WordPress is the most preferred CMS and website-building platform for a reason. And while its easy use often takes the spotlight, its SEO capabilities are not to be underestimated. Yes, WordPress is king when it comes to making search engines eager to share your content. Naturally, the stars behind this successful SEO are the plugins, which offer countless features, enhancing user experiences and making your website generally better.

Still, before the plugins can do their magic, you must go to the beginning. Start from the essentials. You need to optimize your WordPress settings so that search engines will read your website faster, better, and more effortless. So, today, we’ve made a list of 10 settings on WordPress that will boost your SEO. We will start from the easiest and go to some more complex settings. But before we get there, let’s talk a bit more about WordPress settings and why they are essential for your SEO.

Why are WordPress settings essential for your SEO

WordPress settings are the essence of your website. They are the pillars that make its usability and, in general, its communication with the internet. Thus, ignoring them in favor of some powerful plugins is like building a skyscraper with the most high-quality materials on a cracked, sandy foundation. The best part is that these optimizations are built in, and you don’t have to install any extra plugins. They are indeed the first thing to do when you start building your website.

So, let’s go through the settings that will boost your SEO efforts and make your website easier to find and read by crawlers.

Make your website visible

Before you start improving your SEO, you must be sure that you haven’t discouraged search engines from visiting your website. Now, you might be wondering why there is even such an option. Well, when you are in the process of building your website, your SEO is absolutely terrible. For example, first, when you build your website, you fill the blank text spaces with lorem ipsum. Lorem Ipsum is a ready text that has no meaning. Thus, if at this moment Google, Bing, or another search engine comes across your website, it will nuke your SEO efforts for the next six months. Thus, when your website is being built or refurbished, you need to discourage search engines from indexing your website.

So, if you are building your website on your own, you need to activate this option by going to Settings->Reading-> Search Engine visibility.

Once your website is ready, don’t forget to unmark the box, as it will otherwise render all your other SEO efforts entirely useless.

Set up a proper tagline

The next step is to boost your SEO with a proper tagline. In a nutshell, the tagline explains what your website is all about. Now, many companies will put their slogan there. That’s not entirely a bad idea, as your slogan should represent what your business is all about. Usually, the slogan includes the unique sales proposition, the type of business, and the main benefits. Still, you might want to optimize it a bit further by adding some keywords or phrases inside. For example, if McDonald’s puts “I’m lovin’ it” on their website’s tagline, it will do nothing for their SEO.

So, thoroughly research keywords that you might incorporate in your tagline, but don’t compromise on giving a precise indication of your website and business. During this process, there is one thing to consider. Though your business may be directed toward end customers, your website might target business partners. So, make sure to target the right audience with your tagline.

In general, writing a tagline is not that easy. Give this process the due time, and don’t compromise on the result. Only a great tagline will boost your SEO efforts. Once you are ready, go to Settings->General and find the “tagline” box.

Set up your categories and tags correctly

Categories are the most basic method of grouping your content in WordPress. Naturally, on its own, this wouldn’t have such a huge impact on your SEO. Still, if you set it up properly, it will propel your website’s user experience. In terms, this will boost your search engine results.

As you can imagine, a blog post can belong to more than one category based on its topic. Still, the best practice is segregating your posts into just one category, giving users a general division to find your content. If the post touches various topics, you may use tags to connect posts from different categories.

For example, if you are a digital marketing freelancer, and you touch on topics regarding categories such as SEO, offline marketing, online marketing, social media, and others, you may have articles on SEO and online marketing sharing tags like “content,” “strategies” and others.

So, go to Posts->Categories to create your various categories. Don’t forget to place a proper slug, which will be added to your URL. Also, adding a description will help search engine crawlers better position your content. It’s a perfect place where you can add some additional keywords.

Then, make sure to assign each of your posts a category before publishing it through the dedicated option in the right hand-side sidebar.

