WordPress

Google Search Console for WordPress: The Reports You Should Check Weekly

Most people who run WordPress websites install Google Search Console once and never visit it again.

That’s a waste. This dashboard has loads of valuable info that can help you see your site through Google’s eyes. It can also show you what’s killing your traffic.

You don’t have to spend hours upon hours inside Google Search Console. But spending 5 minutes each week checking out these reports can help you spot problems before they become disasters. Not to mention, they’ll keep you ahead of your SEO game.

Here are the reports that you should be checking:

The Search Performance Report

This report should be your starting place. It’ll show you the queries that bring users to your site, how many clicks you’re receiving, and your click-through rate.

Filter by queries that have a high number of impressions, but zero or very few clicks. That means your title tag or meta description needs work. Those are queries where Google showed your page in search results, but nobody clicked. Make that title click-worthy.

Filter your search terms with your brand name. That tells you how much traffic is driven by people who are already searching for your brand. If you clear that filter, you’ll see your true SEO traffic—the amount of queries and traffic you should be analyzing weekly and tracking over time.

The Page Indexing Report

This report is widely overlooked. Here you can see which pages Google indexed for your site and which ones it didn’t.

Run this report weekly. Indexing issues can slowly erode your rankings before you even know it. If Google doesn’t index a page, it won’t rank that page. Period. Whenever you fix an issue on your website, click the Validate Fix button in Search Console and force Google to re-crawl that page. Please do not skip this step.

The Page Experience Report

Your pages’ experience as reported by real visitors. Things like how fast your page loads, whether it’s mobile-friendly, and other signals Google monitors.

See some poor scores? Better take action quickly. Pages that take a long time to load irritate your visitors. They also don’t rank as highly in Google search. Improve the experience, and you double up on benefits.

Your Weekly Checklist

Keep it short and simple:

Open the Search Performance report. Look for drops in clicks or impressions.
Find queries with high impressions but low clicks. Update those page titles.
Check the Page Indexing report. Resolve any new errors right away.
Review the Page Experience report. Flag anything that looks off and fix it.

One More Thing Worth Doing

Export your data to Google Sheets or Excel regularly. Google Search Console only retains the past 16 months of data. When it’s gone, it’s gone forever. With your own copy, you can see long-term trends and do year-over-year comparisons.

If you use a WordPress SEO plugin like SEOPress, you can even pull Search Console data directly into your WordPress dashboard. Clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position all appear right alongside your pages and posts. No more tab switching!

Ten minutes a week. Open Search Console, review these reports, and make the necessary changes. It is a small habit, and it makes a big difference.

Hosting WordPress

Managed vs Shared vs VPS Hosting for WordPress: Which Should You Choose?

Choosing WordPress hosting can be overwhelming—way too many options and not enough easy answers. Let’s simplify things.

Shared Hosting: Cheap but Crowded

Shared hosting is the most popular form of WordPress hosting. Your website resides on a server with hundreds of other sites. You all share processing power, memory, storage…everything.

The main benefit of shared hosting is price. It’s extremely affordable. Most plans cost $3 to $10 per month. If you’re starting a blog or have a small hobby site, shared hosting will work fine.

The disadvantages are very serious, however. When a website on your server blows up and gets a ton of traffic, yours suffers. Slowdowns and downtime happen more often. Having multiple sites on a single server is also a security concern. One poorly maintained website can affect the other sites on the server.

Speaking of poor, the customer support is typically terrible. Low price equals minimal support—That’s a fact of business.

Managed WordPress Hosting: Hands-Off and Fast

Managed WordPress hosting is specifically designed for WordPress. The server is configured specifically for WordPress websites to run smoothly. Speed is typically very fast. Sites also handle high traffic better.

Another huge benefit of managed WordPress hosting is the behind-the-scenes work. The team updates WordPress, creates backups, and monitors security. You can literally forget about it. Oh, and support? Don’t even get me started. Support for managed WordPress hosts is exceptional.

But there are some downsides too—cost and limitations. Plans start at $20 per month. Also, certain plugins and themes are not allowed on some managed WordPress hosting platforms. If you rely on a premium plugin or theme, this could spell trouble.

In my opinion, if you run a business website or any website that makes you money, managed WordPress hosting is well worth the investment.

