Technical WordPress SEO • speed • crawl • indexing
Technical WordPress SEO checklist: speed, crawl, and indexing in 2026
If you’re getting impressions but few clicks, “crawled — not indexed” pages, or poor mobile speed, it’s not “bad luck”. Most of the time it’s technical SEO: how Google sees you, how fast you load, and how clear your site is for crawling/indexing. Below is a short but complete, actionable checklist.
1) Quick diagnosis (10 minutes)
Check: Pages → Not indexed. If you see lots of “Crawled — currently not indexed”, you need clarity + authority.
Test the homepage + 1 article + 1 “money” page. If LCP is poor, you lose UX and crawl budget.
Do you have dedicated service pages + internal links pointing to them? That affects both indexing and conversions.
2) Speed Core Web Vitals
In WordPress, speed comes from 3 areas: images, CSS/JS, hosting/cache. Not from “one more plugin”.
- Images: WebP/AVIF, correct sizes, lazy-load on content, not on the hero.
- CSS/JS: remove bloat, defer non-critical scripts, reduce fonts (1–2 families).
- Cache: page cache + preloading + gzip/brotli.
Start with the SEO page, website creation, and landing pages. That’s where the ROI is.
3) Crawl indexing (GSC)
If Google “sees” your page but doesn’t index it, it’s usually one of these:
- Thin / repetitive content (too similar across pages).
- Weak signals: no internal links to the page, no authority.
- Technical issues: wrong canonical, accidental noindex, redirect chain, slow page.
Quick fix: pick 5–10 important pages and make them “indexable” via interlinking + content updates + speed, then “Request indexing”.
4) Structure: canonical, sitemap, redirects
Avoid duplicates (http/https, www/non-www, trailing slash). Wrong canonical = chaotic indexing.
Don’t include useless tags, 404 feeds, test pages. The sitemap is a list of “priorities”.
Direct 301s, no chains. Every hop means loss and wasted crawl.
5) Prioritization: what to do first
- Critical fixes: accidental noindex, wrong canonical, 404s in the sitemap, redirect chains.
- Mobile speed on “money” pages.
- Interlinking from articles to services and between articles (cluster).
- Content upgrade: useful sections, FAQs, examples, differentiators.
Next article in the cluster: Topic clusters internal linking.
Useful links (from the cluster)
We’ll do an audit + a 90-day plan and implementation: structure, “money” pages, content, and interlinking.
If you want faster growth, we combine it with Google Ads.