How to audit a WordPress site

Audit a WordPress site by crawling every page and checking four things first: the "Discourage search engines" setting, plugin-driven performance bloat, image sizes, and duplicate content from tag and author archives. These four account for most WordPress SEO problems before any content work begins.

Last updated 2026-07-28

Why is my WordPress site not appearing in Google at all?

In most cases one checkbox is switched on: Settings → Reading → "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". It adds a site-wide noindex directive, it is enabled during development as a matter of routine, and it is forgotten at launch more often than any other single mistake in WordPress SEO.

Check it first, every single time, before you look at anything else. A site can sit invisible for months on the strength of that one setting while everyone involved debates content strategy.

If the checkbox is clear and pages are still missing, work down the list: an SEO plugin applying noindex to a post type or taxonomy, a Disallow rule in robots.txt, a stray canonical pointing somewhere else, or an HTTP-level X-Robots-Tag header added by a host or security plugin. The robots meta directives guide covers how each of those signals interacts, because they can and do contradict one another.

Why is my WordPress site slow?

Almost always because active plugins are loading their own CSS and JavaScript on every page, whether that page uses them or not. A contact-form plugin shipping its bundle to all sixty pages of a site that has one contact form is the archetypal WordPress finding, and a site with twenty plugins can carry twenty such bundles.

Page builders compound the problem. They ship large stylesheets, often load an icon font and an animation library alongside them, and render deeper wrapper markup that costs layout time. In Lighthouse this shows up as high Total Blocking Time and poor Largest Contentful Paint rather than as any single dramatic failure.

The second cost is images. The media library keeps whatever was uploaded, and themes frequently render the full-size original where a 600-pixel-wide thumbnail was needed — a 4000-pixel phone photo delivered into a small card is routine and can be three or four times heavier than necessary on its own.

• Deactivate plugins one at a time and re-audit to find the expensive ones.
• Serve images as WebP at the size they are displayed — media library originals are frequently 3–4× too large.
• Add width and height attributes so images reserve space and do not shift layout.
• Use a caching plugin, but verify it does not break the rendered HTML the crawler sees.
• Check that a blanket lazy-loading setting has not been applied to the hero image, which delays the very element LCP measures.

Are WordPress tag and category archives bad for SEO?

They are only a problem when they duplicate each other, which on a small site is most of the time. WordPress generates category, tag, author and date archives automatically, so a blog with forty posts can easily publish a hundred archive URLs that are near-identical lists of the same excerpts.

Decide which archives genuinely serve readers and noindex the rest. Category archives on a site with real editorial sections usually earn their place; tag archives holding two posts, author archives on a single-author blog, and date archives almost never do.

The judgement call is worth making deliberately rather than by plugin default, because an archive that lists useful, distinct content is a legitimate landing page. An archive that repeats the blog index with a different heading is thin content with extra steps.

What other URLs does WordPress create without being asked?

More than most site owners expect: paginated archive pages at /page/2/, RSS feeds at /feed/ on almost every archive, internal search result pages at /?s=, and — depending on version, settings and plugins — attachment pages for individual media items. None of these are announced anywhere in the admin.

Most cause no harm, but they distort an audit if you do not know they are there. A crawl that suddenly reports four hundred URLs on a forty-post blog is usually finding feeds and pagination rather than a real content explosion.

The practical approach is to crawl once without exclusions to see what exists, then set exclude rules for the URL patterns you have deliberately decided are out of scope, and audit what remains. Internal search pages in particular should not be indexable; if a crawl finds them linked and indexable, that is worth fixing at the template level.

How do I audit a whole WordPress site at once?

Point a crawler at the site root and let it fetch every page, then read the results by column rather than by page — that is what turns thirty individual problems into one theme fix. If all thirty blog posts share a missing meta description, the fix is one template edit, not thirty content edits.

Running Lighthouse by hand on a few URLs will not surface that pattern, which is the main reason single-URL testing underserves WordPress specifically: the platform is templated, so its failures are templated too. See how single-page Lighthouse runs compare to a whole-site crawl.

Audra takes the crawl-everything approach. It runs Google Lighthouse, axe-core accessibility checks, broken-link detection and its own HTML SEO and answer-engine checks over each page, combining them into one Audra Score weighted performance 30%, SEO 30%, accessibility 25%, best practices 15%. It crawls 100 pages by default, configurable, with include and exclude path globs — useful on WordPress precisely because of the feed and pagination noise above — and exports a self-contained HTML report or a print-ready PDF.

It runs as a desktop app on macOS (Apple Silicon, signed and notarized) or Windows (64-bit), driving your own installed copy of Chrome rather than bundling a browser. Everything stays on the machine: no crawl data or report leaves it, and there is no telemetry. That also means it can audit a staging site or a password-protected pre-launch build, which cloud tools and PageSpeed Insights cannot reach. Audra is $19 once with a free 7-day trial, no subscription.