Competition is the most important factor which keeps us giving and getting quality products and services.Currently we have thousands of Free WordPress plugins and hundreds of premium plugins,So we can expect some healthy competition among those WordPress plugins to sustain their popularity.
Observing these trends I was curious enough to write an article about war between WordPress plugins and Here I am with my article.
Before reading,I want to give a caution that there is no clear winner here,Individual perspective plays s huge role and the plugins which works well for you might have been nightmares for other peoples,So user discretion is advised. 🙂
So lets analyze the competition between the Good,the bad and the Ugly of WordPress plugins.
Social Sharing Plugins
A blog without good SEO is lame but a blog without good social sharing buttons is blind. by Vivek – WPStuffs
Lol…Ok..May I have your attention please.
Social sharing buttons are great tools to easily get shared on popular social media networks,Untill few years before SEO was the a only greatest source of traffic but nowadays social media is gradually replacing that spot.
You can find several WordPress plugins for social media buttons but I think two top competitors are Digg Digg Social Sharing and TFG Social Share.
The reason for these two plugins getting top in the list is their ability to show floating social media buttons.
Lets explore them individually.
Digg Digg
Digg Digg is a creation by founders of bufferapp.You can see a floating bar besides this article which is powered by Digg Digg.You can show variety of social media icons with Digg Digg and It uses lazy loading which can also boost up your blog speed (not much..but still it will)
- Number of Downloads : 581,609
- Avg. Rating : 3.5/5
TFG Social share
TFG Social share was one of my favorite plugin before I switch over to Digg Digg.The limitation with this plugin is,It only supports few popular social media networks,such as Twitter,Facebook and Google Plus,LinkedIn, stumbleupon and Pinterest.
- Number of Downloads : 233,186
- Avg. Rating : 4/5
Obviously Digg Digg gets you many features than TFG but I want you to try this before going with one.
Free SEO Plugins
SEO is still a mystery for many users,they know its essential but dont know how perfect it.Many free WordPress plugins were released to make this process easy for bloggers and I believe this is one of the main reason for huge popularity of WordPress.
Again here we have two competitors,One well established and old and the other relatively young but rapidly growing.
Ok..You might have already guessed it.Yes it is All in SEO pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Well,both the plugins are really awesome and I bet you will be impressed by features that Yoast offers and simplicity which All in SEO delivers.So it is very hard to pick out the clear winner.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
As I mentioned if you use WordPress SEO by Yoast then you will get features of more than five different standalone plugins.It offers variety of SEO options like custom titles and metas,Inbuilt Google Webmaster tools,Alexa and bing verification system,XML sitemaps,Permalinks setting,Internal links optimization etc..etc..etc.
huh…I need atleast a day to completely the list of features.
Finally,WordPress SEO by Yoast in few words
Best of its kind
All in SEO Pack
All in SEO is the oldest plugin that I ever know and also the most downloaded plugin from WordPress repository.You can check this Infographic : 30 Most Downloaded WordPress Plugins in which it tops the list with whopping 13 million downloads.
About it features,It delivers at what it is best.You will have a variety of SEO options but you cant find other features that SEO by Yoast delivers.
Premium SEO Plugins
Now we have three contestants in this category,but the fact is I never used any of the following plugins.So I am not giving any personal opinion but the information I collected from some authority blogs.
Top three premium SEO Plugins are
- SEOPressor
- Easy WP SEO
- Scribe
Note that these premium SEO plugins are better suits for on page SEO.There are considerable difference between free SEO plugins and Premium ones.
SEOPressor and Easy WP SEO
I must say these two plugins are real rivals,These plugins promote themselves by various methods like giving lucrative affiliate commission and sponsoring free giveaways.Well,I dont say its bad to promote themselves but the bloggers who publishes their review always write why the users should not choose the other plugin. 🙂
For example if a blogger publishes SEOPressor review then he will surely point out why he didn’t like Easy WP SEO rather than giving pros of SEOPressor and vice versa is also true.
Easy WP SEO DESTROYS SEOPressor !
Apart from that there are some other minor diferences like how the plugin calculates keyword density,keyword placement and most of all the price.
So,I can not give any honest review about these plugins unless I try it out.
Scribe SEO
I heard lot of good talk about Scribe but first let me introduce scribe.
Scribe is a content marketing tool by very famous Copyblogger media and Its more like a SEO service than a plugin.You can download Scribe plugin from WordPress repository but you need obtain a API key to use it.API key can be obtained on a monthly payment basis.
Scribe is a all in one tool that you can use it for keyword research,topic discovery,Content tweak and other SEO features like link building etc.
I definitely recommend you to try this product if you can spend atleast $97 per month. 🙂
Caching Plugins
Before start to think about SEO,the ground work you need to do is to increase the blog speed in other words decrease the website load time.Caching is the best option available for decreasing the load time by converting a dynamic content to a static pages.
W3 Total Cache and WP Super cache are the two widely used WordPress plugins for caching.
Unlike other categories here we have a clear winner(s),Yes they both are the winners,but in different context.
W3 Total cache
One of the most complex plugin to configure but once its is fully configured it can make your blog more then ten times faster {they say).
If your blog is hosted on VPS or dedicated hosting then I strongly recommend you to use this plugin,there is no other choice here.
Many experienced bloggers and WordPress veterans run a service to configure W3 total cache,so you can reach them or do it yourself by reading some good documentation’s available on internet. (Google it)
WP Super cache
If you make a complaint to your shared Web hosting provider that your website is crashing more often then first advice that they give you is : Please use WP Super cache if you are using WordPress
I am quoting this from my personal experience and I heard it from more than one shared web hosting provider.So if your blog runs on shared hosting then you have to use WPSuper cache for better performance.
Also configuring WP Super cache is like a calk walk,very easy to configure.
To be continued…
I didn’t expect this article to cross more then 2000 words,but It did.So instead of boring with you such a long post,I split up as two parts and very soon you will get to read the second part.
Now I like to hear feedback from you,I am sure you might have used many of the plugins listed above but do you still think the plugins you currently use is the best one ? or Do you plan to switch over ? Did I miss Anything ? Anything you disagree ?
Lets have discussion right below.
