WordPress Site Audit Checklist: 20 Checks Before You Publish

Publishing on WordPress is easy, which is exactly why problems slip through. A renamed post breaks a menu link, a full-resolution hero image tanks your load time, or a page ships with no meta description because the SEO plugin field was left blank. None of these announce themselves, and all of them cost you rankings and clicks.

This is a practical WordPress SEO audit checklist you can run before you publish, or on a schedule for a site that is already live. It is organised into four areas, with 20 concrete checks and the free tools to run each one. Work through it top to bottom, or jump to the section you are worried about. For a platform overview first, see the free WordPress audit tool page, and for the generic, platform-agnostic version, see the website audit checklist.

On-page SEO (checks 1 to 6)

On-page SEO is the cheapest to fix and often the highest return, because it directly shapes how your page appears and ranks.

1. Title tag present and well sized. Every important page needs a unique title that leads with the term people search and stays in roughly the 30 to 60 character range so it is not truncated (the checker flags anything outside 20 to 70). Check any page with the title tag checker.
2. Meta description present and sized. Write a unique description of roughly 120 to 160 characters for each page rather than letting WordPress or your plugin auto-generate one (the checker flags anything outside 100 to 180). Verify it with the meta description checker.
3. Exactly one H1 per page. WordPress themes sometimes wrap the logo or a section heading in an H1, creating duplicates. Aim for one descriptive H1 that reflects the page topic.
4. Logical heading structure. Follow H1 with H2, then H3, without skipping levels for styling. Screen readers and search engines both use the hierarchy to understand the page.
5. Structured data present. Most WordPress themes ship no JSON-LD schema beyond the basics. Add Article schema to posts and Product schema to shop pages so you are eligible for rich results.
6. Open Graph tags set. Your SEO plugin controls these; make sure each shareable page has a social title, description, and image so links look right when shared.

Technical health (checks 7 to 13)

Technical issues are the ones that quietly stop Google indexing or crawling your site properly.

7. No broken internal links. Deleting or renaming posts leaves dead links in menus, content, and widgets. Scan several pages at once with the 404 checker.
8. No redirect chains. A link that redirects two or three times before landing wastes crawl budget and slows users. Collapse each chain to a single hop.
9. Custom 404 page returns a real 404. A friendly "not found" page must still return the 404 status code, not a 200. A soft 404 that returns 200 confuses search engines.
10. robots.txt is not blocking you. Check that no leftover Disallow: / from development is blocking Google, and that you are not blocking your CSS or JavaScript.
11. Canonical tags are correct. Each page should declare a canonical URL to avoid duplicate-content confusion, especially with WordPress pagination, tags, and category archives.
12. XML sitemap exists and is submitted. Your SEO plugin generates one; confirm it lists your real pages and submit it in Google Search Console.
13. HTTPS with no mixed content. Confirm the whole site loads over HTTPS and no images or scripts are hard-coded to insecure HTTP, which triggers browser warnings.

Performance (checks 14 to 17)

Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal, and on WordPress they usually come down to images and plugins.

14. Core Web Vitals in the green. LCP under 2.5 seconds, CLS under 0.1, and INP under 200 milliseconds. Measure your real pages, not just the homepage.
15. Images compressed and correctly sized. Oversized images are the number one WordPress speed problem. Serve WebP or AVIF at display size, not full resolution.
16. Lazy loading for below-the-fold images. WordPress lazy-loads by default, but confirm it is working and not disabled by a plugin or theme.
17. Render-blocking scripts minimised. Plugin-heavy sites load dozens of scripts that block the first paint. Audit which plugins are adding front-end assets you do not need.

Trust and accessibility (checks 18 to 20)

The last group protects your visitors and rounds out a professional site.

18. Image alt text. Every meaningful image needs descriptive alt text; decorative images should use an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them. A filename used as alt text (like "IMG_2043.jpg") is as unhelpful as none.
19. Security headers set. HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, and X-Frame-Options take minutes to add and protect every visitor from common attacks.
20. Email authentication configured. If your domain sends email, publish SPF and DMARC records so your mail is trusted and your domain cannot be spoofed.

Which checks matter most

Twenty checks is a lot to action at once, so if you are triaging, work in this order. Fix anything that can remove your site from search first: a stray Disallow: / in robots.txt, a noindex left on by accident, or a canonical pointing at the wrong URL can undo everything else, so checks 10, 11, and 12 come before all else if something feels badly wrong.

Next, fix the things visitors and Google see immediately: broken links and 404s (checks 7 and 9), missing titles and meta descriptions (checks 1 and 2), and oversized images dragging down your load time (checks 14 and 15). These are the highest-return, lowest-effort wins on almost every WordPress site, and they are the checks most likely to be silently broken after a busy publishing month.

Everything else, structured data, headings, security headers, and email authentication, is worth doing but rarely an emergency. Get the critical and high-visibility items right first, then work down the list.

Common WordPress-specific gotchas

A few problems show up on WordPress far more than on other platforms, so they are worth calling out:

• Deleted posts leave orphaned links. Removing or unpublishing content is the single biggest source of broken internal links on WordPress, because the links in menus, related-post widgets, and old articles do not update themselves.
• Slug changes without a redirect. Editing a published post's slug changes its URL. WordPress handles some of this, but hand-coded links and external backlinks will break unless you add a 301.
• Plugin sprawl slows the front end. Every active plugin can add scripts and styles to your pages. A site running twenty plugins often ships a dozen render-blocking assets it does not need.
• Themes generate duplicate H1s. Many themes wrap the site logo or a section title in an H1 by default, so a page can end up with two or three without you realising.
• Auto-generated meta from the first paragraph. Without a description set in your SEO plugin, WordPress or the plugin often builds one from the opening text, which is rarely the pitch you would write.

Knowing these patterns means you can check for them deliberately rather than being surprised by them after rankings slip.

How to run the whole checklist at once

Working through 20 checks by hand is thorough but slow. To cover all of them in one pass, run a full free WordPress audit: it scans all 40 checks across on-page SEO, technical health, and performance on your live site, ranks the issues by estimated revenue impact, and writes the AI fix for your highest-impact issue, naming the exact WordPress plugin setting, theme file, or image to change. The free tier covers the critical issues in full detail; Pro adds an AI-written fix for every issue and a client-ready PDF report.

The advantage of an automated pass is not just speed, it is consistency: a tool never forgets check 11 because it got distracted at check 4, and it reads the live rendered page rather than what you think you published. If you would rather run individual checks as you go, the free targeted tools cover the big ones one at a time: the title tag checker, the meta description checker, and the 404 checker all run in seconds with no signup. Use them for a quick spot-check, and the full audit when you want the whole list at once.

Make it a habit

The most important thing about a WordPress SEO audit checklist is that you run it more than once. Every time you publish a post, install a plugin, or change a theme, you can introduce a regression: a new broken link, a heavier image, a duplicate title. Re-running the checklist on a schedule, monthly for an active site, is what keeps small problems from compounding into a ranking drop. Bookmark this page, or set up a recurring audit so the checklist runs itself.