variants end at one |
| Exclusions | SEO plugin | archives, tags, attachments, internal search |
| Title templates | SEO plugin | site name at the end |
| Sitemap | /sitemap.xml | loads, no excluded addresses |
| Search Console | search.google.com | site verified, sitemap submitted |
| Social preview | SEO plugin | default image set |
| Check after a week | Search Console | pages report with no surprises |
Frequently asked questions
Which WordPress SEO plugin is best? Every serious option does the same things: a form for titles and descriptions, a sitemap, index exclusions, preview tags. Pick one and stick with it - the choice matters far less than not running two at once and actually filling the settings in.
Do two SEO plugins cause problems? Yes, specific ones. You end up with two canonical URLs in the code, two sitemaps and conflicting exclusion rules, so the search engine gets contradictory signals about which address is authoritative. Keep one, deactivate and delete the other, moving the settings across with the import tool first.
What permalink structure should I use in WordPress? “Post name” - the title alone in the URL, with no dates or numbers. Set it before publishing content, because changing it on a live site changes every address at once and requires permanent redirects from old to new to avoid losing rankings.
Do I need to remove “category” from category URLs? No. It is cosmetic and has a negligible effect on visibility, while on a live site it means changing every category address and adding redirects. On a brand new site you can change it straight away if you prefer shorter URLs; on an existing one, leave it.
What should I set in WordPress right after installing, to avoid losing visibility? Three things, in this order: untick the indexing block in Settings → Reading, set permalinks to “Post name”, and force one version of your address with a valid certificate. Those are the settings that are hardest to fix later, because they affect every URL at once.
Want your company to show up in Google and in ChatGPT answers? I work on technical SEO and AI visibility from the code side, not the reporting side. Tell me which questions matter to you and I will quote it.