SEO setup for a new WordPress site: the launch checklist

Step by step

1. Set post-name permalinks before you publish

Go to Settings → Permalinks, choose Post name (/%postname%/) and save. Changing this later means redirecting every URL. Keep slugs short and readable when you create each post.

2. Pick one host and force https

Your site should answer at exactly one address, for example https://example.com/. Every other variant must 301 there in one hop: http://example.com, http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com. Check Settings → General: both addresses must be the https version you picked.

Test each variant with curl -sI. A common launch mistake is a www host that serves a full duplicate copy of the site with a 200 instead of redirecting. Fix it with a 301 at your host or CDN, not with canonicals alone.

3. Install one SEO plugin and run the wizard

Install Hydrogen SEO from Plugins → Add New and activate it. The setup wizard asks for a Business Profile and uses it to fill Organization schema, and Local Business schema if you pick that type and enter a location. Skip the AI step if you do not want an account. Keep only one SEO plugin active, or your pages print duplicate tags.

4. Set titles, homepage and social defaults

In Titles & Meta, set a title template per post type, for example %title% %separator% %site_name%, and pick your separator under General. On Hydrogen SEO → Homepage, write a homepage title that says what you do, not just your name. On Social, choose a 1200×630 default share image and add your profiles.

5. Decide what should not be indexed

On Hydrogen SEO → Robots, set Noindex on archive types you will not curate, such as tags if you use them loosely. Author archives, search results and the 404 page are already noindexed, and empty archives are noindexed by default. Noindex thank-you and confirmation pages individually in the SEO Settings sheet.

6. Turn off Discourage search engines at launch

If you built the site with Settings → Reading → Discourage search engines checked, uncheck it on launch day. While it is on, every page gets noindex, nofollow, and the robots.txt your site serves can also block everything with Disallow: /. Then open yoursite.com/robots.txt and a page's source to confirm neither blocks crawling. The health score on Hydrogen SEO → Dashboard flags "Site is hidden from search engines" as critical if you forget.

7. Verify Search Console and submit the sitemap

Add a Domain property in Search Console, verified by a DNS TXT record, so it covers every host and protocol. Copy your sitemap URL from Hydrogen SEO → Sitemap, open it to confirm it loads, then submit it under Sitemaps. Add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools too; it can import from Search Console.

8. Run the first health check and audit

Open Hydrogen SEO → Dashboard, click Refresh Checks and clear any critical issues first. Run the site audit once you have a few pages to catch duplicate titles and missing descriptions early. Then inspect your homepage in Search Console's URL Inspection tool and click Request indexing to get the first crawl moving.

Common launch mistakes

• Staging settings copied to live. A staging site built with noindex, or a password, then pushed to production with the setting intact. Check the source of a live page for noindex on launch day.
• Duplicate hosts. www and apex both returning 200. One must redirect.
• Placeholder pages indexed. "Sample Page" and "Hello world!" from a fresh install. Delete them.
• Two SEO plugins. Duplicate titles and canonicals in the source.

Check it worked

Within a few days, Search Console's Sitemaps report should show Success, and URL Inspection on the homepage should report URL is on Google within a week or two for most sites. New sites often see "Discovered - currently not indexed" for a while; that is normal early on. For a second opinion from outside, run the free SEO audit on your homepage.