11 Must-Have Free WordPress Plugins to Improve SEO

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Are you searching for ways to boost your WordPress website's SEO?

WordPress has several free plugins that can optimize your website for search engines. But with so many alternatives, how can you decide which plugin is the best fit for your website?

In this post, we've compiled a list of the top 11 free WordPress plugins that will help you improve your website's Technical SEO, On-page SEO, mobile SEO, and so much more.

If you need guidance on WordPress SEO, get in touch with our experts.

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1. Yoast SEO

2. ExactMetrics Google Analytics Dashboard

3. WP FormsWPForms

4. W3 Total Cache

5. Broken Link Checker

1. Yoast SEO

It's one of the most popular WordPress plugins for SEO optimization. It offers a wide range of features, including helping you optimize your content for keywords, create XML sitemaps, and analyse your website's readability and structure.

It's easy to use and can help improve your website's rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). Once installed, it examines the content on your website pages and provides you with recommendations to boost your website’s SEO ranking.

Features:

All the requirements to begin ranking in search engines.
Automatically handles all technical SEO for your website.
Be the first to use new tools and features before anybody else.
Make your website user-friendly by focusing on the proper keywords.
Get previews for sharing on Facebook and Twitter.
Lets you configure page titles, descriptions, and keywords.
Quality of the content and writing suggestions for links.
Examines the content on your website pages and provides you with recommendations to boost your website SEO ranking.

2. ExactMetrics Google Analytics Dashboard

This plugin allows you to access Google Analytics reports within your WordPress admin panel. Why is that important? Because it helps you track your website traffic, what's popular on your website, and where the traffic is coming from. You don't need to switch between different platforms to see the data. It gives you insights to tailor your content specifically to the target audience and improve search engine visibility.

Features:

With only a few clicks, accurately configure all robust Google Analytics features (without paying a developer)
Easy Google Analytics Dashboard - View your Google Analytics reports with useful insights directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Support for Google Analytics 4 - Set up and submit accurate website tracking data to Google Analytics 4 with ease.
Track website data in both Universal Analytics (GA 3) and Google Analytics 4 with ease using dual tracking (Universal Analytics 3 and GA 4).
Real-time statistics - Find out who is visiting your website, what they are doing, where they are coming from, how they found it, and other useful information.

Dive Deeper: What Are The Most Important Metrics In Google Analytics 4?

3. WP Forms WPForms

A simple and easy-to-use plugin, WP Forms is perfect for creating contact forms, surveys, user registration forms, and much more. Having a user-friendly contact form plays a crucial role in enhancing your website's SEO ranking. WP Forms is used by more than 5 million websites, and for more than five years they have maintained an average rating of 4.9 out of 5.

Features:

For those searching for a straightforward solution, there is a free version of WPForms Lite available.
In just a few clicks, you can quickly create contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, surveys, polls, and pretty much any other type of web form using our drag-and-drop form builder.
Instant Alerts and Notifications to respond to leads promptly.
600+ pre-built forms templates to quickly get started on creating your forms, simply select one of our pre-built form templates.
Numerous strong features such as multi-pages, conditional logic, unlimited entries, file uploads, subscription payments, and a whole lot more are available.

4. W3 Total Cache

Website speed is a crucial factor for SEO, and the W3 Total Cache plugin can help you improve it. This plugin optimizes your website's caching, minimizes its HTML and CSS files, and compresses its images. These changes can significantly improve your website's load time and SEO.

Features:

Compatible with virtual private /dedicated servers, dedicated servers, and shared hosting.
Management of the Content Delivery Network (CDN) in a transparent manner using the Media Library, theme files, and WordPress.
Support for mobile devices includes appropriate page caching by referrers or groups of user agents, as well as theme switching for groups of referrers or user agents.
Mobile Accelerated Pages (AMP) support.
Support for Secure Socket Layer (SSL/TLS).
Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts (by user agent group) in memory, on disk, or an (FSD) CDN.

5. Broken Link Checker

Having broken links on your website can significantly impact your website's SEO ranking.

Broken Link Checker scans your site for broken links and reports them to you so that you can fix them quickly.

