7 Best WordPress SEO Plugins in 2021 [Proven]

WordPress made it easy for anyone to create a website. It’s easy to use, it’s fast, it doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge. Even someone like me who’s not a developer can do things like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and modify WordPress easily.

There are over a thousand of WordPress SEO plugins, but you don’t need that many to make your website “SEO friendly.”

The SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. Some of the most important factors that Google looks into in order to rank your site are some of the following, user experience, on-page SEO, site speed, mobile-friendliness, internal link structure, structured markups, all these things impact your ranking, and there are hundreds of other factors that Google includes in their algorithm

And WordPress SEO plugins can help a ton to master on-page SEO tasks like titles, meta tags, and other content-optimization-related things. Now, plugins are also amazing for technical SEO tasks, like page speed optimization, redirects, canonicals, and so on.

So, today I’m gonna share with you 7 best WordPress SEO plugins that’ll help you do all of these things, plus more, in a really easy and controlled way.

1. Really Simple SSL

[appbox wordpress screenshots really-simple-ssl]

The first Best WordPress SEO plugins is  90% of websites that rank at the top have SSL installed. It’s pretty much become a prerequisite if you want to rank well, so use the SSL.

It doesn’t have to be through this plugin. Maybe your host provides it, maybe your domain provider provides it, whatever it may be you want a secure site, and what you’ll find is some browsers even notify users, saying “Hey, this site isn’t secure,”.

And that’ll cause people to bounce back, get away from your site, and over time that could decrease your rankings. You want to make sure you have SSL, it’s that important.

2. Rank Math

[appbox wordpress screenshots seo-by-rank-math]

The best WordPress SEO plugins I recommend is Rank Math. You might be more familiar with household names like Yoast SEO and All-in-one SEO pack. These are two great options, but in my opinion, a newer plugin called Rank Math beats both of them hands down.

Rank Math is an all-in-one SEO plugin that can help you with a ton of on-page and technical SEO tasks.

Something I love about this plugin is that they’ve basically integrated a lot of features from smaller one-trick plugins like 34 Detailed SEO Tests, Advanced SEO Analysis Tool, Google Schema Markup aka Rich Snippets Integrated, Deep Content Analysis Tests, Linking Suggestions, 404 Monitor, SEO Optimized Breadcrumbs, Smart Redirection Manager, Google Keyword Ranking and more.

3. W3 Total Cache

[appbox wordpress screenshots w3-total-cache]

Load time is super important, especially because people are using mobile devices now. Yes, there’s 4G, there’s 5G, you know, LTE, whatever you wind up calling it, but the problem with mobile devices is if you’re in a place that doesn’t have the best reception I don’t care if you have a 5G phone, you’re not gonna load websites really fast.

The W3 Total Cache plugin, it ensures that your site will load as fast as you possibly can.

It’ll improve load times, it’ll help you connect with CDNs, minification of CSS, HTML, and Javascript, combining scripts, it makes better use of your server resources so that way your server doesn’t have to continue to push the same content over and over again.

Instead, it caches it so it can deliver it to the user as quickly as possible, and if you have a really good hosting provider they have caching built-in, but most of the hosting providers that I’ve seen don’t have to cache built-in, hence I’m recommending the W3 Total Cache plugin.

Alternative: WP Fastest Cache.

4. A3 Lazy Load

[appbox wordpress screenshots a3-lazy-load]

A3 Lazy Load for images, videos, iframes. Instantly improve your site’s load time and dramatically improve site users experience. This basically means that an image or media item won’t load until the user scrolls to it, allowing the page to load much faster.

It’s literally plug-and-play as long as you don’t have any other conflicting scripts or plugins.

4. ShortPixel

[appbox wordpress screenshots shortpixel-image-optimiser]

This tool compresses images, making large image files smaller and the result is going to be faster load times. To set it up, just sign up for a free account at ShortPixel and then enter your API key in the settings.

And with a free account, you’ll get 100 free image compressions each month or you can pay for credits if you need more. Here you’ll have a few options for compression type Lossy, Lossless, and Glossy.

Using Lossy will offer the best compression rate, while Lossless will give you the best quality photos. Now, Glossy is somewhere in between, which is a nice balance in my opinion.

If you already have images uploaded on your site, just hover over media, and select bulk ShortPixel. You can then optimize all images on your site with the click of a button.

Alternative: Smush

5. Easy Table of Contents

[appbox wordpress screenshots easy-table-of-contents]

Another WordPress SEO plugins is Easy Table of Contents. This plugin allows you to create a table of contents for each post or page in just a few clicks.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, go to your post and scroll down to the Table of contents section. Just hit the “Insert table of contents” checkbox and publish or update your post. It’ll then automatically include a table of contents based on your heading tags.

Now, if you have a super-long post with a bunch of headings and subheadings and tick mark on all subheadings like this:

The result is shown in an article like this,

you might want to clean this up a bit. So this time, I’ll set it to only create a table of contents based on H2 tags.

And I’ll update the page. And as you can see,

it looks much cleaner and more user friendly for visitors to navigate around the page. Now, since a table of contents makes long pages look less daunting, it can help improve things like time on page, bounce rate, and dwell time. Plus, it can help you win jump links in the SERP, which may help increase your CTR.

6. Sucuri

[appbox wordpress screenshots sucuri-scanner]

If your website gets hacked, your rankings and traffic will tank, and when it tanks and you fix it it’s hard to recover. Sucuri helps prevent you from getting hacked.

It’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s better than nothing. The last thing you want to do is get your site hacked and lose all your traffic.

I’ve seen this time and time again, someone gets hacked and they figure it out after a week or two, their rankings tank, they fixed it, and they don’t recover in 30 days.

Eventually, they recover, sometimes it takes two months, sometimes three months, if they’re lucky it happens quickly. And they’re like, “Hey, my business is in the shitter. “I’m losing a lot of money all “because of this one silly thing.” Make sure you don’t get hacked.

7. AMP

[appbox wordpress screenshots accelerated-mobile-pages]

The last WordPress SEO plugins is, AMP for WordPress. This helps with mobile users. If you want to rank really high you want to get in on Google News, you want to make sure that your site has the AMP framework.

In other words, your tech space articles loads really fast, Google just posts it on their end, they’re leveraging their own framework.

I found that in the United States by leveraging the AMP framework I didn’t really get much more mobile traffic, but other countries where mobile devices and infrastructure isn’t as good, such as Brazil, I saw a huge increase in mobile traffic by just leveraging this plugin.

Conclusion:

So, use these 7 best WordPress SEO plugins, you’ll find that your rankings will start going up over time, especially if you haven’t used any of them, but when you start combining all of them it does help quite a bit.

Plugins are great because it allows you to do complex things without any coding. Read this post 23 Best WordPress Plugins for Business Websites in 2021, it helps you to build a more effective, fast, and secure WordPress website.