You can entrust this task to the web developer or perform it yourself. Moving to HTTPS takes no more than an hour and doesn't require any money expenses: a free SSL certificate will be enough if you don't use any payment instruments within your website. You can find a detailed step-by-step guide for setting up a secure connection here.
 To perform content optimization in WordPress, you need only two tools – multifunctional SEO plugin (Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack) and a crawler to check website content for any possible issues (Netpeak Spider for example).
 Basic SEO plugin allows you to create all necessary meta tags, optimize them and see how the snippet of this page could look in Google's desktop and mobile SERP.
 
Yoast SEO interface
 And a crawler will find and detect all problems with content optimization within your website. It can detect and show you the following issues:
 When building proper website and URL structure, you not only care for users, but also do a long-term investment into your site search optimization. What does that mean? Your website structure should remind a tree with 'branches' that correspond to each website category or tag. All of them should be consistent and lead from one to another.
 
Netpeak Spider website structure report
 The same logic goes for URLs. If the website contains a huge number of pages and sections, their addresses should reflect connection between the content and its category. It helps users to quickly figure out where they are now and shows a logical structure of a website to search robots.
 While creating the website structure and building URLs, you should follow several basic recommendations:
 The speed of your website is directly related to its reputation. You should make everything possible to increase the website response time and load speed. You can improve them in the following way:

 To figure out how critical the situation with load speed is, you can use:

 If you are going to start a search optimization, you would likely be interested to see the results of your efforts and get accurate data from the search engines. So, it is necessary to register your website in webmasters panels and web analytics services.
 Webmaster tools allow you to check website indexation status and get information about issues that search robots detected during the last crawl. 
 Analytics services provide a comprehensive report about your audience, its behavior, and the most popular pages of the current website. Based on that data, you can build your content strategy and choose which channels to use in the feature.
 All services mentioned above are absolutely free of charge.
 We're sure that you often face situations when text appears on a page much faster than images and you have to wait till the pictures load. It doesn't sound terrible, but if you open such page on your mobile device, the wait seems to take forever.
 We have to admit, that annoys not only you – search engines also pay attention to the images loading time. In terms of search engine optimization, the perfect image size does not exceed 100 kB.
 To perform a perfect image optimization, follow these recommendations:
 Also, we recommend including images size check to your regular technical audit checklist. You can use crawler to perform it.
 To start the analysis, you just need to write the address of a website in the 'Initial URL' field and tick the 'Images' box on a side panel. When crawling is complete, you'll see if there are any images with a size more than recommended 100 kB. BTW, if you've found a perfect size for images on your website (for example, 250 kB), you can set it as a restriction ('Settings' → ' Restrictions'). With such setting, the program will pay attention only to the images with the size exceeding the limit you've set.
  Users' activities within a website don't affect how your website ranks directly. But rating and commenting systems, social buttons, and other functionality that increase the engagement can positively affect your website promotion. There are many reasons why it's so important to allow users to engage with your content:
 To set up the microdata for a 'star' rating, use the Schema Review plugin. To add the most popular social buttons and widgets, use Jetpack.
  As it was said before, structured data allows you to make webpage snippet look better on a search results page. Organic search ranking means an endless struggle for the user's attention. In this case, attractive snippet and structured data can be your sacred weapon! Thanks to a structured data, snippet will contain not only the Title, Description, and URL, but also many other additional elements: breadcrumbs, phone number, price, rating, author's name, etc.
 You can use one of many automated solutions to implement structured data. It can be plugins like Schema Pro (the best one, but you need to pay for it), WP Review (there are paid and free versions), and All In One Schema Rich Snippets (it's free, but not very convenient). Functionality and usability of each plugin differ significantly.
 
All In One Schema Rich Snippets plugin interface It helps to understand what pages the website contains. It is especially important for sites with frequent updates or a big number of pages. Also, an XML sitemap can contain some additional information – the date and time of the last update, for example.
 You can create the sitemap with specialized plugins for WordPress, online sitemap generators, and Netpeak Spider that has a special sitemap generating feature.
 Even if you did everything right and set all the things mentioned above correctly, they would not work on you like that forever. You need to keep an eye on your website and perform a full technical audit from time to time. It will help you to detect and fix all possible on-page SEO issues. The easiest way to check your website for technical issues is to scan it with a desktop crawler.
  How did your story with WordPress start? Have you made some optimization mistakes? If so, how did you fix them? Share your experience with us! Maybe your stories will help someone to avoid critical mistakes just right now :)
 Content Marketer / SEO Enthusiast