Features:

Validate websites of any size, big or even enormous (it's not unlimited per se, but the page limit can be adjusted as high as necessary)
Scan specific sub-folders and subdomains.
Test references to photos, PDF files, documents, and other resources.
Advanced reporting layouts with column sorting and filtering are provided.
Results are exported in CSV format compatible with all spreadsheet programs.
Detailed redirect stats are produced.
Scheduled runs with email delivery are made possible.
Automated reports are sent to multiple email addresses on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, among other things.

6. Wp Smush

Images play a significant role in website content, but large image files can also slow down your website if they're not optimized. WP Smush compresses your images to reduce their file size without compromising their quality. The WP Smush plugin optimizes your images to improve their loading time and ensure they don’t negatively affect your website’s performance.

Features:

Super Smush - Use multi-pass lossy compression to optimize photos up to two times more.
Lossless compression - Remove unnecessary data from photos and reduce file size without compromising image quality.
Switch to delay off-screen graphics with Lazy Load.
Bulk Smush - Easily optimize and compress a large number of photos.
Background Optimization (Pro Only): Even when the plugin is closed, Smush's potent optimization features will keep working in the background.
Setting a maximum width and height will cause huge images to scale down while being compressed.

7. Pretty Links Pro

One of the top WordPress link management plugins is Pretty Links Pro. It enables you to manage affiliate links with ease and makes it simple to create short, shareable affiliate links.

For affiliate marketers, podcasters, business owners, and others who wish to quickly build short URLs in WordPress, it is the ideal tool.

8. Redirection

If you're switching domains or changing page URLs, it's vital to redirect old page URLs to new ones. Redirection is a plugin that simplifies the process of creating redirects for your pages in a few clicks.

Features:

Without prior knowledge of Apache or Nginx, you can quickly and easily build and manage redirects using Redirect Manager.
Conditional redirects to simple URL matching, you can redirect in accordance with various circumstances.
Total view of every redirect that takes place on your website, together with data about the user, the browser, and the referring URL.
Redirects can be made less noticeable or more secure by adding HTTP headers to your site as whole or individual redirects. Additionally, you can add your own unique headers.
Tracking 404 errors on your website enables you to identify issues and address them.
Errors can be routed in bulk and organized to show you where to spend your attention.

9. Rank Math

Rank Math offers advanced SEO analysis & optimization tools, including keyword research, on-page SEO analysis, XML sitemaps, and AMP support. It is an all-in-one SEO tool that enables you to optimize your content for search engines, tailor it to your target audience, and improve visitor experience.

Features:

You can enable and adjust more than 15 built-in modules based on your needs.
Measure and monitor keyword positions to monitor your SEO progress.
Conduct a thorough SEO study to find problems based on 30 identified parameters.
Easy imports with a single click for smooth transitions from other SEO plugins.
Fully compatible with both the WordPress Classic Editor and the Gutenberg Editor.
Gain access to 20+ Schema types with extensive snippets, including FAQ and How To sections.

Dive Deeper: 14 Step Technical SEO Checklist To Win Your Audience In 2023

10. AMP for WP

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source HTML framework that helps to increase the loading speed of your website on mobile devices and create mobile-friendly versions of your website pages with ease.

Features:

It provides comprehensive support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) so that you can create mobile-friendly versions of your website pages with ease.
With the built-in responsive design tools, you can quickly adjust how your pages look when viewed on different devices.
It provides a step-by-step guide that helps you get started quickly and without any coding knowledge.
You can choose from a variety of themes, colours, fonts, and more to make sure your pages look exactly the way you want them to.
It automatically adds metadata tags to your pages and provides support for rich snippets so that they can be accurately represented in the search results.

11. WPML

WordPress does not by default make it simple to construct a multilingual website. This is a challenge for companies that serve a bilingual clientele spread across many regions.

With the help of this WPML WordPress multilingual plugin, you can quickly build multilingual websites.

It is incredibly user-friendly, and SEO-friendly, and makes it simple to create material in several languages.

Conclusion:

Improving your website’s SEO is an ongoing process, but implementing these free WordPress plugins can make a significant difference in your website’s search engine ranking.

While most of the plugins on this list are popular, it's essential to note that they need to work holistically to improve your website’s SEO.

Therefore, select carefully which plugin to add to your website. By doing so, you're assured of improving your website's SEO, user-friendliness, and most importantly, better Google search rankings.

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