WordPress Site Audits: A Sequence That Finds Real Issues

WordPress site audits done by SEO services often produce reports that look impressive but contain mostly trivial findings: missing alt text on decorative images, suggestions to add keywords to title tags that already perform well, recommendations to install plugins the site already has. The deliverable looks substantial but doesn't surface the issues that actually affect performance.

A useful audit follows a sequence that focuses on what matters. The output is a shorter list of higher-confidence findings with specific fixes.

Section 1: SEO fundamentals that are commonly broken

Robots.txt verification: read the actual file at /robots.txt. Ensure it doesn't block important content. Common errors: Disallow: /wp-admin/ is fine; Disallow: / is catastrophic; sitemap reference missing means search engines have to guess where to find it.

Sitemap verification: visit the actual sitemap URL. Verify it contains your important content, doesn't contain pages that should be excluded, has reasonable lastmod dates, and submits correctly in Search Console.

Canonical tag verification: spot-check 10 pages for correct canonical tags. Common errors: canonicals to wrong protocol (HTTP when site is HTTPS), canonicals to www when site is non-www (or vice versa), missing canonicals on pages that need them.

Title and meta description coverage: every important page should have unique, descriptive titles and meta descriptions. Crawl the site (Screaming Frog free version covers up to 500 URLs) to find pages missing them or using duplicates.

Section 2: indexing health

Search Console's Pages report shows: indexed pages, excluded pages with reasons, error pages with reasons. A clean site has the bulk of important URLs in "Indexed" and a small number in "Excluded" with appropriate reasons (blocked by robots.txt for admin pages, duplicate canonical for parameter URLs, noindex for pages you intentionally noindex).

Red flags: large numbers of "Discovered, currently not indexed" (Google considered the URLs but chose not to index them, usually indicating quality concerns), large numbers of "Crawled, not indexed" (similar to above), large numbers of "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" when you didn't intend to noindex those pages.

Section 3: Core Web Vitals

Run PageSpeed Insights on representative pages: homepage, top content pages, transactional pages. Look at field data (real users) more than lab data. Field data marked "Insufficient data" means the page doesn't have enough traffic for measurement; that's fine but use lab data instead.

The Core Web Vitals to focus on:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): under 2.5 seconds is good. Over 4 seconds is poor.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): under 0.1 is good. Over 0.25 is poor.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): under 200ms is good. Over 500ms is poor.

If multiple URL groups in Search Console show CWV issues, the diagnostics suggest where to focus optimization effort. Layout shift issues usually point to image dimensions or font loading; LCP issues usually point to hero image or critical resources; INP issues usually point to JavaScript execution.

Section 4: content quality at scale

This section is harder to automate but matters more than the technical issues for many sites. Sample 20 pages at random and evaluate: is the content substantive (real information, not just keyword targeting), is it well-organized, does it answer the question implied by the title.

If the sampled pages are thin or low-quality, the site has a content quality issue that no technical optimization will overcome. The fix is content investment (rewrite, expand, consolidate), not technical work.

Common content quality issues to flag: pages targeting the same keyword with overlapping intent (cannibalization), pages thinner than 300 words that aren't transactional (often archive pages or tag pages), pages with grammatical errors or factual mistakes that signal low editorial standards.

Section 5: structured data

Use Google's Rich Results Test on representative pages. Verify the schema you expect is present and validates correctly. The schema types worth checking: Article on blog posts, Organization on the homepage, BreadcrumbList on internal pages, Product on product pages (if applicable), FAQPage on FAQ-style content.

Common errors: required fields missing on Article (datePublished, author, headline), Organization missing identifiable fields (logo, sameAs links), BreadcrumbList items don't point to actual URLs.

Search Console's Enhancements section shows which schema types Google detected on your site and any errors at scale. If you have 1,000 Article schemas and 200 have errors, fixing the source of the error (often a theme template) addresses the issue for all 200 URLs.

Section 6: backlink profile sanity

Use a free backlink tool (Search Console's Links report is included; Ahrefs and Semrush have free tiers) to look at: total referring domains, anchor text distribution, whether the major anchor texts make sense (your brand name, your main keywords) or suggest spam (random foreign-language phrases, payday-loan terms).

If the anchor text distribution shows spam patterns, the site might have a backlink issue worth investigating. Google's algorithms generally ignore spammy backlinks rather than penalizing for them, but the signal is worth understanding.

Section 7: security and uptime baseline

Check that the site has: HTTPS configured correctly, security headers in place (HSTS, Content-Security-Policy at minimum), no known security plugin warnings, recent backups verified working, uptime monitoring active.

These aren't directly SEO issues but they affect availability and trust signals. A site that goes down repeatedly or has security warnings will lose ranking position even if the SEO fundamentals are right.

The output

The audit output should be a prioritized list: high-impact issues with specific fixes (estimated effort and expected outcome), medium-impact issues for future work, and low-impact findings that can be deprioritized.

The audits that produce 100 findings on a site that has 5 real issues are generating noise rather than signal. The output should help the site owner know what to do this week vs what to defer.