We have tested hundreds of SEO plugins available for WordPress and concluded that Yoast SEO is by far the most all-rounded plugin that is both feature-rich as well as minimising the performance impact on WordPress.
Performance Impact with WordPress Plugins
If you aren’t already aware each WordPress plugin slows down your overall website, some plugins may only cause a few millisecond delays whereas other less well-developed plugins can add several seconds to your website load times. Yoast SEO outperforms the majority of the popular SEO plugins such as All In One SEO which is feature-rich but you experience a performance penalty (depending on which features you use).
Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO has many key features enabling you to take control over your WordPress SEO:
- Noindex – Ability to noindex any page, category or WordPress post to help eliminate duplication and thin-content issues
- Page Title and Meta Descriptions – Yoast SEO allows you to take control of all your meta data on every WordPress page, be it a post, page, category or even WooCommerce products & categories.
- Breadcrumbs – Take control over the breadcrumbs being displayed on your site, with highly configurable breadcrumb settings
- Elementor – Yoast integrates with the popular Elementor page builder, making SEO changes easy on drag and drop built pages
- Schema – Yoast allows you to implement schema markup on your site, enabling search engines to better understand the content of your site
- Search Console – Quickly and easily verify your Google Search Console property directly through Yoast’s plugin
And many more features enabling you as the webmaster to tackle the most common SEO problems.
Is Yoast SEO for WordPress Free?
Yoast SEO has two versions available both a free and a paid premium, we often find the free version has more than enough features to help most websites. The premium version is better suited for serious businesses or hobbyist which unlocks a wealth of new features such as redirect manager. One can install an alternative, free redirect management plugin but as mentioned earlier in this article each plugin results in a performance penalty. The more you can do with fewer plugins installed is a win, win for SEO and page speed.