VPS Hosting: More Power, More Responsibility

With a virtual private server hosting plan, you get a slice of a bigger server. Your resources are dedicated. Only your site will use your memory, hard drive space, and CPU power.

Because of this, you have great control. You can install whatever software you desire. You can also quickly scale your resources to handle traffic spikes.

There is a downside to all of this. You are responsible for managing the server yourself. You’ll need to handle setup, security, and any software upgrades yourself. If that idea doesn’t thrill you, VPS hosting can be a nightmare.

Which One Should You Pick?

Here’s a simple breakdown:

Brand new to WordPress and on a tight budget? Start with shared hosting.
Running a business site and want the tech handled for you? Go with managed WordPress hosting.
Need full server control and have the skills to manage it? VPS is your best bet.

A Quick Comparison

Feature	Shared	Managed WordPress	VPS
Price	Very low	Medium to high	Medium
Speed	Slow under load	Fast	Fast
Security	Basic	Strong	You manage it
Control	Low	Limited	Full
Best for	Beginners	Business owners	Tech-savvy folks

Final Thought

Hosting is the backbone of your WordPress website. If you get this right, everything else will be smooth sailing. In fact, the most common mistake we see is people never leaving cheap shared hosting. Site speed decreases. Visitors depart. Choose the plan that works for your site now and scale when you need to.

SEO WordPress

WordPress Technical SEO Checklist (Step-by-Step)

Technical SEO can sometimes be very tricky. You publish strong content and still wonder why you don’t rank well in search results. And many times, the issue sits behind the scenes. Technical problems can stop search engines from finding, reading, and showing your WordPress site.

For this reason, we have compiled a step-by-step checklist that helps you spot common technical SEO issues.

1. Check Your Site’s Visibility

First, you need to make sure your site is visible to search engines. Go to Settings → Reading in your WordPress dashboard. Check that the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box is not selected.

You can also run a quick test in Google. Type site:yourdomain.com. If your pages show up, that means search engines can access your site.

2. Set Up HTTPS Security

Google prioritizes secure sites only. For this reason, you need to look for the padlock icon in your browser’s address bar when visiting your site. And if you don’t have a padlock, that means you need an SSL certificate.

Most good hosting companies offer free SSL certificates. You can contact your host to set this up. Then use a plugin like Really Simple SSL to handle the switch from HTTP to HTTPS.

3. Find and Fix Broken Links

Broken links very often hurt both user experience and SEO. They stop search engines from discovering all your content.

Install the free Broken Link Checker plugin from AIOSEO or another similar tool. It scans your site and lets you fix bad links right from your dashboard.

4. Check for Duplicate Site Versions

Your site might exist in multiple versions:

https://example.com
https://www.example.com
http://example.com
http://www.example.com

This confuses search engines. But there is an easy fix. Just pick one version and redirect the others to it. The All-in-One SEO plugin can help set canonical URLs, so Google knows which version to index.

5. Create SEO-Friendly URLs

Good URLs help search engines know what your content is about. They should be:

Short and descriptive
Include relevant keywords
Use hyphens between words
Avoid uppercase letters
Skip unnecessary numbers

Bad URL: example.com/p=123

Good URL: example.com/wordpress-seo-checklist

6. Optimize for Mobile

Google now uses mobile-first indexing. In simple terms, Google reviews your mobile site before your desktop site.

This means your mobile design matters a lot. Just run the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool to see if your site passes. And if your result has a problem, there is an easy fix. Just grab a responsive WordPress theme that fits all screen sizes. Some themes may look great on computers but break on phones.

7. Speed Up Your Site

Slow sites rank poorly. Test your speed with GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights.

Easy ways to speed up your site:

Use a caching plugin like WP Rocket
Optimize your images
Minify CSS and JavaScript files
Choose a fast hosting company

8. Improve Internal Linking

Help search engines find all your content through proper internal linking. Link related posts and pages to each other using descriptive anchor text.

The AIOSEO Link Assistant feature can find link opportunities and automatically add links to your old content.

9. Create XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps tell search engines about all the pages on your site. They help with faster indexing.

All-in-One SEO creates sitemaps automatically. You can then submit them to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. And this will enable the search engines to find your content faster.

10. Add Schema Markup

Schema markup helps search engines better show your content in search results. It can give you those fancy rich snippets with stars, images, and extra info.

