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How to Add Schema Markup to WordPress and WooCommerce Sites


Are you looking for an easy way to add Schema Markup to your WordPress website manually or using a plugin?

Schema markup works as a great tool that allows you to provide important business information to search engines, which helps your online visibility and can make a big difference in your SEO.

That said, there are several ways to add schema markup to your website, either by manually adding the correct code or by installing a WordPress plugin.

In this article, you’ll find a complete guide on schema markup, including some of its benefits and types. We’ll also find the guidelines on adding schema markup to your WordPress and WooCommerce website. 

What is Schema Markup?

Schema markup is a special kind of HTML code or metadata you can add to your website to provide search engines with more information about your web content.

Traditionally, website owners use title tags, meta keywords, and meta descriptions to tell the search engines what their website is about. However, that’s not all the information search engines need to understand your website and who is looking for it. That’s why adding schema markup to your website is essential.

You can add schema markup to the HTML of all pages on your website. This will give extra properties to all individual elements you’re using, like what kind of information is included and its context.

Schema markup works as an additional layer of data over your web content, telling the search engines what your content is about in a nutshell, like a movie, a person, or a place. This means that when anyone is looking for that particular thing, they’re more likely to find more relevant results. 

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Benefits of Adding Schema Markup to a WordPress Website

Before we get into the details like how many types of schema markups there are or how you can add schema markup to your website, it’s important that you understand how it can help your website performance. 

The most prominent benefit of adding schema markup to your website is the SEO boost. If you’re new in the web world, having a basic understanding of SEO can help you go a long way. When you provide contextual data to the search engines, you increase the chances of your website ranking higher on search engine result pages. The granular details allow search engines to optimize the results further. 

For example, if you’re running a personal blogging site, you can tell the search engines that the site is about a specific person. You can also link your website to your individual or business social media accounts using schema markup – this can be very helpful in allowing your audience to stay connected to your brand over multiple platforms. If you’re running a website for an organization, you’ll be feeding search engines different information. 

Different types of schema markup can help improve your website’s visibility in different contexts depending on the kind of content you have on your website. If you’re looking to further enhance the SEO of your WordPress site, make sure to look into some of the best SEO plugins for WordPress.

How well your website performs on search engines depends on several factors, including how comprehensively you’ve optimized your website for search engines and your web hosting services. With HostPapa’s managed WordPress hosting, we make sure all your current and future hosting needs are taken care of so you can easily scale your website as your organization expands. Find out seven ways your website can benefit from opting for managed WordPress hosting services.   

Types of Schema Markup

You can use schema markup for all types of content on your websites, such as events, informative articles, and movies. There are hundreds of markup types you can use on your website to improve your ranking on search engine results.

That said, you don’t necessarily need to learn new codes. Instead, you can use Google Structured Data Markup Helper to get appropriate codes for your website URL and HTML by selecting the type of content you need the markup for, and you can manually add that to your website.

This section will look at the nine most common types of schema markup for WordPress and WooCommerce websites. Later on, we’ll talk about how to add each time of schema markup to your site.

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What is Organization Schema Markup? 

Organization schema markup helps you further elaborate on your company. When anyone searches for your company, they can easily find basic information about the organization, such as the company’s official name, logo, location, contact information, and social profiles, through the search rich snippets. This can help companies make sure their existing and potential customers can easily find their contact and other important information. 

What is Schema Person Markup? 

You can use schema person markup to list details about an individual, such as name, date of birth, occupation or designation, address, education, and family members. You see this snippet on search engines when you search for a publicly known individual. 

What is Schema Local Business Markup?

The schema local business markup is becoming an essential tool for all small and medium-sized businesses running their operation locally. It allows customers located in the surrounding business’s operation to easily find the company and important details like their address, opening hours, contact information, and menu in case of a restaurant to food delivery business. You can also use the business action property feature, which includes order action and reserve action and allow businesses to enhance engagement with customers and provide more specific details. 

What is Schema Product and Offer Markup? 

The schema product and offer markups are primarily for selling goods or services. It also provides targeted information about their business, such as the price and status of the goods. The offer markup includes the ‘price’ and ‘currency’ properties, whereas the product markup only includes the ‘name’ property.  

What is Breadcrumbs Markup? 

The breadcrumb list schema markup includes path links with the search results that lead to the current page, or it gives you the map to reach the required page on a website from its home page. It helps website owners by reducing bounce rates and lettings users know their location on the site. 

What is Schema Article Markup? 

