Every page is Yoast-green. Nothing ranks. Here’s why.

Yoast, Rank Math and friends handle output plumbing: titles, metas, sitemaps, basic schema. Genuinely useful, entirely insufficient. What decides WordPress rankings sits outside any plugin's reach: information architecture (pages, posts, taxonomies used deliberately), page-builder weight, hosting quality, content strategy and links. A green Yoast light on every page is compatible with ranking for nothing.

They can be: heavyweight builder stacks ship deep div nesting, render-blocking assets and layout shift that field-data Core Web Vitals punish. But rebuild advice is oversold: most builder sites are rescuable with disciplined optimisation (asset stripping, critical-path work, image and font discipline, template cleanup), and modern block-native themes close the gap further. We optimise first, quantify honestly, and only recommend rebuilds when measured reality demands, at which point we can build it.

WordPress gives categories, tags and custom taxonomies, and most sites use them as an afterthought: hundreds of thin tag archives indexed, categories duplicating each other, no deliberate hub pages. Done properly, taxonomy pages become your category-level ranking assets (the "collections" of a content site): a small set of intentional hubs with real introductory content, everything thin noindexed, and internal linking that concentrates rather than dilutes. It is the highest-leverage unglamorous work on most WordPress sites.

Server response time (TTFB) underlies every speed metric, and cheap shared hosting drags it before a single optimisation applies. The honest stack: decent managed hosting or a tuned VPS, page caching, object caching where dynamic, and a CDN. We diagnose from field data and server timings rather than selling hosting bias, and the fix is sometimes a £20/month change that outperforms weeks of tinkering.

Plugin schema covers basics and breaks at the edges: duplicate blocks from theme plus plugin, invalid organisation duplication, missing content-type coverage. We audit rendered output, consolidate to one source of truth, and extend in code (or via a lean schema layer) for the types your content earns: articles with real authors, FAQs, services, local business, aligned with the site's actual entities.

Yes, it inherits everything above plus e-commerce specifics: product schema aligned with the merchant feed, category-page architecture (same buying-guide logic as our Shopify work), faceted-navigation index control, and speed under cart-session caching constraints. Woo stores in contested niches run the same playbook as any serious e-commerce campaign, with the platform quirks handled in code.

One-off technical overhauls (plugin-stack sanity, speed, schema consolidation, taxonomy cleanup) from £1,000 fixed-scope. Retainers from £950/month adding content architecture, link work and measurement. Builder-rescue speed projects quoted after measurement, honestly, including the cases where the answer is "your build is fine; your hosting isn't".