Description
You are looking at a page of your site and you want to know, right now, whether its SEO basics are in place. SEO Debug Bar adds a small button at the bottom right of your pages. Click it, and you get an audit of the page you are on, with a color for each point and a score.
The 27 checks
- Title tag length
- Meta description
- Meta robots and X-Robots-Tag (is the page indexable?)
- Open Graph tags: title, description, image, url, price and currency (for product pages)
- Twitter card
- Canonical URL
- Favicon
- Headings: number of H1, H2 and H3, and a wrong heading structure (for example an H4 straight after an H2)
- Empty image alt attributes and empty link title attributes
- Sitemap (the WordPress sitemap or sitemap.xml) and robots.txt
- Inline and external style files, third-party styles
- Inline and external script files, third-party scripts
- Outbound links
Who sees the bar
- Logged-in administrators, on every page of the front end.
- Visitors whose IP address you list in Settings > SEO Debug Bar. Behind a proxy or a CDN the server sees the proxy’s address, which is why administrators do not need it.
- Nobody else: for any other visitor the plugin loads no script, no style and no panel.
Privacy
The audit runs in your browser, on your own site. The plugin makes no request to any other server: the only extra requests are to your own site, for robots.txt, the sitemap and the favicon. It sets no cookie and collects no data.
Developed by a WordPress developer in Montreal.
Screenshots
Installation
- Upload the
seo-debug-barfolder to/wp-content/plugins/, or install the plugin from the Plugins screen. - Activate the plugin.
- Log in as an administrator and open any page of your site: click the “SEO Debug Bar” icon at the bottom right.
- To show the bar to someone who is not logged in, add their IP address in Settings > SEO Debug Bar.
FAQ
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I do not see the bar.
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You must be logged in as an administrator, or visit from an IP address listed in Settings > SEO Debug Bar. The bar is only shown on the front end of the site, never in the dashboard. If you use a cache plugin, clear its cache and visit the page while logged in.
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Why does the IP list not work behind my CDN?
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The plugin compares the address the web server sees. Behind a proxy or a CDN that is the proxy’s address, not yours. Log in as an administrator instead.
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Does it send my pages to an SEO service?
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No. Everything is computed in your browser from the page you are looking at.
Contributors & Developers
“SEO Debug Bar” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “SEO Debug Bar” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.3.0
Release Date – 4 November 2026
- Tested with WordPress 7.1 and PHP 8. Requires WordPress 5.0 and PHP 7.4.
- The bar is now always shown to logged-in administrators. The IP list still works.
- The script, the styles and the panel are loaded for allowed visitors only (before, every visitor downloaded them).
- The sitemap check now finds the WordPress core sitemap (wp-sitemap.xml).
- Fix: “Outbound links” showed “undefined”; it now shows the number of outbound links.
- Fix: the script no longer creates global variables (it could clash with other scripts) and no longer prints debug data in the console on every page.
- The settings are validated (IP addresses only), escaped and saved with a “Settings saved” notice. The text domain is now
seo-debug-bar, texts are translatable, and the setting is removed when the plugin is deleted.
0.2
- Plugin first version on WordPress.org, 27 checks.