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7 Things I Check Before Optimizing a WordPress Website

August 25, 2026 · Kenneth Ngugi

Before You Optimize a WordPress Website

When I start working on a WordPress website, I don't immediately start installing plugins or changing settings.

I want to understand what is already happening first.

A website can be slow, have indexing problems, or lose rankings for completely different reasons. Making several changes at once can make the problem even harder to diagnose.

Here are 7 things I check first.

1. Check Indexing

Before worrying about rankings, I check whether the important pages can actually be indexed.

I look for:

  • noindex directives
  • robots.txt restrictions
  • Incorrect canonical URLs
  • HTTP errors
  • Pages blocked from crawling

A simple meta tag can prevent an otherwise perfectly good page from appearing in search.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Tip: Always check the page's actual source and HTTP response instead of assuming the SEO plugin settings tell the whole story.

2. Check Canonical URLs

Canonical tags tell search engines which version of a URL should be treated as the primary one.

For example:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/services/" />

If the canonical points somewhere unexpected, you may be telling Google to prioritize a different page than the one you're trying to rank.

3. Check Website Speed

I don't start by installing another caching plugin.

First, I try to find what is actually causing the slowdown.

Some common causes include:

  • Large images
  • Too many plugins
  • Unoptimized JavaScript
  • Poor hosting
  • Database bloat
  • Missing caching
  • Third-party scripts

A slow website doesn't always need another optimization plugin. Sometimes it needs fewer plugins.

4. Check Internal Links

Important pages shouldn't be isolated.

I check whether the site's most valuable pages are receiving relevant internal links from other pages.

For example:

Homepage
   ↓
Service Page
   ↓
Location Page
   ↓
Related Service

Good internal linking helps users navigate the website and gives search engines additional context about how pages relate to each other.

5. Check the XML Sitemap

Your sitemap should contain the URLs you actually want search engines to discover and index.

I look for things like:

  • Redirected URLs
  • 404 pages
  • Duplicate URLs
  • Thin pages
  • Unnecessary archive pages
  • Pages that shouldn't be indexed

Tip: More URLs in your sitemap doesn't automatically mean better SEO.

6. Check Mobile Experience

A website can look great on a desktop and still be frustrating to use on a phone.

I check:

  • Navigation
  • Buttons
  • Font sizes
  • Images
  • Layout shifts
  • Page loading
  • Forms

The mobile version isn't an afterthought. For many websites, it's the version most visitors actually use.

7. Check What Changed

This is one of the most important steps.

If a website suddenly loses traffic or rankings, I want to know what changed before making more changes.

Was there:

  • A plugin update?
  • A theme change?
  • A new SEO configuration?
  • A migration?
  • A change to robots.txt?
  • A large batch of new pages?
  • A server or caching change?

Without that history, SEO troubleshooting becomes guesswork.

My Rule

Diagnose first. Optimize second.

Don't change five things and hope the problem disappears.

Make a change, monitor the result, and learn from what happens.

The goal isn't to make the website more complicated. It's to make it work better.

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