Search Engine Optimization is a factor that every single website owner/blogger needs to take into consideration. As search engine traffic represents one of the largest sources of traffic for most WordPress websites and blogs, it’s very important that a website owner/blogger take into account the correct types of WordPress plugins that can generally improve success from search engine traffic and blog content.
Let us first review a few important Google Ranking Factors 2023 before choosing WordPress SEO plugins:
- Direct website visits
- Time on site
- Pages per session
- Bounce rate
- Total referring domains
- Total Backlinks
- Total referring IPs
- Total follow-backlinks
- Content length
- Website security (HTTPS)
- Total anchors
- Keywords on the page
- Video on page
Then check out this hand-picked collection of 36+ BEST, up-to-date, and proven WordPress plugins to improve your site’s ranking:
Originally Published Dec 2017, updated Apr 03 2023
Table of contents:
- All-in-one SEO Plugins
- Internal Link Plugins
- Page Speed Optimization Plugins
- Security Plugins
- Social Media Plugins
- Structured Data Plugins
- Table Of Contents Plugins
- Sitemap Generators
- 404/301 Redirect Plugins
- Keyword Plugins
All-in-one SEO Plugins:
All-in-one SEO plugins that are especially suitable for beginners and senior bloggers to boost the search rankings with a single plugin.
1. Yoast SEO
Total downloads: 5,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 27,500+
This stands as one of the most popular WordPress plug-ins currently for bloggers and it’s one of the best ways that you can optimize every post on your blog. Yoast SEO can turn almost anyone into an SEO expert with ongoing alerts on how every post can be improved. Yoast recognizes elements in posts such as how to write a proper meta-description, how to identify various keywords or improve keywords and how you can format your post with full custom titles, sitemaps, image tags and more.
Main Features:
- Snippet preview
- Page Analysis
- Technical WordPress SEO
- XML Sitemaps
- Customizable Meta and Link elements
- RSS Optimization
- Breadcrumbs
- Social integration
- Multi-site compatible
- Multi-languages
2. All in One SEO Pack
Total downloads: 3,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 3,100+
Yet another generic, multi-functional, and commonly used WordPress SEO plugin. It is a great alternative to the Yoast SEO plugin that is easy and works out of the box for WordPress beginners.
Key features:
- Google AMP.
- Google XML Sitemap.
- Google Analytics.
- Image XML Sitemap.
- Automatically notifies search engines.
- Site performance optimizer.
- Automatically generates Meta tags.
- 57+ languages.
- Much more…
3. Rank Math
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 5,500+
Rank Math is a revolutionary SEO plugin that combines the features of many SEO tools in a single package & helps you multiply your traffic.
Key features:
- Clean, & Simple User Interface
- Optimal Settings Pre-Selected
- Simple Setup Wizard
- Compatibility Check
- Auto Canonical URLs
- LSI Keyword Tool Integrated
- Google Search Console Integration
- Google Keyword Ranking
- Import Other Plugin Settings
- 1 Click Import From Yoast SEO Plugin
- 1 Click Import From AIO SEO
- 1 Click Import From All In One Schema Rich Snippets
- 1 Click Import From SEOPress
- 1 Click Import From Redirection Plugin
- Role Manager
- ACF Support
- AMP Ready
- bbPress & BuddyPress Modules
- Google Schema Markup Integrated
- Article Rich Snippet
- Review Rich Snippet
- Book Rich Snippet
- Course Rich Snippet
- Event Rich Snippet
- Job Posting Rich Snippet
- Local Business Rich Snippet
- 193 Local Business Types
- Music Rich Snippet
- Person Rich Snippet
- Product Rich Snippet
- Recipe Rich Snippet
- Restaurant Rich Snippet
- Service Rich Snippet
- Software Application Rich Snippet
- Video Rich Snippet
- Social Media Optimization
- Add Overlay Icons On Social Images
- Default OpenGraph Thumbnail
- Auto Facebook Open Graph
- Facebook Authorship
- Facebook Open Graph for Homepage
- Automatic Twitter Meta Cards
- Twitter Card for Homepage
- Default Twitter Card Type
- Social Previews
- More Website Verification Options
- Google+ Page URL for SERPs
- LinkedIn Page URL for SERPs
- Instagram Page URL for SERPs
- YouTube Page URL for SERPs
- Pinterest Page URL for SERPs
- SoundCloud Page URL for SERPs
- Tumblr Page URL for SERPs
- Myspace Page URL for SERPs
- Add Knowledge Graph
- Represent site as a Person
- Represent site as a Company
- Set a Site Logo
- Advanced SEO Analysis Tool
- 34 Detailed SEO Tests
- SEO Analysis Score
- Automated Image SEO
- Powerful Post Optimization
- Add SEO Meta Box to all post types
- Bulk Edit Titles & Descriptions
- Post Preview on Google
- Content Analysis
- Control SEO For Single Pages
- Control The Title
- Control Meta Description
- Auto Add Additional Meta Data
- Control ROBOTS Meta
- Choose a Primary Category
- Single Post/page Optimization
- Focus Keyword
- Google Keyword Suggestion
- Optimize UNLIMITED Keywords (5 by default)
- Choose Pillar Posts & Pages
- Internal Linking Suggestions
- Capitalize Titles
- SEO Failed Tests
- SEO Warnings
- XML Sitemap (New!)
