WordPress SEO Consultant

WordPress runs something like 40% of the web, which means most SEO advice is written with it in mind. It also means most WordPress sites carry the same handful of problems, and most site owners have no idea they’re there.

I’ve been building and optimising WordPress sites for twenty years — since before most of the plugins everyone now relies on existed. That matters because WordPress SEO problems are rarely about content. They’re about what the theme is doing, which plugins are fighting each other, and what the platform generates automatically that nobody asked for.

What usually goes wrong​

Plugin bloat and speed Every active plugin loads its own CSS and JavaScript, usually on every page, whether that page needs it or not. I’ve seen sites loading a slider library on pages with no slider and a form script on pages with no form. It’s one of the most common causes of poor Core Web Vitals scores in WordPress.

Two SEO plugins at once More common than you’d think, usually after a site changes hands. Yoast and RankMath both output meta tags and schema — running both produces duplicates that confuse search engines.

Archive duplication WordPress generates category, tag, author and date archives automatically. Left unmanaged, these create dozens of thin, near-duplicate pages competing with the content you actually want ranking.

Page builders that don’t output real headings Elementor, Divi and others let you style a div to look like a heading without it being one. Visually identical, structurally invisible to Google.

Media handling Uncompressed uploads, missing alt text, and lazy-loading applied to the hero image — which delays the exact element Core Web Vitals measures.

Permalink and migration damage Changed slugs without redirects, trailing-slash duplicates, and mixed http/https URLs left over from an SSL switch.

What I do

Full technical audit specific to how WordPress behaves

Plugin stack review — what’s needed, what’s duplicating, what’s costing you speed

SEO plugin configuration done properly rather than left on defaults

Theme-level fixes, including heading structure and schema output

Archive and taxonomy management

Migration SEO, if you’re moving to or from WordPress

WooCommerce optimisation for product and category pages

I can work alongside your developer or handle implementation myself. My background is in development, so you’ll get instructions your dev can actually use rather than a vague list to interpret.

FAQs

Yoast or RankMath — which is better? Both are capable. RankMath includes more in the free version, particularly schema and local SEO. Yoast is more established with better documentation. What matters far more is that only one is active and it’s configured properly. Most sites I audit have theirs on defaults.

Does WordPress hurt SEO out of the box? No — it’s a good platform for SEO. The problems come from what gets added: heavy themes, too many plugins, unmanaged archives. Those are all fixable.

Can you fix WordPress SEO without a developer? Usually, yes. Most of it happens through settings, plugin configuration and content changes. Theme-level work sometimes needs code, which I can do myself.

My site is slow. Is that an SEO problem? It’s both an SEO and a conversion problem. Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor, and slow sites lose visitors before the page renders. In WordPress it’s usually plugin bloat, uncompressed images, or missing caching — all addressable.

I’m on WordPress.com, not self-hosted. Does that change things? Yes. WordPress.com handles caching and image delivery at platform level, which rules out some standard optimisation plugins and makes plugin reduction the main lever. Worth knowing before someone sells you a caching plugin you can’t use.


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