Let’s face it:
WordPress SEO can be complicated. There are a lot of things to optimise and improve which can be overwhelming to say the least.
You need to use a powerful WordPress SEO plugin to take care of your WordPress SEO needs. But with so many choices…
Which is the best one for your WordPress website?
I’ve got you covered.
I will share the best SEO plugin for WordPress that you should install today (there simply isn’t any other plugin as good as this).
I’ve also included 6 other WordPress SEO plugins that I use to power my website so you can take advantage of my entire SEO plugin stack.
Let’s dive in.
What Will I Learn?
There is one WordPress SEO plugin that I highly recommend. If you don’t use any other SEO plugins, you should at least install this one.
The best SEO plugin for WordPress is…
Rank Math is a must for every WordPress website owner. It lays a strong foundation for your website SEO and has tons of powerful features to take advantage of.
Rank Math is the SEO plugin that I personally use to power all of my WordPress websites.
Here’s why:
Rank Math has over 15 SEO tools built into one plugin.
You can easily optimise your content with built-in content suggestions and take care of most WordPress technical SEO optimisations.
I know what you are thinking…
‘Can this one plugin really take care of my WordPress SEO?’
Short answer – Yes.
Even the free version of Rank Math allows you to do so much:
This list goes on and on. And some of these features are really deep.
For example, Rank Math’s SEO Analysis tool analyses your entire website and identifies issues affecting your SEO.
Each issue is broken down into 4 categories:
This helps you prioritise the issues you need to address first. Rank Math will even give you suggestions on how to fix the issue using the plugin.
It doesn’t get much easier than that.
In the end, you get a final optimisation score out of 100, so you gauge your website’s overall SEO health.
Rank Math’s SEO Wizard is also really powerful. They have designed it to basically configure itself.
Once installed, Rank Math verifies your website settings and recommends the most ideal SEO settings to get the best performance. It will then take you through a step-by-step setup to customise each setting to your needs.
Rank Math has all of the tools you need to:
lay a solid SEO foundation for your website and start ranking in the Google search results.
And for most websites, you’ll only need the FREE version.
It offers a ton of SEO features that some SEO plugins don’t even include in their premium versions! There simply isn’t anything as good available.
If you want to take it up a notch, go for Rank Math Pro. You’ll be able to handle a full scope of SEO issues including:
And so much more. But here’s the best part…
…Rank Math Pro is only $59 for the year and includes unlimited websites. Yes, you read that right – unlimited websites.
Yoast charges $99 for 1 website and their premium features aren’t nearly as powerful as Rank Math.
You can see why Rank Math has become the best SEO plugin for WordPress. It’s the only all-in-one SEO plugin that I recommend for every WordPress website owner.
Check out my complete Rank Math review to see why I ditched Yoast SEO plugin and why you should too.
While Rank Math will take care of most of your SEO needs, there are a couple of others plugins I use and recommend.
Here are 6 other SEO plugins for WordPress you should consider installing.
Want a perfect Google PageSpeed score?
NitroPack is the best WordPress plugin to help improve your website speed.
Website load speed has been a Google ranking factor since 2010. And since the Google Page Experience update in 2021, the importance of a fast loading website has only increased.
NitroPack can increase website speed from the pace of a snail to lightning speed in less than 5 minutes. I’m not even exaggerating.
As an added benefit, you will see an instant increase on both:
Sounds too good to be true?
Here’s why you should consider using NitroPack to speed up your website.
First of all, NitroPack is super easy to set up. You create an account and connect your website. NitroPack will immediately start delivering your website through their CDN (content delivery network).
They have over 216 CDN locations which mean your website will load fast worldwide.
Next NitroPack targets your website code. It’s very easy for-
To become bloated. This can have a significant impact on your individual page load times. NitroPack optimises all of your code, compressing and minimising it wherever it can.
With these speed optimisations in place, your website should already see a huge improvement in load speed times.
But the next big speed culprit is images.
NitroPack comes with a full stack image optimisation tool suite to ensure that your images load as fast as possible.
This includes changing them to automatically display the images in more modern formats such as WebP. NitroPack will also compress images to make them lighter and smaller.
NitroPack gives you full control over what level of speed optimisation you want.
