I’ve reviewed plenty of WordPress sites where teams go straight to a redesign or content sprint while the site’s foundation quietly sabotages their effort. Short version: if Google can’t find or understand your pages, prettier templates and new blog posts won’t move the needle. Why crawlability and indexation matter first Search engines don’t rank what they can’t see. That usually shows up as pages meant to be visible getting buried, while low-value URLs—tag archives, test pages, or thin plugin-generated content—end up in the index. From what I’ve seen, that creates two classic traps: a false sense of progress because analytics show traffic that’s either meaningless or misattributed, and a bad attempt to ‘fix’ rankings by adding more content on top of a broken base. Concrete failures I keep finding (and what they feel like) One site had dozens of old staging URLs still indexable; another relied on chained redirects after a migration so link equity leaked away.…