Nowadays, web development has become very simple and easily accessible to anyone, especially beginners, thanks to WordPress. However, maintaining performance, speed, web security, and customer and user experience can be challenging. The solution for this is to use plugins. In WordPress, you will get 59000+ plugins, but choosing the right plugin from them is like finding a needle in a haystack. The good news is that some plugins are very important, regardless of the purpose or topic of creating a website. With the help of this article, you will learn about some main WordPress plugins that are used to create every type of website.
Table of Contents
ToggleYoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a tool that optimizes your content for search engines. SEO plays an important role in getting unpaid organic traffic. Without proper optimization, your content will not get reach and will not be visible to the target audience. Yoast SEO is a trusted and widely used plugin that helps in increasing the visibility of the website in search engine results pages like Google and Bing. Yoast makes on-page SEO very simple and gives practical analysis of your content. Factors like focus keyword, meta description, internal and external linking, SEO title tag, readability, image SEO, readability score, schema markup, XML sitemap, canonical URLs, etc. It teaches you and provides guidance on how to implement the necessary changes in web pages and posts.
WP Rocket
Speed Up Your Website Instantly, A slow and laggy website not only disappoints visitors but also takes its toll on businesses, so no one needs to worry about that with WP Rocket, which is designed for performance optimization, which makes it load faster whenever users perform any action. Once this plugin is activated, and setting it up is not as complicated as other caching plugins, it uses its automatic feature for caching and compressing files to reduce file size; it also protects images and video content from laggy loading.
Wordfence Security
Protect Your Website from Threats with Wordfence Security website security is often ignored, and then it is too late, and a big mishap occurs, and then the website cannot be recovered. Therefore, WordPress has the Wordfence Security plugin, which helps protect your WordPress site from malicious viruses, cyberattacks, hacking attacks, and malware. This plugin has an inbuilt firewall, malware scanner, and login security tools such as reCAPCHA and two-factor authentication. Real-time traffic monitoring and country blocking features let you know who is trying to access your site. More than millions of people trust this plugin for their website security.
Elementor
In earlier times, one had to rely on dynamic coding or developers to build such detailed and heavy-duty complex websites. But today, thanks to the Elementor plugin, it is very quick and easy to build amazing responsive pages using the drag-and-drop editor. You will find many widgets for text, images, videos, CTA buttons, etc. Elementor integrates with other plugins and tools like WooCommerce, MailChimp, 100+ designed templates, etc. making it a perfect choice for setting up any kind of website.
WooCommerce
If you have a product-based business like clothing, accessories, beauty products, home supplies, and digital products like ebooks and software licenses, then with the installation of the WooCommerce plugin, WordPress is completely converted into a full-fledged e-commerce store. With this, you can manage your store inventory and accept payments through international gateways like PayPal and Stripe.
UpdraftPlus
Backing up your website monthly or weekly is a very important task that most people don’t take seriously until a disaster occurs or all the data on the site is lost. Updraft provides an automatic and easy way to create a backup of your WordPress site and restore it whenever required in the future. Restoring a backup is just a single click away.
WPForms
Most websites require contact forms. Using the WP Forms plugin, you can create contact, survey, registration and other forms without coding. Its convenient drag-and-drop feature that allows users to create responsive forms which works in all devices like desktop, laptops, tablets and mobiles, you can also add spam protection to keep bots away via reCAPTCHA and integrate with popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp.
Smush
Website speed gets compromised due to the large size of images; hence, many people rely on Smush plugin which provides image compression without losing quality, thereby making your website load faster. Smush bulk compresses existing images and also optimizes new images after they are uploaded, thereby improving both SEO and user experience. It works with page builders like Elementor, Bower Builder, Breezy, and Divi among others and is known for image optimization and features like lazy loading and automatic resizing.
MonsterInsights
This tool is mainly responsible for tracking how people are interacting with your website and what is happening insideit, which is vital for its growth. MonsterInsights integrates Google Analytics directly with wordpress, which lets you monitor WordPress from a dashboard. From this, you can track your website traffic sources, page views, bounce rate, engagement rate etc. and track revenue, conversion rates, and product performance for your sites. You can also track backlinks, outbound clicks, form submissions, and file downloads with its help.
Site Kit by Google
Sitekit merges all the features provided by Google in one place. It is a plugin officially launched by Google that lets you track Search Console, Data Analytics, Adsense and Pagespeed Insights data through your WordPress dashboard. With this plugin, you can also verify ownership, track performance, view monetization data through your WordPress dashboard. It makes it easy to access web metrics and understand how users find and engage with your website.
Final Thoughts
Although it is tempting to install more plugins, ultimately it is the usage and quality of the plugins that matters more than the quantity. Installing too many unwanted plugins slows down your website speed and also increases compatibility issues. Always choose a plugin that has good reviews, developer reputation, frequency of updates, and rating and matches your WordPress version.
The plugins mentioned in this blog post are trusted by millions of people because these are tools that solve real-time problems. These plugins help you build a powerful, useful and secure website in WordPress.