Last year a study was conducted to determine how many websites exist on the internet. The outcome was roughly 1.6 billion websites! That means that there's 1 website for every 5 people that exist in the world. Of these websites, 60% of them run content management systems and what's even more amazing is that nearly 30% of them run on WordPress. This is quite an outstanding statistics considering that second and third place is taken by Joomla and Drupal which have 6.6% and 4.6% respectively, only!
Wearing the right pair of shoes with your killer outfit makes all the difference in the world, because what’s a great outfit without a pair of sleek shoes, right? The same principle can be applied to WordPress plugins for your website. If you want your website to turn heads, then you need to be aware of some essential WordPress plugin that will accommodate your website in terms of aesthetics, functionality, level of efficiency and optimisation. Not only will plugins assist in the aesthetics of your website, but they will also assist with various technical aspects as well.
We love search and so we've decided to create a list of the top plugins that assist with search engine optimisation (SEO). You won't use all of these plugins at the same time, and probably only find yourself using a few at once but we wanted to list them all here to give you choice.
Yoast SEO:
What you need to know:
With over 168 million downloads, Yoast SEO is the most downloaded of all plugins and has a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars, and one of the reasons for this are simple; if you have a specific keyword or key phrase you want your post or page to rank for, you enter the desired keyword or phrase into Yoast SEO which will then run a check on your content to determine whether or not the keyword or phrase is being used often enough. It also ensures that the specified keyword or phrase does not appear too often in the content, as well as that it appears in the right places.
Yoast SEO Premium adds the ability to analyse your text on multiple variations of the specified keyword or key phrase. It also enables the ability to add more than just one related keyword, which is not the case with the free version of Yoast. In addition, the premium version also offers:
What you need to know:
As one of the most famous plugins on WordPress, Redirection doesn’t really need a hefty introduction, but we’re going to give you one anyway. This plugin is used to manage 301 redirects as well as 401 redirects on your website, and assists in keeping your website clean. The Redirection plugin has seen a total number of downloads of 16 319 936, receives a 4.5 out of 5-star rating, and it’s also been around for well over 10 years.
Not only does the Redirection plugin assist with straightforward URL matching, but redirects can also be implemented based on the following conditions:
What you need to know:
All-In-One Schema is a plugin that allows you to add additional features on your website for users in the Google SERP. Examples of this plugin include reviews that are seen on the SERP for a specific site, for example, a hotel or guest house. This plugin also adds the ability to make reviews visible on the SERP for sites related to hospitality. It also enables the ability to see product specific information on the SERP, or the ability to see cooking information on the SERP when relevant searches are conducted.
The Schema Rich Snippet assists with the following features:
What you need to know:
The WP Smush plugin is an award-winning image optimization tool, which is not hard to believe as it receives a 5 out of 5-star rating and, to top it off, is absolutely free. The plugin is used on WordPress to optimise images on your page while preserving image quality, where other software may affect image quality by as much as 30%. If an image is too large for your website, the plugin will automatically resize the image to ensure that it does not affect your page load time. Smush also detects when images are the incorrect size and will give you tips on how to optimise your images.
Here’s why we love Smush:
WordPress Social is a useful plugin that tells you which of your posts are performing well on social media. You install the plugin, spend a few seconds setting it up and you're done. The plugin checks each of your posts for the number of times they've been shared and then gives you a colour-coded result. Here's an example where you can see the "Social" column along with a robot-styled indicator of performance:
A really useful and easy to use plugin that brings social into WordPress and gives you the opportunity to understand the performance of each of your posts.
W3 Total Cache
What you need to know:
W3 Total Cache plugin on WordPress is a performance framework that improves the user experience and SEO performance of a website. The W3 Total Cache plugin ensures that our websites can handle huge amounts of traffic without crashing, as well as improves site load time.
Some of the reasons we love W3 Total Caching:
What you need to know:
WP Rocket is a plugin for WordPress used to optimise your website speed. This plugin assists in implementing various speed-boosting features to your WordPress website. WP Rocket makes it easy to implement features such as Google Fonts Optimization, Browser Caching, Cloudfare Compatibility and Mobile Detection. In essence, this plugin is used to improve the loading speed of your WordPress site.
