WordPress SEO is the setup work that gets Google to index only the useful pages of a site and read all the others properly: permalinks, archives, the SEO plugin, updates and speed, before you even get to the content. WordPress runs 40.1% of all websites (W3Techs, 10 October 2026), and in our test on 48 WordPress sites already on page one of Google 46% leave the archive of the default category indexable, the one WordPress creates by itself.
Everyone installs the SEO plugin.
Almost nobody does the rest of the setup.
And these aren't beginners' sites: the ones in the test are already on page one, for searches like "dental practice Milan" or "CNC turning subcontracting" (we ran it on Google Italy, where most of our clients are). The three mistakes that come up most often:
- the "Uncategorized" archive live and indexable, full of posts that ended up there by oversight;
- the author archive showing the login username, sometimes literally "admin";
- a WordPress version that hasn't moved in years, written in plain text in the page code.
These are three things the SEO plugin doesn't fix on its own, because they depend on decisions nobody made.
The blog you're reading runs on WordPress with Yoast. So does Macropix, a Milan-based LED screen manufacturer: on "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising display) it went from position 88 to 2 in five years. Valore Solare, in solar power, uses WordPress with All in One SEO.
So WordPress is the secret?
No. In both cases WordPress is the starting point: what made the difference was the right pages for the right searches. But on a badly configured WordPress site those pages live alongside empty and duplicate archives that Google still has to crawl.
In this guide you'll find:
- the Visilay test on 48 WordPress sites across 16 searches, with the method and the numbers;
- the four settings to check on day one;
- categories, authors, attachments and internal search: what to switch off and how;
- updates, PHP and speed, with data from WordPress.org and HTTP Archive;
- how the blog you're reading is configured.
Let's start.
The test: what 48 WordPress sites on page one leave switched on (16 searches, 10 October 2026)
Of 48 WordPress sites already on page one, 22 leave the default category archive indexable, 9 have an indexable author archive and 31 show their WordPress version in the code.
The method. On 10 October 2026 we used DataForSEO to pull Google's organic results (mobile, Italy, Italian language) for 16 searches typical of small and medium-sized businesses. We ran them in Italian; in English they are: aluminium window prices, subcontract machine shop, dental practice Milan, accountant Turin, building contractor Rome, estate agent Verona, seafront hotel Rimini, restaurant central Naples, online English course, porcelain stoneware tiles, physiotherapist Padua, subcontract 3D printing, long-term car leasing for individuals, condensing boiler prices, CNC turning subcontracting, Franciacorta winery.
Of 128 unique domains, 52 had traces of WordPress in their code. We dropped 4 that we couldn't verify as WordPress. On the remaining 48 we opened the same seven addresses from our server: the home page, /?author=1, the three possible slugs of the default category (the Italian ones and uncategorized), /wp-sitemap.xml and an internal search. For each one we read the response code, title and meta robots. It's a test of more than 300 requests, so we haven't repeated it on Google UK: the numbers below are from the Italian market, and the fixes are the same everywhere.
| What we checked | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Default category archive live (200 response) | 33 out of 48 | 69% |
| ...and with no noindex, so indexable | 22 out of 48 | 46% |
| /?author=1 opens an author archive | 17 out of 48 | 35% |
| ...indexable | 9 out of 48 | 19% |
| ...with "admin" in the URL | 6 out of 48 | 12.5% |
| WordPress version readable in the code | 31 out of 48 | 65% |
| ...stuck before 7.0 | 10 out of 31 | 32% |
| Indexable internal search | 1 out of 48 | 2% |
| Non-existent URLs answering 200 (soft 404) | 2 out of 48 | 4% |
| Default tagline ("Just another WordPress site" in its translated form) on the home page | 0 out of 48 | 0% |
The last row is the most telling. None of the 48 had left the default tagline: the settings you can see, sooner or later someone fixes. The ones you can't see stay there for years.
On plugins the picture is the familiar one: 29 sites use Yoast, 10 Rank Math, 1 All in One SEO, 1 SEOPress, 7 no recognisable plugin. How to choose one is covered in our test of WordPress SEO plugins.
The settings to check on day one (and that nobody checks again)
There are four, and they're all in the WordPress dashboard: search engine visibility, permalinks, site address, and the use of posts and pages.
- Visibility: in Settings > Reading the box "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" must be unticked. It gets ticked during development and forgotten at launch: it's the first check in our guide to SEO for new websites.
- Permalinks: in Settings > Permalinks choose "Post name" (/%postname%/). Decide before you publish, because changing it later changes the URLs of the whole site. How to write the last part is in our guide to the URL slug.
- Address: in Settings > General the WordPress Address and the Site Address must use the same protocol (https) and the same form, with or without www.
