WordPress Essentials: 6 Plugins to Improve your Website’s Speed and SEO
Your website’s speed and SEO play a crucial role in your online business development as they both in some way determine your revenue. In fact, there is a shocking relation between page load speed and conversion rates on a website, especially when it comes to eCommerce pages. A study by Web Performance Today, for example, showed that just one second delay can result in a conversion decrease of 3.5%.
Of course, the actual figure for your site could be much greater, which is why you definitely don’t want to lag behind. Time IS money, after all. So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at some of the most affordable, but at the same time useful and versatile speed and search engine optimization plugins that will surely improve your WordPress user experience. We will first cover speed plugins, so – buckle up!
Speed Optimization
WP Super Cache – One of the most popular and widely used caching plugins available for WordPress, WP Super Cache is extremely user-friendly, quite easy and straight forward to setup, while it also has some features and settings for a bit more advanced users, which can be used to get even more out of this plugin. It features: Support for multiple caching types (Mod_Rewrite, PHP and Legacy), Serve static html files and Cache preload, CDN support.
W3 Total Cache – Another excellent WordPress speed enhancing plugin, but W3 Total Cache will take you even further and beyond simple caching improvement as W3 offers a complete and full-fledged framework. There’s even advanced support for CloudFlare and many CDN services, and with W3 Total Cache you will experience a major speed increase by enabling just the basic settings. Advanced users, on the other hand, will of course be able to get much better performances out of this awesome plugin. W3 features: CDN Support, Browser caching, Database caching, Object caching and Minifying.
Quick Cache – This powerful plugin is pretty easy to set up, so you can get up and running in a matter of minutes. With this useful add-on one is able to make sure that cached versions of pages are not served to logged in users or users that have recently left some comments. Quite helpful indeed. Quick Cache features: Simple installation, Support for GZIP compression, GET Request options, Set expiration times, Client-side cache support.
SEO Improving Plugins
Yoast – Perhaps the best free SEO plugin for WordPress available out there, Yoast takes care of almost all aspects of your WordPress blog’s SEO. With this all-round SEO plugin one can add meta value for homepage, add meta value for single post, manage social SEO, create sitemap file, edit robots.txt and .htaccess, and control indexing of your blog. It also integrates features from other popular plugins like Robots meta and RSS footer, so, what we are basically trying to say here is that if you haven’t used Yoast SEO plugin so far, it’s high time you started.
Social SEO Pro – This excellent add-on was one of the most popular in 2014, and it is still holding up quite nicely. The social SEO is the way to go if you are looking to make your blog stand out from all the other ones on the social networks, and we all know how difficult that can be. Similar to Yoast, Social SEO Pro has quite a few features which allow you to integrate social SEO on your blog, including the ability to write unique titles for every social network.
SEO Smart Link – This WordPress plugin provides you with the ability to automatically link your keywords to any post link, which is a slam dunk for on-page optimization. Once you find your site’s high ranking keywords, you can easily boost your site’s ranking, however, before you use this plugin, you need to be certain of your internal linking and be aware of Google’s linking algorithm. This can be done manually via another useful add-on called WordPress Insight plugin.
If you have some other equally useful and potent plugins that will boost your WordPress page speed and improve its performance by clever SEO, be a dear and mention them in the comments section.
