WordPress can be configured for excellent SEO or catastrophically bad SEO, and the difference is rarely the plugin you chose. These are the settings and habits that decide it.
WordPress site owners who installed an SEO plugin, saw green lights, and got no traffic. Green lights measure whether you filled the fields in, not whether the site is set up correctly.
Very, when configured properly. It gives you full control of URLs, metadata, robots.txt, structured data and site architecture, which hosted platforms restrict. That control is also the risk, since it is entirely possible to configure it badly and WordPress will not warn you.
The mainstream options are close enough that the choice matters less than the configuration. All of them handle titles, meta descriptions, sitemaps and basic structured data. Pick one, learn its settings properly, and do not run two at once, which causes conflicting output.
No, and this is the most expensive misunderstanding in WordPress. A plugin gives you fields to fill in and checks that you filled them. It does not do keyword research, write content, fix your speed or earn links. A page with every light green can still be aimed at a search nobody makes.
Usually three causes in combination: too many plugins each loading assets sitewide, images uploaded at full camera resolution, and cheap shared hosting. Caching helps but treats the symptom. Auditing plugins and resizing images addresses the cause.
Usually not tags, which on most sites produce thin near-duplicate archives. Categories can be worth indexing if they are used deliberately as topic hubs with real introductory content. WordPress indexes all of it by default, which is rarely what you want.
Set them to redirect to the file or disable them. WordPress creates a separate page for every uploaded image by default, and on an image-heavy site that can be thousands of thin pages competing with your real ones.
Post name in most cases, so /page-title/ instead of dates or ID numbers. If your site is already live with a different structure, changing it requires redirects for every URL and carries real risk. Weigh that carefully rather than changing it for tidiness.
They can. Heavy builders add markup and scripts that slow pages and sometimes bury content in a way that complicates crawling. The content is normally still indexable. Speed is the practical concern, so test your Core Web Vitals instead of assuming either way.
Yes. Self-hosted WordPress.org gives you full control including plugins and robots.txt. WordPress.com restricts that on lower plans, with SEO plugins usually requiring a paid tier.
Set canonical tags through your SEO plugin, disable attachment pages, handle pagination properly, and decide deliberately which archives to index. Most of this is one-time configuration.
It adds ecommerce concerns: product structured data, faceted navigation and filtered URLs eating crawl budget, and out-of-stock product handling. See ecommerce SEO.
Run the free audit. It catches indexation, speed and structured data problems, which covers the majority of misconfigured WordPress installs. Our technical SEO service handles the fixes.