WordPress SEO checklist: set these before you auto-publish

A WordPress SEO checklist for auto-publishing covers the settings every new post inherits: permalinks, search engine visibility, one SEO plugin with a working sitemap, rules for tag and author archives, image handling, caching, schema defaults and the account your publishing tool connects with. Set these WordPress SEO settings once, before the first scheduled post goes out.

The reason is arithmetic. Fixing a wrong permalink structure on a site with five posts takes ten minutes. Fixing it after sixty scheduled posts means redirects, a re-crawl and a few weeks of wobbly rankings. Automation repeats whatever defaults you give it, good or bad. (If the term is new, what auto SEO is and what it automates is the short version.)

The WordPress SEO checklist at a glance

Permalinks and search engine visibility

Set permalinks to post name

Go to Settings, Permalinks and choose Post name, which gives URLs like example.com/wordpress-seo-checklist/. Date-based structures make evergreen articles look stale and lengthen every URL. Plain URLs (?p=123) tell readers and search engines nothing.

On a brand-new site, change it freely. On a live site with indexed posts, changing the structure changes every post URL. WordPress will try to redirect some old addresses, but do not rely on that: crawl the old URLs afterwards and add 301 redirects for anything that returns a 404.

Untick "Discourage search engines"

Settings, Reading has a checkbox labelled "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". Developers often tick it on staging and forget it at launch. While it is ticked, WordPress asks search engines not to index anything, and every post you publish is invisible. Check it first, and check it again after any migration.

Which SEO plugin, and how should it be set up?

Use one SEO plugin. Yoast SEO, Rank Math and All in One SEO all handle titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, sitemaps and basic schema. Running two at once usually means duplicate meta tags and two sets of structured data, which is worse than either alone.

• Set the post title template to the post title plus your site name, so every auto-published post gets a sensible title tag even if a field is left blank.
• Confirm the sitemap works. WordPress core has had a built-in sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5; Yoast and Rank Math replace it with /sitemap_index.xml. Open it in a browser and make sure posts are listed.
• Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console under Indexing, Sitemaps.
• Leave canonical tags on their default, which points each post at itself.

Should you noindex tags and other archive pages?

For most content sites, yes. Every tag creates an archive page. If posts get five tags each and few tags are reused, you end up with hundreds of near-empty pages that list one or two posts. That is crawl budget spent on thin pages and a lot of near-duplicate content.

• Categories: keep five to ten broad ones that match your services or topics, one per post, and keep them indexable. Rename or replace Uncategorized and set a real default under Settings, Writing.
• Tags: set tag archives to noindex in your SEO plugin, or stop using tags altogether. Keep them indexable only if you write a proper intro for each tag page.
• Date archives: noindex or disable. Nobody searches for your posts from March.
• Author archives: on a single-author site the author archive duplicates the blog page, so disable it or noindex it. On a multi-author site, keep them and give each author a real bio.
• Attachment pages: WordPress 6.4 turned these off by default on new installs. On older sites, use your SEO plugin to redirect attachment URLs to the file or the parent post.

Images and WordPress speed

Automated posts usually come with a featured image, so image handling repeats on every post. WordPress scales down uploads larger than 2,560 pixels, supports WebP uploads, and adds native lazy loading to images. That is a reasonable base. The rest depends on your theme and host.

• Check your theme displays featured images at a sensible size, not the full original on every archive card.
• Use an image optimisation plugin or your host's tools to compress uploads and serve WebP.
• Make sure the main image near the top of a post is not lazy-loaded; delaying it can hurt Largest Contentful Paint.
• Turn on page caching at the host or with a caching plugin, then test pages while logged out, because logged-in admins usually bypass the cache.

Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds for a good experience are Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. The definitions are on web.dev's Core Web Vitals page. Check yours in Search Console's Core Web Vitals report or PageSpeed Insights before you start publishing at volume.

Schema and canonical defaults

Your SEO plugin outputs structured data for posts, usually Article or BlogPosting plus breadcrumbs, and links them to an Organisation or Person entity. Fill in that entity properly in the plugin settings: the real business name, logo and social profiles. It is one form, and every post you publish references it.

Do not add a second schema plugin on top. And if posts include FAQ sections, know that since August 2023 Google shows FAQ rich results only for well-known government and health sites. The markup does no harm, but do not expect the expanded result.

For canonicals, the main job is making sure each post exists at one address. http should redirect to https, and www and non-www should resolve to one version. If you run several sites, do not publish the same article on more than one of them.

How to set up the publishing account safely

Tools that publish to WordPress from outside, upRanker included, connect through the WordPress REST API using an application password. That avoids sharing your real login, and you can revoke access without changing anything else. Whatever the tool, keep a person reading drafts; the conditions Google cares about are in is automated SEO safe for Google.

1. Go to Users, Add New User and create a dedicated account for the publishing tool. Give it the Editor role, not Administrator.
2. Log in as that user, open Profile, and scroll to Application Passwords. If the section is missing, the site may not be on HTTPS, or a security plugin may have switched the feature off.
3. Enter a name for the tool, click Add New Application Password and copy it. WordPress shows it once.
4. Check that the REST API responds by opening yoursite.com/wp-json/ in a browser. Some security plugins block it, which stops any external publishing tool from working.
5. Set the account's display name to something sensible, or assign posts to a real author, since the name can appear on every post.

Run one test post before turning on the schedule

1. Publish a single test post through the tool, or by hand using the same account.
2. View the page source and check the title tag, meta description, canonical tag and that there is no noindex in the robots meta tag.
3. Open the sitemap and confirm the new post is listed.
4. Run the URL through Search Console's URL Inspection tool and use the live test to see the page as Googlebot does.
5. Check the featured image size, alt text, category URL and internal links.
6. Run PageSpeed Insights on the post, then remove the test post or keep it if it is good.

If your site is new and the question is what to publish rather than how to configure it, what to do after launching a WordPress site with no traffic picks up from here. For pacing, how many blog posts per month you need for SEO helps set a cadence you can keep. Make sure Search Console is linked to your other tools as well; connecting Search Console, GA4 and Google Ads covers that.

None of this is advanced. It is an hour of settings that decides what hundreds of future posts look like to Google. Do it once, run the test post, and only then let the calendar take over. If you want to see what happens after that hour, how upRanker works walks through the publishing side.