The Plugins Don't Rank Your Site. Content Does.

No bloat, no upsell spam, no fake "SEO scores." Just clean meta tags, sitemaps, and proper schema output. The performance difference vs Yoast is noticeable. Built by someone who understands SEO isn't a game score.

Feature-rich free tier that attracted Yoast refugees. Better UX than Yoast, more features in free version. But the "SEO score" gamification teaches bad habits, and it's getting bloatier with each update. Still, if you must have an all-in-one, this beats Yoast.

The original, now owned by Newfold. Works fine, but bloated, aggressive upselling, and the "SEO analysis" creates cargo cult SEO behaviors. If it's already installed, don't bother migrating. But for new sites, there are lighter options.

French-built alternative that's cleaner than Yoast. White-label option is useful for agencies. Good if you need something between The SEO Framework's minimalism and Rank Math's feature sprawl.

One of the oldest plugins, now owned by Awesome Motive. Works, but nothing special. The Awesome Motive ecosystem means aggressive cross-promotion. If you're not already using their other plugins, no reason to choose this over alternatives.

The only WordPress caching plugin I recommend without caveats. It just works. Proper caching, lazy loading, database optimization, CDN integration. Worth the money if you don't want to debug caching conflicts.

Dedicated schema plugin if your main SEO plugin's schema isn't enough. Most sites don't need this - The SEO Framework or Rank Math handle basic schema fine. But for complex schema needs (recipes, events, products), dedicated plugins give more control.

Built into Rank Math, but the documentation is useful standalone. Good reference for understanding which schema types actually trigger rich results vs marketing hype.

Simple, free, well-maintained redirect manager. Handles 301s, 302s, 404 logging, regex redirects. Don't use your SEO plugin's built-in redirects - this does it better and stays even if you switch plugins.

Essential debugging tool. Shows database queries, PHP errors, hooks, HTTP requests. When your site is slow and you don't know why, this tells you. Disable in production.

Lighter than Query Monitor, integrates with the admin bar. Query Monitor is better for serious debugging, but Debug Bar is fine for quick checks.

Just add the GA4 snippet directly or use Google Site Kit. MonsterInsights is another Awesome Motive product that adds dashboard bloat to show you data that's already in Google Analytics. You don't need a plugin for this.

GoDaddy-owned but actually good. Single dashboard for updates, backups, uptime monitoring across all your WordPress sites. Free tier is generous. The workflow improvement is real.

Self-hosted ManageWP alternative. You host the dashboard on your own server. More control, no third-party dependency, but more setup. Choose this if you're privacy-conscious or managing client sites that can't have external services.

Command-line interface for WordPress. If you have server access, this is faster than any dashboard for updates, database operations, search-replace, bulk operations. Essential for developers.