Good content can only take you so far if the technical side of your site is working against it. None of this is exciting work, but it's the kind of thing that, when ignored, quietly caps how well everything else you do performs.

Core Web Vitals, in plain terms

Google groups page experience into three numbers. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures how long the biggest visible element - usually a hero image or heading - takes to load; aim for under 2.5 seconds. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures how much stuff jumps around while the page loads, which happens most often when an image loads without a reserved width/height and pushes the text below it down. Setting explicit dimensions on images and embeds is the single biggest CLS fix for most sites. The third, interaction responsiveness, measures how quickly the page reacts to the first click or tap.

Schema markup (structured data)

Schema is a structured snippet of code that tells search engines exactly what's on a page - a recipe, an FAQ, a product - rather than leaving them to guess from the visible text. FAQ schema specifically is worth the five minutes it takes: it can earn you an expandable FAQ snippet directly in search results, taking up more space than a plain blue link. Adding it to WordPress usually just means pasting the generated JSON-LD into a custom HTML block or a plugin's schema field - no coding required beyond that.

Open Graph tags and canonical URLs

Open Graph tags control how your page looks when shared on Facebook or other social platforms - if your image isn't showing up when you share a link, it's almost always a missing or incorrectly sized og:image tag, or Facebook's cache serving a stale preview from before you fixed it. A canonical URL, separately, tells search engines which version of a page is the "real" one when the same content is reachable through more than one URL (with and without a trailing slash, with tracking parameters, etc.) - without it, you risk search engines splitting ranking signals across duplicate versions instead of consolidating them onto one.

A quick sanity check before you publish

Facebook's own Sharing Debugger (under its "for developers" tools) is the fastest way to see exactly what Open Graph tags a page is sending and force a refresh of its cached preview. For schema, pasting your page's JSON-LD into Google's Rich Results Test confirms it's valid before you rely on it to show up in search.

If you're also trying to get a brand-new site noticed by Google in the first place, our guide to getting indexed and ranking faster covers the discovery side of this, separate from the on-page technical fixes here.