- Posts or pages: services and products go in pages, guides and news in posts. Posts end up in categories, archives and feeds; pages don't.
And the rest?
The SEO plugin does the rest: title, meta description, canonical, sitemap and structured data. Just one, configured: two plugins together write the same tags twice, and for schema there's our guide on how to add structured data without duplicating your plugin.
The "Uncategorized" category (live on 33 sites out of 48, indexable on 22)
The default category is the one WordPress puts every post into when it's published without a chosen category. It's called "Uncategorized" in English, with a translated name in other languages, and it has its own archive with its own URL.
In the test the archive was live on 33 sites out of 48, and on 22 it didn't even have a noindex. Among them are a firm of accountants in Turin, a medical centre in Padua and two subcontract machine shops.
What's the harm, if no customer ever lands there?
Google lands there. Every archive is one more page to crawl, with a title like "Uncategorized Archives" and inside it the same excerpts that are already in the posts: low-value duplicate content. On a 40-page business site it weighs more than on a big portal.
The fix takes a few minutes:
- in Posts > Categories rename the default category with a real name and slug (WordPress won't let you delete it). On our blog it's called "SEO" and it's the category most of our articles sit in;
- in Settings > Writing choose a default category that makes sense for the site;
- if you don't need an archive, set it to noindex from the SEO plugin. The difference between noindex and a robots.txt block is in our guide to noindex.
The same goes for tags. Yoast's guide to WordPress SEO puts it plainly: don't use too many tags, and use each one more than once or twice. A tag used only once creates an archive with a single post in it.
The author archive that shows the username (17 sites out of 48, 6 with "admin")
WordPress creates an archive for every author, which can also be reached from the address /?author=1, redirecting to /author/username/. The name in the URL is the one the author uses to log in to the dashboard.
In the test /?author=1 opened an author archive on 17 sites out of 48. On 9 it was indexable. On 6 the URL ended in /author/admin/.
And what's that got to do with SEO?
Not much, and that's exactly the point. On a business site with a single author, the author archive is a copy of the blog with a title like "admin, Author at...". To Google it's a duplicate; to anyone trying to get into the dashboard it's half the credentials.
If the site has one author, switch off author archives in the SEO plugin settings: that's the advice in Yoast's own guide, and it's what we did. If there are several authors who genuinely sign the content, the archive can stay, with a real biography and a display name different from the username. The rest of the checks are in our guide to website security.
Attachments, date archives and internal search (the three things the plugin already handles)
These are three kinds of page WordPress generates by itself that a business site almost never needs. The good news: the SEO plugin, once configured, deals with them.
- Attachment pages: up to WordPress 6.3 every uploaded image had its own page, with the image and little else. Since 6.4 (November 2023) they're switched off on new installations, but they stay on for sites upgraded from earlier versions, as the official developer note explains. The option is called wp_attachment_pages_enabled and has no screen in the settings: you change it from WP-CLI or with the attachment redirect offered by Yoast and Rank Math.
- Date archives: /2024/ and /2024/05/ are useful to a newspaper, not to a business. Yoast keeps them switched off on its own site.
- Internal search: Yoast sets search results pages to noindex by default. In the test only 1 site out of 48 left a search page indexable: here the plugin does its job.
How many useless archives is Google crawling on your site?
You've just seen that 22 sites out of 48 already on page one leave the default category indexable, and that 6 show "admin" in the author URL. We'll check your WordPress site on the same seven addresses as the test and on the pages Search Console flags, and tell you what to switch off and in what order.
Book a strategy consultationWordPress and PHP versions (31 sites out of 48 show theirs, 10 are stuck before 7.0)
WordPress writes its own version in a "generator" meta tag in the head, unless a plugin or the theme removes it. In the test it was readable on 31 sites out of 48.
Twenty were on the 7.1 branch, the latest (7.1.3, as of 10 October 2026). One was on 7.0. Ten were below 7.0: from 6.8 all the way down to a 4.3, a branch released in 2015.
It isn't just an Italian problem. According to WordPress.org statistics, 61% of installations are on 7.1, so 39% run earlier versions. And 37% use PHP 8.1 or lower, versions that php.net no longer lists as supported (today those are 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5).
But does the version matter for rankings?
No, not directly. It matters for security: a hacked site that starts publishing spam pages is the case where SEO is lost for reasons that have nothing to do with SEO. Three checks to run once a month:
- automatic updates switched on at least for WordPress minor releases;
- a supported PHP version, chosen in your hosting control panel;
- Tools > Site Health, which flags old plugins and risky configurations.
Speed: where WordPress starts at a disadvantage (45% against 74% for Wix)
According to HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac, only 45% of WordPress sites on mobile pass Core Web Vitals, against 74% for Wix and 85% for Duda. The figure is global, but the gap is too wide to ignore.
