SMB SEO

What WordPress and WooCommerce already do for SEO, for free

Updated Oct 7, 2026.

Every WordPress site handles some technical SEO without a plugin, and WooCommerce adds product structured data to a store. Check what yours already does before you pay for a plugin that does it again.

What WordPress does on its own

Since WordPress 5.5, every site has an XML sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml. It lists all public post types and taxonomies, author archives and the home page, and the robots.txt file WordPress serves points search engines to it (WordPress Core).

WordPress adds a canonical tag to every single post, page or other single item, which tells search engines its main address (WordPress developer reference).

Images load lazily by default since WordPress 5.5, so the ones further down a page wait until a visitor scrolls toward them. WordPress also fills in the width and height of images from your media library when they’re missing, so the page shifts less as they load (WordPress Core).

What WooCommerce adds

WooCommerce has written product structured data as JSON-LD since version 3.0, released in April 2017 (WooCommerce). WooCommerce says it maps core product fields, such as the title, description, image, SKU, price, currency and stock status, to structured data on product pages, and that stores “may need extensions or custom markup for richer fields and variation-level data” (WooCommerce).

Two checks before you install an SEO plugin

  1. Open Settings, then Reading, and look at “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. While it’s ticked, WordPress asks search engines not to index any page (WordPress documentation) and turns off its sitemaps (WordPress Core). If it’s still ticked from when the site was built, untick it.
  2. Look for duplicate product markup. If an SEO plugin adds its own product structured data on top of WooCommerce’s, a product page can describe the same product twice. Keep one, and check a product page with Google’s Rich Results Test.

Sources

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