WP Rocket features include:
What you need to know:
It's in the plugin’s name! Broken Link Checker is a free tool for WordPress which monitors your content looking for broken links. It has a total of 4 out of 5-star rating, and it’s seen a total number of downloads of 6 600 303. The plugin will notify you as soon as broken links are found in your blog.
Features include:
What you need to know:
The AMP plugin, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is used to make content load faster for users who use mobile. When users find content on platforms such as Google Search, Pinterest, Twitter and others, the AMP version is served to those users who access content from their mobile devices. AMP has seen a total number of downloads of 2 834 240 and receives a rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars and is absolutely free!
The plugin features and capabilities provided include:
What you need to know:
SEOPress is another substantial plugin used to optimise your SEO, improve social sharing, create optimised breadcrumbs, boost your traffic, add Google Structured data types and schemas as well as a host of different features. The SEOPress plugin receives a 5 out of 5-star rating and has been downloaded a total of 537 771 times. The plugin allows the analysis of content that assists you in writing search-engine optimised content.
Features on the SEOPress plugin include:
What you need to know:
The All in One SEO pack is one of the most downloaded plugins, with a total number of downloads reaching 55 083 171, and is used to optimise SEO for your WordPress website. This plugin receives a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars and has been around since 2007.
The All in One SEO pack includes key features such as:
The SEO Framework plugin is considered by many to be one of the greatest alternatives to Yoast or All in One SEO, as it offers all the key features you need for SEO, without having add-ons that aren’t essential. This plugin assists in keeping site speeds high while simultaneously spending less time with confusing SEO Articles. The SEO Framework plugin receives a 5 out of 5-star rating and has seen a total of 781 119 downloads.
Essential features for this plugin include:
What you need to know:
The Squirrly SEO plugin is used to come up with a selection of copyright-free images that can be used for your blog upon entering a keyword into a search box. It will also give you a list of blog posts that are relevant to the keyword that you entered into the search box. The software is used to analyze content that you have written and will determine whether the content is properly optimised. The Squirrly plugin also has a feature called Performance Analytics, which will give you an indication of your performance on social media as well as your Google rankings. Squirrly also provides weekly audits which provide insight into your content marketing strategy in general. The Squirrly plugin receives a 4.5 out of 5-star rating and has seen a total of 2 804 589 downloads.
The Squirrly plugin gives you knowledge, tools and guidance to assist you with:
What you need to know:
Simply put, the Rel Nofollow Checkbox plugin adds a checkbox in the insert/edit link popup in order to include the nofollow attribute. In addition, it also adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to post external links. The Rel Nofollow Checkbox receives a 5 out of 5-star rating and has seen a total of 4 006 downloads.
In a digital sea of WordPress plugins to suit almost every website need, these are some of the most complete and comprehensive plugins that will ensure that your WordPress is equipped to transform every website into a masterpiece that holds a strong focus on efficiency, speed and user-friendliness.
Which plugins do we use at iMod Digital?
We build a lot of WordPress webites and we optimise even more, and through our years of doing so, we've narrowed our plugin kit down to the following four plugins:
Wearing the right pair of shoes with your killer outfit makes all the difference in the world, because what’s a great outfit without a pair of sleek shoes, right? The same principle can be applied to WordPress plugins for your website. If you want your website to turn heads, then you need to be aware of some essential WordPress plugin that will accommodate your website in terms of aesthetics, functionality, level of efficiency and optimisation. Not only will plugins assist in the aesthetics of your website, but they will also assist with various technical aspects as well.
We love search and so we've decided to create a list of the top plugins that assist with search engine optimisation (SEO). You won't use all of these plugins at the same time, and probably only find yourself using a few at once but we wanted to list them all here to give you choice.
Yoast SEO:
What you need to know:
With over 168 million downloads, Yoast SEO is the most downloaded of all plugins and has a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars, and one of the reasons for this are simple; if you have a specific keyword or key phrase you want your post or page to rank for, you enter the desired keyword or phrase into Yoast SEO which will then run a check on your content to determine whether or not the keyword or phrase is being used often enough. It also ensures that the specified keyword or phrase does not appear too often in the content, as well as that it appears in the right places.
Yoast SEO Premium adds the ability to analyse your text on multiple variations of the specified keyword or key phrase. It also enables the ability to add more than just one related keyword, which is not the case with the free version of Yoast. In addition, the premium version also offers:
- Internal link suggestions - This is a feature where the plugin analyzes your text and suggests links to related posts.
