Straight answer: install one all-in-one SEO plugin (Yoast SEO or Rank Math, pick one and never run both), a caching plugin, and an image compression tool. That’s it for the first week. Everything else people tell you to install on day one is either premature or actively slowing your site down before it’s even indexed.
The one SEO plugin you need
I’ve set up close to fifty WordPress sites over the years, my own and clients’, and the pattern never changes. People install five plugins before they’ve written a single page of content, then wonder why the site loads like it’s dialling up from 2003.
Pick either Yoast SEO or Rank Math. Not both. I’ve seen both installed together more times than I can count, usually because someone read one article recommending Yoast and another recommending Rank Math, so they installed both “to be safe.” That’s not safety, that’s two plugins fighting over the same meta tags, duplicating schema markup, and occasionally cancelling each other’s sitemap out entirely. I had a client last year whose XML sitemap returned a 404 for three weeks because Yoast and Rank Math were both trying to generate one at the same URL. Neither was working. Google Search Console just quietly stopped crawling new pages, and nobody noticed until traffic flatlined.
Rank Math’s free tier gives you more than Yoast’s free tier does at the point of writing this: schema markup for more content types, a built in 404 monitor, redirection manager, and Google Analytics integration without paying. Yoast’s free version is leaner but has been around longer and has better documentation for beginners, which matters if this is your first WordPress site and you’ll be Googling “how do I add a focus keyword” at 11pm. Either one will handle the basics: title tags, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, and a readability check that’s honestly a bit patronising but not wrong.
What these plugins do (and what they don’t)
Here’s the bit most posts on this topic skip over. An SEO plugin does not do your SEO. It manages the technical plumbing so you don’t have to hand-code meta tags in the theme editor. That’s the whole job. It will not write good titles for you, it will not build backlinks, it will not make Google like your content more because you got a green traffic light in the readability checker.
I watched a business owner spend four months getting every single post to a green light in Yoast, thinking that was the work. Green light everywhere, zero backlinks, thin 400 word posts, no internal linking strategy. Rankings didn’t move an inch. The plugin told her the sentences weren’t too long. It never told her the content wasn’t good enough to rank, because that’s not what it’s built to check. If you want the fuller picture of what moves rankings on a WordPress site beyond plugin settings, I wrote a longer breakdown here on how to improve SEO on a WordPress website without wasting six months on a plugin, because that’s exactly what happened to her and it’s more common than people admit.
Set it up in this order (takes about 20 minutes)
- Install and activate your chosen plugin (Yoast or Rank Math)
- Run the setup wizard: tell it whether this is a business or personal site, connect Google Search Console straight away, not “later”
- Set your default title template for posts and pages (something like Post Title | Site Name, keep it under 60 characters)
- Turn off the SEO plugin’s own sitemap if you’re already using a caching plugin that generates one, to avoid the duplicate sitemap problem above
- Submit the sitemap URL to Google Search Console manually, don’t wait for it to be picked up automatically
- Set noindex on tag archives and author archives if you’re running a single author blog, these create thin duplicate content that helps nobody
That last one gets skipped constantly. A tag archive page with three posts tagged “marketing” is a thin, near-duplicate page competing against your actual category pages. On a brand new site with fifteen pages of content, having twenty indexed tag pages with almost nothing on them is not a good look to Google, and it’s not a good look to a visitor who lands there either.
The two plugins that matter more than people think
Nobody thinks of a caching plugin as an “SEO plugin,” but page speed is a ranking factor and has been since Google’s Core Web Vitals update. WP Rocket or the free WP Super Cache will do more for your rankings in month one than any amount of keyword tweaking, because a site that loads in under two seconds gets crawled more thoroughly and bounces fewer visitors.
Same goes for image compression. ShortPixel or Smush, install one of these before you upload your first ten images, not after. I made this mistake myself on a site I launched two years ago: uploaded forty full resolution photos over a weekend, only installed the compression plugin afterwards, and it took the plugin an entire evening to work through the backlog because I’d already sent thousands of visitors a bloated homepage in the meantime. Compress from the first upload, it’s a five minute setup and it saves you from a slow-loading site that Google quietly deprioritises.
