WordPress gives you a solid foundation for SEO but leaves critical optimization tasks to you. The core CMS handles clean HTML output, customizable permalinks, and basic XML sitemaps (since WordPress 5.5), but it doesn't do meta titles, structured data, Open Graph tags, or technical audits without plugins. The most common gap is metadata control. Out of the box, WordPress uses your page title as the meta title and pulls excerpt text for descriptions, which rarely matches search intent. An SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or SEOPress fixes this by giving you full control over titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, and breadcrumb schema. We default to Rank Math at Ottawa SEO for e-commerce clients because it includes WooCommerce schema and local business markup without paid upgrades. Performance is the other half of WordPress SEO. Google's Core Web Vitals punish bloated themes and unoptimized images, which many WordPress installs suffer from. You need lightweight hosting (managed WordPress on LiteSpeed or similar), a caching plugin like WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache, lazy-loaded images through Imagify or ShortPixel, and minimal plugin count. We've seen Ottawa e-commerce sites jump 15–20 ranking positions just by moving from shared GoDaddy hosting to a Canadian VPS and enabling server-level caching. For e-commerce specifically, WooCommerce adds another layer. You need product schema, category page optimization to avoid thin content, faceted navigation that doesn't create duplicate URLs, and image alt text workflows that scale to hundreds of SKUs. WordPress won't handle any of that automatically. Permalink structure matters too. Switch from the default "?p=123" to "/%postname%/" in Settings > Permalinks before you launch, or you'll break URLs later. WordPress also generates attachment pages for every uploaded image by default, which creates thin content at scale—disable those in your SEO plugin. Bottom line: WordPress starts at 60% optimized. The last 40% depends on your hosting, plugin stack, and whether you configure metadata and schema properly. For our portfolio sites, we treat WordPress as a framework that requires deliberate SEO configuration, not a turnkey solution.