Free WordPress SEO Checklist for Small Business

Install a caching plugin

WordPress sites run a little slower than average: 62% of US WordPress business sites pass Google's Core Web Vitals on phones, against 65% across all platforms, and the typical one shows its main content in 1.9 seconds against 1.7 (Stackra corpus). After install, open your homepage in an incognito window and it should feel noticeably snappier. Pick one and stop there; running multiple caching plugins in parallel breaks more than it fixes.

• WP Rocket: paid, easiest set-and-forget. Worth it if speed matters and you don't want to fiddle.
• LiteSpeed Cache: free, 7M+ installs. Full page caching on LiteSpeed hosts, JS/CSS optimization on others.
• W3 Total Cache: older free alternative if your host is unsupported elsewhere.
• After installing: clear cache, open homepage in incognito, run PageSpeed Insights to confirm the win.

Audit installed plugins quarterly

Plugins → Installed Plugins. Every active plugin adds load time, security surface, and update overhead, so fewer is better.

• Deactivate anything you don't recognize; if the site still works after a week, delete it.
• Replace 3 single-purpose plugins with one all-in-one (e.g. Rank Math covers what 4-5 SEO plugins used to).
• Delete deactivated plugins: they're still on disk, still need updating, still a security risk.
• Watch for abandoned plugins (no updates in 12+ months) and replace them with maintained alternatives.

Compress hero images before uploading

Aim for under 500KB. Use ShortPixel or Smush (both have free tiers) to bulk-convert your Media Library to WebP after the fact.

Choose a lightweight theme for your most-visited pages

GeneratePress, Astra, or Kadence load faster than feature-heavy theme builders. If you're already on Elementor or Divi, keep them but limit them on your homepage and top landing pages.

Fill in your business details in your SEO plugin

Yoast SEO → Settings → Site representation: your organization name, logo, and social profiles. Yoast turns this into Organization schema, which makes those details machine-readable for search engines and AI tools. 63% of US WordPress business homepages already carry it, mostly through an SEO plugin (Stackra corpus). In Rank Math the same details are under Rank Math → Titles & Meta → Local SEO.

Don't block the AI search bots in robots.txt

Yoast SEO → Tools → File Editor → robots.txt (the menu is missing if your install disables file editing; then edit it over FTP or ask your host). AI companies run separate bots for search and for training. Keep the search bots open: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot and Bingbot. Blocking the training bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot) is a separate choice and does not remove you from AI search answers. Google's AI Overviews follow Googlebot.

Optional: switch on Yoast's llms.txt

Yoast SEO (free) can generate an llms.txt file, a plain-text map of your key pages: Settings → Site features → AI tools → llms.txt. Treat it as optional. Google says AI Overviews need no special AI files or markup.

Sanity-check that your hero copy isn't JavaScript-only

Right-click your homepage → View Page Source → search (Ctrl+F) for your H1 headline. If you find it, AI crawlers can read it. If you don't, your page builder is probably rendering it via JavaScript: Google renders it, but most other AI crawlers fetch the raw page and see nothing.