For a fuller rundown of the plugins worth having on any WordPress site, not just SEO ones, I put together a list here of the 10 top WordPress plugins that covers security and backup tools you’ll want alongside the SEO basics.
What to skip entirely on a new site
Schema markup plugins beyond what your SEO plugin already provides. Both Yoast and Rank Math handle basic schema now, and a separate schema plugin on top of that is how you end up with duplicate structured data, which Google’s own documentation explicitly flags as a problem, not a bonus.
Multiple analytics plugins doing the same job. One Google Analytics connection, done through your SEO plugin or through Google Site Kit, is enough. I’ve seen sites with three different plugins all pulling Analytics data, all showing slightly different numbers because they’re counting bot traffic differently, and the site owner confused about which figure is correct.
A “social share” plugin loaded on day one before you have any content worth sharing is another common early mistake, though the right one at the right time helps once you’ve got posts people want to pass around, and I reviewed one worth knowing about in this piece on getting more social shares with the Social Warfare plugin.
The uncomfortable bit nobody wants to say out loud
Here’s the truth that most posts telling you which plugins to install skip past entirely: the plugin you choose barely moves the needle compared to what you publish. Yoast versus Rank Math is a five percent decision. What you write, how often you write it, and whether anyone links to it is the other ninety five percent. I know sites running the free version of Yoast with zero premium add-ons outranking sites with the full paid Rank Math suite, purely because the first site published sixty useful, well-researched posts and the second published twelve thin ones with every box ticked in the plugin.
People obsess over plugin choice because it’s a decision they can make and finish in twenty minutes. Writing sixty good posts is not a twenty minute decision, it’s months of work, so the plugin becomes a comfortable place to focus energy that would be better spent on the content itself, or on creating a blog people would read rather than one built to satisfy a green light.
If you’re starting completely from scratch
If this is your very first WordPress site and the plugin question is only one of about forty questions you have right now, don’t try to learn hosting, plugins, content strategy, and keyword research all in the same weekend. I wrote a step by step guide for exactly this stage, covering the order things need doing in, over at how to start a blog from scratch as a complete beginner. Get the plugin sorted in twenty minutes as above, then move on to the content, because that’s where the actual work lives.
And if you’re running a business site rather than a personal blog, and you don’t have twenty minutes a week to spare on plugin settings, sitemap checks, or schema markup, that’s a fair thing to outsource rather than a failure. I list SEO maintenance among the tasks worth handing off in 15 tasks you should be outsourcing, and if you’d rather bring in someone to set the whole technical foundation up from the start, that’s a reasonable route too.
A quick word on cost
The free versions of both Yoast and Rank Math cover everything described above. You don’t need the paid tier of either to get a new site’s SEO foundation right. Rank Math Pro runs roughly £59 to £199 a year depending on the tier, Yoast Premium is about £89 a year. Worth it later for advanced redirect management or multiple keyword tracking per post, not worth it on week one when you’ve published four pages and are still deciding on your niche.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need both Yoast and an SEO checklist plugin?
No. Yoast (or Rank Math) already includes an on-page checklist for titles, meta descriptions, and readability. A separate checklist plugin adds nothing except another thing to load on every page.
Is Rank Math better than Yoast for a brand new site?
Rank Math’s free tier gives more features out of the box, including built in redirect and 404 management. Yoast has better beginner documentation and a longer track record. Either is a fine choice, the mistake is installing both.
Should I install an SEO plugin before or after writing my first post?
Before. Set the title template and connect Search Console first, so your first post gets indexed with the right structure from the start rather than needing to be edited and resubmitted later.
How many plugins should a new WordPress site have in total?
Aim for five to eight in the first month: one SEO plugin, one caching plugin, one image compression plugin, one security plugin, and a backup plugin. Every plugin beyond that should earn its place with a clear job, not just a feature that sounded useful in a listicle.
Official documentation
Related reading: Setting Up Your IDX Real Estate Plugin on WordPress and How To Get More Social Shares With @warfareplugins Plugin.
If you want the full breakdown, here is everything I know about SEO.
