WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world, and plugins are one of the main reasons why. Plugins are essential components of a WordPress site, allowing users to add features such as contact forms, SEO optimization, increased site speed, online stores, and email subscriptions. Anything you need your website to do can be done with a plugin. When it comes to plugins, quality is key.
You'll be fine with a large number of plugins, as long as you use high-quality plugins that follow WordPress coding standards. One of the most popular and must-have WordPress plugins is Yoast SEO. It's easy to see why it's so popular; not only can it help you improve your SEO, but it can also analyze the readability of your content. Search engine traffic is essential for any website.
Every day, Google alone handles more than nine billion searches, and organic traffic can make or break a website. That's why working on your keyword strategy is essential for every website. Yoast SEO is free and offers a premium version with additional features. Security is another important factor when it comes to WordPress sites.
An average of 30,000 websites are hacked every day, and WordPress powers almost 30% of sites on the web. That's why having a reliable backup plugin is essential. UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress backup plugins available online; it integrates with multiple cloud storage options to protect your backups and can even automate your backups with a recurring schedule. Images occupy more than 50% of the average size of the web page, so optimizing your images can make a big difference in the loading times of your site's page. Optimole takes every graphic you upload to WordPress and optimizes it to take up less space while also using a cloud-based system to accelerate its site. Social media is another great way to drive traffic to your website; it's the source of more than 30% of referral traffic to most websites.
Revive Old Post is an essential WordPress plugin that takes new and old posts from your site and automatically shares them on Twitter and Facebook. Caching solutions are an effective way to reduce page load times; W3 Total Cache plug-in can reduce load times by more than 43%, while WP Rocket decreased page load times by a whopping 63%. Elementor is another must-have WordPress plugin; it's a visual page builder that gives you the ability to create original layouts for your pages that are somewhat independent of your current theme. The Redirect plugin is also useful; it shows you a list of pages that are 404, so you can enter the URL where you want the plugin to redirect the visitor. WooCommerce is the best WordPress plugin for e-commerce, providing essential e-commerce features such as shop window creation, product listing, and order management. MonsterInsights is one of the best WordPress plugins for Google Analytics, thanks to its perfect integration and fast configuration process. Finally, comment plugins offer more features than WordPress' default comment functionality.