- Module Based System
- Choose Any Separator Character
- Modify Global Meta
- Search Engine Verification Tools
- Bing Site Verification
- Baidu Site Verification
- Alexa Site Verification
- Yandex Site Verification
- Google Site Verification
- Pinterest Site Verification
- Norton Safe Web Site Verification
- Advanced Redirection Manager
- Smart & Automatic Post Redirects
- 301 Redirection Type
- 302 Redirection Type
- 307 Redirection Type
- 410 Redirection Type
- 451 Redirection Type
- Support for REGEX
- Debug Redirections
- Simple 404 Monitor
- Advanced 404 Monitor
- Advanced SEO Breadcrumbs
- Auto Show SEO Breadcrumbs
- Advanced Link Options
- Nofollow All External Image Links
- Nofollow All External Links
- Open External Links in New Tab/Window
- Redirect Attachments to Parent
- Strip Category Base
- Remove Stopwords from Permalinks
- Ping Search Engines
- Local SEO Optimization
- Contact Info Shortcode
- Deep Support For WooCommerce SEO
- Compatible for EDD SEO
- Only 30k Lines of Code
- PSR-4 Coding Standards (wherever possible)
- Optimize Different Archives
- Optimize Author Archive Pages
- Optimize Date Archive Pages
- Optimize Archive Pages
- .htaccess Editor
- Robots.txt Editor
- Import/Export Settings
- Import/Export Redirections
- Add Content Before the RSS Feed
- Add Content After the RSS Feed
4. SEOPress, on-site SEO
Total downloads: 200,000+
Five Star Ratings: 800+
A powerful WordPress SEO plugin to optimize your SEO, boost your traffic, improve social sharing, build custom HTML and XML Sitemaps, create optimized breadcrumbs, add schemas / Google Structured data types, manage 301 redirections and so much more.
Features:
- Installation wizard to quickly setup your site
- Content analysis with unlimited keywords to help you write optimized content for search engines
- Mobile / Desktop Google Preview to see how your post will looks like in Google search results
- Facebook & Twitter Social Preview to see how your post will looks like on social media to increase conversions
- Titles (with dynamic variables: custom fields, terms taxonomie…)
- Meta descriptions (with dynamic variables too)
- Open Graph and Twitter Cards to improve social media sharing (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp…)
- Google Knowledge Graph
- Google Analytics and Matomo with downloads tracking, custom dimensions, ip anonymization, remarketing, demographics and interest reporting, cross-domain tracking…(GDPR compatibility)
- Custom Canonical URL
- Meta robots (noindex, nofollow, noodp, noimageindex, noarchive, nosnippet)
- Build your custom XML Sitemap to improve search indexing
- Image XML Sitemaps to improve search indexing for Google Images
- Build your custom HTML Sitemap to enhanced navigation for visitors and improve search indexing
- Link your social media accounts to your site
- Redirections in post, pages, custom post types
- Remove /category/ in URLs
- Remove ?replytocom to avoid duplicate content
- Redirect attachment pages to post parent
- Redirect attachment pages to their file URL
- Image SEO: Automatically set the image title / alt / caption / description
- Import / Export settings from site to site.
- Import posts and terms metadata from Yoast SEO, All In One SEO, SEO Framework, Rank Math, SEO Ultimate, WP Meta SEO, Premium SEO Pack and Squirrly
Internal Link Plugins:
User the following plugin to build SEO-friendly internal links in your posts or pages. Also can be used to decrease Bounce Rate, increased Time On Site, and improve Pages Per Session.
1. Broken Link Checker
Total downloads: 700,000+
Five Star Ratings: 490+
Broken Link Checker monitors and tests all internal links & external links on your site looking for broken links. It helps you fix bad links to improve SEO and user experience.