The schema article markup is usually used for news websites and blog posts. It helps make the content on a web page easier for search engines to understand. More and more business websites use a blog section to keep their audience informed and educated. To connect even better, schema article markup can make a big difference in making sure users can find the right information. 

What is Video Schema Markup?

Video content is becoming one of the most preferred mediums to consume content online. This is why a lot of website owners are trying to find creative ways to add more video content to their websites. However, search engines still find it tough to crawl video content. Adding video object markup to your website is a great way to help search engines crawl and index videos on your website, as it allows your video content to appear on search engine results for relevant searches.

What is Event Schema Markup?

By adding event schema markup to your website, you can provide extra information for any event you might be hosting, like webinars, lectures, concerts, and festivals, along with their date, location, and ticket price. Adding event schema markup on your relevant webpage can be very effective in bringing a targeted audience to your website looking for similar events. 

What is Recipe Schema Markup?

The recipe schema markup is particularly for websites that share recipes with their audience. It will show a recipe-rich snippet when someone looks up a recipe related to your content. Use at least two properties to rank your content, like prep-time, cook-time, ingredients, or image and nutrition information.

What is Review Markup?

When you add review schema markup to relevant web pages that include reviews or feedback of any particular product, service, movie, entertainer, or anything or anyone else, it allows Google to show relevant reviews or ratings in the search results. The review snippets may even appear on the rich snippet results on the Google search engine, increasing the chances of your audience finding the information they’re looking for. 

Other Schema Markups

There are hundreds of other schema markups that can be used on different websites. For example, you can use schema software application markup for app-rich snippets. In contrast, site navigation schema markup provides users and search engines with a clear website structure, which helps with organic website links.

Similarly, you can choose from a comprehensive list of scheme markups, such as blog schema entity, review schema entity, brand schema entity, thing schema entity, creative work schema entity, and sport schema markup. 

How to Add Schema Markup to WordPress Manually

The most straightforward way to add schema markup to your WordPress website manually is by generating markup with an effective online tool, providing a few details about your website and organization. After that, all you need to do is make necessary changes to your website theme. 

One example of this would be Schema.org JSON-LD Generator, which allows you to create as comprehensive a structured data set for your website as you need. 

Simply follow the wizard and provide data for the required fields to generate a generic markup for your business or insert specific entries for your specific pages. When you fill in all important details a JSON-LD, JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data will be created that you can add to your theme. 

Make sure you add the essential information about your organization mentioned below and follow the wizard for instructions: 

  • Business name
  • Business category 
  • Address
  • Business hours 
  • Website
  • Hours of operation 

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with JSON – you just need to copy the generated markup and paste it to your WordPress website as a script. Simply add a script tag to the header of your webpage and add the script generated from the tool. A step-by-step guide is provided below on how to manually add schema markup to your website without a plugin. 

That said, another way to add schema markup to your WordPress website is to install a theme that already has schema markup installed by default. You can look up options on the WordPress theme directory for themes with schema or pick the most suitable option from the following themes with schema: 

  • The Schema 
  • Schema Lite
  • Schema

How to Add a Schema Markup Without a Plugin in WordPress 

Start by visiting Schema.org to add schema markup to your WordPress site. You can find different types of markups on Schema.org, but in this section, we’ll show you how to add Article markup to your website. You can add any other markup on your website using the same method. 

You can find markups in the three following code languages: 

  • Microdata
  • RDFa
  • JSON-LD

We’re going to use JSON-LD – Google prefers it and it’s less likely to break your site than other markups. In this section, we’ll show you how you can add Article markup to your WordPress website using block editor, Header.php file, and theme files

WordPress Block Editor 

You can easily add schema markup to any post or webpage by using the block editor. Start by logging in to your WordPress dashboard and following these steps. 

  1. Go to the post or webpage where you want to add schema markup. 
  2. Make sure Custom Fields is checked under the Options tab. 
  3. Click on the 3 dots on the top right corner of the page to open a new screen. 
  4. Scroll down to Options under Tools
  5. Check Custom Fields
  6. Return to the block editor and scroll down to the bottom and locate Custom Field settings. Click on Enter new in the Add New Custom Field section. 
  7. Name your scheme markup.
  8. Copy the code snippet provided and paste it into the Value section. You can also generate the code from Schema Markup Generators and Google Structured Data Markup Helper.
  9. Click on the Add Custom Field once you’ve added the code in Value
  10. Scroll up on the page and click on Update to save your changes. 
  11. Copy the same snippet and add it to your header.php file. 

An important tip to remember when adding schema markup to your website is to make sure you backup your website before starting this process. Even a single mistake when editing website theme files can be enough to bring your whole website down.

