7 Best WordPress Plugins You Should Install For Your Website
- October 20, 2020
- Digital
There are more than 57,000 plugins available in the WordPress plugin directory, which can be a pain when deciding which are ideal and useful. Many of these plugins offer beneficial niche solutions, but there are only a few must-have plugins for all sites.
To make a website work and function smoothly, you need to have the right tools. Your choice of plugins should be able to handle various tasks for your site, which will vary depending on your needs. Regardless of the type of site you’re running, let us introduce the 7 best WordPress plugins you should have to create and grow a great website.
Note: This list is strictly not in order.
1. Yoast SEO
Holding the title of ‘most popular SEO tool’, Yoast SEO is relatively easy to use and undoubtedly one of the must-have WordPress plugins to install. Apart from improving your SEO, this plugin also analyses your content’s readability. Research has shown that 79% of users merely scan through posts and pages, so with your copy being more accessible, there’s a higher chance of gaining more attention.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but search engines offer the most potential. You can’t buy your way to the top in most cases, as only 5% of search engine traffic leads users to paid results, which is why working on your keyword strategy is crucial for all sites. With Yoast SEO, you can optimise your posts and pages using meta descriptions and keywords, and make improvements based on how your content is being optimised.
Price: Free; Offers In-App Purchases
Available On: WordPress
2. WPForms
If you’re keen on creating all kinds of forms, be it contact forms or order forms, without having to touch any Javascript or other codes, then WPForms is your companion. This incredible WordPress Plugin offers an ideal mix of practical features and ease of usage when building your eye-catching forms.
WPForms is also mobile responsive and user-friendly, which explains why more than 3 million websites are currently utilising this plugin. With WPForms, you can customise your contact form that boosts interaction and generates better conversions, garners more survey results and more. You can save a lot of time with these pre-built form templates that are readily available.
Price: Free; Offers In-App Purchases
Available On: WordPress
3. Optimole
On average, images occupy over 50% of a webpage size, making it vital to optimise your images. This is crucial as more than half your visitors will exit your site if it takes more than three seconds to load. The chances of 79% of online shoppers returning to your site are hugely slim too. Images are not the only factor affecting your site’s performance but optimising your WordPress images is crucial for an improved site.
Optimole takes every graphic uploaded to WordPress and automatically compresses it, so it takes up less space. It also taps on a cloud-based system to increase the speed of your site. Lastly, Optimole automatically resizes images to best suit the various screen sizes upon automatically detecting, providing a responsive experience to your users.
Price: Free; Offers In-App Purchases
Available On: WordPress
4. UpdraftPlus
This might come as a shock, but on a daily basis, an average of 30,000 sites get hacked. Adding on, your site might stop working abruptly due to the most minor issues. It is evident that there will always be a pretty high risk of running into compatibility errors. Therefore, it is essential to have backups.
This is where UpdraftPlus comes in. This plugin integrates with multiple cloud storage options to protect your backups. You can even choose to automate your backups with a recurring schedule to be safe and restore your website to a previous state. With the manual or automatic backups UpdraftPlus offers, it’ll be a relief if you’ve been attacked, encountered a compatibility issue, or if you want to migrate your site.
Price: Free; Offers In-App Purchases
Available On: WordPress
5. Revive Old Post
Social media is one of the most significant sources to drive traffic to most websites – so, if you’re not active on social media, you might be at a major disadvantage. Posting actively on social media platforms increases your chances of having more visitors directed to your site from these networks.
With the help of Revive Old Post, you won’t be missing out. This plugin shares your site’s new and old publications on Facebook and Twitter automatically and immediately, including hashtags and links back to your site. As roughly 2 billion and 300 million users log into Facebook and Twitter every month respectively, this will help boost your site drastically. You can also set a schedule for your social media publications too.
Price: Free; Offers In-App Purchases
Available On: WordPress
6. Elementor
Fret not if you’re bad at web developing or do not have a fat purse to hire a developer. Let Elementor do the job. With more than 5 million active installs, this plugin is a visual page builder which grants you the skill of crafting specialised and original designs for your pages. Feel free to make them in line with your current theme.
Elementor’s features include choosing from over 150 attractive built templates from its library, adding cool effects like background overlays, animations, hover effects and more. All you have to do is drag and drop. With Elementor, you can easily build completely unique designs for your website quickly, creating a value proposition, without any hassle.
Price: Free; Offers In-App Purchases
Available On: WordPress
7. Redirection
Redirection is something you certainly can’t miss out on. Everyone despises bad user experience. A 404 or broken page leaves a bad impression for your site but it’s almost impossible to check every single page or post on your site by hand, especially with hundreds of them. This is where Redirection comes in handy.
This direct manager for WordPress allows you to set up custom 301 redirects within your website, keeping a full record of data on clicks. Redirection even gives you the ability to track broken URLs link on your site. All you have to do is install this plugin, and it will show you the list of 404 error pages, and you can enter the URL where you want your visitor to be redirected to.
Price: Free
Available On: WordPress
Conclusion
Plugins are the building blocks of your WordPress site – they bring in pivotal functions to your site, whether you need to boost SEO, increase site speed or add contact forms. No matter the type of site you are building, refer to our list of the 7 best WordPress Plugins listed above and you’ll have what you need to build a great website.