Technical SEO Checklist for New WordPress Sites

A new WordPress site does not rank because you installed an SEO plugin. Google ranks URLs. This is the launch checklist we run on every GridCraft build, mapped to what Google Search Central actually publishes, not to a traffic-light score in the editor.

What we set before the site is public

• A unique title and meta description on every indexable URL. No sitewide tagline pasted onto every page.
• Structured data that matches visible copy. Organization on the home page. Article on posts. JSON-LD, which Google lists as the format it prefers in most cases.
• An XML sitemap of canonical, indexable URLs. robots.txt must not block it.
• Index flags that match intent. Public pages indexable. Thank-you, admin, and leftover staging URLs not.

Sitemaps are a hint, not a ranking lever

Google’s sitemap documentation is blunt. If important pages are linked from navigation, Googlebot can usually find them. A sitemap still helps a new site, a large site, or a site with video, image, or news files you care about. List the URLs you want crawled. Do not list noindexed URLs, and do not list redirects as if they were the live page.

robots.txt does not hide a page

Google’s robots.txt guide says the file manages crawling. It is not how you keep a URL out of Search. A disallowed URL can still appear if other sites link to it, often without a snippet. To keep a page out of results, use a noindex tag (on a URL Google can still fetch) or password protection. Mixing Disallow with a hope that Google will “see the noindex” is how staging sites linger in the index.

Core Web Vitals, with Google’s numbers

Google Search Central still publishes the “good” thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Those metrics are used by ranking systems as part of page experience. Google also says a green lab report does not guarantee a top result. Content still has to deserve the query.

The 2025 HTTP Archive Web Almanac CMS chapter is the field picture. About 45% of WordPress mobile origins passed a good Core Web Vitals set. That is a configuration problem more than a CMS problem. Page builders, image weight, and plugin piles explain why two WordPress sites can sit on opposite sides of the same threshold. Median WordPress mobile transfer size in that chapter was 2,894 KB. We treat that as a budget to beat, not a target to match. The conversion cost of a slow first paint is in why template sites cost conversions.

Structured data without the FAQ fairy tale

Google’s structured-data introduction is still the rulebook. Markup describes the page the visitor can see. Do not invent FAQ, review, or how-to nodes for copy that is not on the URL. Google documents JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa as supported. We ship JSON-LD.

FAQ rich results in Google Search were restricted in August 2023 and then removed. Google’s own documentation changelog records the deprecation notice for 7 May 2026, and later removal of the FAQ rich-result docs. We still write FAQ copy on pages that answer questions. We do not sell accordion schema as a ranking trick. Article markup on posts and Organization markup on the home page remain the types we actually use. Rank Math is how those fields get filled on a GridCraft install. The buyer version of that choice is Rank Math vs Yoast.

llms.txt is not a Google ranking document

Google has not listed llms.txt as a ranking system. We still ship one so assistants that look for it can read a short, intentional summary. Treat it as courtesy copy, not a substitute for titles, sitemaps, or index flags.

Three settings that still brick a launch

1. Plain permalinks. WordPress defaults to ?p=123. We switch to a post-name structure before content work. Google can index either shape. Humans and internal links cannot.
2. The tagline in every title. “Just another WordPress site,” or a slogan jammed after every H1-equivalent title, produces duplicate, noisy SERP lines. Each URL gets its own title.
3. Staging noindex left on. Search engine visibility off, a Rank Math noindex, or a robots Disallow from the staging host. That is the fastest way to publish a site Google never lists.

Core and Complete packages include this baseline. Numbers stay on pricing. If you are leaving a theme, keep the URLs that already earn and 301 the rest. When you want the build, start on contact.