I put NitroPack to the test on this blog and these were the before and after results.
| AVERAGE SCORES | BEFORE NITROPACK OPTIMIZATION | AFTER NITROPACK OPTIMIZATION |
|---|---|---|
| Fully Load Time (s) | 7.50 | 2.02 |
| Requests | 100 | 29 |
| Bytes (KB) | 2,554 | 442 |
| Desktop | 79/100 | 98/100 |
| Mobile | 41/100 | 90/100 |
NitroPack is the complete website speed optimisation plugin. When I installed NitroPack, I was able to replace 3 individual plugins.
What’s more?
My website load speed increased. You can take advantage of NitroPack with their free plan to test it yourself.
To see everything that NitroPack offers, check my full NitroPack review.
Before NitroPack I used WP Rocket as part of my speed optimisation toolkit.
WP Rocket offers lots of great features and can be configured to give your website a real speed boost.
It has been around for a long time and is often the go-to speed optimisation plugin for-
This is because it’s very cost-effective, does a good job and it’s pretty easy to use.
WP Rocket at its core is an advanced caching plugin. But it offers a ton of other features to help improve your website load speeds as well.
As soon as you install WP Rocket it gets straight to work.
It delivers instant improvements with 80% of web speed performance best practices applied immediately without you needing to do anything!
After installing WP Rocket I saw a huge jump in load speed performance:
It went from an E (57%) score on GT Metrix with a load time of over 14 seconds to an A (96%) with a load time of just 4.5 seconds.
That’s a big jump!
One thing I love about WP Rocket is how streamlined the setup is.
It takes less than 3 minutes to customise the settings the way you want and they have built an easy to follow installation wizard to walk through the process.
Running an ecommerce website?
WP Rocket has designed the caching system with ecommerce in mind. They don’t cache sensitive pages so there are no interruptions in the checkout pages.
That means your online store can take full advantage of the WP Rocket features without any issues or interruptions.
WP Rocket is a paid plugin starting at just $49 for the year.
You have a 14-day money-back guarantee so you can give it a test drive before you are committed.
Note: You don’t need NitroPack and WP Rocket together. They have a lot of overlap so you should only choose one for your website.
For me NitroPack made more sense because it includes a lot more. WP Rocket is still a close second as it’s also used and recommended by many WordPress SEO professionals.
You can also configure WP Rocket with a CDN of your choice as an addon. WP Rocket has their own CDN starting at $7.99 per month.
CDNs improve your website load speeds and provide a better user experience, so I recommend taking advantage of one if you use WP Rocket.
Want to learn more about WP Rocket? Read my complete WP Rocket Review to see everything it can do and how to configure it properly.
Images can be one of the biggest reasons your website loads slowly.
As you now know, slow websites aren’t good for SEO. To combat this, you need to use an image compression plugin.
ShortPixel is the best image optimisation plugin available.
Its lightweight, easy to use and delivers excellent compression rates without damaging the quality of your images.
After running a number of tests with image optimisation plugins, ShortPixel consistently delivered the best image compression rates – as much as 40% more.
The image above was the compression ShortPixel achieved after WPSmush had “compressed” the images.
But ShortPixel does more than just image compression. It offers a small but valuable suite of tools that will benefit any website owner.
ShortPixel allows you to:
This can all be done automatically so your website images always load fast. This is great because you set it and forget it!
Installing ShortPixel is easy.
There is a setup wizard to help you activate the right settings for your website. You can also choose the level of compression you want.
The 3 different compression levels are:
ShortPixel offers 100 free image compression credits so you can test the compression on a few pages of your website.
After that you can choose from their subscription or one-time purchase packages which are very cost-effective.
Link Whisper is my secret internal link building weapon.
Internal linking has become an important part of SEO. Google themselves have said that they use internal linking to help understand and find new pages on your website.
Link Whisper is a powerful WordPress SEO plugin that makes internal linking a breeze.
Here’s how it works:
Once you install Link Whisper it starts analysing your entire website. Then it comes up with intelligent suggestions to place internal links.
This might seem basic, but here’s what makes Link Whisper so unique: It’s smart.
