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I want to rank my website on the first page of Google! Can some free WordPress SEO plugin help me?
There are more than 3600+ free WordPress SEO plugins available and honestly, it is overwhelming as most of them claim to do the job, give you the boost you were always looking for. Some even claim to be the genie that you always wanted, to rank you on top of the SERPs in a jiffy. One single click on install and all your pain will go away. In realty, things are never that simple. However, let’s take a closer look on what you really need, and here are the best suggestions.
But before we get started the following are some important numbers on SEO:
- 93% of all Internet experiences start with a search engine, so you really need to show up on them to be found.
- The first 5 SERPs receive 67% of the clicks, hence you need to be in the first page to get traffic
- 39% of eCommerce traffic across the world comes from search, hence SEO as a channel to get customer is very important
For all the beginners and non-techys, you do not need to download all the below plugins. Most have overlapping functions. Plugins having same functions on your WordPress site can significantly affect websites performance. I will mention in case plugins can be used interchangeably or have similar functions.
Free WordPress SEO plugins for beginners
If you are a beginner and just installed WordPress, download the following. Do not look for any other plugins. These are all that you would need:
| Plugin | Use For |
| Yoast SEO | Page / Post Analysis Meta Data control Robots.txt Breadcrumbs Canonical Errors 301 Redirects and more |
| W3 Total Cache | Increase page load speed CDN & Brower Cache |
| Smush | Compress images and lazy load |
| All in one WP Security & Firewall | Checks for vulnerability |
| Site Kit by Google | XML Sitemap Google Analytics Search Console Google PageSpeed Google AdSense Tag Manager |
| A3 Lazy Load | Improve page load speed by delaying loading of BTF images |
With that said, let’s take a look at the expert pick of the best WordPress SEO plugins
Essential free WordPress SEO plugins for bloggers, eCommerce
1. Yoast SEO plugin
My favorite. Yoast SEO has more 5 stars than next 10 plugins’ 5 stars combined. With more than 5 million + downloads and 25,000+ star ratings. It is a complete website optimization tool that helps you make your website SEO friendly.
For every post you create, it focuses on a keyword and accordingly the URL, title, description, content is graded immediately. This helps you improve your content at run time. Besides these, it offers XML sitemap functionality, control over sites breadcrumbs and sets canonical Urls automatically.
Important Features of Yoast SEO:
- Title and meta description
- Snippet control in search results
- A state-of-the-art Schema implementation compatible with most themes and easy to crawl for search engines
- XML Sitemaps functionality
- Breadcrumbs creation and editing
- Set 301 redirects and canonical URLs
- Readability analysis that improves overall post SEO
However, I will not recommend using all the features Yoast offers.
Google XML sitemap plugin or Site Kit by Google plugin can be used for sitemap creation. Also, if you wish to go for paid plugins – SEMRush can give you better control of your content writing and content analysis.
Alternate free WordPress SEO Plugin
- All-in-One SEO pack
2. Site Kit By Google plugin
Official Google plugin that helps provide insights about how people use and find your site. It is like multiple google products all mashed into one. In fact 6 google tools at one place – Analytics, Search console, Tag Manager, optimize, PageSpeed insights and AdSense. Chances are that you are anyways using at least 2 tools. You can view insights of 4 of these tools in your dashboard. This makes Site Kit pretty much a one stop solution for to view, measure and get insights about user and site stats.
Once you have installed the plugin, you need to link google analytics, search console from within this plugin. This can be a bit complicated, but there are tutorials provided by Google as help.
Important features of Site Kit by Google:
- Google Search Console tool helps you check how google search engine views your site. It also helps track how people search and discover your site.
- Google Analytics tool gives insights into user behavior on your site including live visits, navigation patterns and traffic origins.
- Google AdSense tracks your earning via the site.
- PageSpeed Insights tools gives page performance on mobile and desktop compared to real-world sites. It also suggests improvement areas.
- Tag Manager helps you easily tag important events on your site without coding hassles.
- Optimize tools lets you set up A/B testing and also optimize
Alternate free WordPress SEO Plugin
- Google Analytics by MonsterInsight (for google analytics)
- Yoast SEO (for XML Sitemap)
- WP Rocket (For page load speed)
3. All in one SEO Pack
As the name suggests… this is a All-in-One search engine optimizer for your site. It has a clean interface and does about everything. It’s easy and works out of the box for beginners. It has advanced features for complex websites (paid version) with an API for developers. In fact the only reason I am suggesting this if you need to upgrade to a paid version for your future business needs. All in One SEO pack is a lot cheaper than Yoast SEO. Almost all functions are similar to that to Yoast.