In our view the reason isn't WordPress itself: it's what gets installed on top of it. A multipurpose theme, a page builder, dozens of plugins, no cache. Closed platforms decide the code for you; on WordPress you decide it, for better and for worse. The comparison with the most common alternative is in our guide to Wix SEO.
The SEO plugin, on the other hand, weighs little: in the Accelera test we cover in our guide to plugins, the gap between the lightest and the heaviest is 80 milliseconds on the frontend, with no cache. The real causes lie elsewhere, and the method is in our guide on how to speed up a website and the one on Core Web Vitals.
Pages that don't exist but answer 200 (2 sites out of 48)
A soft 404 is a page that says "not found" but answers with a 200 code, the one for valid pages. Google's documentation explains that in these cases Search Console reports a soft 404 error.
In the test 2 sites out of 48 redirected non-existent URLs to an error page that answered 200. The result: every broken link takes Googlebot to a page it has to recognise as an error by itself, and the error page risks ending up in the index.
The rule is simple: the error page stays at the requested address and answers 404. Redirects are only for a page that genuinely replaces the one removed, as we explain in our guide to the 404 error.
How the blog you're reading is configured
The Visilay blog runs on WordPress with Yoast SEO and our own plugin for languages. These are the choices, one for each point of the test.
| Setting | Choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| SEO plugin | Yoast, and only Yoast | Structured data graph and an FAQ block that generates the FAQPage schema |
| Permalinks | /blog/post-name/ (/it/blog/ for the Italian version) | Short, stable URLs, with the language in front for Italian |
| Default category | Renamed "SEO" | No "Uncategorized" archive |
| Author archives | Switched off, /?author=1 goes to the home page | They would duplicate the blog |
| Date archives | Switched off | Nobody looks for articles by month |
| Attachment pages | Off | Every image stays a file, not a page |
| Internal search | Noindex | Yoast's default setting |
| WordPress | 7.1.3, the latest | Security |
It isn't the only right configuration. It's the one that makes sense for a blog with lots of articles and few authors. An ecommerce site will make different choices on archives, and you'll find them in our guide to WooCommerce SEO.
Where WordPress doesn't come into it: structure and pages
Once WordPress is configured, rankings depend on which pages exist and how well they answer the search. The CMS doesn't write them for you.
Macropix has one page for LED walls, one for the indoor version, one for outdoor, one for totems: each ranks for its own search, and "ledwall" (LED wall) alone gets 4,400 searches a month in Italy. The full case is in our guide to SEO for manufacturing.
Sunscape, which develops solar farms in Italy, launched an architecture of pages by region in March 2026: in six months its page-one keywords went from 1 to 38 out of 143, and organic impressions from 329 to 5,809 a month. Timings and phases are in our guide on how long SEO takes.
If you're rebuilding the site, the configuration is decided before launch, not after: the checklist is in our guide to SEO when you redesign your website. When the configuration is in place and the enquiries aren't, the work becomes strategic: it's what we do in our SEO projects.
Frequently asked questions about WordPress SEO
Yes. It handles URLs, canonicals and sitemaps even without a plugin, and it runs 40.1% of all websites according to W3Techs. In our test 48 WordPress sites were already on page one across 16 searches. The problems come from how it's configured, not from the platform.
Yes. Without a plugin WordPress doesn't write a meta description and doesn't produce structured data. The free version of Yoast or Rank Math is enough, and only one at a time: two plugins together write the same tags twice.
No. WordPress won't let you delete the default category, but you can rename it. Change the name and slug, move the posts into real categories and, if you don't need the archive, set it to noindex from the SEO plugin.
It depends on the number of authors. With a single author, yes, because they duplicate the blog and often show the login username (in our test 6 sites out of 48 had /author/admin/). With several authors who genuinely sign the content they can stay, with a biography and a display name different from the username.
It depends on how far you are from the Core Web Vitals thresholds. They don't replace the relevance of the page, but on WordPress they're worth checking: according to HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac only 45% of WordPress sites on mobile pass them all, against 74% for Wix.
Yes, for the setup. The settings in this guide take an afternoon and no code. Strategy, page structure and content take more time and more data: they're the part that brings in the enquiries.
Summary
46% of WordPress sites on page one leave the default category indexable.
One in three opens an author archive from /?author=1, one in eight with "admin" in the URL.
Two in three show their WordPress version, and a third of those are stuck before 7.0.
One SEO plugin, archives off if you don't need them, updates switched on.
Something the industry rarely says: none of these 48 sites is on page one thanks to WordPress, and none in spite of it. 22 of them have an indexable "Uncategorized" archive and rank anyway. Configuration won't get you onto page one: it stops you handing Google useless pages to crawl while you try. And it's the only part of SEO you can sort out in an afternoon.
