WordPress has made website creation accessible to everyone. With its user-friendly interface, speed, and minimal technical requirements, even non-developers like myself can handle tasks such as SEO and WordPress customization effortlessly. In this guide, I'll walk you through the ideal SEO configuration for WordPress, highlighting eight plugins that will significantly boost your site's rankings and traffic. 

The question is, do you have a WordPress-based website? I'm curious, let me know what platform you're using. Are you using WordPress, are you using Wix. 

Some of the most important factors that Google looks into in order to rank your site are some of the following: user experience, on-page SEO, site speed, mobile-friendliness, internal link structure, structured markups, all these things impact your ranking, and there's hundreds of other factors.

There's over 200 factors that Google includes in their algorithm, and I'm gonna share with you plugins that'll help you do all of these things, in a really easy and controlled way.

W3 Total Cache

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 then no care if you have a 5G phone, you're not gonna load websites really fast.

The W3 Total Cache 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, 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 quick 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 caching built in, so I'm recommending the W3 Total Cache plugin.

 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. The Smush Image Compression plugin, what this does is 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. 

The third plugin that you have to use is a Yoast SEO plugin.

Yoast SEO Plugin

It does everything from on-page optimization, controlling your meta tags, 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, 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.

Now look, WordPress out of the box is pretty SEO-friendly, but this 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, 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, the extra search traffic, and Yoast SEO plugin will really help you get there.

Sucuri

The fourth plugin is Sucuri. 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, helps prevent you from getting hacked.

Make sure you don't get hacked.

The fifth plugin, AMP for WordPress.

AMP for WordPress

This helps with mobile users. Look, if you want to rank really high you want to get in on Google News, 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. 

I saw a huge increase in mobile traffic by just leveraging this plugin.

a3 Lazy Load

The sixth plugin for you is a3 Lazy Load. When you use images on your site, even when you compress them, it still takes time for that webpage 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 webpage to load when people haven't even started reading the content and scrolling. That's why we recommend you a3 Lazy Load.

This creates a better experience for you as a user, and search engines prefer this as well.

All In One Schema Rich Snippets

The seventh plugin, All In One Schema Rich Snippets. If you want to improve your search visibility by sharing rich snippets between the page titles, you got to use this plugin. It's great, it's simple to use.

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.

Don't try to abuse schema markup.

Really Simple SSL

The eighth plugin, 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 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 is 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. 

By using these 8 plugins, you'll notice gradual improvements in your rankings over time, particularly if you haven't employed any of them before. However, the real impact is seen when you integrate all of them together.