Technical SEO Checklist 2024 | Technical SEO WordPress Tutorial | Fix Technical Errors on WordPress

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello and welcome to quick tips the search engine optimization video series in this video I'm going to discuss about the technical SEO checklist for the WordPress website so I'm going to use a WordPress website in this video and we will discuss about how to check the technical errors on your website how to use the free tools or free plugins to fix these technical errors on your WordPress website in one of the previous videos I have discussed about the onpage SEO checklist on the WordPress website this is the video if you want to watch this video I'll give you the link in the description box so let's start with the first point in the technical SEO checklist the first point is make sure that your website has a site map this s map will tell the search engine crawlers about the structure of your website how many pages are there how many posts are there so you're going to create a list of pages and post on your website and you're going to use that as a Sit map of your website now you don't need to do it manually definitely there are free plugins that you can use to create the sitemap.xml file of your website and whenever you publish a new blog post or whenever you add a new page it is going to update the site map automatically so you don't need to do it manually so the plugin that I use to create sit map is the Y SEO free plug-in here I have installed the Yost SEO plugin you can also use other SEO plugins such as a rankmath SEO plugin and these plugins will create the site map automatically for example if I go to Y SEO settings here if I go to Y SEO settings if I scroll down you will see XML site map is already included if I open it this is the site map for this particular blog you will see that we have post Pages attachment category sit map and author sitemap so this sit map is created automatically using this plugin if I go to post sitemap it will show all the post which are available on this website so it is going to help the search engine crawlers to find all the pages and post on your website so once you get this site map you can add this s map in the Google search console Google search console is one of the best free tool that you can use to improve the performance of your website you just need to register your website on Google search console and it will give you all the data about your website it will show you the performance of your website on Google search once you get the sit map you can add that sit map to your Google search console here I can show you that this sit map is already added you will see it sit mapor index.xml this is the same sit map so I have already added this site map on the Google search console and Google crawler has already gone through this sit map and these pages are discovered and indexed in the Google search engine the next point in the technical SEO checklist is make sure that your website has robots.txt file this file will instruct the Google crawler which section of your website to crawl and which section is not allowed to crawl so on your website there may be some section that you do not want Google crawler discover and index in their search engine for example if you have any members area then you do not want the crawler to go through the members area and search those pages in the Google search so you can disallow that section on your website for the Crawlers now there are some free websites from where you can create robots.txt file and you can add that on your website if you go to google.com you can search for robots.txt generator let's go to this website this is going to create robots.txt file it will ask you which crawler you want to allow and which search engine crawler you to not want to allow you will also see the list of crawlers so I'm going to allow all these search engine crawlers and this is the area which is not allowed to crawl click on Create robot.txt and this is a simple file created you need to download this file and add that in the root directory of your website so I'm going to use this one I'm going to export this file you can remove this first line and save this one and Export this file now I'm going to log into the C panel of the website this is the file manager and I'm going to upload this file in the root directory of this website click on upload I have it downloaded so I'm going to select that file robots.txt file and it is uploaded and you will see that the file is added here now I'm going to see if that file is available so let's open this URL this is the URL of the website and I'm going to type in robots.txt and you will see that the file is added to the root directory of this domain all right so the next point is get SSL certificate for your website these certificates are available for free now these days all the hosting service providers will give you free SSL certificate using that free SSL certificate you can make your website secured you will see it here the URL of this website is starting with https s is nothing but secured this means it is going to encrypt your website and it will make it secure instead of HTTP now we are using http TPS that is a secured website with the SSL certificate and here you will see a lock added to your website and this is the certificate that I have let's encrypt this is a free SSL certificate that I have got from the hosting Services once you get it you can go to settings and make sure the URL of your website shows https next point is identify the crawl errors on your website now how do you identify y the errors on your website the crawl errors on your website the first option is Google search console and the other option is to register for the free account on ahs.com I have a free account on ahs.com and I have added my website on this free account you will see this website here and this tool will give you overall performance of your website in the search engine so here I have my website registered you will see the site Explorer and this will give you the performance how many backlinks are there refer domains keyword how many keywords are ranking in the organic search what is the traffic for this website refering domain everything you will see in this dashboard this is a free account if I go to site audit here it will give me the information about the health score of this website you will see Health score is 73% and here you will see how many URLs are craw internal URLs having errors so this is the area where you will find all the crawl errors on your website so if I go here you will see these are the errors internal URLs uncr links anchor text you will see all the information here if I go here errors go to errors and these are the errors on this particular website now what I need to do I I need to go through these errors and I need to fix these errors let's say if I go here 404 error so that means these pages are not available on the website however some parts on your website are linking back to these Pages for example this is the page if I open it it shows this is the page which is not available but there is a link to this page you