Features:
- Monitors external links and internal links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
- Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects.
- Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
- Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
- Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
- You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on.
- Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post.
- Highly configurable.
2. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 800+
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) displays pages, posts, and custom post types related to the current entry, introducing your readers to other relevant content on your site.
Features:
- Thumbnail or list view of related content.
- Related posts, pages, and custom post types.
- Templating: The YARPP templating system gives you advanced control of how your results are displayed.
- An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies, YARPP finds related content from across your site. Learn More.
- Related posts in feeds: Display related posts in RSS feeds with custom display options.
3. Internal Link Juicer: SEO Auto Linker for WordPress
Total downloads: 20,000+
Five Star Ratings: 220+
Internal Link Juicer is the state-of-the-art solution for building internal links within post content. It works by using an intelligent per-post configuration of your desired keywords. Overall, it improves your on-page SEO and your user experience (UX) by pointing out the right content for the given context.
Features:
- Maximum diversification: With the intelligent placeholder feature, anchor texts can be diversified and the amount of possible links boosted with little effort. This also ensures a natural linking behavior.
- Automation: You don’t have to link your pages manually every time you create a new post. Once your keywords are configured, links will get built automatically.
- Full control over linking pages: Individual posts that shouldn’t contain generated links can be added to the blacklist. Post types, which should be used for linking, can be whitelisted. These options give you full control over the plugin.
- Customize your link output: With the possibility of our predefined template tags, link output can be completely individualized. This lets you customize generated links for your individual context.
- Configurable linking behavior: Link counts per page, as well as links per target URL and linking behavior for targeted keywords, can be flexibly configured using the options. You’ll have full control for every use case.
- Stay in the loop: Despite our “set and forget” approach and the automation that goes with it, you’ll never lose track of what’s going on within the filterable and sortable statistic dashboard.
- Perfect workflow: The plugins keyword panel in the post editor guarantees an efficient and stress-free workflow.
- Best possible performance: With the high-performance index structure, you’re guaranteed a fast rendering of your pages on the frontend. You don’t have to worry about delays in building internal links.
Page Speed Optimization Plugins:
Fast Page = Better User Experience = High Ranking!
Page Speed is considered one of the most important factors in today’s search engine optimization. Use the following plugins to reduce the page size and boost the page load time.
1. WP-Optimize
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,800+
WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency.
Features:
- Removes all unnecessary data (e.g. trashed/unapproved/spam comments, stale data) plus pingbacks, trackbacks and expired transient options
- Compact/de-fragment MySQL tables with a button-press
- Detailed control of which optimizations you wish to carry out
- Carries out automatic weekly (or otherwise) clean-ups
- Retains a set number of weeks’ data during clean-ups
- Performs optimizations without the need for running manual queries
- Automatically trigger a pre-optimize backup via UpdraftPlus (https://updraftplus.com)
- Show database statistics and potential savings
- Mobile friendly and easy-to-use
- Translated into several languages
2. Autoptimize
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,200+
The WordPress plugin improves your blog’s speed by minifying and caching scripts and styles, injecting CSS in the page head by default and moving and deferring scripts to the footer. It also minifies the HTML code itself, making your page really lightweight.
WordPress Caching Plugins:
1. LiteSpeed Cache
Total downloads: 4,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 2,100+
LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin, featuring an exclusive server-level cache and a collection of optimization features.
LSCWP supports WordPress Multisite and is compatible with most popular plugins, including WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO.
Features:
- Free QUIC.cloud CDN Cache
- Object Cache (Memcached/LSMCD/Redis) Support+
- Image Optimization (Lossless/Lossy)
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Minify inline CSS/JS
- Combine CSS/JS
- Automatically generate Critical CSS
- Lazyload images/iframes
- Responsive Image Placeholders
- Multiple CDN Support+
- Load CSS/JS Asynchronously
- Browser Cache Support+
- Database Cleaner and Optimizer
- PageSpeed score optimization
- OPcode Cache Support+
- HTTP/2 Push for CSS/JS (on web servers that support it)
- DNS Prefetch
- Cloudflare API
- Single Site and Multisite (Network) support
- Import/Export settings
- Attractive, easy-to-understand interface
- WebP image format support
- Heartbeat control
- Automatic page caching to greatly improve site performance
- Automatic purge of related pages based on certain events
- Private cache for logged-in users
- Caching of WordPress REST API calls
- Separate caching of desktop and mobile views
- Ability to schedule purge for specified URLs
- WooCommerce and bbPress support
- WordPress CLI commands
- API system for easy cache integration
- Exclude from cache by URI, Category, Tag, Cookie, User Agent
- Smart preload crawler with support for SEO-friendly sitemap
- Multiple crawlers for cache varies
- HTTP/2 support
- HTTP/3 & QUIC support
- ESI (Edge Side Includes) support*
- Widgets and Shortcodes as ESI blocks*
2. WP Super Cache
Total downloads: 2,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 900+
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users:
- Users who are not logged in.
- Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
- Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.
99% of your visitors will be served static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them.
3. W3 Total Cache
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 5,100+
The #1 caching plugin for WordPress. W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
Features:
- Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
- Transparent content delivery network (CDN) management with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
- Mobile support: respective caching of pages by referrer or groups of user agents including theme switching for groups of referrers or user agents
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support
- Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on (FSD) CDN (by user agent group)
- Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
- Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN
- Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
- Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
- Caching of objects in memory or on disk
- Caching of fragments in memory or on disk
- Caching methods include local Disk, Redis, Memcached, APC, APCu, eAccelerator, XCache, and WinCache
- Minify CSS, Minify JavaScript and Minify HTML with granular control
- Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
- Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript with automated updates to assets
- Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS with automated updates to assets
- Defer non critical CSS and Javascript for rendering pages faster than ever before
- Defer offscreen images using Lazy Load to improve the user experience
- Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag) with “cache-busting”
- JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location control
- Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
- Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)
- Leverage our multiple CDN integrations to optimize images
- WP-CLI support for cache purging, query string updating and more
- Various security features to help ensure website safety
- Caching statistics for performance insights of any enabled feature
- Extension framework for customization or extensibility for Cloudflare, WPML and much more
- Reverse proxy integration via Nginx or Varnish
Image Optimization Plugins:
1. Smush – Compress, Optimize and Lazy Load Images
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 5,800+
Smush is an All-In-One image optimization plugin to compress & resize images on upload and lazy load images on your WordPress website.
Features:
- Lossless Compression – Strip unused data without affecting image quality
- Lazy Load – Defer offscreen images with the flip of a switch
- Bulk Smush – Optimize up to 50 images with one click
- Image Resizing – Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed
- Incorrect Size Image Detection – Quickly locate images that are slowing down your site
- Directory Smush – Optimize images even if they are not located in the media library
- Automated Optimization – Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload
- Without Monthly Limits – Optimize all of your images up to 5MB in size free forever (no daily, monthly, or annual caps)
- Gutenberg Block Integration – View all Smush stats directly in image blocks
- Multisite Compatible – Both global and individual Multisite settings
- Process All Your Files – Smush will process PNG, JPEG and GIF files for optimum results
- Super Servers – Smush images with no slowdown using WPMU DEV’s fast, reliable Smush API
2. EWWW Image Optimizer
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,500+
EWWW Image Optimizer helps you make your site faster, improve your bounce rate, and boost your SEO. But most importantly, make your visitors happier so they keep coming back for more.
With EWWW IO you can optimize all your existing images, from any plugin, and then let EWWW IO take care of new image uploads automatically.
Features:
- No Speed Limits and unlimited file size.
- Smooth Handling with pixel-perfect optimization using industry-leading tools and progressive rendering.
- High Torque as we bring you the best compression/quality ratio available with our Premium compression for JPG, PNG, and PDF files.
- Adaptive Steering with intelligent conversion options to get the right image format for the job (JPG, PNG, GIF, or WebP).
- Free Parking The core plugin is free and always will be. However, our paid services offer up to 80% compression, and a host of other features!
- Comprehensive Coverage: no image gets left behind, optimize everything on your site, not just the WordPress Media Library.
- Safety First: all communications are secured with top SSL encryption.
- Roadside Assistance: top-notch support is in our DNA. While API customers get top priority, we answer every single support question with care.
- Pack a Spare: free image backups store your original images for 30 days.
3. Imagify Image Optimizer
Total downloads: 700,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,300+
Imagify Image Optimizer plugin allows you to compress large images without losing quality on client side.
Features:
- 3 optimization levels: Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra.
- Automatically optimizes images on upload.
- Automatically resizes large images.
- Keeps EXIF data from images.
Security Plugins:
A study shows that site security directly affects SEO.
Use one of these security plugins to protect your website and boost SEO rankings.
You can find more on our WordPress Security Plugins article.
1. Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan
Total downloads: 4,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 3,800+
This is the most popular WordPress Firewall & Malware Scanner on the web.
Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe. Rounded out by a suite of additional features, Wordfence is the most comprehensive WordPress security solution available.
Firewall Features:
- Web Application Firewall identifies and blocks malicious traffic. Built and maintained by a large team focused 100% on WordPress security.
- [Premium] Real-time firewall rule and malware signature updates via the Threat Defense Feed (free version is delayed by 30 days).
- [Premium] Real-time IP Blacklist blocks all requests from the most malicious IPs, protecting your site while reducing load.
- Protects your site at the endpoint, enabling deep integration with WordPress. Unlike cloud alternatives does not break encryption, cannot be bypassed and cannot leak data.
- Integrated malware scanner blocks requests that include malicious code or content.
- Protection from brute force attacks by limiting login attempts, enforcing strong passwords and other login security measures.
Malware Scan Features:
- Malware scanner checks core files, themes and plugins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects and code injections.
- [Premium] Real-time malware signature updates via the Threat Defense Feed (free version is delayed by 30 days).
- Compares your core files, themes and plugins with what is in the WordPress.org repository, checking their integrity and reporting any changes to you.
- Repair files that have changed by overwriting them with a pristine, original version. Delete any files that don’t belong easily within the Wordfence interface.
- Checks your site for known security vulnerabilities and alerts you to any issues. Also alerts you to potential security issues when a plugin has been closed or abandoned.
- Checks your content safety by scanning file contents, posts and comments for dangerous URLs and suspicious content.
- [Premium] Checks to see if your site or IP have been blacklisted for malicious activity, generating spam or other security issue.
Other tools:
- With Live Traffic, monitor visits and hack attempts not shown in other analytics packages in real time; including origin, their IP address, the time of day and time spent on your site.
- [Premium] Stop brute force attacks permanently by using two factor authentication, one of the most secure forms of remote system authentication available.
- [Premium] Password Audit ensures your passwords are strong by simulating a hack attempt using our password auditing GPU cluster.
- The free version of Wordfence includes an excellent comment spam filter. [Premium] An advanced comment spam filter is automatically enabled for premium customers.
- Block attackers by IP or build advanced rules based on IP Range, Hostname, User Agent and Referrer. [Premium] Country blocking available with Wordfence Premium.
2. iThemes Security
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 3,900+
iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords, and obsolete software.
Features:
- Works to protect your site by blocking bad users and increasing the security of passwords and other vital information.
- Monitors your site and reports changes to the filesystem and database that might indicate a compromise. iThemes Security also works to detect bots and other attempts to search vulnerabilities.
- Hides common WordPress security vulnerabilities, preventing attackers from learning too much about your site and away from sensitive areas like your site’s login, admin, etc.
- Makes regular backups of your WordPress database, allowing you to get back online quickly in the event of an attack. Use iThemes Security to create and email database backups on a customizable schedule.
3. All In One WP Security & Firewall
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,300+
An easy-to-use, feature-rich WordPress Security and Firewall plugin.
Features:
- User login security.
- User account security.
- System file security.
- A lot of firewall protection
- Blacklist.
- Database security.
- Mu
- And many more…
Table Of Contents Plugins:
A table of contents lets your visitors quickly navigate between content sections within your long post/article. This can help improve user experience and build internal links to boost your search engine rankings.
You can find more in our 5 Best Table Of Contents Plugins article.
1. Easy Table of Contents
Total downloads: 300,000+
Five Star Ratings: 150+
A user friendly, featured focused plugin which allows you to insert a table of contents into your posts, pages and custom post types.
Features:
- Automatically generate a table of contents for your posts, pages and custom post types by parsing its contents for headers.
- Optionally enable for pages and/or posts. Custom post types are supported, as long as their content is output with the
the_content()template tag. - Optionally auto insert the table of contents into the page, selectable by enabled post type.
- Provides many easy to understand options to configure when and where to insert the table of contents.
- Many options are available to configure how the inserted table of contents appears which include several builtin themes. If the supplied themes do no meet you needs, you can create your own by choosing you own colors for the border, background and link color.
- Multiple counter bullet formats to choose from; none, decimal, numeric and roman.
- Choose to display the table of contents hierarchical or not. This means headings of lower priority will be nested under headings of higher priority.
- User can optionally hide the table of contents. You full control of this feature. It can be disabled and you can choose to have it hidden by default.
- Supports smooth scrolling.
- Selectively enable or disabled the table of contents on a post by post basis.
- Choose which headings are used to generate the table of contents. This too can be set on a post by post basis.