- Page preview: This feature will give you a preview of what a post will look like to a user in Google.
- Social media page preview: As the name suggests, this feature will give you a preview of what your page will look like if you share it on Facebook or Twitter.
- Readability check: Based on scientific research on readability, Yoast will give you suggestions on how to structure your sentences so that readers find it easier to scan through content because, in essence, that’s what most users online do; rather than in-depth reading, they scan through the content.
- Content Insights: This is a function that indicates 5 words that appear most frequently in your content, which allows you to ensure that the topic and keywords you would like to rank for lines up with your content.
What you need to know:
As one of the most famous plugins on WordPress, Redirection doesn’t really need a hefty introduction, but we’re going to give you one anyway. This plugin is used to manage 301 redirects as well as 401 redirects on your website, and assists in keeping your website clean. The Redirection plugin has seen a total number of downloads of 16 319 936, receives a 4.5 out of 5-star rating, and it’s also been around for well over 10 years.
Not only does the Redirection plugin assist with straightforward URL matching, but redirects can also be implemented based on the following conditions:
- Cookies: A redirect will occur when a cookie is set
- Login status: a redirect will only occur when a user is logged in or logged out
- Page type: a redirect will occur if the current page is a 404
- IP address: redirects if a client IP address matches
- Referred: redirects if a user visited the link from another page
- WordPress capability: redirect occurs when a user is able to perform a specified capability
- HTTP headers: redirects dictated by the HTTP header
- Server: if hosted on the same server, a redirect can also be implemented to another domain.
What you need to know:
All-In-One Schema is a plugin that allows you to add additional features on your website for users in the Google SERP. Examples of this plugin include reviews that are seen on the SERP for a specific site, for example, a hotel or guest house. This plugin also adds the ability to make reviews visible on the SERP for sites related to hospitality. It also enables the ability to see product specific information on the SERP, or the ability to see cooking information on the SERP when relevant searches are conducted.
The Schema Rich Snippet assists with the following features:
- It provides search engines with essential information that can be displayed on the SERP.
- These snippets are very interactive and they allow you to stand out from the crowd.
- It aids in a significant increase in Click Through Rate.
- It allows you to rank higher in the SERP.
- When users share your link on Facebook, it assists in displaying proper information.
- People
- Products
- Articles
- Events
- Reviews
- Software application
- Videos
- Recipes
What you need to know:
The WP Smush plugin is an award-winning image optimization tool, which is not hard to believe as it receives a 5 out of 5-star rating and, to top it off, is absolutely free. The plugin is used on WordPress to optimise images on your page while preserving image quality, where other software may affect image quality by as much as 30%. If an image is too large for your website, the plugin will automatically resize the image to ensure that it does not affect your page load time. Smush also detects when images are the incorrect size and will give you tips on how to optimise your images.
Here’s why we love Smush:
- The Smush plugin will automatically locate images that are incorrectly sized which are slowing down your site.
- Images can be optimised even if they are not located in your media library.
- Statistics can be accessed directly in the image blocks with the Gutenberg Block Integration.
- Data that is not being utilised can be stripped without affecting the quality of your images.
- This plugin is absolutely free, which means you can optimise all your images up to 1MB in size… FOREVER!
WordPress Social is a useful plugin that tells you which of your posts are performing well on social media. You install the plugin, spend a few seconds setting it up and you're done. The plugin checks each of your posts for the number of times they've been shared and then gives you a colour-coded result. Here's an example where you can see the "Social" column along with a robot-styled indicator of performance:
A really useful and easy to use plugin that brings social into WordPress and gives you the opportunity to understand the performance of each of your posts.
W3 Total Cache
What you need to know:
W3 Total Cache plugin on WordPress is a performance framework that improves the user experience and SEO performance of a website. The W3 Total Cache plugin ensures that our websites can handle huge amounts of traffic without crashing, as well as improves site load time.
Some of the reasons we love W3 Total Caching:
- Supports Accelerated Mobile Pages as well as SSL
- When W3TC is fully configured, the website performance can increase at least ten times.
- When configured, visitors view more pages, they spend more time on your website and it reduces page load time.
- Websites that use SSL, as well as mobile-friendly sites, can witness improved rankings in the search engine results.
