In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, your website's SEO performance is essential to maintaining a competitive advantage. Optimizing the technical SEO of your WordPress site can feel like finding your way through a maze full of twists, turns, and hidden traps.

But fear not, wordpress plugin development services got you covered! To help you further, we've outlined the top 9 WordPress technical SEO issues you need to fix to make your site work smoothly and rank high in search engines.

1. Site Speed and Performance Optimization

Improving your website's speed and efficacy is crucial for SEO and user experience. A website's search engine rankings, user engagement, and conversion rates can all benefit from making it easier for visitors to navigate.

To optimize your WordPress site's performance:

  • Select a web host that you can trust to provide your site with the traffic and resources it needs to thrive.
  • By storing files locally in the user's browser, you may ease the strain on your server and speed up page loads for recurring visitors.
  • Images can be improved through compression, downsizing to the correct display size, and the use of the correct file formats.

2. XML Sitemaps

If you want search engines to effectively scan and index your site, you need an XML sitemap. They give you a list of your site's URLs alongside metadata like when each page was last updated and how important it is in comparison to others. XML sitemaps aren't generated automatically by WordPress, but plugins like Google XML Sitemaps, Yoast SEO, etc. make it easy to make and manage one.

To optimize your XML sitemap:

  • Exclude tag archives, author pages, and media attachment pages to focus crawling resources on more vital content.
  • Make sure search engines have the most up-to-date information by updating your sitemap frequently, especially whenever you add or change content.
  • To notify search engines about your site's structure and request crawling, submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

3. Duplicate Content

If you have duplicate content on your site, search engines may have trouble determining which version of a page to index and rank. Due to URL rewriting, pagination, and category/tag archives, WordPress sites are prone to duplicate content issues.

To address duplicate content:

  • Use 301 redirects to consolidate several URLs for the same content and send users to the preferable version.
  • When many versions of a page exist, canonical tags indicate the preferable one to help search engines choose which one to index and rank.
  • Use the "noindex" meta tag to keep search engines from indexing duplicate sites like tag archives, author pages, and media attachment pages.

4. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and HTTPS

SSL and HTTPS encrypt information sent between a user's browser and your server. Since SSL and HTTPS are now ranking factors for Google, it is essential that you migrate your WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS.

To make this transition:

  • Obtain an SSL certificate from your web host or an independent SSL provider. 
  • Make sure all of your site's URLs use the secure HTTPS protocol by updating your WordPress settings to use HTTPS as the default protocol.
  • Remove mixed content warnings and guarantee a safe browsing experience by switching to HTTPS for all internal links, pictures, and scripts.

5. Mobile Responsiveness

Keeping your WordPress site mobile-friendly is essential for search engine optimization and user experience as mobile internet usage overtakes desktop usage. If your website isn't mobile-friendly, you're missing out on potential customers who use different devices.

To optimize your site for mobile devices:

  • Make sure your content is legible and easy to access across all devices by using a mobile-responsive WordPress theme.
  • Use media queries to adapt CSS rules to different viewport widths, fluid grids to make column widths proportional, and flexible images to adapt to different screen sizes.
  • Use  BrowserStack, or Chrome's built-in device emulator to check how your site looks across a variety of mobile devices and screen sizes and orientations.

6. Structured Data and Schema Markup

By using structured data and schema markup, you may improve search engine crawlability and get more informative results from your website's content. Search results with rich snippets like star ratings, event information, and product descriptions are more useful and interesting to users.

If you're using WordPress and want to add structured data:

  • Make use of the Schema.org vocabulary to specify the types of articles or content that will be included in the structured data.
  • Markup your HTML using JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa to make your structured data machine-readable by search engines.
  • To quickly and easily implement structured data markup, use a WordPress plugin like Schema Pro, Yoast SEO, or All in One Schema Rich Snippets.

7. Internal Linking

Including relevant internal links throughout your site enhances the user experience, helps search engines find and index your content, and spreads link equity.

To optimize your internal linking strategy:

  • Link to relevant content on your website to boost user engagement.
  • Too many internal links diminish link equity and make content harder to navigate.
  • Link Whisper and Internal Link Juicer are two WordPress plugins that can help you manage and optimize your internal links.

8. Broken Links and 404 Errors

There is a correlation between 404 errors and poor user experience, which in turn might affect a website's search engine rankings.

To identify and fix broken links on your WordPress site:

  • Check for 404 errors and broken links using Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or a dedicated plugin like Broken Link Checker.
  • Make a personalized 404 page that directs visitors to where they can find the information they're looking for. 
  • If you need to manage 301 redirects on your site, plugins like Redirection and Simple 301 Redirects can make it easier to replace broken links and consolidate URLs.

9. URL Structure and Permalinks 

WordPress permalinks and URL structure optimization can help search engines better crawl and index your site's content. Search engines prefer URLs that are concise, informative, and packed with keywords.

To configure your WordPress permalinks:

  • Navigate to the WordPress dashboard and select Settings > Permalinks.
  • Pick a permalink format that works well with your site's subject matter.
  • Dates and numeric identifiers make URLs less clear and harder to change, so avoid them.
  • The use of hyphens rather than underscores or other separators in URLs improves readability and search engine optimization.

Conclusion

With these issues resolved carefully, your website will have an opportunity to compete in today's digital ecosystem. Remember that building and maintaining an established online presence is an ongoing task. Keep a close eye on your site's analytics, study the latest SEO practices, and always strive to improve your optimization tactics.