Is WordPress Good for SEO by Default?

Mostly yes, with an asterisk the size of the settings menu. Nothing about WordPress stops you ranking, it powers around forty percent of the web and plenty of the sites beating you are on it. Google doesn't rank platforms, it ranks pages. But "good for SEO" and "good for SEO out of the box" are seperate claims, and the second one is false.

The defaults work against you

A fresh install ships with unhelpful permalinks (post IDs and dates instead of readable URLs), no meta title or description control, and no automatic image handling. None of it is hard to fix. All of it is easy to never do. Set the permalink structure to post name on day one, because changing it later on an established site means redirecting every URL you've ever published.

You'll want a plugin, and that's fine

WordPress purists will tell you the core doesn't need help. For SEO it does: meta titles, descriptions, sitemaps and schema all arrive via plugin. Yoast is the boring, reliable choice, Rank Math gives you more for free. Either works. One warning about the traffic light scores: they're a prompt, not a target. We've seen people rewrite perfectly good sentences to turn an amber dot green, which is optimising for the plugin instead of the reader. The valuable part of these plugins is the invisible plumbing, sitemaps, canonicals, schema, not the score.

The real risk is neglect, not the platform

Where WordPress sites lose rankings is maintenance. A bloated theme drags every page. Nineteen plugins fighting each other drag every page. A hacked site, and unpatched WordPress installs get found quickly, can be flagged or deindexed outright. Tag and category archives quietly breed thin duplicate pages unless you noindex the useless ones. The platform is fine, the upkeep is the job, and the upkeep is where it usually goes wrong.

So should you use it?

If you have it and it's maintained, keep it, it will rank as well as the work you put in. If you're choosing fresh, be honest about who's doing that upkeep. We moved our own builds to Webflow partly because we were tired of the patching treadmill, that's a maintenance decision though, not an SEO one. The CMS was never what was holding anyone's rankings back.