Ian from WSL UI shared his experience using maptrics on his site and wrote a detailed post on his blog: How maptrics found 1,000+ SEO issues on my site before Google did. This case study summarises the issues maptrics found, what the WSL UI team fixed, and the results — from our perspective. Thanks to Ian and Octasoft for letting us tell the story.
The Customer
WSL UI is a free desktop application for managing Windows Subsystem for Linux distributions, built by Octasoft. Alongside the app, the team runs a technical blog covering DevOps, Kubernetes, homelab infrastructure, and WSL guides — with over 40 published posts and growing.
The site is built with Next.js 15 and deployed on Vercel. It uses programmatic SEO features including auto-generated Open Graph images, FAQ structured data for Google rich results, and a custom markdown-based blog engine with D2 diagrams.
The Challenge
The WSL UI site had grown organically over several months. New blog posts, tag pages, series listings, and documentation pages were added regularly — but SEO metadata wasn't being validated systematically. The team assumed their metadata was solid because individual blog posts were carefully authored with frontmatter including titles, descriptions, and tags.
The problem was everywhere except the blog posts themselves. Infrastructure pages — tag listings, series indexes, the blog homepage, download pages — had accumulated SEO gaps silently. With no automated checks in the deployment pipeline, these issues went unnoticed.
The Discovery
After signing up for maptrics and pointing the crawler at their sitemap, the initial scan completed within minutes — covering all 81 indexed URLs. The results were eye-opening.
By the Numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| URLs crawled | 81 |
| Unique issues found | 24 |
| Total issue occurrences | 1,618 |
| High severity issues | 1 |
| Medium severity issues | 5 |
The Top Priority: Missing H1 Tags
maptrics flagged 35 pages with no H1 heading as the single high-severity issue. These were listing and utility pages — tag archives, series pages, the blog index, downloads, themes, and the about page. Each page rendered content correctly in the browser, but lacked the semantic <h1> markup that search engines rely on to understand page topic.
This is a textbook example of an issue that's invisible to developers but highly visible to search engines. The pages looked fine, worked fine, but were silently underperforming in search results.
Meta Tag Gaps
The medium-severity findings revealed widespread metadata issues:
- 45 pages had titles shorter than 55 characters — wasting valuable SERP real estate
- 31 pages had meta descriptions under 120 characters — reducing click-through potential
- 8 pages were missing Open Graph images entirely — meaning no preview when shared on social media
- 11 pages had load times exceeding 3 seconds
- 1 case of duplicate meta descriptions across pages
Open Graph and Structured Data
Lower-severity findings included missing og:locale, og:site_name, and og:image dimension tags across 50+ pages, missing breadcrumb schema on 37 pages, and a FAQ schema with too few questions on one post.
The Fix
Armed with the prioritised maptrics report, the WSL UI team worked through the issues systematically — starting with high severity and working down.
H1 Tags (High)
Every page template that lacked an <h1> was updated. Tag listing pages received headings like "Posts tagged [tag-name]", series pages got the series title as an H1, and utility pages (downloads, themes, about) each got descriptive headings. All 35 affected pages were resolved.
Titles and Descriptions (Medium)
Short titles were expanded to use the full 55-60 character display space. A tag page previously titled "desktop - WSL UI Blog" was reworked to be more descriptive and keyword-rich. Meta descriptions under 120 characters were similarly expanded to give both search engines and users a clearer picture of each page's content.
Open Graph Images (Medium)
Series listing pages were missing OG images because only individual blog posts had hero diagram-based OG images. A default fallback OG image was added for series, tag, and index pages so every URL has a social sharing preview.
The Outcome
After a single crawl and one round of fixes, the WSL UI site addressed all high and medium severity SEO issues. The improvements span the entire site:
- 35 pages gained proper H1 headings
- 45 pages received improved title tags
- 31 pages got expanded meta descriptions
- 8 pages gained Open Graph images for social sharing
- Heading hierarchy fixed across 78 pages
The team has connected the Vercel deploy webhook to maptrics so that every future deployment is automatically crawled and compared against the current baseline. Any regressions — an accidentally removed meta tag, a new page missing an H1, a broken OG image — will be caught at deploy time rather than discovered weeks later in a manual audit.
In Their Own Words
"I thought my site was in decent shape as I had previously run my site through some of the big players in the SEO site checking space. I write blog posts with frontmatter metadata, generate Open Graph images, and use structured data for FAQ rich results. Then maptrics crawled my site and found 24 issues I didn't know I had. The prioritisation — high, medium, low, info — meant I could fix what mattered most first. The 'Why does this matter?' explanations on each issue turned a report into a learning experience."
— Ian, Octasoft Ltd / WSL UI
Read Ian's full post on the WSL UI blog for his step-by-step walkthrough and the complete issue list.
Key Takeaway
The WSL UI case demonstrates a pattern common in developer-built sites: the content pages are well-optimised, but the scaffolding around them isn't. Blog posts had careful SEO metadata because they were authored individually. But tag pages, series listings, and utility pages were generated programmatically — and nobody checked whether the templates included proper H1 tags, sufficient title lengths, or complete Open Graph metadata.
maptrics caught what manual review missed — not because the team wasn't diligent, but because 81 pages across dozens of templates is too much to audit by hand with every deployment. Automated, continuous SEO monitoring turns a reactive process into a proactive one.
WSL UI is a free desktop application for managing Windows Subsystem for Linux, available on the Microsoft Store. The WSL UI blog covers DevOps, Kubernetes, homelab infrastructure, and Windows development topics at wsl-ui.octasoft.co.uk/blog.