WordPress SEO: what the plugin's green light is not measuring.

WordPress imposes almost no structure, so every decision is yours, including the ones you did not know you were making. That flexibility is why it powers most of the web and it is also why most WordPress sites have avoidable problems.

The pattern shows up the same way on site after site. A theme was chosen, a page builder was added, an SEO plugin went on, a caching plugin went on after that, and each one has an opinion about the same handful of settings.

Nobody decided the result. It accumulated, usually across two or three people over several years, and no single person has ever looked at all of it together.

The specific collisions are predictable. Two plugins both writing the page title. A caching plugin serving a version of the page from before the last fix. A theme adding its own structured data alongside the plugin's, so the page describes itself twice and differently.

A plugin gives you fields to fill in and outputs the tags. It does not decide what should go in them, it does not write anything, and its green light means the field is filled, not that the page is any good.

This is worth being blunt about because the green light does real damage. A page can score perfectly in the plugin and be a page nobody would ever rank, because everything the plugin measures is form rather than substance.

The keyword density reading is the clearest example. It is measuring a thing that stopped being a ranking factor a very long time ago, and writing to satisfy it makes copy worse and pages less likely to rank.

What the plugin genuinely does for you

• Outputs the title and description you write.

  Useful. It does not write them and it cannot tell you whether they are good.

• Generates the sitemap.

  Genuinely useful, and it is the one job it does completely.

• Controls indexing per page.

  Useful, and also the setting most often left wrong after a rebuild.

• Adds basic structured data.

  Useful, and worth checking your theme is not adding a second, different version alongside it.

Page builders produce a great deal of markup to achieve a simple layout, and they load their own scripts and styles on every page whether the page uses them or not. On most WordPress sites that is the single largest cause of a slow load.

This is not an argument against using one. They let somebody run their own site, which is worth a lot. It is an argument for knowing what it costs and dealing with that rather than adding a caching plugin on top and hoping.

The other common cause is images. WordPress will happily serve a four megabyte photograph straight off a phone at two hundred pixels wide, because nothing in the platform stops it, and one page can carry six of them.

Caching plugins are usually added at this point and they do help. What they do not do is remove the weight. They serve a heavy page faster, which is a different thing from a light page.

A clean structure, one page per thing you want to be found for, real copy on each, and the plugin settings actually agreeing with each other. The platform is rarely the reason a site does not rank.

The structural problem on most WordPress sites is a services page listing everything the business does. It competes for nothing, because a search engine cannot tell what the page is about when it is about nine things.

The fix is dull and it works. One page per service, one page per location that genuinely matters, each written properly, each linked to from somewhere on the site rather than sitting in the sitemap with nothing pointing at it.

Categories and tags are worth a mention because they generate pages nobody meant to publish. A tag archive with two posts on it is a thin page, and most sites have dozens of them indexed without anybody deciding that.

The order worth doing it in

• Find out what the site is actually outputting.

  Not what the settings claim. Duplicate titles and doubled structured data are common and invisible from the dashboard.

• Fix the collisions and the leftover noindex.

  Free, fast, and it is often the whole problem.

• Deal with the weight.

  Images first, then the builder's own load, then caching. In that order, not the reverse.

• Then the structure and the copy.

  One page per thing, each one actually linked to.