AIOSEO makes adding schema easy. You can set up markup for articles, products, recipes, and more without any coding skills.

11. Optimize Your Robots.txt File

This file tells search engines which parts of your site to crawl or ignore. It helps them focus on your important content.

You can edit robots.txt through AIOSEO. Block search engines from crawling admin areas and other unimportant sections to save your “crawl budget” for the pages that matter.

SEO WordPress

WordPress SEO Plugin Comparison: Yoast vs Rank Math

Yoast vs Rank math wordpress seo plugins comparison

You’ve probably heard about Yoast SEO and Rank Math if you are looking to boost your WordPress site’s search rankings. Yoast has been the leader for many years. They have over 10 million active installs. But Rank Math is catching up fast with 3 million installs. Let’s compare these popular plugins to help you pick the right one for your site.

Free Features

Right out of the box, Rank Math packs a ton of free features that would cost extra with Yoast:

SEO titles and descriptions
Social media descriptions
Analysis for up to 5 keywords per page
XML sitemap creation
Local SEO schema
Image optimization
Internal link suggestions
404 error monitoring
Redirect options (301 and 302)
Basic WooCommerce SEO

You can also turn these modules on or off as needed. Yoast offers many of these same tools, but keeps several locked behind its premium paywall. If you want redirects, multiple focus keywords, or local SEO with Yoast, each will incur an additional cost.

Rank Math gives you more bang for zero bucks if you are a budget-conscious site owner.

Readability

One area where Yoast truly shines is readability analysis. It separates this score from the overall SEO rating. This matters because search engines factor readability into rankings.

Yoast uses the Flesch-Kincaid test to assess sentence length, word complexity, transition words, and passive voice. It also gives specific tips on how to fix problems. The premium version even includes an inclusive language checker that analyzes content for accessibility and bias.

Rank Math doesn’t separate readability from the overall SEO score. It only shows errors, with no clear guidance on how to fix them. Yoast offers better support if you are a content creator who needs help crafting reader-friendly posts

Website Builder Integration

Both plugins let you set global SEO defaults for your content types. This saves tons of time compared to editing each page individually.

But Rank Math does more than basic page checks. It also provides additional global settings for builders such as Elementor, Divi, and Beaver Builder. Rank Math also covers templates and widgets if Elementor is part of your setup and you use the Header & Footer Builder plugin. That way, your SEO settings follow your design system, and not only your pages.

Yoast only allows global SEO settings for three content types in its free version (homepage, posts, and pages). It integrates with Elementor, but only on individual pages, not in global settings.

Rank Math offers more comprehensive control if your sites are built with page builders.

Optimization Display

Both plugins show how well your content is optimized through color-coded indicators on your pages and posts lists.

Yoast takes a more straightforward approach. It uses dots that work like a traffic light. Green is good, yellow is okay, and red is poor. It also separates SEO and readability into different columns. On each page, you will notice the indicator in the corner. The Yoast box below your content provides detailed notes.

Rank Math shows a numerical score out of 100. It color-codes them for easy reading. It includes keyword, schema, and hyperlink data right in your posts list. On individual pages, your score appears in the top-right corner with detailed feedback in the side panel.

Both do a good job showing optimization status, but Yoast’s separate readability score provides clearer guidance.

AI Features

Both plugins now offer AI tools. But they have different purposes.

Rank Math’s Content AI includes 40+ tools. They also have 125+ prompt templates for everything from content creation to optimization. It can generate content suggestions, provide insights on meta tags, and improve existing content. But they’re an add-on starting at $60/year.

Yoast, on the other hand, takes a more focused approach, including two AI tools in its premium version: AI Generate for titles and meta descriptions, and AI Optimize for content suggestions. They’re simpler but cost nothing beyond the premium subscription.

Which Should You Choose?

Go with Yoast if you:

Need help improving content readability
Run a site in a language besides English (Yoast supports 18 languages)
Want to learn SEO through their courses

Pick Rank Math if you:

Manage multiple websites
Want more free features
Use website builders and need global SEO control

Web Development WordPress

WordPress SEO Plugins That You Should Know

Just as the taste of a food item can be enhanced by a side dish or an add-on, the same applies to WordPress plugins. It allows the website to be more functional and simplifies the site-building process.

WordPress is a household name for creating websites and blogs. Over 42.7% of the websites on the internet are powered by this tool. With the help of this tool, you can develop your site even if you aren’t a developer.

