Schema for WordPress

What is schema markup?

Schema.org (often referred to as Schema) is a specific vocabulary of tags or microdata that you add to your website to improve the way your page is represented in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Here’s an example of an events booking website that has schema markup on its event schedule page. The SERP entry looks like this:

The schema markup told the SERP to display a schedule of upcoming Kew Gardens events. As you can tell, for a user, that is really helpful.

Schema lets search engines know what your content means, not just what it says.

With Schema, not only does the content on your website get indexed and returned in search results, but the context of your content can be displayed too. Essentially, Schema markup tells the search engine what that content means.

Let’s say you’ve written a lemon tart recipe for your blog. The search engine sees this, and produces a SERP entry with ‘Lemon Tart’. However, if I put the right Schema markup around the article, I’ve just told the search engine that this article is a recipe, and here are the details. You would have seen these rich snippets around the web before, detailing cooking times, calories, ratings etc, they look something like this:

You can use schema markup to get all kinds of rich snippets in Google, including:

• Star ratings
• Embedded photos or videos
• Product information
• Addresses and phone numbers
• Recipe cooking times
• article information
• Event dates, times and locations

If you want to implement Schema on your WordPress site, there are two ways; Manually or via a Plugin. We’re going to look at an easy way to add schema markup to WordPress. And the best way to do that is with Schema.press

Schema plugin Installation

We’ve tried various plugins for you, so you don’t have to! Schema seems to be the most lightweight and accurate to us, it’s also a totally free plugin framework, automatically implementing valid schema.org markups to WordPress in JSON-ld format, the most recommended by Google.

Here’s how to get the Schema plugin working in WordPress

1. Install the plugin – From your WordPress dashboard head on over to Plugins > Add New and Search for the plugin ‘Schema‘ – You’ll want to click install, and activate when prompted.

2. Initial Settings– You’ll now have ‘Schema’ over in your left panel menu, head over to Schema > Settings. Fill out all the relevant fields for your website.

As you can see, we’ve added in the matching pages, and also provided a path to our company logo.

Over on the knowledge graph tab, you can fill out all the relevant fields too, remember though, if you are already using the Yoast plugin you’ll want to check the box at the bottom, letting Schema know that Yoast can handle this part.

Carry on through the tabs and fill out any field that you think is relevant. You can find in-depth documentation here if you need it! Schema Docs.

3. Setting up ‘Types’ – Over on the left panel, you’ll also notice a ‘types’ tab, click through to make sure your page and post types are associated correctly. You can see below we’ve made sure that our posts are set to Article, BlogPosting – This tells SERPs that our posts are blog articles, which in turn will also submit our images, author and time and date.

Testing your Schema works

We use the Structured data testing tool from Google, which can be found here: Testing Tool. Once you have that open, insert the URL you want to test:

You should then see something like the below, you can see the data on the right that Schema is providing.

You can then open up each section to view for further details.

As you can see on the right, Schema is picking up lots of useful information to pass on to SERPs and we’re getting 0 errors. Result.

Other rich snippets

There are lots of other snippets you may want to get working, and to find out more about how to do that, head on over to Schema.press for the full breakdown.