Creating tags is similar. Try to make tags based on keywords that are relevant to your business. For example, if you are offering bike parts, you may be tempted to put a tag “forks.” However, you can see where crawlers might find this explanation a bit confusing. So, “front suspension” will be much better, as it’s far more related to your specific business niche.

Otherwise, creating tags is similar to categories. Go to Posts->Tags and create your tags with their slugs and descriptions.

Set your theme and plugin to auto-update

WordPress wouldn’t be a leader in the web-building and CMS markets without its plugins and themes. Naturally, much of the websites’ usability comes precisely from them. So, keeping plugins and themes up to date is a no-brainer. Moreover, this is more than just an SEO booster. It’s essential for your website as a whole. If you skip some major update, it can entirely crash your website, which, as you can imagine, won’t be very good for your overall usability. Naturally, this will become an SEO nightmare if you don’t notice your broken website in time.

Moreover, not updating your plugins and theme is a security issue. Usually, updates fix bugs and breaches that malicious attackers could exploit. So, keeping your infrastructure up to date is a must, regardless of your SEO efforts.

The good news is that you can effortlessly take care of this problem. All you need to do is set the theme and plugins to auto-update. This is quite easy. Go to the Plugin page and just enable the auto-update option on the right-hand side. The only downside is that you must do it for each plugin individually.

To activate the auto-update option for your theme, go to Appearance->Themes. Click on the theme you want to automatically update and enable the automatic updates right below the Headline.

Instal an SSL certificate

While SSL certificates were optional 10 years ago, today if you want anyone on your website, an SSL certificate is a must. Thankfully, HostArmada offers a robust SSL certificate as a bonus to every plan, so there is no need to go far and beyond to find a security option.

In a nutshell, SSL certificates are internet protocols that encrypt the transfer of data between the user’s browser and the website’s server. This way, third parties can’t just tag along and steal the information.

Users will see a padlock left of your URL in the browser’s search box. This will indicate that the website has an SSL certificate. Naturally, most users will entirely avoid websites without this padlock icon on the top left.

Installing an SSL certificate is a bit more complicated, so if you need more specific instructions, check out our dedicated article on SSL and the provided step-by-step instructions.

Optimize your permalink structure

The next step in making your WordPress the best pillar on which to build your SEO strategy is optimizing your permalinks. Now, if your website is more than 4-6 months old, changing permalinks will damage your SEO. So, if you do have some success in search engines, don’t change it. However, if you are just starting to build your website or you’re at the very beginning of your SEO efforts, then by all means, the permalinks must be optimized.

If you haven’t done the optimization, don’t worry. It’s not that bad, as WordPress uses the post name as a default URL tail. This means your URL will be something like “https://www.hostarmada.com/blog/why-is-ezoic-a-must-for-monetizing-your-website”

Still, you can do better. Go to Settings-> Permalinks.

Here, you will see several options:

Plain – This option will create a unique ID for your article and place it as a tail in your URL. For example, https://www.hostarmada.com/blog/123. Using this option is not a great idea, as it won’t give the search engine crawlers any information on the topic of your post.

Day and name – This is better than the plain permalink structure, but it will create extremely long URLs as it features the date and the name. So, if we used this permalink structure, this article would have had this URL https://www.hostarmada.com/blog/2023/12/17/10-settings-on-wordpress-that-will-boost-your-SEO. Not ideal, as you can see.

Month and name – The same as the day and name option, but doesn’t specify the day, only the month and the year.

Numeric – This structure is similar to the Plain, but it uses the post ID in your wp_post table. Still, it doesn’t help your SEO efforts at all, as it doesn’t provide any information to the search engine crawlers.

Post name – This is the default option, which uses the post’s title. This is a great choice if you don’t want to add additional information for the crawlers. If you do, then you need to use the custom structure.

Custom – This structure allows you to build your URL by adding the category, the author, or many other options. Adding the category is generally great for SEO, so don’t hesitate to do it. Moreover, if you rely on your name or brand as a keyword, you might also add your author’s name to the URL.