How to Add Custom Code Directly to Your Theme Files

You can directly add the code snippet to your website theme editor and header.php files.

  1. Go to Theme Editor under Appearance.
  2. Click on the header.php file under the Theme Files.
  3. You should see a new screen where you can edit the file. Paste the scheme code in the file editor section right before the </head> tag.
  4. Click on Update File after you have added the code snippet.
  5. Reload your webpage and you should be able to see the schema markup right before the closing tag. This means you’ve successfully added schema markup to your WordPress website without having to use a plugin. 
  6. You can also test the website URL and ensure there are no errors in the updating process using the Google structured data testing tool we mentioned earlier.  

You can use the same process to add any schema markup to your website based on your website structure and business nature. Whether it’s organization schema, breadcrumbs markup, schema person markup, or another markup, you can easily add them to your website. 

Another way you can safely add custom code to your header.php file is to use a plugin to add custom code and functionality to your site. There are a variety of plugins you can use, but we’ll show you how to add custom code to your header.php file using the Insert Header and Footers WordPress plugin. 

Adding the code snippet to the header.php files using a plugin can be easier and safer than directly editing your theme files. You can choose the option that best works for you between the two options. Follow the steps below to add custom code using the Header and Footers plugin. 

  1. Install and activate the plugin, then go to your WordPress dashboard. 
  2. In Settings, click on Insert Header and Footers
  3. You’ll see a different screen where you need to add the code to the Header, Body, and Footer of your website. 
  4. Make sure you add the code snippet within the Scripts in the Header screen. 
  5. Click Save and the custom code will be added to your header.php. 

How to Add Schema Markup to WordPress Using WordPress Plugins

As most websites already have a theme installed, it may not be feasible to change your theme. The good news is that you can also add schema markup to your WordPress site through plugins. Let’s look at some of the WordPress plugin options that you can use to add schema markup to your website. 

The Schema Plugin 

Adding schema markup to your WordPress site using the Schema Plugin is very easy. It comes with some useful features like allowing you to use different schema markup types on a per post type or per-category basis. It also works smoothly with other plugins installed on your website like SEO plugins to ensure you’re making the most benefit from markups. 

The plugin uses a lightweight linked data format, JSON-LD, which is recommended by Google. The review markup is not included in the plugin, but you can download the Schema Review companion plugin for free. 

You can set up the schema plugin by following these steps: 

  1. Install the Schema Plugin from the Add New option under Plugins
  2. Search for Schema
  3. Click Install.
  4. Click Activate
  5. Once the plugin is activated, go to Settings under Schema and start adding schema markups to your website as required. 
  6. Make sure to fill in all the necessary information like the business logo, and location of your About and Contact webpages. 
  7. To start setting things up, click on Quick Configuration Wizard
  8. Follow through the wizard and provide all the information you can about your website, including your social media profiles.
  9. Select the option to edit your custom markup types. 
  10. Make sure to add any other custom post types that you want via the Add New button and fill in all the required details. 
  11. If you need to further tweak the settings, you can do that from Settings. Go to Extensions under Schema to add extensions. 

If you’re looking for more advanced features, you can also download the premium version of the Schema plugin and get extra features, including: 

  • Option to minify the scripts 
  • Choose where you want the output of schema.org script markup 
  • Enable the instructions for properties 
  • Insert a link to your website’s admin toolbar to be able to test schema.org markup 
  • Insert schema.org markup to your post type archives as well as tag archives

The Schema Pro Plugin 

You can use the Schema Pro plugin as a premium alternative to using advanced schema markup features on your WordPress website. 

Additional features that you can use with the Schema Pro plugin include:

  • It supports a wide range of data types for schema markup 
  • You get custom field support 
  • It supports custom post types, archives, and taxonomies 
  • It allows the ability to extend and add more markup 
  • It offers complete automation to ensure schema data is added to new and existing pages and posts

You can find and use a number of alternative WordPress plugins for schema markup. The following are some other WordPress schema markup plugins that you can use. 

  • All In One Schema Rich Snippets
  • WP SEO Structured Data Schema 
  • WordLift AI-Powered SEO 
  • WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup 
  • SEOPress 
  • Schema and Structured Data for WP & AMP   

Yoast SEO Plugin

If you’re already using the Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress website, you can continue using the same plugin to add schema markup to your site. That said, it doesn’t require adding as much markup as a lot of the premium plugins mentioned above. This plugin works as an overall SEO plugin and isn’t dedicated to just schema markup. This means you don’t need to worry about installing and activating an additional plugin to your WordPress dashboard.

