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You already have a sitemap. WordPress has generated one in core since version 5.5, served at /wp-sitemap.xml, with no plugin required. And you may not need it. Google's own threshold: you might not need a sitemap if "Your site is 'small'. By small, we mean about 500 pages or fewer on your site" and it […]
WordPress makes a set of SEO decisions for you at install, before you write anything. Four of them are wrong for most sites, and none of them is fixed by a plugin. That is the useful frame for this subject, because "WordPress SEO" is usually presented as a plugin choice, and the plugin is the […]
This page names no winner, and the reason is that the choice matters far less than the category's marketing implies. The major WordPress SEO plugins do the same six things. They have converged, they will continue to converge, and the difference between them is interface preference and a small number of features most sites never […]
Choose your permalink structure once, at launch, and use the post name. /blog/your-post-title — short, readable, and it does not date your content. The reason to be deliberate is not that one structure ranks better. It is that changing it later breaks every URL you have published, and fixing that means redirecting all of them. […]
Every post you publish generates archive pages you did not write. Its category archive, one archive per tag, the author archive, the date archives, and a place in the paginated blog index. On a site with 50 posts and 200 tags, WordPress has published around 250 pages of your content rearranged into lists. Most of […]
"How many plugins is too many?" is the wrong question, and it is the only one most people ask. Twenty lightweight plugins that load nothing on the front end cost less than one page builder. The right question is what each plugin costs on each request, and there are four numbers that answer it — […]
This page names no hosts and ranks nothing. Host performance changes with plans, data centres and ownership, so any ranking published today is wrong within a year — and the reader who needs it most cannot verify it anyway. What does not change is what to check. Eight requirements, one number that tells you whether […]
There are four caching layers on a WordPress site, they cache different things, and stacking two of the same kind causes bugs rather than speed. Layer What it stores Who usually provides it Page cache The finished HTML of a page A plugin, or your host at server level Object cache The results of database […]
The number most people try to raise is not the number Google uses. The PageSpeed Insights score is a lab simulation of one page load on a synthetic device. What actually gets assessed is Core Web Vitals measured from real visits, at the 75th percentile, split between mobile and desktop. Those are different things, and […]
Three metrics, three thresholds, and one rule that decides everything: assessment happens at the 75th percentile of real page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop. Metric Measures Good Needs work Poor LCP Loading ≤ 2.5s 2.5–4.0s > 4.0s INP Responsiveness ≤ 200ms 200–500ms > 500ms CLS Visual stability ≤ 0.1 0.1–0.25 > 0.25 The 75th […]
A completely blank white page means WordPress's fatal error handler did not run — and that narrows the cause before you touch anything. Since WordPress 5.2, an ordinary fatal error produces "There has been a critical error on this website" plus a recovery email. A blank page means something prevented even that. Three things cause […]
The standard advice — deactivate every plugin, then reactivate one at a time — works and it takes your live site down while you do it. On a busy site that is an outage, and on an ecommerce site it is lost orders. There are two better options, and most people have never been told […]