Divi can do many things…
It doesn’t do everything well.
It doesn’t make everything easy.
But it can be done.
When looking to do SEO for your Divi website, start here before installing a plugin.
You may find that you don’t need that SEO plugin after all. Or you could go with a simpler plugin, and save the page speed and learning curve.
Table of Contents
Learn About These Divi SEO Settings and Options:
(1) Custom Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions

Writing your own meta titles and meta descriptions is a bread and butter feature of SEO plugins.
In Divi, you can set your own meta titles and descriptions for posts, pages, and even category pages without a plugin.
Unlike Yoast and RankMath, Divi will not give you features like character counts, delimiter options, regex, traffic lights, scores, etc. for your meta data. If that’s okay with you, then suffice with Divi and bypass the plugin bloat.
It’s a bit longwinded to setup the first-time, so I wrote a specific tutorial:
How to Add Meta Descriptions in Divi (Easy, No Plugin Method)
(2) Insert Schema Markup / Structured Data
Go with Divi to add schema markup/structured data. You get the code yourself and insert it using Divi. There’s some pros and cons of using Divi for this SEO setting:
Pros:
- Free plugins have limited schema options and supported data types. With Divi, it’s your custom code so there is far more flexibility. Any markup type can be used and you can add as many required and recommended properties as possible.
- SEO plugins will remove inserted schema from your website if you delete the plugin. It won’t be removed with Divi, unless you change themes.
- Use the Divi Theme Builder to add schema to page templates, such as the global footer.
Cons:
- You are creating the code. There is a chance of making errors, thus invalidating the markup or even breaking the page. Use one of these free tools for help.
- Time consuming. Generating the code, and inserting it, will take longer than using a plugin.
- Not practical for websites with many pages that need schema.
My tutorial for this:
How to Add Schema & Structured Data to Divi Posts and Pages (No Plugin Required)
(3) Insert Tracking Codes

Divi has an easy, built-in setting to add code to the < head > of all website pages. This is great for inserting tracking codes for web analytics tools like Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity.
To insert tracking codes on Divi:
Select ‘Divi‘ from the sidebar on the WordPress dashboard. Select ‘Integration‘ from the top header menu. Enable the ‘Enable header code‘ button. Add your tracking code to the first code block which is labeled ‘Add code to the < head > of your blog’. Then, ‘Save Changes.’
(4) Canonicals

For most blogs and small to medium-sized business websites on Divi, canonicalization is not something to worry about. When problems do occur, its often on ECommerce websites, multi-language websites, related to pagination, AJAX, or with certain plugins like FilterGrid.
Ensure your website is registered on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Canonical issues are reported there. Also helpful is the free Mangools SEO extension (Chrome/Firefox) to check the canonical of a page directly in the web browser. (A free account is not necessary to check canonicals, but you can register to get a 10-day free trial for all Mangools tools.)
The good news is that WordPress handles canonicals very well for the most part. Divi bases its canonical URLs off your permalinks and the domain name defined in the Settings > General page of the WordPress dashboard. Hence, self-referencing canonicals are, by default, sorted for you by WordPress on posts and pages.
The Divi SEO setting to enable canonical URLs under the ‘Homepage SEO’ and ‘Single Post Page SEO’ tabs are thus redundant and could be ignored.
However, default WordPress does NOT insert a canonical for blog category pages. We can do this via the Divi SEO settings. Here’s how:
Select ‘Divi‘ from the sidebar on the WordPress dashboard. Select ‘SEO‘ from the top header menu. Select ‘Index Page SEO‘ from the secondary header menu. Enable the ‘Enable canonical URL’s‘ button. Then, ‘Save Changes.’
I highly recommend reading this article on Canonical Tags by Brad Crawford for more details on canonicals, Divi, and WordPress.
Conclusion
The goal of this post was to save your website the bloat of an unnecessary plugin or two. We have these opportunities thanks to Divi.
Granted – Divi is not the universal ‘best theme for SEO’, but settings like the above are refreshing for SEO consultants and webmasters alike.
I hope Elegant Themes expands the built-in SEO features of Divi. It has stagnated. Their incessant promotion of third-party paid products on The Divi Marketplace is not a good sign for the future. Incentives of more features are cut short when third-parties can serve the same goal, with Elegant Themes getting a slice of the sale.
Do you have any other Divi SEO settings to share? Comment below with your suggestions and feedback. I reply to every comment.
I’ve been using Divi for a while now, and your breakdown of the SEO options really helps to simplify the process.