Platform guide
WordPress SEO plugins
You need roughly one SEO plugin and possibly a caching plugin. Most of the rest add weight in exchange for features you will configure once and forget.
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The one you actually need
An SEO plugin exists to give you control over titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, indexation rules and the XML sitemap. Yoast and RankMath both do this competently and either is fine.
Install one. Configure it properly. Do not install two, which conflicts in ways that are tedious to debug.
What the plugin will not do
It will not make your content good, build links, fix your site structure or decide what to write. The green light in the sidebar measures adherence to simple rules, not whether the page will rank.
Chasing that green light has produced a great deal of stilted, keyword-stuffed writing that reads worse and ranks no better.
Plugins to think twice about
Schema plugins, where your theme or SEO plugin already emits structured data. Redirect managers, where your host or server can do it faster. Image optimisers that run on every request rather than at upload. Anything promising automated internal linking, which produces links no human would have placed.
The performance arithmetic
Every plugin is code loaded on page views, often on pages that do not use it. Twenty plugins each adding a small amount is how a site ends up slow with no single culprit to blame.
Common questions
Is the paid version of an SEO plugin worth it?
For most small sites, no. The free versions cover titles, metas, canonicals, indexation and sitemaps, which is the whole job. Paid tiers mostly add redirect management and internal linking suggestions you can do without.
Where to next
If you would rather have someone do this than read about it, the commercial page for this work is WordPress SEO services.
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