Webinar: Common WordPress SEO Technical Issues You Need To Know with Olesia Korobka

Are WordPress technical issues quietly sabotaging your SEO? Time to put a stop to that.

Understanding the common pitfalls means you won’t fall for them.

Olesia Korobka shares her findings from hands-on tests and years of expertise.

Tune in as Peter Mead and Nik Ranger host this SEMrush session packed with real answers.

Full Transcript from the Common WordPress SEO Technical Issues Webinar

Peter Mead:
It’s Peter Mead, and welcome to the Australian Search Marketing Academy, together with my fabulous co-host, Nik Ranger, and our amazing guest expert, Olesia Korobka.
Today’s presentation—which I’m really excited about, such an important topic—is WordPress SEO: Technical Issues You Need to Know.
I’ve had the pleasure of looking at Olesia’s slides, had a sneak preview, and so I’m really excited about this.
But firstly, let me introduce your co-host, Nik Ranger, SEO specialist at Studio Hawk.
Nik’s overseeing digital strategy, data analysis, content, site architecture for large and local enterprises and small business alike.
Nik’s focus: data-driven results, technical SEO audits, researching user intent, and finding opportunities in competitive industries.
And might I add, from my own personal experience with Nik Ranger, she does a mind-blowing website migration for enterprise clients.
So, I just can’t say enough good things about Nik Ranger.
Thank you so much for co-hosting, and welcome! How are you going?

Nik Ranger:
I am absolutely blushing! My head is going to be expanding out the sides of this frame.
Honestly, it’s fantastic to be here. And of course, if you’re tuning in, WordPress is everywhere.
So many people use WordPress. A lot of people are considering using it, or you’re already thinking about a different platform, you might be migrating—who knows?
There are so many really, really great things that we can explore here today.
And of course, I am joined by Peter Mead as the other co-host.
And of course, you’re known as the godfather of SEO, and you’re an absolute weapon when it comes to WordPress.
Now, WordPress is 30% of the web, and I think a lot of people have a lot of questions because there’s so much you can do with it.
It’s an open-source CMS, lots of different variations, lots of plugins, and a lot of vulnerabilities and things like that that also come with the territory.
So, really excited to get into it.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, WordPress all the way for me.
Thank you so much, Nik, for also giving a little bit of an introduction to me.
Let’s move on to Olesia Korobka.
Olesia is an SEO entrepreneur specializing in lead generation through different search engines.
Currently focused on technical SEO, image SEO, and research around the application of knowledge graph in SEO.
She’s also a networking connector.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing several of your presentations and appearances in other forums, Olesia.
I’m so excited you’re joining us today and really interested in your take on what some of these common SEO issues are with WordPress.
So, welcome! How are you today?

Olesia Korobka:
Thank you! Very fine. We have very good weather in Ukraine right now.
Hello to SEO Busch Life!
Not that much I can add. I hope you like the presentation.
I just need to warn you that I won’t be able to cover everything there, but we’ll pinpoint some issues that we can later discuss—maybe some questions around that.

Nik Ranger:
Sure, terrific.
We can never probably go through and cover absolutely everything in WordPress, so this is a really great opportunity.
We’re on the panel with some amazing experts here today.
So, make sure to post in your questions, and we’ll get them answered.

Peter Mead:
Thanks so much.
Well, Olesia, are you ready to share your slides and give us your presentation?

Okay, excellent. Terrific, looks good. Thank you so much.
Take it away.

Olesia Korobka:
Thank you. So, let’s talk about some common technical WordPress issues for WordPress websites that can have negative impacts on your SEO. I’ll have about half an hour, and because of the time limit, we won’t get into the deepest details, but we’ll still see something you can target—the issues after the presentation—and we can go into the details after that. I’ll be happy if you share your experience in the comments or your thoughts, and let’s go.

Some huge numbers here: WordPress celebrated its 18th birthday recently, a few days ago, and now it’s around 64 million websites that are using WordPress, which makes it almost 40% of the web. Why? Because it’s easy to use. You don’t need to be a developer or an SEO to make a website on WordPress. But at the same time, that may lead to errors that can affect your rankings in a way that you won’t like, probably. My goal here is to help you build a stronger website or to fix it from an SEO point of view and avoid common errors on the way.

Let’s also focus on the positive aspects. We’ll have a direction where to look if you have one of the listed issues below. I assume that this presentation will be helpful for webmasters who need to check their website is SEO compliant, SEO-wise, and maybe also for some coders. But it’s not a full SEO audit, and I’m not talking about all technical issues and not all technical errors under the sun, but we’ll focus on some most common ones, significantly and specifically for WordPress sites.