- Easily exclude headers globally and on a post by post basis.
- If you rather not insert the table of contents in the post content, you can use the supplied widget and place the table of contents in your theme’s sidebar.
- The widgets supports being affixed or stuck on the page so it is always visible as you scroll down the page. NOTE: this is an advanced option since every theme is different, you might need support from your theme developer to learn what the correct item selector to use in the settings to enable this feature.
- The widget auto highlights the sections currently visible on the page. The highlight color is configurable.
2. Table of Contents Plus
Total downloads: 300,000+
Five Star Ratings: 110+
A powerful yet user friendly plugin that automatically creates a context specific index or table of contents (TOC) for long pages (and custom post types).
More than just a table of contents plugin, this plugin can also output a sitemap listing pages and/or categories across your entire site.
Includes an administration options panel where you can customise settings like display position, define the minimum number of headings before an index is displayed, other appearance, and more.
For power users, expand the advanced options to further tweak its behaviour – eg: exclude undesired heading levels like h5 and h6 from being included; disable the output of the included CSS file; adjust the top offset and more. Using shortcodes, you can override default behaviour such as special exclusions on a specific page or even to hide the table of contents altogether.
Easy to implement using shortcodes or as a widget.
3. LuckyWP Table of Contents
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 750+
A highly customizable, SEO-friendly table of contents plugin with Gutenberg, Smooth Scroll, and Auto Insertion support.
Full Features:
- Automatical insertion a table of contents (configure post types and position).
- SEO-friendly: table of contents code is ready to use by Google for snippets on result page.
- Insert by shortcode, Gutenberg block or widget.
- Button on toolbar of the classic editor.
- Gutenberg block into “Common Blocks”.
- Setting the minimum number of headings to display table of contents.
- Setting the depth of headings for table of contents.
- Skip headings by level or text.
- Hierarchical or linear view.
- Numeration items: decimal or roman numbers in order or nested.
- Customizable appearance: width, float, title font size and weight, items font size, colors.
- Color schemes (dark, light, white, transparent, inherit from theme) and the ability to override colors.
- Toggle Show/Hide (optionally)
- Customizable labels.
- Smooth scroll (optionally).
- Setting offset top for smooth scroll.
- Wrap table of contents with <!–noindex–> tag (optionally).
- Pretty hash in URL
- RTL support.
- Available override global settings for a particular post.
- Highly compatible with WordPress themes and plugins.
Social Media Plugins:
Social signal is a proven factor in modern search engine optimization. This article explains What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?
You can find more in our Best Social Sharing Plugins article.
1. AddToAny Share Buttons
Total downloads: 500,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,000+
The #1 social sharing plugin provides various ways to share posts, pages, products on over 100 social media websites.
Features:
- Custom placement and appearance.
- Standard and floating social share buttons with counters.
- Mobile friendly and retina ready.
- Optimized for the latest WordPress.
- Custom social icons & buttons.
2. Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons
Total downloads: 200,000+
Five Star Ratings: 5,200+
A WordPress social sharing which let’s you add share icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom share icons of your choice.
Features:
- Pick from 16 different designs for your social media share icons
- Give several actions to one social media share icon (e.g. your facebook share icon can lead visitors to your Facebook page, and also give visitors the opportunity to like your page)
- Decide to give your social media icons an animation (e.g. automatic shuffling, mouse-over effects) to make your visitors aware of the share icons, increasing the chance that they follow/share your blog
- Make your social media icons ‘float’ or ‘sticky’
- Allow visitors to subscribe to your blog by Email
- Add ‘counts’ to your social media buttons
- Decide to display a pop-up (on all or only on selected pages) asking people to follow/share you via your social media icons
- Decide to display sharing-buttons and social media icons at the end of every post
- Select from many other customization features for your social media icons!
3. Sassy Social Share
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 450+
Sassy Social Share enables your website users to share the content over Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit and over 100 more social sharing and bookmarking services.
This is the Simplest and Smoothest Social Sharing plugin with optimized and great looking vector icons.
