WGD SEO

WGD SEO gives your WordPress site a complete, free SEO foundation without loading heavy scripts on public pages. Everything here is fully functional: nothing is locked, limited or gated behind a licence key.

On-page SEO

• SEO title and meta description fields for posts, pages, products and every public taxonomy, with a live snippet preview.

• Focus keyphrase, readability and content-quality scoring, including a block editor sidebar that scores drafts as you write.

• Canonical URL, noindex/nofollow and robots controls, plus noindex options for author, date and search archives.

• Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, and site verification tags for Google, Bing, Yandex and Pinterest.

• Bulk SEO editor for posts and terms, and a change history with one-click undo.

Structured data and sitemaps

• JSON-LD schema for organisation, website, page, article, author, FAQ and breadcrumbs.

• XML sitemap index with post-type and image sitemaps, a paginated HTML sitemap, robots.txt sitemap injection and an optional llms.txt file.

• Breadcrumb, FAQ, table-of-contents, HTML sitemap and reviews shortcodes.

Technical SEO

• Redirect manager with regex rules, CSV import and export and chain/loop detection, plus a 404 monitor with closest-page suggestions and one-click redirect creation.

• SEO audit that flags duplicate or missing titles and descriptions, image alt text and performance issues, with an Action Centre to work through the results.

• Client-ready SEO reports, with an optional weekly or monthly email digest.

• Import existing metadata from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress and The SEO Framework.

• IndexNow key serving and URL submission.

• A Site Speed screen that runs a Google PageSpeed Insights check on a page of your site (uses your own free Google API key).

Optional integrations

• Connect Google Search Console to see clicks, impressions and keyword positions inside WordPress.

• Google Analytics 4: save a measurement ID and tick the consent box in Settings; the tag is added to your pages only then.

• Review widgets that cache Google, Facebook, Trustpilot and Yelp reviews and display them with a shortcode.

Every integration stays off until you connect it; see “External services” below for exactly what is sent and when.

External services

This plugin contacts an outside service only when you use a feature that needs one: you connect an integration, press a button that fetches or checks a page, or switch on an option that says so. Nothing is sent when you activate the plugin or from your public pages unless a section below says so, and until you connect an integration no admin screen sends anything.

After you connect Google, a few report screens (Search Console, SEO Opportunities, Launch Readiness) can refresh your Google figures with the credentials you saved; that is described under Google Search Console API. There is no usage, error or licence telemetry, and no request is made to any WGD server.

Google Search Console API and Google OAuth

Used to show clicks, impressions and keyword positions for your site, and (from the URL inspector) indexing status. com; you can instead paste an access token). Once connected, the figures are refreshed when you open a report screen that needs them and the saved copy is older than six hours, by a short background task, and a daily background task measures the effect of fixes you applied.

Clearing the saved Google credentials on the Search Console screen stops all of it. com/privacy

Google Analytics 4

Off by default. js script is loaded on your public pages only when all three of these are true: a GA4 measurement ID is saved, you have ticked “My visitors have agreed to Google Analytics” in Settings, and nothing has held it back (a cookie-consent plugin can return false from the filter wgdseo_ga4_allowed for a visitor who has not agreed). Until then no script is enqueued or printed and no request is made to Google.

Once it loads it runs for every visitor, including logged-in users, and visitor data is sent to Google’s collection servers, as with any Google Analytics installation; the script sets Google Analytics cookies. This plugin has no cookie banner: ticking the box is your statement that your visitors have agreed, or that you show a consent notice where the law requires one. com using the same service-account credentials.

com/privacy

Google Places API (reviews)

com to find your listing; the listing’s reviews are then fetched and refreshed once a day. Reviewer pictures are not loaded from Google (or from any review platform) on your public pages: the widget shows the reviewer’s initial. com/privacy

Facebook Graph API (Meta)

com and refreshes them once a day. com/privacy/policy/

Trustpilot API

com and refreshed once a day. com/legal

Yelp Fusion API

com and refreshed once a day. com/privacy/en_us/20260101_en_us/

Google PageSpeed Insights API

com’s PageSpeed Insights API, only when you click “Run a live check” (or “Run and compare”). Google now normally requires your own free Google Cloud API key for these requests, so add one on the Site Speed screen; without a key Google usually answers that its shared quota is used up and the screen says so. What leaves your site is the page address, the device type (mobile or desktop) and your key.

com/privacy

IndexNow

org (operated by Microsoft Bing on behalf of participating search engines) so the page can be crawled sooner. Submissions happen when you click Submit, or automatically on publish if you turn that option on. com/privacystatement

Pages you point the plugin at (Competitor Compare, Competitor Matrix and the broken-link checker)

Competitor Compare fetches the public page address you type in, once, when you click Compare; the Competitor Matrix does the same for up to three addresses. The broken-link checker requests (a HEAD or GET request, with no cookies and nothing about you or your site’s visitors) up to 60 external addresses that your own posts already link to, when you click Scan and in the weekly scheduled maintenance run.

That weekly run is off until it is switched on in Technical SEO, and the site profiles in the Setup Wizard switch it on. Requests to private or local addresses are refused. These are requests to the sites you chose or linked to, so each site’s own terms and privacy policy apply.

Support tickets (email)

The Support screen lets you email a ticket to the plugin author. com (the recipient can be changed in Settings). No HTTP request is made to any WGD server.

com/privacy-policy/

Your own site

The Technical SEO, Launch Readiness and URL Inspector screens check your own site’s certificate, home page and redirects by requesting your own web address. Those requests go to your own domain only.

Data kept on your site

The 404 monitor stores, in your own database, the address, referrer and browser identification of visitors who reach a missing page, until you clear it, or until the weekly maintenance run (when switched on) removes entries not seen for 90 days. It is never sent anywhere. A monthly results summary can be e-mailed to the site administrator address when fixes have measured results; switch it off on the Results screen.