Additionally, the cherry on top is its extensive ecosystem of plugins and themes. There are over 50,000 free WordPress plugins, leaving you with ample options.

Given its thousands of plugins, choosing one can be pretty challenging, especially if you’re new. To make it easier for you, we have curated five of the best WordPress SEO plugins you should know. Read below to find out.

Five Best WordPress SEO Plugins

There are WordPress plugins that solve a niche problem, and then there are those that cater to a broader audience. In this post, we have listed five must-have WordPress SEO plugins you need to install.

Yoast SEO

It’s one of the most popular tools in the WordPress plugin ecosystem. It’s well-known for optimizing SEO; however, its main USP is the readability factor of the content. Do you know that 79% of internet users scan only through the pages and posts? According to Forbes, only 16% of users read the entire content.

Hence, increased accessibility to your page increases the likelihood of retention. Organic traffic helps your website rank higher in search engine rankings. Content is important, but keywords are even more crucial.

That’s where plugins come to the fore. In this case, Yoast SEO helps in all these aspects. Some of the key features of this tool are as follows:

It enhances your content’s readability by offering straightforward tips.
It enhances your WordPress pages and posts using meta descriptions and keywords.
Ensure your content is well-optimized and make any necessary changes.

While you can subscribe to this plugin for free, a premium version is also available. It includes additional features not available in the free version.

WPForms

WPForms is a vital tool for creating contact forms. Good communication is essential for growing your business and social media page, and it is only possible through a well-structured contact section. It allows visitors to contact you without hassle.

One of the most user-friendly contact form plugins for WordPress is WPForms. This drag-and-drop form builder lets you create email subscription, contact, payment, and more forms with ease. The tool features over 1,200 pre-built templates, making it easy to create a variety of contact forms.

Here are some of the highlighted features of WPForms:

It comes with pre-built template forms, allowing you to save time in creating different types of contact forms.
You can create attractive contact forms for free.

WPForms is free, but a premium version is also available, offering additional features and options.

UpdraftPlus

Data is the new oil, as technology has become central to modern life. It has its pros and cons, the downside being its vulnerability to cyberattacks. It has been reported that over 13,000 websites are hacked every day.

With WordPress accounting for more than 43.1% of websites on the internet, it has become a major target. Additionally, the page may not function properly at times due to simple errors.

So, how do you eliminate all these risks? Installing a powerful plugin, which in this case is UpdraftPlus. It’s one of the best tools to back up your website.

Some of the highlighted features of this online plugin are as follows:

It helps restore your webpage to its original state.
The multiple cloud storage options safeguard your backups.
The tool creates manual or automatic backups of the website.

The online plugin is available in free and premium versions.

SeedProd

SeedProd is also a must-have WordPress plugin, especially for business owners. With this tool, you don’t have to hire a developer, as it lets you easily design or customize your webpage.

With this tool, you can customize the landing page or choose from pre-made templates. In short, you have ample choice at your fingertips. It features pre-made thank-you, sales, 404, and coming-soon pages, among others.

Also, the best part of this tool is that it’s compatible with all WordPress themes. You can customize a design without changing your current theme.

Check some of the highlighted features of SeedProd:

It offers over 300 design templates to choose from or allows you to create your own layout from scratch.
The tool has a smart design system that saves time and eliminates repetitive work.
It features blocks and widgets, including pricing page blocks, social profiles, countdown timers, and more.

MonsterInsights

To grow your business or page, it’s essential to understand your target audience. It’s important to understand the user’s behavior to improve your marketing strategy. This is where our next plugin comes into play.

MonsterInsights is an easy-to-use tool that joins your WordPress page with Google Analytics. It allows you to obtain relevant data about your website visitors.

The plugin is easy to set up. Once it’s done, you can check the statistics from your WordPress dashboard. It helps you analyze the stats and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

Here are some of the highlighted features of MonsterInsights:

The tool enables you to identify which content requires improvement and which performs best.
It helps to create a profile of the audience, such as education, interests, demographics, age, and gender.
You can study your visitor’s behavior. For instance, finding the keywords they searched for or the links they have clicked.

The plugin is available free of cost, but if you want additional features, there are premium options in three plans:

Agency – $399.50 per year
Plus – $99.50 per year
Pro – $199.50 per year