Free WordPress SEO checker

How to check a WordPress URL

Paste the public URL of a post, a page, or the homepage. Do not paste the wp-admin address. The checker reads the page a visitor gets, including the tags Yoast, Rank Math, or another plugin printed into the head.

If the platform is already set to WordPress, the fix text names the plugin screens I use. Auto-detect does the same when the HTML looks like WordPress. A headless front end that only mentions WordPress in the API will not always be detected. Set the platform yourself in that case.

Titles and meta descriptions in Yoast or Rank Math

The title visitors see in the theme is not always the title Google gets. The SEO plugin can replace it with a template. A template that says "%%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%" on every post is why ten results look the same.

Open the post, then the Yoast or Rank Math box, and write a title for that URL. Do the same for the meta description. Empty descriptions are common on old posts because the box was never filled in. The homepage often uses a template from the plugin settings instead of a sentence someone wrote.

After you save, load the public URL and view source. Search for the title tag. If the plugin title is not there, a second plugin or the theme is overwriting it. Turn one of them off for titles. Two plugins writing titles is worse than one empty title, because you cannot tell which sentence will ship.

Indexation on WordPress

WordPress can noindex a page from several places at once. Settings, Reading, has a box that asks search engines not to index the site. I still find that box ticked on sites that went live years ago. The checker will flag the robots tag. You still have to open the setting and clear it.

Yoast and Rank Math can noindex a single post, a whole post type, or the category archives. Attachment pages are a classic one. If you do not want those thin URLs in Google, noindex is fine. If you noindexed the service pages by mistake, take it off and check the public HTML again.

Canonical tags stack the same way. The plugin, the theme, and a multilingual plugin can each print a canonical. The checker reports what is in the HTML. If you see two, remove one. The URL you want in Google should be the one in the tag.

Theme headings

Many themes print the logo as an H1 on every page, and then print the post title as an H1 as well. Some block themes hide the page title and leave no H1 at all. The checker counts H1s in the HTML. It cannot redesign the theme.

Pick one H1. On a post, that should be the post title. Change the logo to a paragraph or a div in the header template. On the homepage, write one H1 that says what the business does. Do not leave the only H1 as the site name if the page is trying to rank for a service.

Plugins that add noindex, and what this check is not

Maintenance plugins, membership plugins, and some cache plugins add noindex while a page is "coming soon" and then forget to remove it. Staging plugins sometimes leave a robots header on the live site. If the checker says the page is noindex and you cannot find it in Yoast, search the other plugins and the server header.

This page does not review the theme speed, the plugin list, or the content of every post. It checks the URL you paste. A WordPress SEO project still needs a look at the template, the indexable post types, and the queries those pages should win. That is the work behind the WordPress SEO service, not a free one-page check.

A sensible order on a WordPress site

Clear the Reading setting and any sitewide noindex first. Then open one service page and one post and compare the plugin title with the title in the public HTML. Then fix the header template so there is a single H1. Then look at archives, attachments, and author pages and decide which of those should be indexed at all.

Caching plugins can keep the old head after you save. Purge the cache and load the URL again before you trust the checker. A CDN in front of WordPress can do the same. If the checker and the browser disagree, you are probably looking at two copies of the page.

When the template is clean, the remaining work is the usual SEO work: which URLs deserve to exist, what they should rank for, and whether the internal links point at them. The checker will not write that plan. It will stop you shipping a noindex tag while you write it.