The most common WordPress schema defect is abundance: the theme injects one Organization, the SEO plugin another, a reviews plugin a third, and extraction systems distrust the contradiction more than they would trust silence. The fix is a single source of truth: one injector, everything else disabled at output, and the graph connected through one Organization node.
An SEO plugin exposes settings; it does not make decisions. Titles, schema depth, and archive handling still need a human strategy, and stacked plugins injecting duplicate markup actively hurt.
Page builders and bloated themes drag Core Web Vitals below the line. Trim unused CSS and scripts, lazy-load below the fold, and measure on a real mobile connection, not your office fiber.
Default category and tag archives leak thin duplicates into the index. Decide which taxonomies deserve to rank, write real intro content for those, and noindex the rest.
This exact method ships inside our client engagements at $45/hr, estimate in writing first.
Start a ProjectPlugins expose settings; they do not make decisions. Here is the human strategy layer WordPress still needs.
Page builders drag Core Web Vitals below the line. The fix order that rescues scores without a rebuild.
Most high-intent searches now end in an extracted answer, not a click. AEO is the discipline of being that answer.