6 best SEO plugins for WordPress
Your WordPress website may have great content, but if it’s not SEO-optimized, you’ll encounter a big problem. Your website won’t appear in search results, which will reduce your chances of getting traffic significantly. Researching the best SEO plugins for WordPress may seem confusing. Whether you’re starting a WordPress site or developing an existing one, we’ll simplify your search and guide you through the best WordPress SEO plugins and handy tools that best suit your needs.
1. Yoast SEO plugin
You probably already know Yoast SEO. It is the most popular free plugin, with 5 million active installations and a 4.7 star rating to its credit. It is easy to use for beginners but with advanced options for professional users. These are the main features:
- Keyword Optimization: Allows users to optimize pages and posts with SEO-friendly titles, meta descriptions, and keywords.
- Snippet: Provides users with a preview of what the page will look like in Google search results.
- Readability Check: Analyses text according to Flesch-Kincaid principles and makes sure it’s easy to read.
- Gutenberg-ready: it’s flexible, which means it works perfectly in both classic editors and Gutenberg editors.
- Constant updates: The plugin is updated every two weeks. This way, users can rest easy knowing that their websites are optimized using Google’s latest algorithms.
2. W3 Total Cache
The faster your website loads, the higher your ranking. Many users often overlook this and end up providing a bad user experience with their slow websites. W3 Total Cache helps your website’s cache operations, CDN integration, and more. As a result, the amount of data sent to the server and database decreases and the upload speed of your website increases.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
This add-in automatically creates XML site maps for your website and notifies search engines each time they are updated. Simply put, it improves the structure of your pages, making your WordPress site easier to find. Google itself especially recommends this add-on for large websites with lots of multimedia content and files and new websites with limited internal links. But in reality, any type of website will benefit from this add-on. It also doesn’t slow down your website.
4. Monster Insights Google Analytics
Facts and figures mean nothing if we ignore them. It’s true that most things related to Analytics can have a steep learning curve, this plugin helps make it easier. You’ll be able to access Google Analytics data directly from your WordPress dashboard, saving you a lot of time. It can show where your visitors are from, what device they’re using, their gender, age, and more. This is useful if you want to make data-driven decisions for your website.
5. WPTouch Mobile Plugin
People access the web from different devices, with mobile phones being one of the most popular. That’s why we need to make sure that our website looks easy to use when accessed through small screens. The WPtouch plugin allows you to automatically add a simple and elegant mobile theme to your WordPress site. The admin panel allows you to customize settings without having to change any code. More importantly, it is recommended by Google.
6. Optimole
The first thing you need to know before you start reading this article is what WebP is. WebP is a graphic format developed by Google released on September 30, 2010. This image format is a brother of the WebM for videos. It is used for optimized images, and has no problems with loss of image quality in compression. You can use the Optimole plugin to help you turn images into WebP-enabled browsers. This add-on will not only optimize your WebP images, but also serve them through a CDN add-on home page.
As an alternative to add-ons, you can also use the Photon API to do the same. With this API, your JPEG and PNG images will be instantly converted to the desired format.
Conclusion
Choosing from all SEO plugins for your WordPress site will depend on the type of operation you want to perform. Some need specific functions, some do not.
