Lightcrawl — What It Does and Why It Matters
Most SEO crawlers give you 2,347 results and wish you luck.
Lightcrawl gives you 12 things you should actually fix.
That’s not a limitation — that’s the point.
What is Lightcrawl?
Lightcrawl is Blacklight’s internal crawler. You run it, it maps your entire site, and it comes back with a clear list of structural problems. No exports. No pivot tables. No digging through filter menus to find the thing that actually matters.
It runs entirely inside WordPress. Nothing leaves your server. No external crawl service sitting between you and your own data.
What does it actually find?
Here’s where it gets satisfying.
Orphan pages These are pages that exist on your site, are perfectly indexable, but have absolutely no internal links pointing to them. Which means Google has no reliable way to find them. Which means they might as well not exist.
Users almost always react to this one with “wait, how is Google supposed to find this?” — and the answer is: it isn’t. Lightcrawl surfaces these immediately so you can fix them.
Pages accidentally blocking search engines
This one is more common than anyone wants to admit. A noindex tag left over from a staging environment. A plugin that set noindex globally and nobody noticed. A developer who forgot to clean up before launch.
Your page is live. It looks fine. Google is completely ignoring it. Lightcrawl finds it.
Broken internal links
Classic, but still painful. That link to your services page that’s been returning a 404 for eight months because you renamed the URL and forgot to update it. Lightcrawl doesn’t just tell you a broken link exists — it tells you exactly which page it’s on and where it’s pointing.
Title length problems
Too short. Too long. Missing entirely. Title tags are one of the most basic SEO signals and an embarrassing number of sites get them wrong across half their pages. Lightcrawl gives you the full list so you can work through them.
Pages with no outbound internal links
A page with no links out to the rest of your site is a dead end. Users hit it and have nowhere to go. Crawlers hit it and turn back. It quietly damages your site structure in ways that are invisible until someone points them out.
Thin content
80 words. 120 words. An empty product page that someone published and forgot about. These pages don’t rank because there’s nothing there to rank. Lightcrawl flags them so you can either beef them up or make a decision to remove them.
Stale content
Pages that haven’t been touched in two years. Blog posts that once ranked but are slowly aging out of relevance. Lightcrawl tracks this so you always know where your content decay is happening before Google decides for you.
Multiple H1 tags
Page builders are the main culprit here. You set your page title as an H1, the theme adds another one, and now you’ve got two H1s competing on the same page. Lightcrawl spots it across your entire site in one pass.
The bit that makes it different
Finding the problem is only half the job.
When Lightcrawl flags an issue, Blacklight doesn’t just log it and move on. It tells you what the problem means and what to do about it. An orphan page isn’t just flagged as an orphan page — Blacklight tells you why it matters and suggests adding internal links from related content.
That’s the “Now what?” system in action.
How to use it
Go to Lightcrawl in the Blacklight menu and run a scan. Let it finish — on larger sites this might take a few minutes. When it’s done, head to the Recommendations page and start working through what it found.
Start with the critical issues. Work down the list. Run another crawl when you’re done.
That’s it.