Question

I have received some great feedback on my last post, Harsh Agrawal commented on the post asking for a recommendation for a plugin for adding structured data. There are tons of plugins available but I really wish there was a perfect plugin that I swear upon, but it’s a little complicated than that, so I decided to make a blog post out of it.

I have gone through all the available Structured data plugins, some of them used to work, some of them kinda work and some of them…. well, they are premium, so I haven’t got a chance to get my hands on it. I have spent a few hours trying pick and test some of the plugins that I liked the most and decided to write my opinion on them.

1. WP SEO Structured Data Schema by Phil Singleton

I have also mentioned this plugin in one of my earlier posts as well, this seems to be the one that is very easy to use and understand for a non-technical end user.

There are two main sections of this plugin:

After you activate the plugin, go to the options page of the plugin by clicking on the WP SEO Schema menu from the left sidebar in WP-admin. If you are a local business, then select ‘LocalBusiness’ otherwise select Organization from the dropdown and fill out all the fields on that page. That’s was the first part.

After you fill out all the details, you will be able to add the below schema types from your post editor screen.

• Article
• Blog Posting
• News Article
• Event
• Product
• Video
• Service
• Review
• Aggregate Ratings

Once you hit publish, the plugin will automatically convert the data into JSON-LD format and add it to the appropriate position on the website for Google. It will not display any details in the frontend, so don’t be get confused if you don’t see any output in the post preview.

You might be also interested in a tutorial on adding Structured Data for Local Business using this plugin.

2. Schema by Hesham Zebida

This one simply named, Schema, has been released very recently. It looks promising, works out of the box and it will probably be popular in the future. However, I think the user experience is a little bit confusing and since there is no output in the front-end, the user can feel lost. There are ‘Settings’ which are fine, but then the Types, which I have felt was confusing for me as well. It can be frustrating for the non-technical users who might be sitting at their desk, being clueless about whether the integration works or not.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is a learning curve for non-technical users. Other than that, I think it is a well-made plugin and does what it says.

And then there are…