Some impacts are harder to prove. The factors don’t work in isolation, and they are blended together, so to say. Often, fixing one of them is not enough to feel any impact. It’s like the synergy of your hard work and fixing a mix of factors. I’ll also avoid naming any particular tool negatively or even positively because things can change over time, and I don’t want to feel responsible for any consequences. But let’s focus on how it should be working instead, and what the best practices are. I’ve done a lot of research, as you might imagine, made a lot of tests, looked at lots of websites. However, some information, of course, will be a bit basic because the most common areas are often very basic. Let’s go from the start.

The most basic thing is:
When you set up a website, imagine you make this checkmark in the dashboard for the search engines not to index your website and forget to remove the disallow after that. So that happens sometimes. The next thing is to make permalinks and robots.txt and sitemap.xml independently with an SEO plugin. After that, you’d want to make some static precautions by adding ways to backup—either from time to time or automatically, manually. Adding a security plugin is highly recommended and important if you are not a developer and cannot do it any other way. You should limit the number of logins. You should remove the admin page and make it inaccessible from outside, or leave it but make login available from it and log in to another page. I also encourage you to create email alerts or telephone alerts, or whatever is more convenient for you, to get notified in case someone tries to access your website in a bad way.

With WordPress API, there’s really no need in using these files: xmlrpc.php. I suggest you disable it in .htaccess. In any case, don’t move your .htaccess to the dashboard. Don’t make it editable there. If your site gets hacked, you’ll lose your rankings, probably, and may have other consequences too. So this is to safeguard you against those.

Now, let’s take a closer look at problems adhering to themes and templates:
No matter whether you are buying a template or ordering a custom one, it has to be responsive. Don’t make two versions—mobile and desktop. It’s not too common for WordPress, but sometimes I see that. Buy something initially good. If you are using some outdated theme, it’s about time to switch to another one. That also refers to duplicate tags inside the code—one for mouse and the other version for desktop. It may seem responsive, but it has duplicate tagging, and that’s not good at all.

What is a good thing? A good thing is easy to manage, allows custom integrations which you need if it’s not a custom design template. It should have a child theme, good structure, and code. When you are doing a speed check, look into the code. If they are not adding thumbnail or extremely small image into the source attribute of images, if they are not delaying JavaScript too much—because Google won’t see that. Another way you can check: switch JavaScript off and see how the pages look without it. If they are not looking the same, probably you might want to refuse this template and use another one. Chances are that they are trying to delay code loading to win the page speed scores, but that is not good, neither for indexing nor for rankings.

You might want to check for code validation. You have the role in the presentation that you can use. Specifically, I look out for tags that are open and not closed, and vice versa, unbalanced quotation marks, and around structure. You serve decorative images with img tag and useful images without one. To see that, you should put the checkers for cell structure and images inside the validator. Also important to know that some themes go with paid stuff on a trial or prepaid for three months only. Check that out if that suits you, because you’ll have to pay for that to update or review that.

I’ve seen lots of test pages, example posts in index—people forget to remove data, lorem ipsum in posts, and sometimes even reviews and authors, some generic media and other things that go with the template. Do you think, “Hello World”? Don’t—we don’t want to rank for “Hello World” on our website. Some generic things like that.

Lots of things are caused by page builders. Some of them are very handy, very easy to use, intuitive, but you may end up fixing problems you were not intended to deal with. A bit more about bloated HTML later, and speed and all that stuff in a few minutes. But some of them, when you make these page builders, some of them are very hard to switch afterwards. So when you build your website with a page builder, you may have issues if you want to switch. Some of them are made this way that you have to fill so many details each time that you want to fill in something, any content—you have to build with each block, and it takes a lot of time, and you may leave that half optimized because you don’t check everything.

Some of the builders have limited functionality—you can only do this or that, but if you want to add any new feature, things become drastically complicated, and you don’t control fully those builders. Sometimes they go and add, say, figure tags to your tables, breaking the styles and everything for your website due to some updates, and you have to jump on that and fix that. If you are not a developer—chances are you’re not—and don’t read documentation, very few people actually do. With each update, you can miss that, and that can potentially lead to unexpected results. Thus, despite they help you to get around with design and everything, maintenance and some unwanted limited functionality may cause you some pain and unplanned workarounds.

For SEO plugins, you can use any SEO plugin you like, which is not in conflict with your other code, unless you have some custom solution—but it’s kind of really rare for WordPress. Most people intuitively configure them well enough, and plugins—some of them have help resources and settings that can help you to configure properly. However, sometimes there are quite simple configuration errors that you should avoid. You should also not expect great results from following SEO plugins’ in-built automated recommendations inside the content as to the text size, some focus keywords, and so on. Don’t worry about those too much. Don’t rely fully on them. Sometimes they are a bit out of place, and following them usually—not always—will provide you with benefits.