will see that this page is not available however this blog post has a link which is going to this page so I need to find out the link which is on this blog post if I open this one let me open it and on this page here you will see a link going back to this page which is not available on this website so I need to remove this link and once I remove this link this error will go away the same article is listed on these blog block post so recently I deleted some pages on this website that's why it is giving me these 404 errors I can go through all these blog post and I can remove link which is going back to this page and this error will be fixed let's go back let's say https page has internal links to http so what it says you have https a secured page which is linking back to http page so I use to use the HTTP link instead of https you will see it here internal outbound link which has HTTP instead of https so I can go through these pages and I can fix it instead of HTTP I can use https and it will fix that error so this is how you can go through all these errors and try to fix the error the next is page with broken link now what does it say this page has a broken link which which is going to this page so I can again go to the page and I can fix that error so this is the best tool if you want to find out the crawl errors on your website it is going to take some time you need to register your website on ahr.com after some time it will go through your website and it will find out the crawl errors on your website the next point in the technical SEO check list is fix the broken link it is nothing but what we just saw 404 page the links going to the broken pages so you can use the ahs.com and you can fix the broken link issues on your website the next point is the page speed of your website you need to monitor the page speed of your website if your website is loading slow then it is going to affect performance of your website it will increase the bounce rate on your website so make sure that your website is loading fast there is a Google free tool which you can use to monitor the page speed go to Google google.com and search for Google page speed insights this is the link let's copy the link of the blog post and enter it here and analyze this will give you an idea about the page speed of this particular URL here you will see the performance of this URL on the mobile device is 85 which is not bad this is a good performance on mobile device if I go to Des desktop you will see the performance is 99 so this is one of the best performance I consider try to get the score above 80 it is not always possible to get a score of 95 Plus for all the pages on your website now how you can do it you can use cash plugins on your website which is going to improve the page speed of your website you can also try to use plugins which will compress the image size it is going to increase the page speed if you're are using images with with low file size so on this website I'm using the smash plugin which is reducing the image file size on this website and the other plugin is wpr rocket it is a cache plug-in there are many free cash plugins that you can use for example if I go to add new plugin search for a cache plug-in and you will see a list of free cash plugins that you can use here you will see light speed cache it is installed on more than 5 million WordPress website W3 total cash which is also installed on 1 million website WP Super Cash also installed on 1 million website so you can use any one of these cash plugins and it is going to help you increase the page speed on your website these are available for free there are some throw plugins that you can also use in the upcoming videos I'm going to install the cash plugins and I'll show you how to use these cash plugins on a WordPress website the next point in the technical SEO checklist is add a structure data or the schema markup on your WordPress website this schema markup will inform the search engine about the page and its content again you don't need to do it manually if you're using SEO plugin you will get an option to add the schema markup here I'm using Y SEO plug-in and if I go to any one of these post let's try this one go to edit now if I scroll down you will see the US SEO settings in one of the previous videos I shown you how to install and use the OST SEO free and premium plug-in if you want to watch that video I'll give you the link in the description box here you will see the option schema so if you go to schema it will create a schema markup automatically for the page type it has already selected this one as a web page so default for the post is web page and and article type is article so if you running news article you can select news article if you're using take article you can select take article so it will inform the search engine crawler about this particular page and its content using the schema markup the next point in the technical SEO checklist is make sure that your website is mobile friendly these days mostly all the themes are mobile friendly so I don't think you need to worry about it make sure that you're using a proper theme a lightweight theme and a responsive theme responsive is nothing but the theme which is compatible with all the devices here I'm using Astra theme and it is compatible with mobile devices if I go to preview here select mobile and this is how it will look on the mobile devices so this theme is mobile responsive it works properly on mobile devices if you're using older theme which is not mobile responsive you can change the a theme and use a theme which is a responsive next point in the technical SEO checklist is 404 page redirect 404 is nothing but the page which is not available on your website let me show you an example let's go to one of the post here so this is the post which is available which is working fine but if you try to access a page which is not available on this website it will go to 404 page let me try this one I'm going to add something like this at the end of this URL and try to go to that page which is not available it will go to 404 page it shows this page doesn't seem to exist and here I have a search bar so this is a 404 page which I have created using the Astra theme if you're using other theme you will get an option to create 404 page if not then you can install a free plug-in which will redirect the 404 pages to the homepage or any other page on your website where you want them to go if the page is not existing let's go to plugins and search for a plugin click on add new plugin and search for 404 page redirect so this is a free plugin all 404 page redirect to homepage so if someone try to go to a page which is not available on your website they will be redirected to Homage of your website so these are the points that you need to consider while working on technical SEO on your WordPress website so that's it for now see you in the next video do not forget to subscribe to my channel to get more quick tips about online softwares and tools if you have any questions please leave us message in comment section and press the like button if you like the video thanks for watching quick [Music] tips