Technical SEO plugins for WordPress
There are a lot of different SEO plugins available for WordPress. If you’re not a technical SEO expert or WordPress professional, it can be challenging to decide which ones are the best for your website.
No need to fret! Let’s take a look at my current favorite WordPress plugins that can help with SEO, specifically with technical SEO.
The SEO Framework
We’ve used plugins like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO in the past. A few years back, we switched to The SEO Framework for a few reasons:
- It’s lightweight, which helps with load time, part of technical SEO
- It doesn’t pop up all over the backend of WordPress, confusing our clients
- It doesn’t make SEO content suggestions our team disagrees with
- It has the quickest configuration of any general technical SEO plugin we’ve used
There are paid packages available that include additional extensions, but more likely than not, the free option will be enough for you.
WebP Converter for Media
Google has been pushing the use of WebP images for a while now. WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
Websites that use WebP have a smaller page size than those that don’t. That means faster load times, which means a better user experience and higher ranking in Google.
After activating this plugin, you can convert all your images to WebP. Best of all, if the original was smaller than the WebP version, it will switch it back. Then as you upload new images, it will convert them automatically, check the file size of each, then use the smaller one.
Autoptimize
This is my favorite option for a caching and a minification plugin. Autoptimize speeds up your website by optimizing CSS, JavaScript, images, and Google Fonts. It can also minify HTML code.
You’ll need to do extensive testing as you adjust settings in Autoptimze. Once you have it configured, though, it can make a huge difference in your website’s speed.
Async Javascript
Async Javascript speeds up your website by asynchronously loading JavaScript files. That means that instead of loading all the JavaScript files at the beginning, which impacts something Google calls Core Web Vitals, it will load them one at a time, following Google’s recommended best practice.
This can make a big difference in your website’s speed, especially if you have a lot of JavaScript files. The downside is that it can sometimes break things. So just like the Autoptimize plugin, be sure to test extensively every time you change a setting.
Of course, there are a lot of great SEO plugins out there that can help with your website’s technical SEO. These are my current favorites that help with technical SEO. Of course, you’ll also want to start on a good foundation with a solid, SEO-friendly theme.
If you need help with SEO or picking the right WordPress theme and plugins for your website, we’re here to help. Feel free to reach out, and we can talk to see if we are a good fit for you.