How to Optimize Your WordPress Website

Set Up Your Domain, Hosting, and Theme

Get your own domain and hosting

For a business site, it is better to use your own domain name and hosting, rather than a free subdomain on someone else’s platform.

Your own domain lets you brand the business and keep control of what visitors see. Many free blogging platforms insert advertisements or redirect scripts to offset their cost. Those extras are not there for your reader, and they are not there for search engines either.

A free address such as yourbusiness.wordpress.com also leaves the door open for someone else to register yourbusiness.com. When you own the domain and the hosting, you own the address.

A keyword in the domain is less important than it once was. Choose a name that represents the business and is easy to remember. Do not force an awkward keyword into the domain just because it matches a search phrase. Choosing that name carefully is an early step in how to optimize your WordPress website.

Use a responsive layout

Most modern WordPress themes can adjust the layout to the device, but not all of them do, and the setting is not always on by default. A responsive layout reformats the page for the screen in front of the reader. A wide desktop menu, for example, may collapse on a phone because there is less room.

Open the theme settings and confirm that responsiveness is enabled. Then view the site on a phone and a desktop and fix display errors before you rely on it. A theme that claims to be responsive can still break a menu, a form, or an image at a smaller width. Check the real pages, not only the theme demo.

Email signup boxes, without intrusive pop-ups

A simple email signup, placed in the layout rather than over the page, can help people come back when you publish something new. When someone finds the site useful, they can leave an address and hear from you later, instead of having to remember the URL.

How you place that box matters. Large pop-ups that block the content — what Google has called intrusive interstitials — get in the way of readers and can hurt the experience of the site. Prefer a static signup in the sidebar, footer, or content, not a pop-up that covers the page on arrival. A signup should be easy to use, and just as easy to ignore.

Don’t overload the site with widgets and ads

If you have been around the web for a while, you have seen “link farms” and “banner farms”: pages loaded with outbound links and ads that leak attention away from the content. Those sites are less common than they once were, but it is still possible to over-widgetize a WordPress site.

A few practical rules:

• If an element does not add useful information, leave it off.
• Keep outbound traffic “leaks” to a minimum.
• Put information first, and sales second.

You may want the site to produce leads or sales. When the layout is built around widgets and ads instead of the content, readers have little reason to stay, and the page is harder for a search engine to understand. Content is the reason the site exists. Everything else should support it.

Set a clear permalink structure

Permalinks are the permanent URLs for your posts and pages. Think of each one as an address. A new WordPress site often starts with a plain structure such as https://www.example.com/?p=123. That address tells people and search engines very little about what they will find there. It is an address with no name on the door.

In the WordPress dashboard, open Settings → Permalinks. Common options are:

• Plain: https://www.example.com/?p=123
• Day and name: https://www.example.com/2017/06/21/sample-post/
• Month and name: https://www.example.com/2017/06/sample-post/
• Numeric: https://www.example.com/archives/123
• Post name: https://www.example.com/sample-post/
• Custom structure

A post-name structure is usually the most useful: it includes the post name without a long date path. Some people add category names to every URL. That is optional and often makes the address longer than it needs to be. The WordPress documentation on permalinks covers those Settings in more detail. Setting this structure well is part of how to optimize your WordPress website.

If you change permalinks on a site that already has traffic or inbound links, the old addresses will 404 unless you add redirects. It is the same problem as moving house without telling the postal service. Plan the redirects in your server or redirect plugin before you switch, then test a few of the old URLs.

On-Page Work That Optimizes Your WordPress Website

Choose relevant keywords

When you started the site, you had a topic in mind — the business, the services, the people you serve. Every new page should stay related to that topic. That is what makes the site useful and consistent.

The practical way to aim the writing is to choose phrases that match those topics and use them as the subjects of pages and posts. Write titles and headings that match what a customer would actually search for.

Aim for phrases that are relevant and that people search for. A very broad term such as “search engine optimization” is crowded; a more specific phrase that still matches the page, such as a service plus the type of business, is usually easier to write a useful page around. Relevance comes first. Keyword research is a way to choose a clear topic. It is not a way to promise a position.

Google Keyword Planner, used with a Google account, is one research tool. If you also run ads, look at suggested bid costs separately from the organic page work. They are not the same job.

Use related wording, not just one phrase

You do not have to repeat one phrase on every line. There are only so many times a single wording still reads naturally. Related words and natural synonyms help the page stay readable and cover the topic.

A thesaurus can help you vary wording; use it to stay accurate, not to stuff extra terms. If a British reader would say “petrol” and an American reader would say “gas,” and both are relevant to the page, you can use the wording your audience uses. Cover the topic in the language your readers use, and stay on that topic.

Using Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a common WordPress plugin for titles, meta descriptions, indexing choices, sitemaps, and on-page checks. There is a free version that covers the basics, and a paid version with extra features. Check Yoast’s site for current pricing; do not rely on older published figures.

In broad terms, the free version can help you:

• Set a focus keyphrase and review how it is used on the page
• Edit the search title and meta description
• Keep some pages out of search results when they should stay private
• Mark outgoing links as nofollow when that is appropriate
• Check readability, including a reading-ease score
• Reduce duplicate URL issues
• Control breadcrumbs and set a primary category when a post sits in more than one category
• Generate a sitemap
• Add consistent links or other notes to an RSS feed
• Edit robots.txt and .htaccess from the WordPress admin, if you need that access

The paid version has historically added redirect management, extra keyphrase fields, social previews, internal-link suggestions, and a view of the most-used phrases in a draft. Use only the features you can see in your own install, and do not invent menu labels. The Yoast install walkthrough is the place for first-run settings.

