Run a site audit and fix issues

The site audit checks your whole site for the problems that hold it back in search: indexing settings, titles and descriptions, content, technical setup, social and schema, AI-search readiness, security and performance. It gives you a score from 0 to 100, a list of issues sorted by severity, and a fix for most of them.

The audit does not crawl your site. It reads your settings and published content directly from WordPress, plus a few requests to your own home page, so it finishes in seconds even on shared hosting.

Run the audit

1. Go to RankKit SEO → Site Audit. The Site audit tab opens.
2. Click Run audit. On a site that has never been audited, the Dashboard shows Run your first audit instead, which does the same thing.
3. When it finishes you see the score, the grade, a score per category and the issue list. Click Run again after you fix something to see the new score.

The latest result is also shown on the RankKit SEO → Dashboard in the SEO health card, with the top six issues under Top issues.

What the audit looks at

• Your settings: search engine visibility, permalinks, HTTPS, sitemaps, llms.txt, IndexNow, social image, logo, verification codes and AI crawler rules.
• Your published content: up to 1,000 published posts, pages and other public post types, most recently modified first. Password-protected posts are skipped, and posts set to noindex are counted but not checked.
• Your media library: images without alt text and very large image files.
• Your home page, fetched once as a logged-out visitor, for the security and performance checks. A few small extra requests go to the same site: one CSS or JavaScript file, the uploads folder, /?author= and the REST user list, and the http:// version of the home page.
• Your server setup: WordPress, PHP, plugin and theme updates, debug settings, object cache and autoloaded options.

Every check is listed with what it means and how to fix it in Every site audit check explained.

Read the score

The score starts at 100 and each issue takes points off. Critical issues cost the most, then Warning, then Notice. For content issues, the penalty grows with the share of your pages that are affected, so one short title costs less than fifty.

Security and performance issues count for about a third towards the overall score, because they affect rankings less directly than indexing and on-page SEO. Their own category scores use the full penalty.

Score	Grade
90 to 100	A
80 to 89	B
70 to 79	C
50 to 69	D
Below 50	F

The categories are Indexing, Metadata, Content, Technical, Social & schema, AI search, Security and Performance. Click a category tab, or All, to filter the list.

Fix issues

Each issue shows its title, a one-line explanation and, when it affects specific pages or files, a count. Click View to list the affected items (up to 50, each linked to its edit screen) and Hide to close the list.

The button next to an issue depends on the kind of fix:

Button	What it does
Fix it	Changes the RankKit SEO setting for you, then re-runs the audit. Used for turning on sitemaps, llms.txt, Markdown pages and IndexNow, and for the four security hardening switches.
Set up	Opens the RankKit SEO screen where you fix it, for example Settings → Social for a default social image.
Open	Opens the WordPress screen where you fix it, for example Settings → Reading or Dashboard → Updates.
Fix with AI	RankKit SEO Pro. Writes new titles, descriptions or alt text for the affected items with your AI provider.

Issues with no button need a change outside RankKit SEO (server configuration, content edits). The explanation says what to do.

Every Fix it change is recorded in the Change Log with the note "Audit fix", so you can revert it there.

Tip Start with Critical issues, then the warnings that affect the most pages. The list is already sorted that way.

The other Site Audit tabs

Tab	What it does	Edition
Page speed	PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals for any URL. See Page speed.	Free
Competitor analysis	Compares your page with one that outranks you. See Competitor analysis.	Free
Focus pages	A ranking diagnosis for up to 25 important pages. See Focus pages.	Pro
Index status	Which pages Google has indexed. See Index status.	Pro
History	Score over time and weekly scheduled audits. See Audit history.	Pro

The broken link checker (Pro) sits at the bottom of the Site audit tab.

With RankKit SEO Pro

• Fix with AI on title, description and alt text issues. RankKit SEO asks for confirmation ("RankKit SEO will write a new title for 20 items using your AI provider and apply it right away."), fixes up to 20 items per click, takes a backup first and puts all the changes in one Change Log batch you can undo with one click.
• A Search performance category when Google Search Console is connected: pages losing search traffic, titles that underperform for their ranking, and keywords close to page one.
• Every run kept in History, with an optional weekly audit.

Start a 14-day free trial or see plans.

Let an AI agent run the audit

If you connected an AI agent, it can run the audit, read the issues and apply fixes with the run_audit, list_audit_issues, get_audit_issue and fix_audit_issue tools. Every fix waits in the Change Log until an administrator approves it, even with approval mode off.

Who can run the audit

Running the audit and applying its fixes needs the Site audit permission, which only administrators have by default. You can give it to other roles in the Role manager.

FAQ

Does the audit slow down my site?

No. It reads data that WordPress already has and makes a handful of requests to your own site, only when you click Run audit (or when a scheduled audit runs on Pro). Visitors are not affected.

Why does the audit only check 1,000 pages?

To keep it fast on any host. It checks the 1,000 most recently modified published items. Site-wide checks (settings, security, performance) always run in full.

I fixed an issue but it is still listed. Why?

The list shows the result of the last run. Click Run again. Fix it re-runs the audit automatically; other fixes need a new run.

Can I undo a one-click fix?

Yes. Open the Change Log, find the entry with the note "Audit fix" and click Revert.

Troubleshooting

Problem	Cause	Fix
The homepage could not be loaded for testing	Your host or a firewall blocks requests from the site to itself (loopback requests).	Ask your host to allow loopback requests. Until then the performance checks are skipped.
Fix with AI shows Set up AI	No AI provider is configured.	Add a key in Settings → AI provider. See Add your AI provider key.