Among SEO plugins for WordPress, Slim SEO and SEOPress are quite popular names within the WordPress community. They help you optimize technical SEO issues for WordPress websites. Each plugin has a different approach and offers different sets of features. Choosing which plugin is suitable for your website depends on many factors.
In this article, we will compare both plugins, their pros and cons, to give you the best overview and help you to choose the best one that suits your needs.
Quick introduction
Slim SEO is a fast and lightweight SEO plugin for WordPress. Its purpose is to provide a complete, full-featured SEO solution for WordPress users with non-bloated code and minimal configuration.
Slim SEO has 3 products:
- Slim SEO free: the free plugin that provides technical SEO for WordPress
- Slim SEO Schema: a powerful and flexible schema plugin for WordPress
- Slim SEO Link Manager: a plugin that helps you build internal links easier in WordPress with real-time reports
SEOPress is an affordable, all-in-one solution for WordPress SEO. It tries to solve everything for SEO for WordPress.
SEOPress has 3 products:
- SEOPress free: basic SEO features for WordPress
- SEOPress PRO: a complete pack of SEO features for WordPress
- SEOPress Insights: an off-site rank & backlink checker for WordPress
In this comparison, we'll compare all products and we'll try to mention which one product provides which features.
Features
Both plugin allows you to add custom meta tags for your posts, pages, or custom post types. That includes:
- Meta title, description, robots, and canonical URL
- Open Graph and Twitter cards tags
They also provide settings for categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and post type archives.
The main difference is that Slim SEO has a nice and minimal UI, and it does many things automatically (like auto set noindex for 404 and search pages), while SEOPress tries to provide settings for everything. That makes the SEOPress UI a little bit bloated and complicated for users.
Sitemap
Both plugins offer custom XML sitemap to submit to search engines. The sitemap in the plugins includes posts, terms, and optionally users.
While Slim SEO creates sitemap automatically and doesn't require users to configure anything, SEOPress adds many options for users to configure the sitemap, which sometimes confuses them.
SEOPress also provides HTML sitemap that you can show on your site with a shortcode. As HTML sitemap is for humans, Slim SEO doesn't create it.
Schema
Slim SEO free automatically creates schemas for your website, which includes WebSite, WebPage, Breadcrumbs, Article, etc. You don't need to configure anything to have schemas.
For creating advanced schemas for custom post types, Slim SEO Schema is a powerful plugin that can help you build schema markup with support for dynamic variables, custom properties, custom JSON-LD, etc.
On the other hand, SEOPress free doesn't have schemas. You need to use the PRO version to create schemas for your website. However, the number of supported schemas is limited (15 vs. 32 in Slim SEO). And the settings for schema properties are not as customizable as in Slim SEO.
Slim SEO allows you to insert code to header and footer easily. You can insert anything, from HTML verification tags for webmasters, or tracking tags for Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, or anything.
In SEOPress, things get more complicated. SEOPress has options for verification tags and tracking scripts. But you have to find the correct IDs and set them up properly in the plugin settings page. The settings page is quite complicated and has a lot of options that normal users might not understand.
Redirection
Both plugins provide a redirection feature to users. Slim SEO has it in the free plugin, while SEOPress only offers it in the PRO version.
The UI of the plugins is similar, although Slim SEO's UI/UX is a little bit cleaner.
The functionality of the plugins is pretty much the same: they both allow you to create redirects, monitor 404 pages, redirect attachment pages, etc.
Both plugins support a breadcrumbs shortcode to insert into your theme. The breadcrumbs also have JSON-LD schema that can help Google understand your site structure.
This feature is available in Slim SEO free. With SEOPress, you have to buy the PRO version to use it.
Other features
There are some small features that both plugins implement, such as:
- Auto insert alt text to images when uploading
- Add a backlink to RSS feed to prevent content scraping
- Compatible with page builders: Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Oxygen, Bricks, etc.
- Migrating data from other SEO plugins
- Broken link checker
Some SEO features are available in Slim SEO only:
- Link suggestions when writing posts
- Link reports for internal, external links, keywords, link statuses, etc.
- Auto update internal links when a post slug changes
Some SEO features are available in SEOPress only:
- Instant indexing that auto pings Google, Bing, Yandex when you create a new post.
- Integration with OpenAI
- Google News & video sitemaps
- Rank and backlink checking with SEOPress Insights
- Content analysis with unlimited keywords
Performance & Coding quality
To compare the performance and coding quality of plugins, we'll use a 3rd-party platform plugintests.com that do the tests for us:
Note that the platform can only checks the free versions of the plugins. Premium versions are not publicly available, and they can't be checked.
Here is the comparison table:
| Features | Slim SEO | SEOPress |
|---|---|---|
| Plugin zip file size | 150 KB | 2.2 MB |
| Memory usage | 141 KB | 488 KB |
| Page speed impact | 0 | 0.047 s |
| Load time (homepage) | 0.197 s | 0.365 s |
| Load time (add new post) | 0.639 s | 0.759 s |
| Lines of code (PHP) | 4,942 | 32,240 |
| Code complexity (PHP) | 1,022 | 6,498 |
Pricing
Both plugins offer free versions for users to use on their WordPress websites. For Slim SEO, it's a complete plugin, meaning there's no PRO version of that. For SEOPress, the free version has only basic features. If users want more features, they have to upgrade to the PRO version.
Regarding premium versions, Slim SEO has multiple offers for each product:
- Slim SEO Schema: from $39/year with lifetime plans available
- Slim SEO Link Manager: from $39/year with lifetime plans available
SEOPress has only 2 plans:
- SEOPress PRO: $49/year and no lifetime plans
- SEOPress Insights: $99/year and no lifetime plans
Conclusion
Choosing a suitable SEO plugin for your website depends on many criteria: what features do you really need, whether the plugin is easy to use, whether it affects the loading speed of the website or not, and how is the price of the plugin?
As for Slim SEO and SEOPress, the features and prices are quite different, but the most obvious difference is the performance and UI of these two plugins. If you need a plugin that is fast, lightweight, and has decent features, then Slim SEO is perfect. If you need a detailed configuration for almost everything, SEOPress will be more suitable.
Whichever you choose, both plugins are good products and they will help you handle SEO issues to get better rankings on search results pages.