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Essential WordPress SEO Plugins for Bloggers (2024)

ByNina Clapperton August 18, 2022April 12, 2025 Updated onApril 12, 2025

Here’s a quick guide to my favourite SEO plugins for WordPress bloggers:

Essential Plugins:

1. Rankmath

Rankmath is an SEO plugin. It’s lighterweight than Yoast and more functional, so I massively prefer it.

The free plan lets you add up to 5 keywords to track per post. It also has easy schema options and is very easy to connect to your author boxes.

The Pro plan gives you some additional benefits, like tracking more keywords. I have the Pro version for my sites.

2. WP Rocket

Google loves a speedy site, and nothing is speedier than WP Rocket. I use it on my sites – even the ones with Lyrical host – to speed things up even more.

It’s about $50 a year for one site to massively improve the speed.

The way it works is that it creates a cache of your site – like a memory. So anyone who returns doesn’t need to reload everything each time. It’ll save what it remembers, and change the rest.

3. Cloudflare CDN

Not exactly a plugin, as it’s done via Nameservers. But if you aren’t with Lyrical and don’t have their Stackcache plugin that runs your CDN, you’ll want to set up Cloudflare.

It basically moves your site’s server closer to whichever user is using it, so it’s faster to load.

4. Short Pixel

Travel bloggers especially need this plugin.

Short Pixel is an image optimization plugin that compresses and resizes images.

I recommend 1200px width for pictures, and optimizing them to WebP versions to speed things up.

I compress all my images through Short Pixel.

I buy their credits in bulk rather than monthly, as I’ve found it’s a better bang for your buck.

5. Easy Table of Contents

This is the BEST table of content plugin.

I find the one with Kadence glitchy, especially on mobile. So I’ve always used this plugin.

It’s free, mobile friendly, and auto inserts across your posts.

6. WP Code Snippets

Kadence theme is odd in that it doesn’t have an editable header/footer area built in on the free version.

I don’t like to mess with that kind of coding so I download this free plugin so I can adjust my header and footer to add things like my Google Analytics code.

7. Login Lockdown

This is a great plugin to help keep your site secure. I recommend it to everyone to help protect from spammy login attempts or hackers.

Optional, But Epic Plugins:

8. Link Whisper

The #1 internal linking tool on the market.

I’ve been obsessed with Link Whisper since summer of 2021 and always recommend it to people.

Link Whisper nearly automates your internal linking (you’ll still need to do a bit of work).

I have a full review here and a walkthrough here.

9. Query Hunter

Query Hunter is a free GSC keyword tracking tool.

Check out what keywords you rank for, and crucially, what you are ALMOST ranking highly for so you can optimize your content for it.

You can use the paid one to have AI write new sections to add the keywords in, too.

I have Query Hunter free, Pro, and 2.0 now and they’ve made my life so much easier.

Get the free here!

Get the 2.0 here!

10. AntiSpam Bee

If you have comments turned on, be sure to have AntiSpam Bee turned on. It’ll help block spam comments.

Or, my second favourite, is Akismet.

11. WP Optimize

This is “optional” because you don’t need it all the time.

WP Optimize is a great option to remove extraneous code on your site. It’ll optimize the code and delete “tables” (aka. the ghosts of deleted files and plugins still lurking on your database).

Don’t keep it on all the time though. Remove it when you don’t need it.

I use the free version.

12. WP Youtube Lyte

If you have Youtube videos on your site, you need this free plugin.

Typically, if you embed a Youtube video on your site, it’ll preload the whole video. That’s a speed sucker.

Instead, WP Youtube Lytre only preloads the thumbnail.

This saves sooo much speed for you.

13. Campout

This free plugin by Joe of Niche Campus is epic! It helps you find posts that need updates.

When you have over 50 posts, you’ll probably start to lose track of when you made changes last and which need updating. Cue this epic plugin!

14. Hubbub (Formerly Grow Social by Mediavine)

If social shares are important to you, you’ll want to download Hubbub.

This used to be called Grow by Mediavine (note: NOT the grow.me system. I don’t recommend that). However, it was acquired and rebranded as Hubbub in early 2024.

Hubbub will put social share buttons on your posts that are super easy for people to engage with.

I don’t recommend the floating ones, as they can cut off content on mobile. Instead, I use the ones before and after my content.

15. Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a link cloaker. You only need this if you have affiliate links you’re sharing on socials to make it easier to share.

I don’t recommend using this regularly for every link on your own site as it can result in broken affiliate links.

I use it on my sites for sharing links on socials easily or for redirecting people to my freebies instead of the weird Google doc URLs.

16. Rank Logic

Spencer of Link Whisper fame created a second amazing plugin called Rank Logic. It helps you track your rankings and all of your updates.

So you can see what changes you made and if they worked!

I love it for this feature, but it has so many more. Like showing rankings per article, per author, and per date.

17. Alt Text AI

I love alt text because of accessibility, but I hate writing it.

Cue Alt Text AI!

You can buy monthly credit packages or bulk credit packages and optimize images across your site with keyword optimized alts so you never have an empty alt tag again!

It’s incredibly affordable too.

18. Instant Images

This one isn’t the best for speed, I’ll admit (it’s not terrible but it’s probably better not to have it), but it connects to Unsplash and Pexels to make it easy to auto download images to your site from these free libraries.

I use this when I’m bulk publishing posts with my VA if I’ve had a backlog.

19. Google Web Stories

If you want to do Google Web Stories, you need this plugin.

It’s not the best to be honest. It’s pretty glitchy – and you’ll want to message your host to ask for extra fast PHP – but it’s needed for it to work.

20. Create by Mediavine

If you have recipes on your site, you need this free plugin for their recipe cards.

They have special schema which helps them rank for all sorts of recipes.

21. Updraft Plus

If your host doesn’t take backups of your site, have Updraft doing it regularly. Otherwise, download it once in a while to take your own even if your host does them for you.

Make sure you back up to a Google drive, NOT to your database. Otherwise it’ll slow down your database.

I use the free one.

22. Query Monitor

Not sure which plugin is causing speed issues? Query Monitor will help you figure it out!

This is another one that I don’t keep unless I’m actively using it, as it can be quite slow.

But it will spot anything that is causing a major speed issue on your backend.

This is great because waterfall tests often lump these speeds into your database load/host load, so it can be hard to tell which individual plugin is the issue.

23. Ad Inserter

This is technically built for adding Google Adsense ads manually on your site.

But I’ve never used it for that.

I use it to add hook elements, like an affiliate disclaimer at the top of all my posts or to auto-add my newsletter opt in before every 3rd header in a post.

What Did I Miss?

Are there any plugins you love that I didn’t talk about? Share them in my free Facebook Group, SEO for Bloggers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvI72LDgV_I

Read More WordPress Blogging Tips

Nina Clapperton

Nina Clapperton is the founder of She Knows SEO.

She started blogging in 2018 and spent years doing everything “right” while earning $0. Then she stopped guessing and learned how search actually works. She rebuilt her travel site around audience intent and structure and grew to 50,000 sessions in 6 months. Within a year, the blog was bringing in $30,000 months and later crossed 243,000 pageviews.

She took the same audience first SEO approach and built her education business into multiple $100,000 months.

Now Nina teaches bloggers and online business owners how to build search powered businesses grounded in strong positioning, clear structure, and monetisation that actually supports their audience. She covers traditional SEO and AI driven search without the tech bro noise, and she’s known for explaining complex strategy with analogies you won’t forget.

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