- Browser caching enables for instant repeat page views.
What you need to know:
WP Rocket is a plugin for WordPress used to optimise your website speed. This plugin assists in implementing various speed-boosting features to your WordPress website. WP Rocket makes it easy to implement features such as Google Fonts Optimization, Browser Caching, Cloudfare Compatibility and Mobile Detection. In essence, this plugin is used to improve the loading speed of your WordPress site.
WP Rocket features include:
- The WP Rocket code has been developed according to WordPress best practices, which makes it developer friendly.
- Images will only load as your visitor scrolls on your site, which improves the loading time of website pages.
- WP Rocket makes use of minification in order to reduce the weight of your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files.
- Indexing on your website is improved through the simulation of a visit to preload a cache. This is achieved through the WP Rocket crawler.
- As soon as you turn on WP Rocket, page caching is activated to improve SEO and to increase conversions.
What you need to know:
It's in the plugin’s name! Broken Link Checker is a free tool for WordPress which monitors your content looking for broken links. It has a total of 4 out of 5-star rating, and it’s seen a total number of downloads of 6 600 303. The plugin will notify you as soon as broken links are found in your blog.
Features include:
- Links that are monitored on blog posts, comments, pages, the blogroll and custom fields.
- Detecting links that have missing images, that don't work and that have redirects.
- The ability to search and filter links by anchor text, URL and so on.
- Broken Link Checker is highly configurable.
- You receive notifications by email or via your Dashboard.
- The ability to edit links directly from the plugin, without having to update each post manually.
- Displays broken links in posts differently.
- It prevents search engines from following broken links.
What you need to know:
The AMP plugin, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is used to make content load faster for users who use mobile. When users find content on platforms such as Google Search, Pinterest, Twitter and others, the AMP version is served to those users who access content from their mobile devices. AMP has seen a total number of downloads of 2 834 240 and receives a rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars and is absolutely free!
The plugin features and capabilities provided include:
- CSS Tree Shaking: It assists in dealing with cases where a defined CSS rule on a site exceeds the CSS size limit that is allowed on a single AMP page.
- Core Theme Support: Enables full AMP validity for four default themes namely Twenty Fifteen; Twenty Sixteen; Twenty Seventeen, Twenty Nineteen.
- Gutenberg Support: Enables content creation for AMP that is fully integrated with Gutenberg.
- Compatibility Tool: Assists in the development of AMP experiences by means of enabling AMP debugging with detailed information about the possibility of validation errors that may exist, the markup/scripts caused by them, as well as the specific components on the site that is responsible for content on the page in question.
- Many Optimisations: A multitude of code, performance and developer experience enhancements including improved UI flows, accessibility and internalisation, to customisation flexibility.
- AMP First Experiences support: Enables full-site AMP experiences without losing the flexibility of the platform, or the fidelity of content.
What you need to know:
SEOPress is another substantial plugin used to optimise your SEO, improve social sharing, create optimised breadcrumbs, boost your traffic, add Google Structured data types and schemas as well as a host of different features. The SEOPress plugin receives a 5 out of 5-star rating and has been downloaded a total of 537 771 times. The plugin allows the analysis of content that assists you in writing search-engine optimised content.
Features on the SEOPress plugin include:
- Building your own custom XML Sitemap in order to improve indexing.
- Removing stop words.
- Improving search indexing for Google Images through Image XML Sitemaps
- The analysis of content
- Import/Export setting from one site to another.
- Canonical URL.
- W3C check.
- Linking your social media accounts to your website
- Google Local Business
- Backlinks
- Stats from Google Analytics in the Dashboard
- Easy Digital Downloads: add OG Price / OG Currency, remove EDD meta generator.
- Google Page Speed
- Email notifications on 404
- Import redirections using CSV
- RSS
- Video XML Sitemap
What you need to know:
The All in One SEO pack is one of the most downloaded plugins, with a total number of downloads reaching 55 083 171, and is used to optimise SEO for your WordPress website. This plugin receives a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars and has been around since 2007.
The All in One SEO pack includes key features such as:
- Automatic generation of META tags
- Compatibility with various other plugins
- Automatic notification of search engines such as Google and Bing about changes made to your website
- Advanced Canonical URLs
- Google AMP support
- Custom Post Types receive support for SEO
- Automatic optimisation of your titles for Google and other search engines.
