WordPress SEO: The Settings and Archive URLs That Need Fixing
Not "install a plugin and turn the lights green" — the settings you set once, and the URLs WordPress creates whether you asked or not.
Six archive types WordPress makes for you, and which deserve to be indexed.
What WordPress actually does to your SEO
WordPress does two things no static site does to you: it ships with defaults that are wrong for a business site, and it manufactures URLs on your behalf. Both are fixable in an afternoon. Neither is fixed by an SEO plugin, which only writes tags.
This post covers the platform layer only. The strategy layer — intent, topics, authority, timelines — lives in our complete SEO guide. If you are comparing platforms rather than fixing one, the same treatment for the other popular builder is in our Wix SEO breakdown.
The settings you set once
Seven settings decide most of what a crawler sees. Five live under Settings, one in the post editor, one nowhere in the admin UI.
| Setting or feature | Where it lives | WordPress default | What to set, and why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Permalink structure | Settings › Permalinks | Plain — ?p=123 | Post name. Google's URL guidance asks for readable words, not long ID numbers. Choose before you publish. |
| Search Engine Visibility | Settings › Reading | Unchecked | Leave unchecked on a live site. Ticked, WordPress emits a site-wide noindex,nofollow tag — the most common reason a new site has zero impressions. |
| Site Title | Settings › General | Whatever was typed at install | Your brand name, spelled as you want it in search. Google's site-name system reads the home page title and og:site_name. |
| Tagline | Settings › General | Empty on a current install | A real one-liner, or nothing. Many themes print it beside the title on every page, so a placeholder goes site-wide. |
| Default post category | Settings › Writing | Uncategorized | A category you would publish under. Deleting a category reassigns its posts here, so it is not only a fallback. |
| Attachment pages | wp_attachment_pages_enabled option (no admin toggle) | 0 on sites first installed on 6.4+, 1 on sites upgraded to it | Set to 0. Disabled, an attachment URL redirects to the file instead of rendering a near-empty page. |
| Excerpt | Post editor sidebar | Blank — WordPress auto-uses the first 55 words | Write it. It is what archives and feeds display, and the auto-cut lands mid-sentence. |
That checkbox is labelled "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" and has produced this meta tag since WordPress 5.3 — a request, not a block (Settings Reading Screen, last updated 8 June 2024).
<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />
Inherit a site whose traffic makes no sense? Check that box first.
The real cost of changing permalinks later
Changing the permalink structure changes every post URL on the site at once. That is the cost, and it is bigger than it looks.
Every old URL needs a permanent redirect. Every internal link in your own body copy, and every backlink you earned, still points at the old path.
Google's site-move guidance says permanent redirects do not lose PageRank, but that for a medium-sized site "it can take a few weeks or more" for the new URLs to replace the old ones, that redirects should be kept at least a year, and that internal links should be rewritten rather than left bouncing through a redirect (Site move with URL changes, last updated 20 August 2026).
So pick Post name on day one and never touch it. Inherited a date-based structure on a trafficked site? Do the migration once, properly, with a mapped redirect for every URL.
The archive URLs WordPress creates for you
WordPress generates category, tag, author, date and attachment URLs whether you asked for them or not. Publish forty posts and you can easily be sitting on a few hundred crawlable URLs, most of which nobody wrote.
That is the WordPress index-bloat problem, and "noindex everything" is not the answer — some of these pages are genuinely good. Here is what each is, and when it earns indexing.
| URL type | Example | What it is for | Index it when… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category archive | /blog/category/seo-guides/ | Your editorial taxonomy. Categories are hierarchical — a parent also lists its children's posts. | It reads as a curated topic page with a real introduction. |
| Tag archive | /tag/permalinks/ | A flat list — WordPress is explicit that tags have no parent–child relationship. | Rarely — most are one-post lists created by a typo. |
| Author archive | /author/name/ | Everything one author wrote. | You have named authors readers follow. On a single-author site it duplicates the blog index. |
| Date archive | /2026/10/ | Posts by month or year. | Almost never — nobody searches by month. |
| Attachment page | /blog/post-slug/image-name/ | A wrapper page per uploaded file. | Never. |
| Paginated archive | /blog/page/2/ | Page two onward of the above. | Leave it crawlable — each page lists different posts, so it is not a duplicate. |
The decision rule
An archive earns indexing when it is a page somebody would want to land on from a search result. Not because it exists, and not because a plugin has a toggle for it.
On most business sites that means: index the categories you have written real introductions for, noindex the tag, author and date archives, kill the attachment pages, then confirm the sitemap agrees — our XML sitemap guide covers why a sitemap listing noindexed URLs sends mixed signals.
Two mechanics matter. A noindex rule only works if the crawler can reach the page, so do not also block it in robots.txt — Google says a page blocked there never has its noindex seen and can still appear in results (Block search indexing with noindex, last updated 10 December 2025). Where two URLs genuinely show the same content, use a canonical tag: Google treats redirects and rel="canonical" as strong signals, sitemap inclusion as weak (Consolidate duplicate URLs, last updated 10 July 2026).
Attachment pages: the classic thin duplicate
An attachment page is a page WordPress creates for an uploaded file. One post with eight images could historically produce eight extra URLs, each holding an image, a caption and little else.
WordPress 6.4 changed this. A database option, wp_attachment_pages_enabled, now controls it: 0 on newly created sites, 1 on sites that upgraded into 6.4, deliberately, so existing sites did not lose pages overnight. With it off, attachment URLs redirect to the file. There is no Media settings toggle — core chose "decisions, not options" (Changes to attachment pages, Make WordPress Core, 16 October 2023).
