WordPress made it easy for anyone to create a website. It’s easy to use, it’s fast, and it doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge. Heck, even someone like me who’s not a developer can do things like SEO and modify WordPress in a breeze. A WordPress Plugin will ensure there is a boost in the website’s capability.
Digital Marketing cannot begin without a website. It would help if you had a web presence in order to promote it. Your social media marketing and email marketing is depended on the website’s SEO. WordPress Plugins ensure that you get the best SEO and help you rank on Google.
Some of the most important factors that Google looks into in order to rank your site are the following, user experience, on-page SEO, site speed, mobile-friendliness, internal link structure, and structured markups, all these things impact your ranking, and there are hundreds of other factors.
There are over 200 factors that Google includes in their algorithm, and today I’m gonna share with you plugins that’ll help you do all of these things, plus more, in a really easy and controlled way.
Table of Contents
1. W3 Total Cache
Look, load time is super important, especially because people are using mobile devices now. Yes, there’s 4G, there’s 5G, you know, LTE, whatever you wind up calling it, but the problem with mobile devices is if you’re in a place that doesn’t have the best reception and it doesn’t matter if you have a 5G phone, you’re not gonna load websites really fast.
The W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin ensures that your site will load as fast as you possibly can. It’ll improve load times, it’ll help you connect with CDNs, and it makes better use of your server resources so that way your server doesn’t have to continue to push the same content over and over again.
Instead, it caches it so it can deliver it to the user as quickly as possible, and if you have a really good hosting provider they have caching built-in, but most of the hosting providers that I’ve seen don’t have cache built-in, hence I’m wrecking, recommending the W3 Total Cache plugin.
2. Smush Image Compression
If you’re creating blog content, and hey, you’re on a WordPress blog or WordPress as a CMS, there’s a good chance you at least have a blog article or two, and in that blog article what do you think you’re including? Images, if you’re not you should change that and go add images right away.
Smush Image Compression Defeats WordFence, Wins Plugin Madness 2017 https://t.co/odSGoPLvxz #wordpress #wordpress pic.twitter.com/OFNhfNRPaB
— WP Growth (@viralwp) April 18, 2017
The Smush Image Compression WordPress plugin ensures that your images still look really good and quality, so that way when someone looks at them they don’t look all pixelated and fuzzy, they still look really sharp, but this decreases the size of the image in which I’m talking about the server size, right, that hard drive space that it’s taking up, so when people ping your site it loads much faster.
3. Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin
It does everything from on-page optimization to controlling your meta tags and your title tags. It even analyzes your content, telling you if you’re doing a good job or a bad job. It creates sitemaps for you and helps with structure and markup. It does pretty much what most things that you need if you want to ensure that your WordPress blog is SEO-friendly.
WordPress out of the box is pretty SEO-friendly, but the Yoast plugin puts those last, final touches that are really important. Most people think, “Oh yeah. “If I do most of the things, that’s fine.” No, that used to work five, or six years ago, but SEO has changed.
Now Google wants you to do every little thing right, and when you combine them all that’s when you see the climb in ranking, and the extra search traffic, and this plugin will really help you get there.
4. Sucuri WordPress Plugin
If your website gets hacked, your rankings and traffic will tank, and when it tanks and you fix it it’s hard to recover. Sucuri helps you and helps prevent you from getting hacked. Now, it’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s better than nothing. The last thing you want to do is get your site hacked and lose all your traffic.
I’ve seen this time and time again, someone gets hacked and they figure it out after a week or two, their rankings tank, they fixed it, and they don’t recover in 30 days. Eventually, they recover, sometimes it takes two months, sometimes three months, and if they’re lucky it happens quickly. And they’re like, “Hey, my business is in the shutter. “I’m losing a lot of money all “because of this one silly thing.” Make sure you don’t get hacked.
5. AMP for WordPress.
This helps with mobile users. Look, if you want to rank really high you want to get in on Google News, and you want to make sure that your site has the AMP framework.
In other words, your tech space articles load really fast, Google just posts it on their end, they’re leveraging their own framework, and by leveraging the AMP framework I didn’t really get much more mobile traffic, but in other countries where mobile devices and infrastructure isn’t as good, such as Brazil, I saw a huge increase in mobile traffic by just leveraging this plugin.
6. A3 Lazy Load WordPress Plugin
When you use images on your site, even when you compress them, it still takes time for that web page to load. You want to make it where those images load as people scroll, that way you’re not just loading up all these images on a page and it takes forever for that web page to load when people haven’t even started reading the content and scrolling. That’s why I like Lazy Load.
