DIGISTARTER Basic SEO

Description

Most SEO plugins ask you to learn a second interface before you can write a single sentence. This one adds three settings and one field, in the places you would look for them anyway.

A title pattern, set once

Under Settings → General, right below the Site Icon, pick a separator and decide whether the site name comes before the page title, after it, or not at all. That choice applies to every kind of page WordPress renders — posts, pages, categories, tags, archives, author pages, search results and the 404 page.

The front page is the one exception. It always shows the site title followed by the tagline, whether WordPress generates it or a static page is set as the front page. A front page called “Home” makes a poor title, and a WordPress-generated one has no title at all.

The defaults match what WordPress already does, so activating the plugin changes nothing until you decide otherwise.

A meta description where the page is edited

• In the editor sidebar, on posts and pages.
• In Quick Edit, in both list screens.
• A column in the list screens, so you can see at a glance which pages still need one.
• For the front page: in Settings → General, next to the title settings.

Left empty, no description tag is written. The plugin never invents a description from the first sentences of your text — an empty result is more honest than a bad one.

Open Graph, without a second set of fields

Every page gets og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type, og:site_name, og:locale and a Twitter card tag, built from the title, the meta description and the featured image. og:title carries the plain page title; the site name is already in og:site_name and would otherwise appear twice in a link preview. Pages without a featured image get no og:image, and pages without a description get no og:description.

A sitemap at the URL search engines expect

/sitemap.xml, listing every published post and page with its last-modified date. Generated fresh from the database on each request — nothing is written to a file, so nothing can fall out of sync after a post or page is created, edited, or deleted.

WordPress has had a built-in sitemap since version 5.5, at /wp-sitemap.xml; a request for the shorter /sitemap.xml normally redirects there. On at least one real installation that sitemap answered with a 404 HTTP status despite valid content in the body — something between WordPress core and that specific server’s setup — and Google Search Console refuses a sitemap that doesn’t answer with a plain 200, redirect or not. This plugin’s own version bypasses whatever caused that: it matches the request directly and always sets its own status, independent of WordPress’s usual page-not-found handling. robots.txt is updated to point at it.

What it deliberately does not do

No per-page title override, no robots controls, no character counters, no snippet preview, no templates with placeholders, no menu of its own, no dashboard. If you need those, install one of the large SEO plugins — this one exists for sites that do not.