SEO Best Practices for Self-Hosted WordPress Sites

For self-hosted WordPress sites, SEO best practices focus on technical setup, content optimisation, and site performance to improve search engine rankings effectively.

Key SEO best practices include:

• Use HTTPS (SSL): Secure your site with HTTPS to build trust and improve rankings, as Google considers HTTPS a ranking factor. Implementing HTTPS can be done via SSL certificates and forcing HTTPS site-wide to ensure all content loads securely.

• Choose a Consistent URL Format (www vs non-www): Decide on either www or non-www for your domain and ensure consistent use with proper redirects to avoid duplicate content issues and consolidate domain authority.

• Optimize Permalinks: Use SEO-friendly URLs by setting permalinks to a clean structure like /postname/ for better readability and indexing.

• Manually Set Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: Customize title tags and meta descriptions for each page or post to improve click-through rates and rankings. This can be done manually in theme files or via SEO plugins.

• Use Proper Heading Structure (H1, H2, H3): Organize content with a clear hierarchy of headings to enhance readability and SEO relevance.

• Choose an SEO-Friendly Theme: Select a lightweight, well-coded theme optimized for SEO to ensure fast loading times and clean code, avoiding themes with unnecessary features that slow down the site.

• Optimize Images: Use image optimisation plugins or tools to reduce file sizes without losing quality, improving page load speed and user experience.

• Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Use a CDN to serve content faster to users globally, which can positively impact SEO by improving site speed.

• Edit Robots.txt and Use Schema Markup: Manage your robots.txt file to control search engine crawling and add structured data (schema markup) to enhance search result appearance and visibility.

• Keep WordPress Core, Themes, and Plugins Updated: Regular updates improve security, performance, and compatibility with SEO best practices.

• Avoid Duplicate Content: Use canonical URLs and proper redirects to prevent duplicate content issues that can harm SEO.

These practices collectively improve your WordPress site's search engine visibility, user experience, and security, which are critical ranking factors. While plugins like Yoast SEO simplify many tasks, manual optimisation is also possible and gives full control over SEO elements.