With over 22 million live websites built on WordPress[1], it is the most popular CMS available today. With thousands of themes available for free and to buy, it has never been easier to get set up with your very own website. But with millions of websites currently live, almost all niches are saturated and it’s more important than ever to ensure your website is the one that is found organically. We’ve curated 5 WordPress plugins that we believe are essential to getting your website off to the best start in 2019.
1. Yoast
Yoast needs no introduction to most, it is essential for ensuring your on-page content is properly optimised and within Google guidelines. Yoast will allow you to create unique Page Titles and Meta Descriptions as well as view readability scores and assign canonical tags to your pages. You can also assign a keyphrase to a page and check how well that keyphrase is optimised on your page.
Check out Yoast here: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
2. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a caching plugin which allows you to serve static HTML files to users rather than your website having to process the larger WordPress PHP scripts. What this means is that your web page will load much quicker than it usually would, giving you a quicker load time and allowing users to engage with content quicker, it also means you’ll be getting a better speed score from Google, something we know can affect how you perform in the SERPs.
See more about WP Super Cache here: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
3. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker is exactly that. A plugin which will check your pages, posts and pretty much everything else to scan for broken links. Having broken links on your website is not just bad for Google but also for user experience. It happens to all of us at some point and is incredibly frustrating, usually enough for a user to click off your website right? Once the checker has followed all the links you can either edit the URL or remove the link completely.
Install the Broken Link Checker here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/
4. Smush Image Compressor
Smush Image Compressor is another great plugin to be using on your website, especially if your website is image heavy. Smush will automatically optimise images on upload to WordPress, ensuring your images have as small a file size as possible. Large image sizes are one of the most common problems we come across on websites and are one of the main contributors to slow loading pages so it’s essential to ensure you’re optimising images and compressing them.
Find out more about Smush here: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
5. Autoptimize
Autoptimize is a tool which will optimise your websites coding. It concatenates all scripts and styles and will also minify and cache scripts This helps to reduce your websites HTML size and like Super Cache it helps load the page faster, making the site better for users and also giving you better scores in the all important page speed testing tool.
Check out Autoptimize here: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/
Conclusion
These plugins will help you get off the ground with your WordPress website’s SEO in 2019. If you need help getting more organic traffic to your website then take a look at our SEO services and get in touch with one of the team today and see how Anicca can help your business grow.