Dynamic sitemap

Adding a sitemap to your WordPress will be a game-changer. Every search engine loves having their work cut out for them. Essentially, a sitemap is a file that lists all your site’s content in a machine-readable format. As you can imagine, crawlers love this summarized version of your website rather than mapping it on their own.

More importantly, sitemaps will tell search engines which of your links are more important than others. This way, search engines will prioritize indexing them over others, putting them in the search engine faster than usual.

The best thing about sitemaps is that WordPress creates them automatically. To check out yours, simply type your domain name plus /sitemap.xml. For small business websites, that’s all you will need. However, a customized sitemap is necessary for websites with vast content or huge corporations with many pages. Dynamic sitemaps are a blessing, as they are always up-to-date.

Install an SEO plugin

This should go without saying, but still… Installing an SEO plugin will vastly improve your SEO. It will give you the opportunity to closely follow your SEO efforts and manage your content so it follows the best practices.

For example, YOAST SEO will show you whether your text has perfect readability and where exactly its problems are. This is invaluable if you want to make it to the front page of Google.

Moreover, SEO plugins will give you the opportunity to optimize your meta title and description effortlessly. This way, you can add keywords to the mix and create a general optimization for all of your content.

Optimize comments settings

Censoring your audience when it comes to commenting on your website is a terrible idea. The main point of having a blog is to start a conversation to actively seek communication with your audience. If this communication is one-sided, the audience will quickly distance itself.

On the other hand, the comment section below your blog posts should be a place for civilized conversation, not a marketplace for phishing and other schemes. Spambots and spammers will use every opportunity to flood your comment sections if they can post unchecked. So, light censorship is more than welcome.

So, to moderate your comments, go to Settings-> Discussions. There, you will find various options on how to deal with your comments section. What you will choose entirely depends on your strategy. Still, as a minimum, we suggest keeping all Default post settings on.

Furthermore, insist the author fill out their name and email and manually approve comments. This way, you can keep on top of what’s being said on your website. Still, don’t be tempted to exclude negative comments or critiques just because they do not fit your narrative. Censorship of such kind will instantly disperse any audience.

Set user permissions

Limiting contributors’ access to your WordPress dashboard’s options can play a crucial role in keeping your SEO intact. It’s no wonder that a single team usually implements the SEO strategy. They simply have the bigger picture. Moreover, you can’t expect a blog post author to have in-depth knowledge of SEO. Thus, they don’t need access to all dashboard options.

For example, an author may write a brilliant SEO-optimized post. But there’s more to great SEO than the text. The Images, the Alt texts, the meta titles. Those are post-production efforts that can be messed up if the author doesn’t see the bigger picture. Thus, giving them limited accessibility is a must.

The good news is that WordPress has some built-in roles that perfectly encapsulate everyone’s role. There are seven default roles – admin, editor, author, SEO editor, SEO manager, contributor, and subscriber. You must go to Users-> All users->Edit to change them.

Screen

You can customize what access to give these users so they can do their job without any risk of messing up anything else. This is essential if you are working with freelancers and other third-party service providers.

And that’s it

These are the most important settings you need to address to create the foundation of one truly inspiring SEO strategy. Of course, there are other small things you can do to tweak your WordPress to help you gain a foothold on Google or Bing’s front page, but these ten are the most essential.

Another essential factor for dominating the search engines is your loading speed, security, and, most importantly, reliability. A slow website will chip away not only from your SEO efforts but also from your overall performance. But nothing is more detrimental to your website than having downtime.

Luckily, HostArmada addresses all these essential problems. Having great hosting is key to a great SEO. We offer lightning-fast loading time, robust security, and 99.9% uptime, which will boost your SEO effort through the roof. Check out our plans and find the one that fits your needs perfectly. If you need any help, don’t hesitate to contact our team. They will gladly help you find the perfect solution to your problems.