How I run a WooCommerce SEO checklist on a live store

What does a WooCommerce SEO checklist cover?

A WooCommerce SEO checklist covers the store-specific layer that a general WordPress checklist skips: how products and categories get their URLs, which generated URLs should stay out of the index, what the product and category templates print, and how stock changes are handled. It's the same list I work through before quoting WooCommerce SEO services, so nothing here is theory.

The site-wide basics, like HTTPS, redirects and crawl checks, sit in my technical SEO checklist for WordPress. This one assumes those are done and goes through the store in the order the problems compound: setup, product pages, category pages, markup, stock, speed and monitoring.

What's on my category page SEO checklist?

Category pages are where most WooCommerce stores should rank for the broad searches, like a product type in the plural. They're also the pages stores leave emptiest: a heading and a grid.

Every category that matters gets its own title tag, a short introduction written for the searcher, and the right subcategories linked. WooCommerce gives each product category a Description field, and its docs say some themes display it beneath the category name. If yours doesn't, that's a template fix, not a reason to leave it blank.

Then the traps. Sorting and filtering a category creates URLs with the same products in a different order, which Google's own canonicalization docs name as a common source of duplicates. When those URLs turn up in the Pages report as duplicates, the only question is whether Google picked the clean category URL, and how Google groups duplicates without a canonical shows how to check. Usually it has, and they can be left alone.

How do I add Product schema without fake reviews?

WooCommerce already prints Product structured data from its own code, so the first check is how many Product graphs a page carries. An SEO plugin, a reviews plugin and the theme can each add another, and two graphs describing one product is the usual source of errors.

Google's product snippet documentation says the markup must include one of review, aggregateRating or offers. A store always has an offer: a price, a currency and availability. That's the honest way to satisfy it, and it's the fix I use for Product snippet errors in Search Console.

Review and rating markup goes on only when the reviews are real and visible on the page. Google's structured data guidelines name fake reviews as misleading markup, and a structured data manual action means the page loses eligibility for rich results. It isn't worth the stars.

What do I do with out-of-stock and discontinued products?

Temporarily out of stock and gone for good are different jobs. A product that's coming back keeps its page, its URL and its rankings, with the availability shown on the page and in the markup. WooCommerce has a store-wide setting to hide out of stock items from the catalogue, and I check what it's doing to category pages before anyone deletes a product.

A discontinued product with traffic or links gets a 301 to its closest replacement; one with neither can return a 404. Bulk-redirecting everything to the shop page helps nobody. The full decision tree for out-of-stock products is its own post.

How do I check speed and Core Web Vitals on WooCommerce?

On product and category templates, not the home page. Those are the pages that rank and sell, and they're usually the heaviest: galleries, variation swatches, reviews, related products and tracking scripts.

Google's Core Web Vitals targets are an LCP within 2.5 seconds, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and a CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. On a store, the product image is usually the LCP element, variation swatches and mini-carts are where INP suffers, and late-loading review widgets or banners cause the layout shift. I test one URL per template type and fix the template, since one fix covers every product.