The beauty of having a WordPress website is that many issues or problems can be addressed with a simple plugin. You don’t need to know a line of code to add this piece of software to your site, and your site will quickly and easily get the improved functionality of the plugin. As anyone in the WordPress community knows: There’s likely a plugin for that!
Today, we’re looking at the best plugins to drastically improve your site’s speed and SEO. Speed is necessary for a great user experience, and you always need to be on top of your SEO to ensure that people can find your site.
Here are the 8 best WordPress plugins to boost speed and SEO of your blog.
Awesome Plugins for Faster WordPress Websites
This comprehensive WP cleanup plugin will help you optimize your site’s speed in short order. It cleans up your database by taking away spam comments, old post revisions, and trashed items. Since an excess of clutter like that is what substantially contributes to a slow site, removing them regularly will boost site speed.
It’s free of charge.
Each time a site visitor arrives, his or her browser’s required to load a slew of items like logos, CSS files, and additional resources. Depending on how much of this is on a site, the slower the site will be. WP Super Cache essentially keeps track of items already loaded the first time a page was accessed—so it doesn’t waste resources by loading them again.
This plugin will run automatically after it’s been uploaded and enabled. It’s also free of charge.
Look at any WordPress site today, and you’ll notice how replete they are with images because images hook readers and visitors. Unfortunately, vivid images come in big file sizes, which has a tendency to really slow down a site. That’s where this plugin comes into the picture: It compresses images as they’re scaled down, so site speed won’t suffer. As a result, unnecessary data is stripped, helping to optimize your site’s performance.
WP Smush is available for free.
Usually, Instagram plugins serve images directly from Instagram’s servers, hampering your ability to control image size and other factors necessary to maintain good site speed. As an Austin-based SEO, I run into this issue regularly when tuning sites, particularly tech startups. This lightweight and developer-friendly plugin instead pulls Instagram images and creates and optimizes precision-sized thumbnails. It then serves the images locally, helping to increase site speed.
It’s available for free.
Useful Plugins for WordPress Websites With Better SEO
Formerly WordPress SEO by Yoast, Yoast SEO is the go-to plugin for many marketers who want better search rankings. That’s because this plugin assists you in writing better content, offers you a page analysis, provides a search-engine view so you know if your meta description is excellent or not, and even creates an XML sitemap to help your rankings.
Yoast’s popularity is based on it being free, but there’s also a premium version for additional support that starts at $69 for a single site.
Google Analytics for WordPress
Knowing how your site performs is vital to SEO efforts because you need to know where visitors are coming from, how much time they’re spending on each page, and what they’re doing on each page. When you’re armed with this info, you’re better able to optimize pages so that they appear higher in search results.
It’s available for free, but you need a Google Analytics account first.
Think of rich snippets as additional tidbits of information that show up underneath Google’s search results. Sometimes also called Schema markups, these snippets make it easier for your WordPress webpages to successfully stand out in search results, thus helping with SEO. In a practical sense, when people understand what your site is about more clearly, that can translate to higher click-through rates.
Pricing starts at $69 for a full year, with other, more expensive tiers beyond that.
Since outbound links can damage your site’s SEO rankings, it’s beneficial to take an inventory of them and get rid of the inferior ones. LinkPatrol improves your outgoing link profile by removing spammy links immediately, finding and removing problem anchor texts, and keeps track of newly added links and keywords.
You can start cleaning up your links for $50 for the basic plan.
These 8 stellar WordPress plugins will boost your site speed and SEO, guaranteed. Use them today to begin enjoying faster load times, greater site performance, and higher search results.
This is an editorial contribution from Kyle Sanders, Head of Search at Complete Web Resources.