Often, homepage SEO configurations are done from SEO plugin and override whatever you do from the page template itself, so check if it’s not the case. Also, if you are not a local business, make sure that automated schemas that go with some SEO tools don’t make your local business—as you may get some ranking consequences if you are targeting national SERPs. Then, if you want, of course, to be local, then that’s okay with you. It’s also important to enable and fill in all the fields for Open Graph. Search engine robots also use this information, and your site just looks better in social media. Check all the methods filled in—self-referencing canonicals and canonicalized pages. You won’t need meta keywords, but most tools now switch them off by default. If you are not planning to use other solutions, you can switch robots and sitemap one.

Nik Ranger:
I want to keep it pretty consolidated, but again, you want to make sure that you’ve got a good crawl.
Do you ever see what you have now, and to be able to plan out what you’re going to have in the future?
And if you’re going to lose any of those pages, do some due diligence because you might actually lose some traffic and some keywords.
I’ve gone through site migration—yeah, it’s never a perfect scenario, is it?
But I mean, the more prepared you are, the better.

Peter Mead:
And you’re planning this energy, you know, crawling and crawling again, and then crawl again.
And then when they have the new dev site ready for testing, you know, put your 301 redirects in place and crawl the redirects and try and crawl those again and find any pages that are missing.
Just keep testing and crawling, and then when you’re happy, hit the go button.
And then you will find things that didn’t get checked off.

Olesia Korobka:
It’s good to preserve URLs, and it’s quite easy with WordPress because they are easy to configure.
Their site things are a bit easier, and 100% do you like to do your redirects via plugin or by .htaccess?

Nik Ranger:
Yes!
[Laughter]
It’s so much easier, it’s quick, it’s efficient.

Olesia Korobka:
Yeah, I like it too, and it’s easier for me creating.

Peter Mead:
I’ll ask the next question because actually, I’ll just say—Donovan here has asked, is there a page builder plugin that you would recommend, or not, for performance especially?
Now, this seems to be a really popular question we get in all kinds of forums from different people.
The question goes on to be, “I find them hard to optimize, bloated JS libraries, etc. Caching helps, but still trying to find a fast one.”
And of course, so many WordPress sites we work on—there’s Elementor, there’s other kinds of page builders, maybe even just WordPress Gutenberg, people using blocks and things like that.
So, what would your—can we make it faster? Can we remove the bloat? What can we do, Olesia?

Olesia Korobka:
I don’t use page builders myself or try to avoid using them at all, but if you have to, you just choose the one you like most, which is more convenient for you.
You can rewrite the code after that. I don’t see any other solution.
So you’ll create some files—JavaScript files or other files, PHP files—that will override what these page builders are doing wrong and make it better.
Just contact someone who can help you with that, but usually, I don’t recommend using them.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, awesome. And I guess that leads quite naturally to a sort of adjacent question around themes.
What sort of themes do you see that you like, that you’ve seen are really quite lovely and responsive?

Olesia Korobka:
That depends on the type of business you are managing, because themes are usually focused on something.
There are some themes for services, using the show in commerce, or something like that, and the same with the builders.
So you just check what they are doing right, and well, you have this in slides, you can verify that they are working properly and choose the one which is better.
But they change over time—sometimes you see some very nicely looking theme and it works not really good, but then developers jump in and they really make it much better.
But sometimes, moreover, what I find is that the custom-made theme is working much better usually than those generic templates on some markets.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, 100%. A lot of the time, those generic ones will just have boilerplate-type template content, and they’ll just be like, if you want to make a new page, you have to use that boilerplate and then just—they try to please everyone, they need more people who buy it, and they try to make it good looking for everyone, so they are also limited with what they can do.

Peter Mead:
This next question here from Ramesh—he says, “How do you manage pagination on the home page where the last articles are getting featured? Pagination goes beyond 10 or 20, etc.”
I mean, I guess there’s a bigger question about pagination here in general.
But for example, this particular question is really talking about if you had articles on a home page, would that be the best way to do it, or would you think of maybe restructuring?
I mean, we know that especially blog posts, they do tend to get buried over time, and that’s just the nature of that.
But maybe take a different approach—think about restructuring and maybe the structure, you know, some think about from a content hub point of view.
Sorry, what would you say, Olesia?