Link Whisper is powered by AI, which allows it to build better internal links. While other internal linking tools just create links when you specify a specific keyword…
…Link Whisper understands the content associated with your post or page. From this, it can recommend internal linking opportunities that you would have otherwise missed.
Cool, right?
This means two things:
This feature alone makes Link Whisper a must-have WordPress SEO plugin.
But it does more than just make suggestions…
Link Whisper comes with a full analytics tool suite.
You can easily find orphaned pages or pages with very few internal links, and Link Whisper will build links to those pages with a click of a button.
This connects all your pages together nicely, making it easier for users and search engines to move through your website. That means:
You can also integrate Link Whisper with the Google search console to see important search metrics and detect 404 errors.
It’s easy to address any errors affecting your SEO quickly.
You can use the completely free plan which has many great features. But if you want to step up SEO with internal linking, I recommend upgrading to a Link Whisper paid plan, which starts at just $77 per year.
Every time you install a new plugin to your WordPress site, it adds new javascript and CSS code to every page on your site.
Even if you don’t use that plugin on that specific page.
Perfematters helps you to take control of your website’s javascript and CSS.
This SEO plugin analyses each page on your website and identifies any code bloat. This is basically any CSS and javascript that doesn’t need to be there.
It will even look at plugins that you don’t really need and give you an option to disable them. This leaves you with clean and beautiful code which helps your website load faster.
And by disabling bad code, the script no longer loads it. This reduces your overall number of HTTP requests and your page size.
Perfmatters is the best plugin to:
Another big problem for WordPress sites is the database size.
Every time you update a page or make a revision, WordPress saves a new version of that page. Over time this can:
Bad performance = lower rankings.
Perfmatters cleans everything up in your database and even puts limits in place to prevent it from happening again. This ensures a fast and snappy database.
Perfmatters is easy to use and has a simple “toggle on, toggle off‘ user interface.
There are also a bunch of other cool features you can take advantage of like:
And so much more. All of this helps make your website more secure and improve your website performance.
This can lead to an increase in rankings and a much better user experience for your website visitors.
Perfematters offers some features totally FREE so you can check them out before you buy! Paid plans start at just $24.99 per year, making this another no-brainer for your WordPress plugin SEO stack.
SEO Auto Linker is another internal link-building tool.
It’s easy to use and completely FREE.
The plugin automatically links words and phrases in your posts and pages to other content on your website.
But it allows you to have a lot more control than most of the internal linking tools.
Here’s what I mean:
Just add your URL and specify the target keywords you want to automatically be linked to that URL. SEO Auto Linker does the rest for you.
Every time one of those keywords is mentioned within the content on your website, an internal link will be placed back to that URL.
There’s no need to remember to add internal links when you publish a new piece of content because the plugin does the work for you.
You can also specify the maximum number of links per page or post so that you don’t end up with too many of the same links in one piece of content.
It’s simple and efficient.
If you want a bit more control over your internal linking strategy then SEO Auto Linker is for you. It works differently to Link Whisper, so you can use both plugins together.
Note: The SEO Auto Linker plugin hasn’t been updated in years but it still works well.
It has everything you need to boost your internal linking strategy and help you get your new website pages indexed quicker.
Do you run an affiliate website?
You can even add your affiliate links to SEO Auto Linker so that the plugin automatically adds your affiliate links without you needing to do anything.
Simply put…
SEO plugins make it easier to optimise your website.
WordPress can be a complicated platform. It would take you forever if you had to manually make every single optimisation without plugins.
For most people, it probably wouldn’t even be possible.
This allows you to focus on other important SEO factors like:
Even the top SEO agencies and SEO professionals take advantage of SEO plugins for their WordPress clients. It’s how they can handle lots of clients and still deliver good results.
If the pros do it, so should you!
If you run a WordPress website…
…you need to be taking advantage of the available SEO Plugins.
It makes it so much easier to:
So follow my advice and start by installing Rank Math. This one WordPress plugin will take care of 80% of your SEO for you.
Then, choose between NitroPack and WP Rocket. This will ensure that your website is loading fast and passes all of Google’s speed requirements.
Those plugins alone will put you in front of most WordPress website owners and there are 810 million of them according to the Wordpress statistics we published.
So what are you waiting for? Upgrade your Wordpress site today!
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