SEO
Structured Data in Joomla 6 Is Already Switched On
Structured data used to mean an extension, or hand-editing layouts to sprinkle microdata attributes through the markup. In Joomla 6 it is core: a system plugin plus a set of type plugins, enabled on a fresh install.
What ships
A System - Schema.org plugin does the output, and a plugin per type supplies the shape: Article, BlogPosting, Book, Event, JobPosting, Organization, Person, Recipe, and a Custom plugin for anything not covered.
Output is JSON-LD in the page head — the format search engines prefer, and the one that does not require weaving attributes through your markup. Which means a template override cannot accidentally destroy it, unlike the microdata approach it replaces.
Where to set it
Per article, in the Schema tab of the editing screen. Pick the type and fill in the fields it exposes — an Event asks for dates and a location, a Recipe for times and yield.
Sitewide defaults live in the system plugin's options, including the Organization or Person that represents the site itself. Setting that once is worth doing: it is what ties your articles to a publisher.
Check the output, not the settings
Structured data is one of those areas where the configuration looking right proves nothing. View the page source and find the application/ld+json block, then run the URL through a validator — Google's Rich Results Test for eligibility, or the schema.org validator for correctness.
Two failures are common. A type whose required properties are not filled in produces markup that validates as JSON but is ignored. And a page carrying two conflicting descriptions of itself — usually because an extension also emits schema — confuses rather than helps.
Ratings, and the rule people ignore
The tempting one is AggregateRating: star ratings in search results genuinely raise click-through, which is why every shop wants them.
The rule attached is not optional. The rating must come from real reviews left by real people, it must be visible on the page itself, and it must describe the item the page is about. Marking up a rating nobody left, or one that appears nowhere on the page, is a manual-action risk — and the penalty is applied to the site, not the snippet.
If you sell products, that markup belongs to the e-commerce component, which knows the actual review data. Adding it by hand in a template is how sites end up claiming 4.9 stars from zero reviews.
When you need the Custom plugin
The bundled types cover common publishing. For anything else — FAQPage, HowTo, SoftwareApplication — the Custom plugin takes raw JSON, which you write to the schema.org vocabulary yourself.
Before doing that, check whether the type still earns a rich result. Search engines regularly retire support: markup that no longer produces anything is harmless but pointless, and the documentation for the specific search engine is the only authority on which types are live.
What structured data does not do
It does not improve rankings on its own. It makes a page eligible for a richer presentation of a ranking it already earned. A page that nobody links to and nothing answers does not rise because you described it more precisely.