How to Audit Your WordPress Site for SEO, Broken Links, and Image Issues

Most WordPress sites carry dozens of small SEO and accessibility issues their owners never see. A few missing meta titles here, a stretch of broken external links there, a handful of images without alt text or width attributes. Each one is small in isolation. Stacked together, they cost rankings, conversions, and trust.

This guide walks through running a complete WordPress site audit in roughly five minutes using a single free plugin: the Pixellize Site Issue Scanner. By the end of this post you will have a prioritized list of fixes for your own site, plus the one-click tools to apply most of them.

Why a site audit matters

Search engines and visitors notice the same things, just in different ways. A page with a missing meta description loses click-through in search results. A broken outbound link drops user trust the moment it is clicked. An image without dimensions causes the page to jump while it loads, which Google measures and uses as a direct ranking signal.

Doing this kind of audit by hand means opening every page, viewing source, and ticking checks off a list. Doable for ten pages, miserable for fifty, impossible for five hundred. A scanner that crawls the entire site once and surfaces only the issues is the practical answer.

What the scanner actually checks

Pixellize Site Issue Scanner runs four categories of checks against every published page on your site:

• SEO structure. Missing or oversized meta titles and descriptions, missing or duplicate H1 tags, skipped heading levels, hidden noindex pages, and missing or broken sitemap files.
• Links and assets. Internal and external links validated for 404 errors, 301 and 302 redirects mapped so you can collapse chains, and JavaScript, CSS, and iframe loads checked for failures.
• Images. Broken images detected, missing alt attributes flagged, missing width and height surfaced (a common cause of layout shifts), and oversized files above 250 KB highlighted.
• External link best practices. Outbound links missing target="_blank" or the security attributes that prevent reverse-tabnabbing.

Step 1: Install and activate the plugin

1. From your WordPress admin, open Plugins, Add New.
2. Search for Pixellize Site Issue Scanner.
3. Click Install Now, then Activate.
4. A new Site Problems menu item appears in the WordPress sidebar. That is your dashboard.

The plugin is GPL-licensed and listed on WordPress.org with a five-star rating. There is no premium tier, no API key prompt, and no remote service. Everything runs inside your own admin.

Step 2: Run your first scan

1. Open Site Problems from the sidebar.
2. Click Settings and confirm the maximum pages to crawl per scan. Start with 50 if your site is small, or up to 200 for larger sites. You can also filter by post type (Posts and Pages) and by post status (Publish, Draft, Private).
3. Back on the dashboard, click Run Scan. The crawler walks through your pages live. You can pause and resume at any time.

Most small to medium sites finish a scan in under a minute. The crawler is throttled by default to keep the load on your server low.

Step 3: Read the Site Health Score

When the scan finishes, the dashboard shows a single Site Health Score at the top, calculated from the ratio of clean pages to pages with errors. Below that, issues are grouped by category with counts:

• Critical errors that must be fixed first
• Warnings that should be reviewed
• Best-practice notices to consider

Each issue is clickable and includes a How to Fix note explaining what the problem is, why it matters, and what to do. This is what makes the plugin useful even if you have never run a technical SEO audit before.

Step 4: Apply one-click fixes

Several of the most common issues can be resolved without leaving the dashboard. Here are the four most useful one-click tools:

Add target=”_blank” to external links

Outbound links should open in new tabs and include rel="noopener" for security. The scanner finds every external link missing those attributes and lets you fix them across the entire site in one click.

Auto-fill missing image dimensions

The Auto-Dimension Fixer fetches each image, reads its real width and height, and injects the correct attributes into your HTML. The result: layout shifts disappear, your Cumulative Layout Shift score drops, and Core Web Vitals improve immediately.

Edit meta titles and descriptions inline

Click an entry, edit the meta title or description with live character counting, save. The change syncs automatically with Yoast, Rank Math, or AIOSEO so your existing SEO plugin reflects the new value too. No double entry, no conflicting data.

Remove unwanted noindex tags

If you find pages flagged as hidden from search engines that you actually want indexed, the Noindex Removal tool toggles the tag off in a single click. A common cause of mysterious traffic drops after a theme switch.

Step 5: Bulk find and replace broken URLs

If a domain you link to has died, or you migrated images from one CDN to another, the scanner will surface every broken link. The Bulk Find & Replace tool then lets you swap the old URL for a new one across post content, meta fields, and serialized option data in one operation.

Two safety guardrails keep this from being dangerous: the search runs as a preview first so you see exactly which rows will change, and serialized data is rebuilt with correct length prefixes instead of being string-replaced naively.

Step 6: Re-scan and confirm the fix

After applying fixes, run another scan. The dashboard saves a Crawl History with date and time stamps for every batch, so you can compare two reports and see which fixes actually moved the Site Health Score. Export the report as a CSV to share with a developer, an SEO consultant, or a client.

Tips for larger sites

• Selective scanning. If you only manage a section of a large multi-author site, filter by post type and post status so the report is short and relevant.
• Performance tuning. Settings exposes concurrent requests, timeouts, and crawl delays. Lower these on shared hosting; raise them on dedicated servers.
• Compare over time. Run a scan once a month and use the Crawl History to track whether the score is trending up or down.

What it does not do

Honest scope: this is a structural audit tool. It will not write meta descriptions for you, generate alt text from image content, rewrite slow JavaScript, or replace a manual content review. What it does well is finding the technical issues humans tend to miss and offering quick fixes for the most repetitive ones.

Wrap-up

If you have never audited your site before, an hour with the Pixellize Site Issue Scanner is one of the highest-leverage WordPress maintenance moves you can make. Most users find ten to twenty fixable issues on a site they thought was clean, and the one-click tools handle the bulk of them in minutes.

Get the plugin from the WordPress.org listing, or read the full feature breakdown on our Site Issue Scanner page.