Write original content

Original content is what the site has to offer. It is what gives a page a reason to exist. If two sites publish the same text, a reader has no reason to prefer yours — they can get the same words either way.

Write pages that reflect the business, the services, and the places you actually serve. When you write the page yourself, or brief it carefully, you can keep it relevant to the people you want to reach. That relevance is the point.

Write as if you mean it. If you do not know the subject, it shows. Readers can tell when a page is padded or vague. If the site is about a trade you practice, write from that knowledge. A steady supply of useful pages is easier to keep up when you actually know the work.

Related posts

A related-posts block at the end of an article is another way to connect similar pages, the same idea as a sitemap: it gives people a next step, and it adds internal links between pages on the same topic. That can keep a reader on the site longer because the next useful page is already in front of them.

You do not have to install a separate plugin if the theme already has a related-posts option. Check the theme first. Every extra plugin is another thing to keep updated and another possible conflict when WordPress itself is updated. If the theme does not offer it, a related-posts plugin can be used — just install one, not several, and keep it maintained.

Keep titles clear

Use the SEO title field in your plugin, stay within a sensible length, and include the keyphrase when it reads naturally. Put it near the front if that still sounds like a normal title. Do not stuff the title with extra keywords, and do not force a phrase into the front if the sentence stops making sense.

A clear title states the topic. For example, a page on this subject might use a title such as “WordPress Blog Search Engine Optimization: 8 Tips to Optimize Your Blog.” It says what the page is, at a reasonable length.

A weaker title buries the topic behind filler: “8 Nifty Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Blog for a Search Engine.” The useful words are split up, the phrase is not easy to find, and characters are spent on a word that does no work. If the title does not make sense when you read it out loud, rewrite it.

Use headings and format the page

Headings break the page into a readable outline. They give a person the gist of a section before they read the paragraph, and they give search engines a short map of the topics on the page. Headings are not as heavily weighted as they once were, but they still earn their place: they make a long page usable.

A simple pattern: one H1 for the page title, H2s for main sections, and H3s for subsections on a long page — around a thousand words or more, or whenever an H2 section needs a further split. Do not turn every sentence into a heading. If you highlight every line in a book, nothing is highlighted.

There is more to formatting than headings. Images, captions, and short subheads help a reader move through a long page. Use them to support the writing, not to replace it. Do not pack the page with images at the expense of the text. Do not break the writing into so many tiny paragraphs that the argument is hard to follow. Format should make the page easier to read, not noisier.

Optimize images

Large, uncompressed images slow the site down. A multi-megabyte photo that is thousands of pixels wide has no place in a blog post as uploaded. Compress images before you upload them, or use an image-optimization plugin to compress new and existing files.

The source of this walkthrough used an automatic optimizer that could compress new uploads and clean up older images already in the library. Any reliable compressor that keeps the image clear is fine. You can install one from the Add Plugin screen in WordPress. Add descriptive alt text that describes the image. Faster pages are easier to use.

Use internal links

Internal links point from one page on your site to another related page. They help a reader go deeper without searching, and they show a search engine how topics on the site connect.

Use descriptive anchor text — the name of the topic or the page — not “click here.” If you are pointing to a page about a service, use the name of that service. A few relevant links on a page are enough. A long list of unrelated links looks like a link farm and is hard for a reader to use. Stay on topic, and keep the number of links reasonable.

Be careful with stop words in slugs

A slug is the URL version of the title. “Ten Things to Do In Seattle” becomes ten-things-to-do-in-seattle. Stop words are common words such as “and,” “the,” “a,” and “an.”

Some plugins can strip stop words from slugs automatically to shorten the URL and put more weight on the remaining words. That can change the meaning. “Strawberry and banana yogurts” is not the same as “strawberry banana yogurts.” One is two products; the other is one.

If your plugin offers to remove stop words automatically, leave that off. Yoast may flag stop words in a slug so you can decide. Remove a stop word only when it does not change what the page is about.

Write a unique meta description

The meta description is the short snippet that often appears under the title in search results. Some sites use one identical description on every page. That wastes the chance to say what this page, in particular, offers.

Write a unique description for each important page. State the topic clearly, include the keyphrase once when it fits, and keep the grammar clean. Do not make it a list of keywords. Keep it concise. You are trying to tell a person what they will find if they open the page, not to decorate the listing with extra phrases.

Fix weak or leftover pages

Most sites have pages written before the owner knew how to structure a title, a heading, or a meta description. You cannot change what you did not know then. You can change it now.

When you have time, go back through older pages:

• If a page is thin, add useful, original detail.
• If a page has never had a unique title or meta description, write them.
• If a long article has no headings, add a real outline.
• If images are huge, compress them.

On a large site this is a list, not an afternoon. Work through it in batches and keep a note of what is still waiting. New work and cleanup can run in parallel. That cleanup is a practical part of how to optimize your WordPress website over time.

When to Get Help Optimizing Your WordPress Website

You can do a lot of this work yourself. This walkthrough is for that work: the site you already have, improved in a clear order.

When you want a new WordPress site built with SEO foundations in the build, talk with Online Presence Manager about Website Design. When you want ongoing local-search work — the Google Business Profile, citations, on-page work, and reporting — see Local SEO Services, or Schedule a Call.