If you’re on the jasonmascarenhas.com site you’ll notice that as you read my blog posts images load as you scroll. This creates a better experience for you as a user, and search engines prefer this as well.
7. All In One Schema Rich Snippets.
If you want to improve your search visibility by sharing rich snippets between the page title, you gotta use this WordPress plugin. It’s great, it’s simple to use, and it is one of the best things that I’ve done out there. Now, with schema markup what you’ll find is some people are like, “Yeah, we’re gonna use “all this schema markup and use all these tags “even though our site isn’t relevant “to the specific schema markups.”
You don’t want to do that. For example, I wouldn’t be using stuff on jasonmascarenhas.com, a schema markup that’s relevant for restaurants when I have nothing related to restaurants on my site. That’ll irritate Google and hurt you in the long run, so when you’re using this be nice and kind. Don’t try to abuse schema markup.
8. Really Simple SSL
90% of websites that rank at the top have SSL installed. It’s pretty much become a prerequisite if you want to rank well, so use the SSL. Now, it doesn’t have to be through this WordPress plugin. Maybe your host provides it, maybe your domain provider provides it, whatever it may be you want a secure site, and what you’ll find are some browsers even notify users, saying “Hey, this site isn’t secure,” and that’ll cause people to bounce back, get away from your site, and over time that could decrease your rankings.
You want to make sure you have SSL, it’s that important. So, use these eight plugins, and you’ll find that your rankings will start going up over time, especially if you haven’t used any of them, but when you start combining all of them it does help quite a bit. If you have any questions leave a comment below. Let me know what your question is about WordPress or these plugins and I’ll answer it.
As a website owner, you are probably aware of how important it is to drive traffic and increase ratings for your website. However, with so many websites out there, it can be challenging to get noticed. Fortunately, there are many tools and strategies available to help you improve your website’s ratings and traffic. One such strategy is using WordPress plugins. In this article, we will introduce you to 8 WordPress plugins that can help skyrocket your ratings and traffic.
- Yoast SEO
The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. This plugin helps you optimize your website’s content for search engines by providing a checklist of best practices for SEO. The Yoast SEO plugin allows you to customize meta descriptions, titles, and other SEO elements to improve your website’s ranking.
- WPForms
WPForms is a drag-and-drop form builder that allows you to create customized forms for your website. With WPForms, you can create contact forms, surveys, and other types of forms to collect information from your visitors. By collecting data from your visitors, you can improve your website’s user experience and better understand your audience’s needs.
- Jetpack
Jetpack is a plugin that offers a suite of tools to help you manage your website. Some of the features included in Jetpack are site stats, security, backup, and optimization tools. Jetpack can help you improve your website’s performance, security, and user experience.
- W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a caching plugin that helps improve your website’s speed and performance. With W3 Total Cache, your website’s pages will load faster, improving your website’s user experience and search engine rankings. W3 Total Cache also includes other optimization features, such as minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
- Smush
Smush is a plugin that optimizes images on your website. With Smush, you can reduce the file size of your images without sacrificing quality. Optimized images load faster, which can improve your website’s speed and user experience.
- MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is a plugin that connects your website to Google Analytics. With MonsterInsights, you can track your website’s traffic and user behavior, including which pages are most popular, how visitors find your website, and more. This information can help you make informed decisions about your website’s content and marketing strategy.
- OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a lead generation plugin that allows you to create customized opt-in forms to collect email addresses from your visitors. With OptinMonster, you can create pop-ups, slide-ins, and other types of opt-in forms to encourage visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or other marketing materials.
- WP Mail SMTP
WP Mail SMTP is a plugin that helps ensure your website’s emails get delivered to your visitors’ inboxes. With WP Mail SMTP, you can configure your website’s email settings to use a reliable SMTP service, reducing the chances of your emails ending up in a spam folder.
In conclusion, these 8 WordPress plugins can help you improve your website’s ratings and traffic. By using these tools, you can optimize your website’s content for search engines, improve your website’s performance and user experience, collect data from your visitors, and more. Implementing these plugins may take some time and effort, but the results can be well worth it.
If you need extra help getting in the rankings, whether it’s just content marketing, SEO, or link building, feel free to leave a message or email. We love helping companies grow their search traffic online and thank you for reading this article. If you enjoyed the read like it, share it, and tell other people about it.