Features:
- GDPR Compliant
- Compatible with Gutenberg editor
- Compatible with myCRED (append myCRED referral ID at the end of the url being shared)
- Around 100 Social Sharing/Bookmarking services
- Social Media follow icons (Redirect website visitors to your Social Media pages)
- Share counts are supported for Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Buffer, Reddit, Pinterest, Odnoklassniki, Fintel and Vkontakte
- FREE Icon Customization options
- Options to specify sharing icon shape – Square, Round and Rectangular
- Options to specify sharing icon size – minimum 16 pixels, no upper limit
- Options to specify sharing icon backround color and logo color
- Share counter customization options
- Enable share count cache with option to control cache refresh time-frame
- Enable/Disable vertical/floating sharing interface on mobile device
- Url Shortening Service integration
- Standard and Floating layout for Social Share icons
- Customizable Target Url for Social Sharing
- Rearrange Order of Social Share icons
- Specify Position of Social Sharing Bar with respect to content – Top and Bottom
- Enable/Disable Social Sharing on default/custom post types
- Enable/Disable Social Sharing on individual pages/posts
- Enable/Disable total/individual social share count(s)
- Mobile Responsiveness
- Compatible with AMP
- Enable Social Sharing at WooCommerce products
- Official Like Buttons (Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet, Google +1 etc.)
- Widgets and Shortcodes
- Compatible with BuddyPress, BBPress, WooCommerce
- Multisite Compatible
- Supports HTTPS enabled websites
Structured Data Plugins:
Schema (Structured Data) markup is extremely beneficial for search engines to produce better results on your page. An SEO schema markup is still one of the least used forms of SEO and it can provide a huge boost to your search engine rankings.
You can find more on our Best Structured Data Plugins article.
1. Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 220+
Schema & Structured Data adds Google Rich Snippets markup according to Schema.org guidelines to structure your site for SEO. (AMP Compatible)
Supported Schema & Structured Data types:
- LocalBusiness
- BlogPosting
- News Article
- WebPage
- NewsArticle
- Recipe
- Product
- VideoObject
Features:
- Conditional Display Feilds
- Knowlegde Base Support
- Full AMP Compatiblity
- Unlimited Custom Post Types
- Easy to use with Minimal Settings
- Archive Page Listing Support
- JSON-LD Format
- Easy to use Setup Wizard
- Breadcrumbs Listing Support
2. Open Graph and Twitter Card Tags
Total downloads: 80,000+
Five Star Ratings: 110+
This plugin improves the sharing of your WordPress pages, posts, WooCommerce products, or any other post type on social media, by setting the correct Facebook Open Graph Tags.
It also allows you to add the Twitter Card tags for more effective and efficient Twitter sharing results, as well as the Meta Description and Canonical tags if no other SEO plugin is setting them.
3. Schema
Total downloads: 60,000+
Five Star Ratings: 210+
Super fast, lightweight plugin for adding schema.org structured data markup in recommended JSON-LD format automatically to your WordPress sites.
Enhanced Presentation in Search Results By including structured data appropriate to your content, your site can enhance its search results and presentation.
Key features:
- Easy to use, set it and forget it, with minimal settings.
- Enable Schema types at once per post type or post category.
- Valid markup, test it in Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
- Output JSON-LD format, the most recommended by Google.
- Reuse data saved in post meta, which is created by other plugins.
- Extensible means you can extend its functionality via other plugins, extensions or within your Theme’s functions.php file.
Sitemap Plugins
1. XML Sitemaps
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 2,100+
Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.
With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
2. WP Sitemap Page
Total downloads: 300,000+
Five Star Ratings: 190+
The plugin helps you quickly generate an HTML sitemap and embed into your WordPress website with a shortcode.
Features:
- Display all pages, posts and categories
- Display the Custom Post Type (such as: “event”, “book” …)
- Display the taxonomies
- Display only one kind of content using the attribute “only”
- Possibility to customize the way it will be displayed through the admin panel
- Possibility to exclude some pages or some Custom Post Type (CPT)
- Posts and categories displayed hierarchically
- Has CSS class to customize it if you want
- Available in multi-languages (cf. English, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Czech, Persian …). You can add your own translation if you want
3. XML Sitemap & Google News
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 70+
This plugin dynamically creates dynamic feeds that comply with the XML Sitemap and the Google News Sitemap protocol. Multisite, Polylang and WPML compatible and there are no static files created.
There are options to control which sitemaps are enabled, which Post Types and archive pages (like taxonomy terms and author pages) are included, how Priority and Lastmod are calculated, who to ping and a possibility to set additional robots.txt rules from within the WordPress admin.
Redirect Plugins:
Redirect 404/301/302 error or specific pages to another URL with the following plugins. This could help fix the crawl errors on search engines.
You can find more on our Best WordPress Redirect Plugins article.
301 & 302 Redirect Plugins:
1. Redirection
Total downloads: 5,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 8,000+
A redirection plugin for WordPress that makes it simple to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This can help reduce errors and improve your site ranking.
