You’ve got the basics of your new WordPress website in place. There’s a theme that creates the look and feel you’re after and you’re happy with the design and layout. Now it’s time to start adding the plugins—those extras that enable your site to do more, on both the front end and the back end. But while the plugin might be an add-on, a lot of them are fundamentally essential to a smooth functioning and high performing website. Here are our recommendations for the 10 best SEO plugins to use on a WordPress site:
Yoast SEO
The most popular WordPress plugin enjoys its status for a reason. You not only get the space to include your meta title and meta description—essentials if your pages are going to rank well for search, but you get a concise analysis of all the key SEO facets that make up a page. The analysis comes replete with green and red indicators to tell you what needs work and what’s good to go.
Google XML Sitemaps
It doesn’t do much good to have your pages all SEO-friendly if the search engines don’t know where to find them to begin with. Google XML Sitemaps is the answer to the problem. This plugin will neatly index all of your pages in one place and make for easy browsing by an algorithm.
All In One Schema Rich Snippets
This plugin provides another way of controlling the snippet of information that appears about your page in a Google search. Using this plugin also enhances your chances of getting in the prestigious knowledge panel spot—the box at the top of search results that directly answers the question of the searcher.
Broken Link Checker
Search engines hate broken links. So much so that their very presence on your site will have a negative effect on the search performance of your good links. But keeping the site clean can be an arduous task and the Broken Link Checker can help. You can set up this plugin to be alerted when a broken link is on the site, adjust how it’s presented to website visitors and prevent it from being indexed by search engines until you get it fixed.
Redirection
As you identify the broken links, you’ll likely want the traffic that ends up inadvertently landing there to be somewhere else on the site. The redirection enables you to automatically send people from the broken URL to another page that will be more likely to have the content they’re looking for.
W3 Total Cache
The speed in which your website loads is absolutely critical to your digital performance and there are a lot of highly technical activities required to get good speed and maintain it. W3 Total Cache takes care of this, ensuring you don’t have to be the one that minifies your third-party and JavaScript CSS files or caches your pages.
Shortpixel
You’ve likely been told that the web is a visual place and good images are important. That’s true. They can also load down your site and hurt loading speed. The Shortpixel plugin compresses the images to improve speed, while not hurting the quality of the image.
All In One WP Security & Firewall
WordPress is good with security, but you can never be too careful and the WP Security & Firewall plugin gives you an extra layer of security. Is it worth it? Let’s put it this way—how many times have you visited a website that has a warning that it may have been hacked? This plugin will help prevent that warning from getting on your site.
Really Simple HSSL
A part of being a secure website is having an “https” domain, unless of the traditional “http” look. The “s” stands for security and this feature is rapidly becoming a necessity for any website that’s serious about ranking in search. This plugin won’t automatically do that—you have to install an SSL certificate. But Really Simple HSSL will configure your site to prepare it for the transition.
Antispam
If you don’t allow comments on your pages you don’t need to worry about this one. But if you, you’re likely familiar with how much spammy content comes through the com-boxes. This plugin filters legitimate comments from the spammy ones.
Want assistance implementing SEO best practices? periscopeUP can help. Contact us to make your website compliant and accessible to all users.
