WordPress powers a huge share of the web, but its default settings are designed to publish fast, not always for clean SEO. Several silent behaviors (typography filter, category URLs, theme-inherited H1) create technical problems that few publishers notice.
This guide brings together real cases met in production and their fixes, to take back control of what WordPress actually publishes. The linked articles are in French.
1. Content & typography
By default, WordPress applies the wptexturize filter, which automatically converts your straight quotes, apostrophes and ellipses into typographic versions. Handy for reading, but a problem as soon as it mangles a snippet of code, an attribute or a configuration extract pasted into a post. How excerpts are handled (the <!--more--> tag) also shapes what Google and your readers see on listing pages.
- French quotes in WordPress: the end of the headache
- Adding the “more” tag automatically to control your excerpts
2. URLs & duplicate content
WordPress can serve the same category content under several URLs (with or without a trailing slash, pagination variants), all returning an HTTP 200 code. The result: technical duplicate content that spreads signals instead of concentrating them. It is one source of duplication among others (HTTP vs HTTPS, tracking parameters), all covered in the Crawling & indexing guide.
3. H1 & robustness
Many themes display the site name as an <h1> on every page, duplicating this strong semantic signal instead of reserving it for each page’s own title. And because an unprotected WordPress remains exposed to comment floods that can bring the server down, robustness is part of SEO hygiene too: a site that stops responding stops being crawled.
- H1 duplicated across the site: forcing a unique H1 per page
- Protecting WordPress from a comment flood behind anonymous proxies
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