Features:
- Redirect manager.
- Conditional redirect: Login status, Browser, Referrer, Cookies, HTTP headers and Custom filter.
- Tracks 404 errors.
- Supports both Apache and Nginx.
- Import & export settings.
2. Easy Redirect Manager
Total downloads: 200,000+
Five Star Ratings: 460+
301 Redirects helps you manage and create 301 & 302 redirects for your WordPress site to improve SEO and visitor experience.
With a user-friendly interface, 301 Redirects is easy to install and configure.
Perfect for new sites or repairing links after re-organizing your existing WordPress content, or when your site has content that expires and you wish to avoid sending visitors to a 404 page.
Features:
- Choose from Pages, Posts, Custom Post types, Archives, and Term Archives from dropdown menu
- Or, set a custom destination URL!
- Retain query strings across redirects
- Super-fast redirection
- Import/Export feature for bulk redirects management
- Simple redirect stats so you know how much a redirection is used
3. Simple 301 Redirects
Simple 301 Redirects provides an easy method of redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web. It’s especially handy when you migrate a site to WordPress and can’t preserve your URL structure.
Total downloads: 200,000+
Five Star Ratings: 150+
By setting up 301 redirects from your old pages to your new pages, any incoming links will be seemlessly passed along, and their pagerank (or what-have-you) will be passed along with them.
Database Optimization Plugins:
Database performance is one of the most important factors that affect page speed. Try out these three WordPress plugins to clean up and optimize the database and speed up your WordPress site.
You can find more on our 5 Best & Free WordPress Database Optimization Plugins To Speed Up Your Sites article.
1. WP-Optimize
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 2,000+
WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency.
Features:
- Removes all unnecessary data (e.g. trashed/unapproved/spam comments, stale data) plus pingbacks, trackbacks and expired transient options
- Compact/de-fragment MySQL tables with a button-press
- Detailed control of which optimizations you wish to carry out
- Carries out automatic weekly (or otherwise) clean-ups
- Retains a set number of weeks’ data during clean-ups
- Performs optimizations without the need for running manual queries
- Automatically trigger a pre-optimize backup via UpdraftPlus (https://updraftplus.com)
- Show database statistics and potential savings
- Mobile friendly and easy-to-use
- Translated into several languages
2. Advanced Database Cleaner
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,100+
This plugin was created by Younes JFR and it performs a number of automatic checks to complete a full-on database cleanup. You might be surprised to know that your database is filled up with a series of old drafts, spam comments that haven’t been deleted and more.
This cleaner can work to regularly clear out almost every aspect of these bulk files which are not benefiting your website in any way. This is one of the most advanced database cleaners available on the WordPress network and it performs a variety of functions that would regularly take hours for a user.
Features:
- Delete old revisions of posts and pages
- Delete old drafts of posts and pages
- Delete old auto drafts
- Delete pending comments
- Delete spam comments
- Delete trash comments
- Delete orphan postmeta
- Delete orphan commentmeta
- Delete orphan relationships
- Delete orphan dashboard transient feeds
- You can choose what items to clean-up
- You can schedule your database clean up to run automatically
- Optimize database and improve website speed
- You can schedule your database optimization to run automatically
- View and clean cron tasks (scheduled tasks)
- View and clean tables
- View and clean options
- Supports multisite installation
3. Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 170+
A popular ‘one-click’ plugin to clean and optimize your WordPress database.
Features:
- Deletes revisions of posts, pages and / or custom post types (you optionally can keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions and you can choose to delete revisions older than…)
- Deletes trashed posts, pages and comments (optional)
- Deletes spammed comments (optional)
- Deletes unused tags (optional)
- Deletes ‘expired or all transients’ (optional)
- Deletes ‘pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’ (optional)
- Deletes ‘orphan postmeta items’
- Optimizes the database tables (optionally you can exclude certain tables, or even specific posts/pages, from optimization)
- Creates a log file of the optimizations (optional)
- Optimization can be scheduled to automatically run once hourly, twice daily, once daily or once weekly at a specific time (optional)
- ‘Optimize DB (1 click)’ link in the admin bar (optional)
- ‘Optimize Database’ Icon in the admin menu (optional)
- MULTISITE compatible: optimizes all sites in the network with one click
Conclusion:
Consider some of these top SEO plugins for installation with your WordPress blog if you would like to have improved success with search engine traffic on your blog. If you are dedicated to improving your search engine marketing and the traffic for your website, these plugins could be an excellent starting point.
