WordPress Technical SEO Done Right

A good looking design and great content are important, but they won’t deliver results on their own. If your site is lacking in technical SEO essentials, you might be missing out on valuable traffic to your site.

Here at Wibble, we’ve seen this many times across plenty of websites. We know that technical SEO makes a massive difference to how a site ranks on search engines, like Google, and how users engage with the site. Aspects like broken links, poor site structure, slow loading times and poor mobile performance can all hurt SEO.

This is why Wibble integrates technical SEO into every website from the very beginning. It’s not something we tack on later, it’s part of the foundation of the website. After all, better rankings are dependent on better builds.

This is why, in this post, we’ve outlined the common technical factors that affect SEO on any WordPress site and how we handle them at Wibble.

The structure problem

Site structure is essential for SEO. Search engines, like Google, rely on a clear hierarchy to find, navigate and index pages correctly. If the structure of the site is broken or doesn’t make sense, it leads to wasted crawl budget and lower rankings.

We often see problems such as:

• Duplicated pages
• Inconsistent or messy URL structures
• Endless redirect chains
• Poorly designed navigation
• Missing or broken sitemaps which make site crawling difficult for search engines

All of these issues can slow down crawlers or cause search engines to miss important content, reducing search visibility. As well as this, a confusing site structure and poor navigation can frustrate users, leading to lower engagement and high bounce rates which all indicate to search engines that your site might not be useful, thus lowering your site’s rankings.

So how do we ensure our sites are built the right way? Well, to fix these, we take a structured approach. At Wibble, we:

• Write clean code and use semantic HTML so that search engines can interpret content easily
• Create clear and logical sitemaps to show search engines how pages are connected
• Configure ‘robots.txt’ files carefully to prevent any indexing issues
• Handle redirects properly to address broken links and avoid any redirect chains wasting valuable crawl budget
• Plan navigation and information architecture with both SEO and user experience in mind

This approach to good site structure doesn’t just help search engines, it also makes navigation simpler for users. When people can find what they need quickly, they’re likely to stay on your site for longer and engage with call-to-actions. As well as this, correctly structured sites are easier to expand as your site grows, allowing you to scale up in the future. There are so many good reasons to implement correct site structure to your website!

We’ve applied these methods to many projects, such as Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland, Go Office and Neueda. In each of these cases, a clear and well thought out site structure improved search visibility and created a smoother user journey.

The speed issue

A slow site can be one of the biggest barriers to your site ranking high. Search engines favour fast-loading websites because they provide a better user experience. A slow website will result in higher bounce rates, fewer conversions and inevitably lower rankings.

We regularly see the same issues holding WordPress websites back, such as:

• Heavy off-the-shelf themes with irrelevant and unnecessary code
• Plugin overload where multiple plugins are used to carry out the job of one
• Unoptimised images that are much larger than they need to be
• Poor hosting setups that can’t cope with spikes in traffic
• Excess third-party scripts or tracking code slowing pages down

Users expect pages to load quickly when they visit a site. If your site is slow, users will leave before engaging with the content, increasing bounce rates. Search engines, like Google, may interpret high bounce rates as a sign that your website isn’t valuable to users, which can lower your rankings. As well as this, a slow site can prevent search engines from crawling all your pages properly. For example, Google allocates a specific crawl budget for sites — this is the number of pages Google can crawl and index on your site within a set timeframe. If pages take too long to load, some of them might not even get indexed, negatively impacting overall search visibility.

At Wibble, we address these issues by ensuring we have performance in mind when building websites. Our web development team:

• Create lightweight and custom themes in-house
• Use plugins only where necessary, and opt to use custom code where possible
• Optimise assets like images, fonts, stylesheets and scripts
• Implement caching and CDNs to deliver content faster

The outcome is a site that loads quickly, increases crawl rate, keeps users engaged and ranks high in search results.

One example is Aisling Events, where we cut monthly web support costs by 90% thanks to performance improvements. For Obbi Golf, we delivered a fast and responsive website, earning a rating of A in GTmetrix for site speed.

If you’d like a deeper dive into exactly how we achieve these results, check out our blog post on building high-performance WordPress websites, written by our lead web developer, Karl Proctor.

The mobile challenge

Most traffic on websites now comes from mobile users, and with Google utilising mobile-first indexing, the mobile version of your site becomes the benchmark for how it ranks. If your site doesn’t perform well on smaller screens, you risk losing both users and visibility in search results. Common issues we see include:

• Layouts that break or look cramped on smaller screens
• Awkward navigation menus that are hard to use on mobile devices
• Buttons or links that are too small to tap easily
• Content hidden or removed entirely from the mobile version of the site

When content is hard to read, buttons are too small, or layouts break on mobile, search engines, like Google, see this as a poor user experience. Users who struggle to use your site on mobile are likely to leave quickly, reducing engagement and thus negatively affecting rankings.

Here at Wibble, we ensure our sites are mobile-optimised by starting early in the design phase. Our web design and web development teams work together to:

• Follow a mobile-first approach in the design phase
• Build responsive layouts that allow pages to adapt to different screen sizes seamlessly
• Ensure interactions on the site are clear and easy to use on smaller devices
• Test websites rigorously across a range of screen sizes and browsers

This approach means that users always get a high quality user experience no matter how they’re accessing the sites, thus improving engagement and boosting the site’s search performance.

For example, the design of Belfast Hills Partnership’s website focused on accessibility and usability across devices, improving both engagement and search visibility. We’ve also shared our philosophy in Why Good Web Design Isn’t Just About Looks, written by our digital designer, Aisling Doherty, which outlines why usability is just as critical as aesthetics for SEO success.

Our verdict

A well-structured WordPress site that’s easy to crawl, fast to load, and simple to use on mobile will always perform better in search results and provides the benefit of creating a smoother user experience.

At Wibble, we’ve proven through countless projects that our approach to technical SEO works. Whether we’re fixing crawlability issues, optimising performance, or designing for mobile-first audiences, we make sure we get technical SEO right from the beginning of any project and build WordPress websites that deliver results.

contact wibble web design

Wibble are an award-winning web design and development agency in Belfast with a specialism in custom WordPress development. If you want a WordPress site that not only looks the part but also ranks, then get in touch with us.