Most wounds are self-inflicted, at least in local SEO. A weak site makes it much harder to get visible in the organic results and in the Google Maps results, and to stay there. But you won’t grow the site to be big and strong if simple tasks are a PITA, or if you spend too much time and energy and money on features that stop working, or if your site gets hacked and you can’t get it out of sickbay fast. Too many plugins, or the wrong plugins, can cause all of those problems and more.
My advice is simple: install as few plugins as possible. If you pack too heavy, in general you will find it much harder to create and improve pages long-term, more plugins will conflict or stop working, and a vulnerable plugin will result in a hack sooner or later. All of those things directly affect your ability to do local SEO that’s effective and yields more $$.
Of course, there are hundreds or thousands of excellent WordPress plugins out there. You’ll probably need at least a few of them to keep your site standing, manageable, and presentable. So I’m not knocking them at all. If you’re going on a trip, half of your duffel bag is taken up by clothes, and those are non-negotiable. So what you need to determine now is (1) what else you should bring and (2) how much extra room you should leave for easy rummaging and for souvenirs.
What plugins are the most useful to your local SEO? Here is my shortest of short lists:
1. Yoast, or Rankmath, or All-in-One SEO. Any of these is an extremely handy way to specify and customize a title tag on each page, and to create an XML sitemap. I don’t find the other features useful, but those two are plenty. By the way, if you don’t use Yoast or a similar plugin, XML Sitemap Generator for Google is a simple and hassle-free standalone plugin that only takes care of your XML sitemap.
2. Max Mega Menu. This is the best way to get all of the pages you care about – i.e. service pages and spin-off pages – onto the main menu. That is important because the internal links to those pages are critical.
3. Redirection. If you rename a URL, retire a page, or kill off or add a subdirectory, you need to be able to 301-redirect one page to another easily, quickly, and reliably, or else you’ll lose any backlinks, or an already-ranking page will drop out of the index, or both. Other plugins can do redirects well, but this one is my favorite, because it’s simple and never seems to have problems.
4. Duplicate page. Many of your pages will wind up similar to each other, in their layout if not also in their content. If you need to spend time building every single page from scratch, you’re less likely to create new pages at all, or you’re less likely to spend your time on making them informative and well-optimized. This plugin, or whatever duplication or cloning plugin you like, will allow you to create the page you want once and use that as the starting point for subsequent pages.
5. Link Whisper. I’m constantly on your case about going heavy on the internal links, and part of that involves continually patrolling your pages (and photos) for places where you can add links to relevant other pages (or posts or videos). The trouble is the sitemaps in our heads tend to be fuzzy. It’s easy to forget that you’ve got a page on this topic, or a post on that topic, or exactly which one it was. Link Whisper can suggest specific internal links for you to add.
Honorable mention goes to Site Kit, which often is the least-troublesome way to install Google Search Console. And install it you must, so you can camp out in it and come to understand how your local SEO is really doing.
If a plugin is not on that super-short list, that’s because (a) it’s useful more broadly, (b) I don’t find it useful, or (c) I simply haven’t run across it yet.
What about plugins I do not recommend? At the top of the list are caching plugins. Also, I had a serious problem with MonsterInsights once, and will leave it at that for now.
Local SEO is a matter of doing basic things very well, over a long period. Don’t let your choice of plugins complicate that. Pack light, go far.
You’ve touched on a really crucial point regarding the pitfalls of over-relying on plugins in local SEO! It reminds me of the classic saying, “less is more.” In an age where almost everything is about adding features and functionalities, it’s refreshing to see a focus on how simplicity can lead to more effective outcomes.
You make some really valid points about the impact of site performance on local SEO, and I can definitely relate to the struggle of managing plugins effectively. For a while, I was in the habit of adding one plugin after another, thinking they would enhance my site. But soon, I found myself caught in a web of complications—broken features, slower loading times, and even conflicts that left me scratching my head. It was a real wake-up call to realize how counterproductive that approach can be.