Alternate free WordPress SEO Plugin
- Yoast SEO
4. Broken Link Checker
As your site grows bigger, so does number of posts, pages and interlinks within your website. Broken Link checker plugin will monitor your interlinks and look for any links that lead to nowhere! It will notify you immediately on your dashboard (and even email) and color the broken links differently for easy detection.
The plugin does not let the search engines follow the broken links which helps in further optimization. This plug and play app lets you edit links from its dashboard saving the cumbersome job to visit the page.
Important Features of Broken Link Checker plugin:
- Monitors links in posts, pages, comments
- Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects.
- Makes broken links display differently in posts
- Prevents search engines from following broken links
- Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page
Alternate free WordPress SEO Plugin
- WP Broken Link Status Checker
5. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Unlike other Google Analytics plugins, MonsterInsights allow you
to enable all advanced Google analytics tracking features with just a few
clicks (no need to hire a developer).
The best part is that MonsterInsights comes with a Google
Analytics Dashboard for WordPress that shows you actionable analytics reports
right inside your WordPress dashboard. We have created customized reports that
eliminates the fluff and only show you the stats that matter, so you can see
exactly what’s working and what’s not!
Simply put, MonsterInsights is the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that’s both easy and powerful.
6. W3 Total Cache plugin
W3 Total Cache is a must have plugin for all type of users. It improves the websites SEO score by increasing performance, reducing load times. It makes use of CDN (Content delivery network), web browser cache and other best practices to give up to 10x improvement in overall site performance.
Important features of W3 Total cache plugin:
- Better search engine result page rankings, especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL
- browser caching leading to reduced page load time
- Optimized progressive render: pages start rendering quickly and can be interacted with more quickly
- Improved web server performance; sustain high traffic periods
- Up to 80% bandwidth savings when you minify HTML, CSS and JS files.
Alternate free WordPress SEO Plugin:
- LiteSpeed Cache
7. All In One WP Security & Firewall
This is one of the most popular security plugin. Downloaded over 800k times it is compatible with most themes. It is easy to install and use and it has some cool features.
It recommends the latest updates to WordPress security and practices and does all the boring stuff itself. Admin security, password strength and its bot repeller is stuff of legends.
Important features of All in One WP Security and firewall plugin:
- Makes you change default “admin” username (security risk)
- Password strength tool to allow you to create very strong passwords
- Stop user enumeration.
8. WPtouch Mobile Plugin
WPtouch plugin makes your website mobile friendly and works seamlessly with search engines. It creates a simple version of your site for mobile visitors which you can tweak from dashboard. It does not effect the desktop version.
This plugin is important in this modern era of smartphones where maximum traffic comes from mobile. The plugin is recommended by Google too and your site will pass Google Mobile test like a breeze….
oh…. you dont need to do any coding!
9. Smush Plugin
Smush is an award winning image optimizer plugin. It primary function is to compress images with minimal drop in quality. Besides this you can also resize and lazy load images to increase your page load speed considerably.
Free version allows you to compress up to 50 images at one go and there is no limit to number of images you can compress. You can resize images and set max and min width size. It also detects incorrect image size uploaded on the page.
Important features of Smush plugin:
- Lossless Compression with image size less than 5MB
- Lazy Load feature
- Bulk compress images – PNG, JPEG and GIF files
- Image Resizing
- Incorrect Size Image Detection
- Optimize images even if they are not located in the media library
- Gutenberg Block Integration
- Multisite Compatible
Alternative free SEO WordPress plugin:
- Hummingbird plugin
10. A3 Lazy Load
Speed up our site immediately with
this wonder plugin. Images is the top element for slow page load and increasing
bandwidth. A3 Lazy Load works by loading images only when you scroll to its
placeholder. In other words, below-the-fold images do not get loaded
immediately allowing the rest of the “not-so-data heavy” elements to
load first. It gives the visitor an impression that the site opens up really
fast, while the page loads in the background.
The best part about the plugin is
that it works out of the box i.e plug and play! It also gives you ability to
exclude some pages and types of images you do not want to lazy load.
Important features of A3 lazy load plugin:
- Lazy load almost all types of images
- Flexibility to select images you need to lazy load from
Post, Pages, Custom Post, widgets, thumbnails and even gravatars - Works with containers that are build for horizontal
scrolls - Supports all WordPress video Embeds including Youtube,
Vimeo and HTML5 video - built in support for content that is added by iframe
- Built in auto support for WordPress AMP plugin
List of top 10 free WordPress SEO plugins
- Yoast SEO
- Site Kit by Google
- All-in-one SEO pack
- Broken Link checker
- Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
- Smush
- A3 Lazy load
- WPtouch mobile plugin
- W3 Total Cache plugin
- All in one WP Security and Firewall
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