- Support for XML Sitemaps
- Nonce Security built into the All in One SEO Pack
- Translated in 57 languages
- All in One SEO pack is the only free plugin to provide SEO Integration for e-Commerce sites, including WooCommerce
- 100% Compatible with PHP 7
The SEO Framework plugin is considered by many to be one of the greatest alternatives to Yoast or All in One SEO, as it offers all the key features you need for SEO, without having add-ons that aren’t essential. This plugin assists in keeping site speeds high while simultaneously spending less time with confusing SEO Articles. The SEO Framework plugin receives a 5 out of 5-star rating and has seen a total of 781 119 downloads.
Essential features for this plugin include:
- It’s one of the smartest plugins available thanks to built-in Artificial Intelligence that listens to all that WordPress gives in order to automatically optimise your pages. This saves you a great deal of time.
- It’s a plugin that comes pre-configured and offers a suitable starting point through AI.
- The SEO Framework plugin has a strict Privacy Policy that ensures that your email address won’t automatically be shared with third parties and has no links cloaking your information.
- The colour scheme has been configured in such a way that it is accessible to people with any type of colour-vision deficiency.
- This plugin is the only one to offer pixel-perfect guidelines for Google Search to optimise your metadata.
- The SEO Framework is seamlessly integrated within WordPress, which gives it a natural feel when interacting with this plugin
What you need to know:
The Squirrly SEO plugin is used to come up with a selection of copyright-free images that can be used for your blog upon entering a keyword into a search box. It will also give you a list of blog posts that are relevant to the keyword that you entered into the search box. The software is used to analyze content that you have written and will determine whether the content is properly optimised. The Squirrly plugin also has a feature called Performance Analytics, which will give you an indication of your performance on social media as well as your Google rankings. Squirrly also provides weekly audits which provide insight into your content marketing strategy in general. The Squirrly plugin receives a 4.5 out of 5-star rating and has seen a total of 2 804 589 downloads.
The Squirrly plugin gives you knowledge, tools and guidance to assist you with:
- Increasing your awareness regarding SEO. If you’re not an SEO expert, there’s no need to worry. Squirrly offers a step by step process that offers coaching sessions that allow you to master the SEO basics and to conquer advanced tactics.
- Tools that assist you with the successful implementation of basic SEO tactics. It also offers some of the best automation features that help you to work smarter. These features include On-Page Optimisation, Keyword Research and weekly SEO Audits.
- Keeping you both focused as well as moving forward with guidance regarding the ever-changing world of SEO, Google updates and more.
What you need to know:
Simply put, the Rel Nofollow Checkbox plugin adds a checkbox in the insert/edit link popup in order to include the nofollow attribute. In addition, it also adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to post external links. The Rel Nofollow Checkbox receives a 5 out of 5-star rating and has seen a total of 4 006 downloads.
In a digital sea of WordPress plugins to suit almost every website need, these are some of the most complete and comprehensive plugins that will ensure that your WordPress is equipped to transform every website into a masterpiece that holds a strong focus on efficiency, speed and user-friendliness.
Which plugins do we use at iMod Digital?
We build a lot of WordPress webites and we optimise even more, and through our years of doing so, we've narrowed our plugin kit down to the following four plugins:
- Yoast - This, in our opinion, is the best SEO plugin if you want to move quickly. It's useful for individuals and agencies for rapid deployment and we'd certainly recommend it to anyone who cannot afford an agency to take their SEO to the next level.
- Redirection - We'll be honest, we usually use an .htaccess or web.config file to handle redirects but if we don't have server access then we turn to Redirection. We recently used Simple 301 Redirects on a project that we didn't have server access to and Redirection wasn't fulfilling our requirements.
- Smush Image Compression - This isn't a plugin we use on every website that we build or are asked to optimise, but rather only on those website's that have a large number of images. It does a great job but can take quite a long time to get going unless you have the paid version.
- WordPress Social - Social signals are a real thing when it comes to SEO, knowing how your posts are performing on social media platforms is important and WordPress Social makes this simple.
- W3 Total Cache - There are a number of things you need to do when it comes to a website that's loading slowly if you want real results but W3 Total Cache is a great option to enable caching. Please be careful with this plugin, it's not the easiest to set up.