Olesia Korobka:
Content hub is a very good approach. I like that too.
I try not to paginate the home page—it can create lots of issues.
If you can make a good infinite scroll or paginate the parts of the content that appear on the same page and upload them upon request—one user has to click the button to upload more blog posts—and you can also encourage users to go into categories.
Most users don’t want to browse all those hundreds of blog posts, they want to find something they really need.
So you just go from the user point of view and give them an easy solution for them to find—if you file with filters or with the categories or with even tags or whatever is better for the user.
Go from the user and you’ll have some solution, either with infinite scroll or with filtering the results.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, nice. What have you got for us?
Imagination is, of course, yes, we know that Google said that they don’t treat pagination the same way anymore in general.
Yeah, maybe ignore it, maybe you can still signal to Google what’s on your second, third, and fourth page.
But what have you got for us, Nik? Have you got a question for Olesia?

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, I do. I think—where was that render-blocking question? I’m just scrolling around. There we are.
So, Buckets Arrow has asked, his biggest issue is to eliminate render-blocking resources when clients use themes purchased via the web.
He works with small businesses, and they often have very limited budgets.
This is a great question. We’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ve got a lot of thoughts on my own too.

Olesia Korobka:
Well, I need to think about that. Very limited is—how much limited? No budget at all?
That’s tough. Yeah, of course, it’s complicated, isn’t it?
And I guess that your render-blocking resources, that kind of thing—other than changing, getting into the code and setting the load order of some of those resources, maybe also have a look at your theme and whether the page builder is adding on ridiculous extra JavaScripts and things, and see if you can defer the loading of some of those resources.
But specifically, it’s a very case-by-case, isn’t it?

Peter Mead:
Yeah, it’s different for every website, and sometimes within one website, there are different instances of different page types and posts. Debugging question, more.

Nik Ranger:
I think it’s really interesting because when it’s going through and crawling, it’s crawling from top to bottom.
So a lot of developers just consider moving those tags to the bottom—that’s sort of an easier way of being able to fix that.
Whereas sometimes the more advanced way is to add those asynchronous or defer the actual attributes, making sure that the fix is final by taking any non-critical scripts and links and tags, to make sure they’re accompanied with those asynchronous or deferred attributes.
So, if you don’t have a lot of budget, I know a lot of people do like to try WP Rocket, because that minifies a lot of their CSS files and combines them and loads the CSS only needed to be visible for that part of the website.
So maybe that could affect some ways, and especially if you’re just a little bit more budget-conscious, that could be something.
But again, in terms of all the things that you can do to optimize your site priority, really just consider there might be some other things that might help you more in the long run.

Olesia Korobka:
Yeah, maybe using some plugins will be an available solution here when you have very tight budgeting and cannot debug manually.

Peter Mead:
Listen, Olesia, I would like to know—you know, I get people asking me, “Hey Peter, can I pick your brain for a minute?”
And I just feel like saying that to you, Olesia—can I pick your brain for a minute?
Because you had some slides about the Core Web Vitals, and we know this has got to do with page speed and the web and the page experience update.
What does your crystal ball say to you—do we need to be as worried about this, or are we just thinking that it could be another mobilegeddon?

Olesia Korobka:
I think that it’s a bit overestimated at the moment, because it sounds very technical, and many people do their ordinary business and ordinary job, and that sounds so very complicated for them that they become nervous and scared.
But really, those are just three metrics—LCP, CLS, and FID—and they are field data, and they are quite easy to debug and quite easy to fix, actually.
You have all the resources for that, but I don’t think their impact is so very big.
And Google also said, not once, that even if you have a very fast website but everything else is not optimized, you won’t be high in rankings.
Pages that are more relevant to the query, so to say, have valid content, and only after that you worry about all the minor issues, which are speed issues.
Google doesn’t look at the PageSpeed Insights—those are more for debugging, so they are not using these metrics out there, but they help you to make your site faster and to fix all those Core Web Vitals too.
And yesterday or the day before yesterday, Google also said that they are no longer crawling tags, so it can be an issue for most of the websites in terms of speed and rendering HTML.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, I mean, there was a time a while ago where we just went nuts over speed and speeding up websites, but actually, Nik Ranger, just before the webinar you and I were talking a little bit about—not just before today, but in previous times we’ve talked about WordPress and the appropriate use of WordPress.

Nik Ranger:
And perhaps some people who are talking maybe from large enterprise-type websites, maybe big retailers who maybe don’t think that WooCommerce will do the job for them, or maybe large content websites, publishers who are deciding not to use WordPress.
I don’t know, do you have a question—do you want to put that question to Olesia, maybe in your own words? Because I found it very interesting.

