WordPress SEO Expert for Business and Content Sites

An agency or freelancer built it on Elementor, Divi or a theme builder. It looks fine. It brings in fewer enquiries from Google than it should, and nobody can tell you why.

Hundreds of posts, a tag list nobody prunes, and traffic that’s flat or sliding even though you keep publishing.

You’re leaving Squarespace, Webflow or a custom CMS, and you want every URL, title and redirect carried across before DNS changes.

Dozens of plugins, two caching tools, settings nobody remembers choosing. You want one person to sort it out and explain it in plain English.

Every install starts with a Sample Page and a Hello world post. Themes add demo pages, some page builder add-ons publish their header and footer templates as URLs, and the Uncategorized category never goes away. If they’re live, they’re often in your sitemap too. Quick test: try https://yourdomain.com/sample-page/ in your browser and see what loads.

On most WordPress sites, https://yourdomain.com/?author=1 redirects to an author archive named after the first user’s login. If that user is called admin, the page title reads admin, Author at your site name, and it’s listed in your sitemap. So you’ve just handed bots half of your login. On a one-author site, that archive is also a copy of your blog list. The good news: Yoast and Rank Math can both switch author archives off.

Tags cost nothing to create, so teams create lots. A tag used on two posts becomes a thin archive that competes with those posts, and a category named like a service page ends up competing with the service page. I map which archives deserve to rank, noindex the rest and merge the duplicates. Here’s my guide to keyword cannibalisation, plus a free cannibalization checker that runs on your Search Console export.

WordPress used to give every uploaded image its own page with nothing on it but the image. Version 6.4 switched that off, but for new installs only. Older sites still have it on unless an SEO plugin redirects those URLs. Yoast does by default. Swap plugins, though, and those pages can come back.

Elementor, Divi and similar builders wrap each element in several layers of markup. Lighthouse warns when a page passes about 800 DOM nodes and flags an error at about 1,400, and builder pages get there fast. Elementor’s newer container layouts are leaner, but old section and column layouts don’t convert themselves. Then there’s the quiet trap, which I deal with on my own site. Edits keep serving old CSS until someone runs Elementor, Tools, Clear Files and Data (once called Regenerate CSS and Data) and purges the cache.

Watch what each plugin loads on every page. I’m looking for things like a slider script on pages with no slider, or a form plugin’s CSS loading sitewide. Two cache plugins fighting over the same files is another one. LiteSpeed Cache only does page caching on LiteSpeed servers or through QUIC.cloud. On other hosting it’s an optimisation layer, and stacking it with a second cache plugin invites trouble. Pick one cache and put it in charge.

The Discourage search engines setting in WordPress adds noindex, nofollow to every page, and it can bite you both ways. Leave it unticked on a staging copy and Google can index a duplicate of your whole site. Forget to untick it after launch? Your live site is asking Google to drop it.

Moving from date-based URLs to plain post names is often the right call. Do it without a redirect map, though, and every link pointing at the old URLs breaks. Rank Math includes a redirect manager in its free plugin; Yoast keeps its redirect manager in Premium. Either way the map comes first, and my free redirect map builder handles the bulk of it.

WordPress already creates several sizes of each upload, lazy loads by default and, since 6.3, marks the likely main image as high priority. Builders and sliders often bypass all of that with a full-size hero set as a CSS background. Schema goes wrong the other way. Your SEO plugin, your theme and a separate schema plugin can each output Organization markup, and then Google reads three versions of your business. More on that in the 6 schema types most businesses need.

I crawl the site with Screaming Frog and compare it with what Search Console says Google has indexed. The gap between the two is usually where the leftover pages and thin archives live.

With an editor or read-only login I check the SEO plugin, permalinks, reading settings, plugins and theme. Then I look at what each plugin loads on the front end.

You get every issue ranked by what it costs you in traffic or leads, with the exact setting, template or page to change. No vague advice to improve site speed.

I make the changes myself or work alongside your developer. Redirects, noindex rules and plugin changes go onto staging first when the site has one.

After changes ship I re-crawl, resubmit the sitemap and watch the Page indexing report until the removed URLs drop out. That usually takes a few weeks.

A 30-page service site and a 2,000-post content site aren’t the same crawl, and custom post types add their own archives and sitemaps.

A lean block theme needs less work than an Elementor or Divi build with years of nested sections.

Multilingual plugins like WPML or Polylang, booking widgets, membership tools and anything else that creates URLs or loads scripts.

Moving from Squarespace, Webflow or another CMS adds a URL inventory, a redirect map and a staging QA pass.

Whether I make the changes, or write the fix list and check your developer’s work.