A large part of how well your site does in search is decided by the choices you make while building it. With a CMS as widely used as WordPress, those early choices carry a long way.

Say you picked a theme and customized it a little; once the site is live you are tied to it. You are published, but did you set everything up properly? This piece covers what to get right while you are building. The wrong theme can waste a great deal of work.

The same holds for plugins. You can install and remove them freely, and mostly without thinking about the consequences. But the effects are not always easy to undo, and a trace of the plugin's code usually stays behind on your site. That can turn into a performance problem later.

Here are the points to think about while you are launching and optimizing a WordPress site. If you are about to build one, read to the end.

1. Find a hosting provider you can rely on

As a rule, the better the hosting, the faster your content reaches the people asking for it. That matters more than ever now that Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor and an improvement in speed means an improvement in position.

You can check where you stand with the Türk SEM page speed tool.

Plenty of variables affect hosting quality, but the real question is whether the hosting is shared or managed. Shared hosting means a group of websites sitting on the same server, which means those other sites affect how yours performs. If the server does not have the capacity, your site's performance drops noticeably.

Good hosting is what you get when a defined amount of server capacity is guaranteed to your site. Managed hosting usually arrives with a set of extras as well: a CDN, an SSL certificate, frequent backups and support that deals with the technical side for you.

To be fair, shared hosting is rarely a problem for a small site, so dedicated hosting is not compulsory for everyone. But if you want peace of mind, or you are building something larger, renting your own server is worth considering.

2. Turn on your SSL certificate

In 2014 Google added HTTPS to its list of ranking factors. It is not among the strongest signals, but moving to HTTPS can still give you a slight lift.

Unlike most other CMS platforms, WordPress does not hand you an SSL certificate out of the box. The easiest way to get one is usually through your hosting provider. Most hosting companies now offer a free SSL certificate, sometimes on by default, sometimes waiting for you to switch it on. So your best move is to open your hosting control panel and look for the SSL certificate settings.

Once you are sure the certificate is active, you need to change your site address from http to https. Open your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings > General. In the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) fields, enter your home page URL with https:

That is it. Your WordPress site will now be marked as safe to visit.

3. Use an SEO friendly URL structure (WordPress permalink settings)

WordPress gives you several templates for your URL structure, plus the option to build a custom one. Whichever template you pick is the one your site will use:

Keep in mind that most of those templates are not genuinely SEO friendly.

The plain template says nothing and throws away the chance to put keywords in the URL. Neither your readers nor search engines can read those URLs, which makes it a user experience problem as well.

Putting the date in your URL is another poor idea. Blog posts usually get updated later, and the date stays where it is: The 10 Best SEO Tools to Use in 2020 becomes The 10 Best SEO Tools to Use in 2021, the title changes and the URL keeps the date you first published it.

So of all the options in that menu, I would use the “Post name” template for your WordPress site: it describes the page and it does not box you in.

4. Choose an SEO friendly theme

WordPress comes with thousands of free and paid themes, and a good many of them look rather attractive. Behind the look, though, a theme can be buried in unnecessary code, respond badly on mobile screens or offer almost no customization. By the time you find that out, changing the theme has become a serious inconvenience.

Which is why it pays to start with a theme that has been around a while, has plenty of reviews and has proved itself. Some of the most popular SEO friendly WordPress themes are Divi, OceanWP, Zakra and Astra. If you want a different one, open its demo and measure it with Google PageSpeed Insights for a quick audit:

Frankly, once you put the theme on your own site, customize it and fill it with your own content, it may perform rather differently from the demo.

5. Go easy on plugins

WordPress tends to be the choice of people building a site with little or no technical background. So when they hit a technical problem, the usual answer is to install a plugin. That is a fine option, except that every extra plugin costs you a little performance: it makes your site slower, or clumsier, or both.

As a general rule, the fewer plugins on your WordPress site the better. Remember that most WordPress plugins have an external alternative. If you want to optimize your images, for instance, an online compressor or a desktop editor will do it. Schema markup can be added with Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. And there are many other ways to improve WordPress page speed.

You cannot avoid the effect of plugins altogether, of course, but you can at least review them and pick the lightest alternatives. Used sparingly, plugins are unlikely to do measurable damage to your performance, especially if they are well built and come from developers with a reputation to keep. Some of the most popular ones for SEO are Yoast SEO, All in One SEO and Rank Math.

6. Check your visibility settings

While you are getting ready to open the site, do not forget your visibility settings. New sites default to Coming Soon and only become visible once you launch them properly from the admin panel ( Settings > General > Privacy ):

It is also common to restrict indexing during development, so the draft can be shared between the people building it. If that is your situation, make sure you allow indexing again once you are ready to show the site to search engines.

7. Verify your site in Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an excellent tool for watching and improving how you perform in search. It carries several categories of report: performance, indexing, user experience, search enhancements and security.

To get started, open the tool and register your site's URL. Google gives you a verification tag to copy into your site's code. To add it in WordPress, go to My Sites > Plugins > Add New, search for Google Site Kit and install it. You are ready to use Search Console.

For a fuller account of the verification process, see this guide.