• Woocommerce tutorials

Peter Mead:
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe this is something less like a question and more like a bit of a quick roundtable discussion as to larger enterprise-level sites, or even just sites that are able to grow and expand in functionality on just that one WordPress CMS.
I’ve got a pretty massive client, and when I say that, they’re in almost the half a million to 750,000 users per month range, and they don’t have that many issues with scalability.
If anything, it allows them a lot of flexibility and a lot of ability to have more functionality across their site.
I think the challenge there is just keeping them in reins with what they can do, and not to go too crazy on the JavaScript, because you really want to make sure that things are side-rendered.
Again, I see a lot of great flexibility and things like that, but I think one thing with WooCommerce, which you brought up, is it can sometimes be a little bit challenging for some people—just doing the tracking, the setup, and things like that.
Whereas maybe something like Shopify does make it pretty easy for those kinds of things to have that transparency.

Olesia Korobka:
Absolutely, maybe there’s more groundwork that needs to be done—setting things up and building things.
What are you—what’s your take on this, Olesia? Do you see a scenario where you just wouldn’t bother using WordPress? What do you think?

Olesia Korobka:
I would not use WooCommerce. I’d use something else for the e-commerce sites, so yes, that’s kind of that scenario.
And WordPress is so very convenient for most industries and for franchises, and you can have the same template for many instances, and it just works great for me most of the time.
Maybe some very big websites won’t use it—maybe news websites.
But good choice—I know many big companies that are not using WordPress for their core website, but they are using it for the blog part separately, because it allows you to install it separately and it’s quite convenient as well.

Peter Mead:
Okay, well, look, we’re getting close to the end of the webinar, and one thing that I like doing now and again is asking for your quick takeaway.
If there was one thing that our viewers today could do—just one thing they could do to improve their SEO and to fix those technical WordPress SEO issues—Nik Ranger, maybe I’ll throw it over to you first, and then go across to Olesia.
What would be your little one-minute takeaway for our viewers today?

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, sure. So, I think especially with WordPress, I always like to look in and be able to trim the fat wherever I can.
Yoast is a really, really common plugin that a lot of people use on WordPress because it automates robots.txt, sitemap, and a host of other really great goodies.
I just go in to the Yoast, into the taxonomies and things like that, and just kind of trim the fat—get rid of all those tag pages, get rid of the category pages, get rid of archive pages, and some other fairly knockout things that it kind of just auto-generates and adds to your sitemap.
Again, if you want to build out those pages and make it really, really great, it’s a nice little thing to be able to do, but most of the time I think people like to decide what that’s going to look like for them rather than Yoast decide that.
So, it’s one of the first things that you can do.
Other than that, just check that it’s the www/non-www, the trailing slash, and just make sure that there are a tags and href attributes with your internal links. So there you go.

Peter Mead:
Okay, that’s a good little roundup. What’s your little one-minute takeaway for us, Olesia?

Olesia Korobka:
I’d use content more. Focus on content more, because technical and content go in line together.
You should have it structured, and that’s part of the technical part. You should have all the headings in place, all the titles, holding matters, use appropriate images, make sure that Google sees them and that they influence your content in a positive way.
Try to use schema if you can. If you can’t, try to make it compliant, and it will work for you.
It’s not a ranking factor, but it helps so much support to understand what your page is about, and you’ll never regret if you invest your time into it.
Optimizing images in the right way, schema, and structured content will do the thing.
Don’t worry too much about those page speed issues unless they are too great.
So, I’d not invest too much time into that if you’re limited on resources and your website is more or less good. That’s okay. That may be enough.

Peter Mead:
Terrific, that’s a great little roundup as well.
So, with that, I think we’re out of time.
I would just like to say thank you so much, Nik Ranger, for co-hosting.
Yes, always a pleasure, and your knowledge and experience is phenomenal.
Thank you so much for being on the show with us.

Nik Ranger:
Oh dude, it’s coming from the legend himself, Mr. Peter Mead. You’re making me blush, thank you.

Peter Mead:
Also, just a shout out to SEMrush, and we’re so thankful for SEMrush for providing us this platform and for what they do for the whole community—for all of us to be able to jump on a free webinar like this and get this kind of information from top experts.
So, thank you so much, SEMrush.
And today, Olesia, what you’ve given us today I think is really giving us a lot to think about.
The slides are amazing, and some of your little details that you’ve put in there, I’m really interested in.
I’m going to rewatch this and take notice of some of those little details you’ve put in.
Thank you so much for your time.

Olesia Korobka:
Thank you.

Peter Mead:
All right, thanks guys. Have a good one. See you in the next one, next time.
Bye.