12 WordPress Plugins For SEO & Site Performance

WordPress is one of the most popular content management system platform out on the web and it does do a pretty good job at it. But with the use of some useful plugins you could get your site higher in the search engines and attract more potential visitors but as the traffic on your site increases, the loading time increases as well because it takes to load all the scripts and plugins.

However, there are certain plugins that are available which can tackle this problem as well. Today, I’ve gathered 12 SEO & Performance related wordpress plugins

SEO WordPress Plugins

1. All In One SEO

Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Top Features

• Support for Custom Post Types
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Nonce Security
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines

2. WordPress SEO By Yoast

Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
Top Features

• Post title and meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis for ultimate SEO.
• On page SEO Analysis using the Linkdex page analysis library.
• Meta Robots configuration
• Focus keyword testing.
• .htaccess and robots.txt editor.
• Basic import functionality for HeadSpace2 and All in One SEO.

3. Platinum SEO Pack

Platinum SEO Plugin offers Complete onsite SEO solution for your WordPress blog.Platinum SEO Plugin offers all the functionality of All In One SEO
Top Features

• Canonical URLs
• Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines
• Add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir, noarchive, nosnippet meta tags to any post/page.
• Support for custom post types
• Override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page

4. SEO Content Control

SEO Content Control helps to identify and clean up various sorts of weak content, in order to improve a site’s quality and to rank better.

5. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
Top Features

• SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases
• SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window
• Ignore list for keywords you do not want to link
• Control external links with custom keywords

6. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML site map which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a site map, it’s easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Site Performance Plugins

7. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
Benefits

• Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds
• “Instant” subsequent page views: browser caching
• Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site; visitors view more pages
• Optimized progressive render: pages start rendering quickly

Top Features

• Caching of objects in memory or on disk
• Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
• Non-blocking JavaScript embedding

8. WP Minify

WP Minify grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.
Top Features

• Easily integrate Minify into your WordPress blog.
• Minifies JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
• Ability to include extra JS and CSS files for Minifying.
• Ability to exclude certain JS and CSS files for Minifying. Expire headers for minified JS and CSS files.
• Detection and elimination of duplicate sources.

9. WP Database Optimizer

This plugin allows you to have your WordPress tables to be optimised on a schedule. It uses the WordPress Database Class to do the work, and you can set the number of days in between optimisations.

10. WP Parallel Loading System

The WP-PLS (short for Parallel Loading System) is a WordPress plugin that will enhance the loading efficiency of your Blog You’ll need access to your server Administration Panel (cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk) in order to create new sub-domains for your domain.
Top Features

• Page speed improvement.
• Automatic Image Optimization.
• Parallelize HTTP connections.
• Sub-domain real-time health tracking.
• Auto recovery from resource files bad sync.

11. WP Super Cache

If you don’t want to use W3 Total cache plugin, you can give a go the WP Super Cache a try. This plugin will generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts.
Top Features

• Works well with WordPress MU (now WP-MS) in VHOST or non-VHOST configuration.
• Each blog’s cache files are identified to improve performance.
• Automatically disable gzip compression in WordPress instead of dying.
• Automatic updating of your .htaccess file. (Backup your .htaccess before installing the plugin!)

12. JS & CSS Script Optimizer

This plugin will help you make your Website more quick. It can grouping and packing Java Scripts and CSS. Also it makes fewer HTTP requests.
Top Features

• Combine several scripts into the single file (to minimize http requests)
• Pack scripts using Dean Edwards’s JavaScript Packer
• You can move all JavaScripts to the bottom
• Combine all CSS scripts into the single files (with grouping by “media”)
• Pack CSS files (remove comments, tabs, spaces, newlines)
• Ability to include JavaScript and CSS files (new)
• If any script fails and shows error you can add it to exclude list