SEO can be fairly easy to learn, but hard to execute due to the limitations you might run into within a CMS like WordPress. Thankfully there are a lot of plugin developers out there who have built great plugins, many of which are free, to help you improve the SEO of your WordPress website.
Below is a list of WordPress plugins that may help your website’s SEO performance if used correctly. We will even give you advice on using a plugin if there are any specific quirks to be aware of. This is only a list of plugins, other online lists include SEO tools you might use to enhance your SEO, but if you’re reading this chances are you likely want to know what plugins are the best to use.
THE BEST SEO PLUGINS TO HELP YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE RANK HIGHER
1. Yoast SEO
The grandaddy of SEO plugins for WordPress, Yoast started out life as “WordPress SEO” back before the WordPress Foundation was formed and using the term ‘WordPress’ in plugin names was blocked by the core dev team. Founded by Joost de Valk (Joost is pronounced “Yoast”), Yoast SEO is the most installed and most widely used plugin for SEO enhancement on WordPress websites. There’s a good reason for that, it has a simple and intuitive interface, is easily
Pros:
Yoast is a free plugin that offers almost all of the technical SEO capabilities your website will need to rank higher in search engines with very few things missing and few drawbacks. In fact the free version of their plugin includes more critical features that other SEO plugins which often hold back one or more critical technical SEO features for their paid versions.
Cons:
The plugin includes some features that are not always accurate like a system of colored circles which attempt to indicate how well a document is optimized for search engines. In the past the plugin has had a few issues including once when they added ‘heavy’ images to their plugin admin area to promote their premium services and one-time when the plugin defaulted to a setting that harmed SEO after an update.
Tips:
- Pretty much every WordPress website using Yoast should remove tag pages from the index.
- Always make sure you are redirecting media attachement pages to the media file.
2. SEOPress
SEOPress is a powerful and lightweight plugin for WordPress that performs almost onpar with Yoast. The plugin’s free versions offers an incredible array of features and a realy easy to use interface. It even includes some features not found in Yoast that might be useful for your specific website and earned their #2 spot on our list.
Pros:
Extremely feature packed free version, easy to use, and capable of doing everything you need for most technical SEO needs. Paid version is reasonably priced and the dev team communicate with users well.
Cons:
The free version has one drawback, which dependening on your circumstance may or may not be a deal breaker. That is that you cannot edit your Robots.txt file with the free version, you must upgrade to their premium plugin.
3. WP Automatic Links
One of the biggest pains in running a WordPress website is trying to always build internal links back to your important pages that drive sales or lead gen (i.e. money pages). WP Automatic Links solves this pesky problem by giving your site a powerful feature to automatically build links across blog posts, pages, and various other post types.
Pros:
Internal and external links can be added instantly without editing the code of your site or your database. Links post to the browser and help your SEO by distributing link values better to important pages on your site.
Cons:
This plugin is not free and cannot be purchased. Currently only clients of the agency who built it are able to use it.
4. WP Rocket
Hands down the single best pagespeed optimization plugin on the market. WP Rocket is a premium experiecne worth the premium price. Constantly updated to give your website an edge when it comes to loading faster and getting a ranking boost from Google’s ‘core web vitals’ ranking metric.
Pros:
Powerful feature-packed plugin supported by an amazing dev team that will help you speed up your website in ways you probably think are not possible. Feature set includes adding DNS-prefetch tags, lazy loading, CSS and JS minification, Delayed JS until user interaction, YouTube embed optimization, and more.
Cons:
Not a free plugin and they recently removed the html minification feature.
Tips:
- Use a tool like GTMetrix to discover third-party content you should pre-fetch.
- Test your CSS and JS settings one at a time and one per day to avoid causing problems.