WordPress SEO Settings Checklist

WordPress ships with a handful of settings that quietly govern a site's entire SEO posture — most set once at install by whoever built the site, never revisited, occasionally wrong in ways that cost rankings for years. This checklist sweeps every setting that matters, in the order they appear in the admin, with the correct value and the reason. Twenty minutes on a new site; a revealing audit on an inherited one.

Settings → General and Reading (the big three)

1. Site Address consistency: WordPress Address and Site Address on the one canonical form — https, www-or-not per the launch decision — with the server 301ing every variant to it; mismatches here breed redirect chains at the root.
2. Search Engine Visibility: UNCHECKED. The single most expensive checkbox in WordPress — "Discourage search engines" ships enabled from many staging workflows and silently noindexes everything, per the launch-disaster files. Check it on every site you touch, today, then make it a deployment assertion.
3. Homepage displays: static page versus posts feed — a business site wants a real homepage (static) with the blog at /blog/; the choice shapes what your most-linked URL actually says.

Settings → Permalinks and Discussion

1. Permalinks: Post name (/%postname%/) for almost everyone — the full reasoning and the change-safely procedure in the permalinks guide; the rule here is only never change it casually on a live site (it's a migration).
2. Discussion: comment moderation on (the spam defence's first line), pingbacks/trackbacks off (legacy spam vectors), and comment pagination off unless threads run enormous (paginated comments mint duplicate-ish URLs).

The SEO plugin's settings layer

Configured once per the Yoast or Rank Math guides — the checklist's summary of what must end up true regardless of plugin: title templates sane sitewide (brand appended, separators chosen, no double-titles from theme conflict); the indexation map set deliberately — posts/pages indexed, category archives per your taxonomy strategy, tag archives usually noindexed, date/author archives noindexed on single-author sites, attachment pages redirected to the file (the classic thin-page flood, one toggle); sitemap enabled and submitted, feeding only what's indexable; and breadcrumbs on with markup.

The infrastructure checkboxes

1. HTTPS enforced — certificate live, http 301ing, no mixed content, per the migration leak-check.
2. One tag-emitter per job: verify the theme isn't duplicating the SEO plugin's titles/schema/canonicals (view-source on a post — one set of each tag; the double-emission conflict is the stack rule's commonest violation).
3. Users → your author profiles real: display names human (never "admin"), bios filled — the authorship layer's cheapest win.
4. Updates governance: auto-updates for minor core, staged discipline for majors and plugins, backups verified — the security posture that protects everything else on this list.

Frequently asked questions

I inherited a site — which settings do I audit first?

The damage-ranked order: visibility checkbox, HTTPS/address consistency, the indexation map (what's noindexed that shouldn't be — and vice versa), permalink structure (note it, don't touch it), then the double-emission check. Thirty minutes that regularly finds the one setting explaining a mystery.

Do any of these settings actively improve rankings?

They remove ceilings rather than add lift — the floor-clearing model: wrong values suppress (noindex, duplication, chains); right values let content compete. The improvement comes from what you publish onto the correctly-set platform.

How often should the checklist re-run?

On inheritance, after major plugin/theme changes, and annually inside the audit — settings drift through updates and helpful colleagues. The deployment-assertion habit (visibility + indexability checked on every release) covers the dangerous ones continuously — after which attention belongs on the levers that compound: content and links (our lever).