When you first install the Yoast plugin, it asks you to fill in information such as the business or entity that the website is representing, social media account links, and more. Providing this information is also part of adding schema markup to your WordPress site, but since you’re using an existing plugin, you can skip this step.

  1. In the Yoast installation wizard, select what type of organization your website is.
  2. Select the name of the person or organization you want to associate with the website. If you select an organization, you also need to provide a logo and the name of the person when you select a person.

If you want to associate your website with a person who doesn’t have a user account, you can go with one of the two options. Firstly, you can select an organization and fill in the details assuming the person is an organization. The second option would be to set up a new user account using the email address that works as an alias account of your own.

If you ever want to change the type of entity your website represents, you can do that by going to General > SEO > Search Appearance. Scroll down on the page until you find Knowledge Graph & Schema.org and fill in the correct information about your website.

If your website represents a person, you can select their user name from the drop-down list under Personal Info. The plugin will automatically pull details about the user from their user profile. Make sure you fill in the correct information within the user profile, including your name and social media links. After you’ve successfully set up the website type, the Yoast plugin will be automatically adding the data types and schema markup to your WordPress website.

Here are a few examples of how the Yoast plugin for SEO adds schema markups to your website:

  • The full entity graphs are based on content types in your website and the website type settings. This is the same list of content types and entities within your site, just as displayed during the test run on Google Structured Data Testing Tool. 
  • The marking up of all single posts and webpages with Article and Author data types. 
  • Marking up all search results of the website as SearchResultsPage.
  • Marking all archive website pages with the correct data type such as Profile Page for author archives, and CollectionPage for taxonomy and data archives. 

The plugin also offers another helpful feature, Yoast Structured Data Blocks. It allows you to add FAQs and How-tos to your website posts or pages like a blog, and the plugin will use relevant schema markup to tell search engines what the page is about.

How to Add Schema Markup to a WooCommerce Store 

When you’re running a WooCommerce store, you can get even more benefits from adding schema markup to your website. When search engines understand what you’re selling and who your target audience is, there are higher chances your store will be visible to users who are interested in your products or services. This is why it’s a must for all WooCommerce stores to add schema markup to their website and enhance their SEO

In this section, we’ll share different ways you can add schema markup to your WooCommerce store. 

How to Add Schema Markup to your WooCommerce Store Using WordPress Plugins 

There are different plugins that can help you add schema markup to your online store.

  • Yoast WooCommerce SEO is a premium plugin that enables you to add similar schema markup to your WooCommerce store just as the Yoast plugin works for a general website. 
  • WPSSO Core Premium plugin comes with an eCommerce markup for WooCommerce stores. It charges a fee based on the number of WordPress installations you’re working on. 
  • eCommerce SEO by WordLift plugin offers structured data and more extended product markup that allows you to get your products better visibility on retail listings of Google.   
  • Schema WooCommerce is an extension of WooCommerce that works as a schema plugin, which helps add relevant schema markups to your online store. 

Testing Your Schema Markup 

It’s important that you test your schema markup after you’ve added it to your WordPress website. To be able to make a comparison later, run a test before and after adding the schema markup. You can use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool for this. 

Open the testing tool in the browser and enter the URL of your website. In the case of some plugins, you may get an option that links you directly to the tool and you can access it right from your WordPress dashboard. 

The testing tool by Google will show you which properties of schema markup are included on your website and which are missing. If you find any important properties missing that you need to add to your site, you can go back and make necessary changes to your plugin settings and or add them manually.

Google has also introduced more recent Rich Snippets testing tools. You can use this tool to check for schema markup working on your website for rich snippets and it also shows if any data is missing so you can make changes accordingly. 

Summing It Up 

We know that adding schema markup to your WordPress website or WooCommerce store can make a big difference in boosting your SEO because it informs search engines what your website is about and gives the context to content on your web pages. 

Considering how using search engines has become a part of everyday life around the world, having relevant information about your business or products directly on search engine result pages might be the difference between making a new sale or not, so adding schema markup to your website might be a competitive advantage that can work for your website. 

Make sure you go through all methods explained in the article to add schema markup on your website in detail, including the manual option of adding code to your theme files, using SEO plugins like Yoast, or installing a dedicated schema plugin like Schema Pro on your WordPress website. Don’t miss out on this easy way to get ahead of your competitors and make your online presence stronger.

Last modified on: August 23rd, 2023

Categorized as Web Hosting

Julia is a Content Coordinator for HostPapa, with a special focus on editing copy and all things blog-related. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, watching Oscar-nominated movies, and drinking iced lattes.

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