8. Build and submit your sitemap

WordPress does not produce XML sitemaps out of the box. A plugin adds that, and Google XML Sitemaps is probably the most widely used and most reliable of them. When you choose a sitemap plugin, make sure it lets you do the following:

  • include or exclude URLs you define;
  • include or exclude WordPress taxonomies;
  • set crawl priority;
  • change crawl frequency.

Whichever plugin you use, it will most likely rebuild your sitemap automatically whenever you add or remove a page. The sitemap is also likely to live at a URL of this shape, for example – example.com/sitemap.xml

Google will probably find your sitemap on its own, but you can also open Google Search Console, go to Index > Sitemaps and submit the URL yourself.

9. Do the on-page SEO

With the site built, it is time to fill it with content. Here are the things to keep in mind as you create new pages on your WordPress site.

Find keywords with real potential

First of all, you need the keywords your content will be built around. Not just any keywords, but the ones most likely to bring organic traffic: terms people search often and your competitors have not already worn out.

There are plenty of keyword research tools out there, and I would look for the one that brings the most research methods together. The Google Ads Keyword Planner, for instance, is an old and dependable way to find new keywords:

All you do is enter a few seed keywords, and you come away with thousands of ideas. Not all of them are worth pursuing, so you also have to weigh metrics such as search volume and keyword difficulty. Filter on those parameters until you are left only with keywords that are realistic to rank for and will bring a meaningful amount of traffic:

Once you have your shortlist, order it by traffic potential and start producing the content.

Use <H> headings

Headings matter both as ranking signals and as user experience. They divide the page into sections, make it easier to move around and keep the reader engaged. They are also a good place for the keywords you found in the previous step.

To add a heading in WordPress, click the Add Heading button, or simply type /heading in the editor:

WordPress allows up to six heading levels, but <H1> is usually reserved for the page title and you rarely need to go past <H4>. So organize your pages with <H2> for the main sections and <H3> for the subsections under them.

Add a title tag and a meta description

The title tag and the meta description are what you see in a search snippet. By default WordPress does not let you set them while writing a post. All you get to create is a page title and an excerpt, and neither is marked up with the proper HTML tags, so they are not the same thing. Technically, that leaves Google free to build your snippet out of whatever it finds on the page.

If you want more control over what goes into that snippet, a plugin such as Yoast will let you edit your page title and meta description.

Both are a good opportunity to use a couple of your keywords. The title is where the page's main keyword belongs; the description is better left for a few variations on it.

Add alt text to your images

It is not its primary function, but alt text explains the content of an image to a search engine. Content creators tend to neglect it, and it does a great deal to get your images into image search results and to raise the relevance of your content in general.

To add alt text in WordPress, go to the Alt text field in the block editor as you insert the image. Alt text is meant to be short, plain and descriptive, not stuffed with keywords.

10. Optimize your images

Image optimization has always been part of learning search engine optimization, but now that PageSpeed judges pages on speed, the weight of an image has become a priority in itself. The faster your images load, the better your pages rank.

The obvious way to make images load faster is to make them lighter: compress them and use appropriate formats. If you want to go a step further, defer offscreen images (lazy loading) and work on efficient encoding.

In WordPress most of this can be handled by an image optimization plugin. The commonly recommended ones are WP Smush, Imagify and reSmush.it. If your site is relatively small and you do not have to process many images, I would still use an external tool for it. Online tools such as TinyJPG and TinyPNG will happily compress your images to roughly half their original size.

11. Implement rich results

Schema is a system of HTML tags that helps Google find particular pieces of information on your page. Tag your phone number, for example, and Google knows it is your phone number.

The benefit is that Google understands your content better and can present it better in search. You can use schema tags to produce rich snippets, to fill out your local business listing and to make your content eligible for particular kinds of search. There are, in fact, certain search types you cannot appear in at all without schema on your pages.

The best way to apply schema on a WordPress site is with a plugin. If you already use Yoast for your SEO, look at its schema features. Otherwise there are dedicated plugins such as Schema or Schema & Structured Data for WP.

Once the markup is on your pages, check that it works with the Google Rich Results Test. You can also paste code straight into that tool to test whether it is structured correctly before it goes live.

12. Optimize the code

Finally, once you have finished building and optimizing your WordPress site, you will probably find it performing better already. Themes, plugins and manual customizations tend to leave a certain amount of mess in your code. Over time that mess shows up in your performance, and in your user experience reports in particular.

One thing you can do about it is minify your HTML, JS and CSS files. That means stripping out unnecessary formatting, orphaned code, line breaks and comments. The performance gain is usually small, but you can expect to lose up to a third of the file size. The plugins recommended for this are Autoptimize, WP Super Minify and Fast Velocity Minify. If you would rather not install more plugins and your site is small, try an external minifier: CSS Minifier, JavaScript Minifier and HTML Compressor.

Another setting worth trying is deferring the JavaScript you do not need immediately. In essence you reorder when different bits of code run while the page loads, and push the non essential ones further down. That can be done with any number of WordPress plugins, among them Async JavaScript, Autoptimize and Speed Booster Pack.

Final thoughts

These settings are far easier to get right while you are building a WordPress site from scratch. Do not put them off; make the choices covered here at the start. Past a certain point, changing your theme becomes a great deal more trouble than it is worth.