So if your site predates 6.4, assume attachment pages are on and check. Your images still need filenames, alt text and compression — image SEO is a separate job from deleting the pages that wrapped them.
What an SEO plugin actually does
An SEO plugin does not do SEO. It gives you fields in the editor and writes tags into your <head>. That is the whole job.
- Title and meta description fields per post, page and archive — core gives you none. Our guide to meta descriptions covers what earns a click.
- Per-URL and per-archive robots controls — this is where the noindex decisions above get executed.
- Canonical tags, usually self-referencing by default, overridable per URL.
- An XML sitemap — core also generates one, so keep exactly one live.
- Schema output — typically Organization, WebPage, BreadcrumbList and Article or BlogPosting. Our schema markup guide covers what is worth adding on top.
Three options, verified on wordpress.org on 7 October 2026: Yoast SEO (10+ million active installs), Rank Math (4+ million) and All in One SEO (2+ million). All three cover the bullets above; the differences are interface and pricing.
One rule matters more than the choice: run one SEO plugin, not two. Both emit a title tag, a meta description, a canonical and their own schema, so you get duplicate tags in one <head> and no idea which a crawler honours. Migrating? Use the importer, verify in page source, delete the old one.
Speed on WordPress, honestly
On WordPress, your theme and your plugin count decide your speed — caching makes a fast site faster, but it does not make a heavy theme light. A page-speed plugin cannot remove the sliders, font families and jQuery dependencies a bloated theme loads on every view. That is a theme decision.
The only fix is a lighter theme, or a custom one.
The fixes are in our page speed optimisation guide; the metrics are defined in our Core Web Vitals guide.
Content structure WordPress gets right, and the bit everyone skips
Three structural things, in order of how often they are wrong.
- One H1, from the post title. Nearly every theme renders the post title as the H1, so do not add another inside the content. Check once in page source: if the title renders as an H2, or the site name as the H1, that is a theme bug.
- Fill the excerpt. Left blank, WordPress uses the first 55 words of the post, which is why archive listings so often end mid-clause.
- Link internally while you write. The editor's link search finds your own posts as you type — the easiest win WordPress offers, and the one most sites skip. Our internal linking guide covers what should link where.
If this keeps slipping because nobody owns it, that is the gap our SEO services close — and the honest organic timeline is three to six months to meaningful movement.
dh-theme, All in One SEO, and a WPCode snippet that strips every ld+json block out of post and page content. We added it after finding pages where our hand-written BlogPosting and BreadcrumbList sat alongside the ones AIOSEO already emits, with conflicting values. The plugin now owns those types; we hand-write schema only where it generates none. We have not measured a ranking change and are not claiming one — it was a correctness fix.What to check after a theme change or migration
A theme change or host move is where configured sites quietly become unconfigured. Work this list the same day.
- Search Engine Visibility. Staging sites have it ticked, and copying a staging database to production copies the tick. Check Settings › Reading first.
- Permalink structure. Confirm it is unchanged, then re-save the Permalinks screen to flush rewrite rules.
- View source on a post. Count the H1s, title tags and canonicals — one of each. Check the tagline too; new themes print it where the old one did not.
- One sitemap, and it resolves. If the new theme or plugin set added a second generator, disable it.
- Spot-check twenty URLs, including a category, a tag, an author archive and an attachment URL, so you see what the new setup publishes.
- Re-check the noindex decisions. Plugin settings usually survive a theme change; theme-level SEO options do not.
If the move changed any URLs, treat it as a site move, not a theme swap, and keep the redirects at least a year. The broader audit sequence is in our technical SEO guide.
Where to go from here
Do the settings table first — one sitting, and permanent. Then make the archive decisions, because that is where WordPress sites differ most and where the commodity advice runs out. Then publish: platform hygiene is a prerequisite for ranking, not a substitute for it.
Frequently asked questions
Which permalink structure is best for WordPress SEO?
Post name. It produces a short URL built from the post slug, matching Google's guidance to use readable words rather than long ID numbers. The WordPress default is Plain — a query string like ?p=123 — so it is a change you make deliberately, before publishing.
Will changing my permalinks hurt my rankings?
It changes every post URL at once, so every old URL needs a permanent redirect and every internal link needs rewriting. Google says permanent redirects do not lose PageRank, but that for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to replace the old ones, and that redirects should be kept at least a year.
Should I noindex category and tag archives?
Decide per archive, not by type. An archive earns indexing when it is a page somebody would want to land on from a search result — a category with a real introduction often qualifies, a one-post tag archive does not. On most business sites: index selected categories, noindex tag, author and date archives.
Do I need an SEO plugin on WordPress?
Yes, in practice. WordPress core gives you no meta description field, no per-URL robots controls and no editable canonical. An SEO plugin supplies those fields and writes the tags. It does not do SEO for you — and running two at once produces duplicate titles, descriptions, canonicals and schema in one page head.
What are WordPress attachment pages and should I disable them?
They are wrapper pages WordPress creates for uploaded files, and a classic source of thin duplicate URLs. WordPress 6.4 added the wp_attachment_pages_enabled option, off by default on new sites and on for sites that upgraded into it. Set it to 0; attachment URLs then redirect to the file.
Want someone to own the settings and archives?
We audit WordPress builds, make the indexing decisions, and do the work that follows.
Make Digital Hangover a preferred source
One tap tells Google to show more of our SEO and marketing coverage in your Top Stories.