Why use WordPress plugins?
WordPress is a popular platform for building websites. To elevate user experience, here are some plugins from the Plugins Repository.
Note - Before installing the plugins below, it's best to have a backup of your website ready. As a general rule, if you can duplicate your website to a testing environment, and work on the plugins there, this is a good safety measure to ensure nothing "breaks" on the live environment. After implementing a major change, make sure to test and ensure everything is still working as it should be.
General SEO plugins - Pick one of the four plugins below. You'll need to read their descriptions and see which functionalities best serve your needs. For small websites, the free versions of the plugins below should do fine. If you prefer a direct go-to solution, Yoast SEO is a good option for a number of websites.
- Yoast SEO – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
- All in One SEO – Best WordPress SEO Plugin – Easily Improve SEO Rankings & Increase Traffic – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
- Rank Math SEO – Best SEO Plugin For WordPress To Increase Your SEO Traffic – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
- The SEO Framework – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
XML Sitemap plugin, as a backup solution - If you prefer not to install a dedicated, general SEO plugin, you can simply install a small plugin for XML Sitemaps. While certainly not as powerful as the options above, this solution can also be fine:
A plugin for adding ALT Texts - If you happen to have a lot of images on your website that don't have ALT texts, you can add a plugin to add ALT texts in bulk. Works in combination with Yoast SEO plugin, above:
A plugin for removing tags - WordPress tags can be of great help, but often they're just used for spamming Google. This might lead to important pages not being indexed, and, instead, having duplicate content appearing on search engines. Sometimes, it's best to just use categories, and delete all the “spammy” tags on the website. It can be difficult to manually remove a high number of tags at once. Thankfully there is a plugin that helps you mass-delete tags on your website. A backup is highly recommended prior to doing so, just to make sure everything works fine afterward.
For speed, a caching plugin - For speed purposes, it's good to have a caching plugin. Do note that this type of plugin generally requires more advanced technical knowledge. If you have a small website, with very little traffic, you probably won’t need one. That being said, Google counts speed as a ranking factor. What we suggest with the plugins below is testing the speed of your website using two tools from Google dedicated to speed tests (1, 2).
- Caching Plugin for WordPress⎪WP Rocket
- LiteSpeed Cache – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
- WP Fastest Cache – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
- W3 Total Cache – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
For compressing the images - a WebP plugin - We suggest "serving" your site's visitors' images not only in JPG/PNG format but also, as an alternative, as WebP. The plugins below are premium, but some have some options for smaller websites. If possible, keep both WebP and JPG/PNG images, as there might be some users with older browsers that don't render WebP properly. Compressing the current images is also something to consider, but WebP should bring the best results.
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