Scan of 140K Sites Reveals Best WordPress Plugins

An analysis of 140,000 sites hosted on managed WordPress host Kinsta revealed the WordPress plugins that users judge to be the best for SEO and performance. These findings highlight which plugins publishers value for performance, SEO, and user experience.

This is a list of the most popular plugins for SEO and performance, but it’s notable that Elementor is also highly popular outside that context, with 31% of the sites using it.

10. Schema.org Structured Data – Schema Pro – 1.75%

Adding structured data is critical for SEO and in general for making it clear for search engines and AI what the content is about. Only 1.75% of the 140,000 sites scanned by Kinsta use a standalone Schema plugin. The reason may be that users are satisfied with the structured data functionalities offered by SEO Plugins.

The Schema Pro WordPress plugin offers a wider selection of structured data types than most SEO plugins and it also offers the capability to add custom structured data automatically across the entire site targeted to specific kinds of posts or at the individual page level.

9. XML Sitemap Generator for Google Plugin – 2.17%

Sitemaps are helpful for encouraging search engines to crawl web pages efficiently in a timely manner. But only 2% of sites use it, likely because a basic version of this functionality is native to the WordPress core and it’s provided by all WordPress SEO Plugins.

Like the dedicated Schema Pro Structured Data plugin, the XML Sitemap Generator for Google Plugin offers greater flexibility than built-in XML site generators found in most SEO plugins but with only 2.17% use it’s clear that SEO plugins are a perfect fit for most WordPress users. The advantage of using Schema Pro Structured Data plugin is that it offers greater flexibility but that might be just for edge cases.

8. Broken Link Checker – 3.27%

The Broken Link Checker is a plugin that checks for broken links but is not commonly used in this sample of sites. Google Search Console offers a report of 404 errors discovered by Googlebot which indicates broken internal and external links. The broken link check can also be accomplished with a software app like Screaming Frog.

The Broken Link Checker plugin offers a cloud-based scanner and a local checker that uses website server resources to monitor the entire website for broken links.

7. SEOPress – 4.81%

SEOPress is the seventh most popular plugin in the sample of 140,000 sites that are hosted on Kinsta. It’s a fairly popular plugin with 300,000+ installations. all-in-one SEO plugin that facilitates content optimization, schema implementation, and redirection management.

6. All in One SEO – 5.11%

The sixth most popular plugin is highly popular online, with 3+ million installations. On Kinsta it’s installed on 5.11% of sites in this sample.

5. Imagify – 11.62%

Imagify is am image optimizer that reduces image file sizes to improve website loading time. The popularity of these kinds of plugins may reflect the lack of image optimizing skills of the average WordPress user as it’s an easy thing to optimize an image before uploading it. Less than 12% of sites on Kinsta have installed it.

4. Rank Math – 18.32%

Rank Math is a highly popular SEO plugin with over 3 million installations worldwide. So it’s not surprising to see that almost 20% of sites hosted on Kinsta use it.