WordPress, the most popular free and open-source content management system makes bloggers life much easier. But if you have any experience with this system you know very well that it can be quite unreliable. On the other hand, choosing a paid WP theme can be a bit devastating for your wallet. Fortunately, you can resolve many issues by using a bunch of free WordPress plugins. 

Yoast SEO

No doubt, this is an essential plugin for your web. The search engines are the major source of traffic for every website. The number of internet users using search engines is steadily growing. Thus the Search Engine Optimization is more and more relevant.  You shouldn’t ignore this fact.

Yoast SEO for WordPress is the reliable solution for your blog or website. It guides you all the way to create better content and improve your ranking in search results. The Yoast SEO allows you to help your users, gain trust and sustain the rankings.

Additionally, this plugin is easy-to-use. First, you have to choose a focus keyword and use it rightly in the article you are writing. Page analysis feature checks if you have used the focus keyword everywhere on the image alt tags, meta description, headings and the whole post. Furthermore, it suggests you to correctly set up the text and images for better usability and visibility for search engines.

Besides, Yoast SEO enables you to improve the way your page or posts look like on the search results with the snippet preview. The rule is simple – the green color signifies that content is well SEO-optimized and readable.

Although this plugin can significantly increase the value of your posts, you still have to put a great effort into the keywords research. There is plenty of free tools which can help you do this. I recommend you KWFinder, Google Keyword Planner or Moz’s Keyword Explorer. To be sure that your article is flawless, take these two steps simultaneously.

Broken Link Checker

For those who are creating a lot of content, Broken Link Checker is a must-install plugin. If you have a well-optimized website or blog with a remarkable number of visitors, you wouldn’t like to lose the potential customer because of a broken page. You can quickly take care of a good impression of your site by using Broken Link Checker.

This handy plugin will scan your website and automatically fix broken links. The Broken Link Checker monitors not only your posts but also comments and other content for broken links and instantly informs you if any are found. This plugin reports on the missing images so you can instantly fix them.

Last but not least, BLC plugin prevents search engines from following the broken links or displays the broken links differently. Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post. You can get notifications either via email or WP dashboard.

Google XML Sitemaps

Do you need more improvements on your website? You can do it by choosing Google XML Sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com to better index your site with a particular XML sitemap.

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.

A sitemap enables the search engine bots to view the complete structure of your website and retrieve the results more efficiently. You can be sure that Google XML Sitemaps will not break your site or slow it down.

WP Smush

Do you know that not only your texts have to be well-optimized but images, as well? Photos give a great value to your content and allow you to gain users’ attention. Uploading images helps you deliver the message much more efficient than the texts can. That’s why you should take care of it by using WP Smush.

The images take up a lot of storage space and slow down your website. You cannot ignore slowing your site speed because it makes your page look much less attractive and engaging. You can kill two birds with one stone by compressing images. WP Smush allows you to resize, optimize and compress all of your images without reducing the quality of them.

This plugin optimizes all of your image files in JPEG, GIF and PNG formats using advanced compression techniques and saves lots of storage space. Smush allows you to manage your WordPress media library better and make your site faster and more efficient.

Additionally, the plugin lets you even smush bulk data (up to 50 attachments) at a time. Remember, WP Smush will not replace the photo editing. You should take care of correct dimensions of uploaded media on your own.

W3 Total Cache

You are probably wondering what the cache is? The general idea of caching is storing the website data temporarily in the cache so that it loads faster the next time the user opens the same page. Cache is a place to store something temporarily in the computing environment.

You can enable caching in WordPress by using one of the most popular plugins for it – W3 Total Cache. It allows you to improve the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing download times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration.

It features page cache, database caching, object caching, browser caching and a lot more. It significantly improves page rankings, especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL. Besides, it has options to minify and HTTP compression of the HTML, JS, and CSS files so that you can save bandwidth up to 80%.

This plugin reduces page load time, increases visitors time on site, and optimizes progressive render. In short terms, thanks to W3 Total Cache you will get better ranking on search results which consecutively result into high traffic and more conversions. You can also choose WP Super Cache which works quite similar to W3 Total Cache.

All In One Schema Rich Snippets

In the and, the icing on the cake  – All In One Schema Rich Snippets. This plugin allows you to beautify the appearance of your page or post on search engine result pages. A rich snippet contains a summary of your page in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing and sometimes in the Newsfeed of Facebook in an attractive format with star ratings, author photo, image, etc.

All In One Schema Rich Snippets provides the search engines with the precise information to be displayed in the search engine result pages. This plugin can help your blog get more click-through rates through search engines as well as rank better.

Summary

If you are struggling with a low speed on your site, these plugins should help you resolve this problem. By improving SEO, providing the fundamental features and compressing images your blog will be much more user-friendly and lucrative in the future.

If you are already using any of them, please let me know about your opinion in the comment below. Maybe you can suggest me other WordPress plugins for speeding up the site, share with me.

Stay tuned for more plugins!