If you’re using WordPress, you’ve already made a smart choice for SEO. It’s flexible, well-supported, and packed with plugins that can help you rank higher. But here’s the catch: most WordPress sites—even good ones—are sitting on a pile of technical SEO issues that quietly chip away at their performance in Google.
And when Google notices (because it will), you might find your pages slipping down the rankings or not showing up at all. Let’s stop that from happening.
We’re going to talk about five major technical SEO issues that crop up in WordPress websites. This isn’t a checklist of 37 things. It’s five high-impact problems—and how to actually fix them.
1. Your Site is Crawling Too Slowly (And Google Hates That)
WordPress makes it incredibly easy to create new pages, posts, categories, tags, and even custom post types. With every addition, WordPress also generates new URLs. This can quickly lead to a bloated site architecture with hundreds—or thousands—of unnecessary pages being created in the background.
Now imagine Googlebot coming to crawl your website. It has a limited crawl budget—the number of pages it will crawl per visit. If your site is cluttered with low-value pages (like tag archives, author pages, or media attachments), Google might waste its crawl budget on those instead of focusing on your core, money-making content.
Fix it:
- Use an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast to set “noindex” rules for tag archives, author pages, and media attachment pages. This ensures they don’t show up in search results and Google deprioritises them.
- Set crawl-delay rules in your robots.txt file—but be cautious. Overdoing this can make your site harder for Google to crawl.
- Check Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats Report regularly. If you notice Google spending time on irrelevant pages, it’s time to tighten things up.
2. Duplicate Content (The Unintentional Kind)
Duplicate content is one of the most common technical SEO issues in WordPress—and it often happens without you realising. A single blog post might appear under multiple URLs: its main URL, category archives, tag archives, author archives, and even date-based archives. That’s five versions of the same content, which sends mixed signals to search engines.
While Google isn’t going to penalise you for duplicate content (contrary to popular belief), it does cause confusion. If Google isn’t sure which version to prioritise, it may not rank any of them as well as it should.
Fix it:
- Set canonical URLs using your SEO plugin. Canonical tags tell Google, “This is the preferred version of this content.”
- Avoid using too many tags and categories. They’re great for organising content—but don’t go overboard. Stick to one or two relevant categories and only a few tags per post.
- Noindex low-value archive pages (especially date and author archives).
- Use a tool like Screaming Frog to audit duplicate content issues and clean up any overlaps.
3. You’re Not Using a Real Sitemap
An XML sitemap is like a roadmap for Google. It tells the search engine which pages exist, which ones are most important, and how often they’re updated. WordPress does offer a basic sitemap by default, but it’s often too basic—and sometimes includes junk pages you’d rather not have indexed.
For instance, your sitemap might include old drafts, test pages, staging content, or pages marked “noindex”—which defeats the purpose of a sitemap entirely. A poor sitemap can waste Google’s time and water down the SEO juice flowing to your important pages.
Fix it:
- Use a plugin like Rank Math or Yoast to generate a proper sitemap. These plugins give you full control over what’s included and excluded.
- Manually exclude low-value pages and post types from your sitemap.
- After generating the sitemap, go to Google Search Console and submit it. Use the coverage and index reports to verify that everything looks clean and intentional.
4. Site Speed and Core Web Vitals Are a Mess
Site speed isn’t just a UX problem anymore—it’s a ranking factor. Google introduced Core Web Vitals as part of its Page Experience update, and WordPress sites often struggle to meet the benchmarks.
If your site is taking more than a couple of seconds to load, you’re losing visitors. On top of that, slow load times tell Google that your site offers a poor experience, which can impact rankings.
There are many culprits behind sluggish WordPress sites: too many plugins, bloated themes, oversized images, slow hosting, or a lack of caching.
Fix it:
- Use Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to identify speed issues and view your Core Web Vitals scores.
- Choose a lightweight theme like GeneratePress, Astra, or Kadence. These themes are built with performance in mind.
- Limit your plugin usage. Audit your plugins and remove anything that’s not essential.
- Use caching plugins such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache. They can significantly boost performance.
- Compress and lazy-load images using plugins like ShortPixel, TinyPNG, or Optimole.
- If you’re on shared hosting, consider moving to a managed WordPress host. It’s an investment, but it makes a huge difference.
5. Broken Links and 404 Errors
Broken links are a signal of poor maintenance. When users click a link that leads nowhere, it’s frustrating. But it’s not just a bad user experience—Google notices too.
If you frequently remove or rename content without implementing redirects, your internal link structure will suffer. And when Googlebot encounters too many 404s or broken links, it starts to devalue your site’s authority and trustworthiness.
Fix it:
- Use a plugin like Redirection to manage 301 redirects for any content you remove or move.
- Audit your site for broken links regularly using tools like Broken Link Checker, Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs.
- Google Search Console’s Coverage Report will flag 404s. Don’t ignore them—either fix the link or set a redirect.
- Maintain a habit of updating internal links when you update or restructure content.
Conclusion
WordPress is a fantastic platform, but it’s not perfect out of the box. Technical SEO issues can quietly sabotage your rankings, slow down your site, and frustrate both users and search engines. The five issues we’ve covered—crawl inefficiency, duplicate content, weak sitemaps, poor performance, and broken links—are some of the biggest culprits.
The good news? You don’t need to be a developer to fix them. With the right plugins, a little know-how, and a bit of regular maintenance, your WordPress site can become a lean, search-optimised machine.
Don’t wait for your traffic to dip before taking action. Prevention is always easier than recovery when it comes to SEO.
If you’re unsure where your WordPress SEO stands—or you’re too busy to fix these issues yourself—we’ve got your back. At Algo Digital, we specialise in technical SEO audits that go beyond the obvious. We’ll dig into the bones of your site, find what’s holding you back, and fix it before Google even notices there was a problem.
Visit algodigital.co.uk to book a free discovery call and find out how we can help your WordPress site perform like it was always meant to.
