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We all live in an online-first world, and it will undoubtedly be like that for a long time; so many small and large businesses are capitalizing on that fact by building great websites. Brands increase their online presence by using WordPress to build stunning full-featured websites. It was launched in 2003, and now, it can power almost 40% of the entire web. The publishing software takes care of everything from simple hobby blogs to the most popular websites online. This helps them showcase their products and services in the best way possible to attract and retain more online buyers.
Building websites using WordPress is not just the code-free flexibility and low-cost investment that makes it the best choice. Still, it also has something to do with its incredible plugins that enable multiple options and features to perform a specific task in an organized manner. In this article, we will provide some of the popular WordPress plugins that can customize your website, enhance your SEO, and increase the overall functionality of your website. We will also cover some key aspects surrounding WordPress plugins, so stay until the end! These plugins are one of the main reasons why business owners choose WordPress over other content management systems.
What are WordPress Plugins?
WordPress provides many features to its users by enabling different types of browser plugins. Plugins are an extension of a website's functionality and can be incorporated without writing a single line of code. As plugins help elevate the website's performance, they are vastly celebrated in the website-building community. They can impact your website's aesthetics and create new dropboxes or forms for readers to fill in. These plugins can also add unique social media buttons to increase interaction between the website and the user.
If we start listing the plugins one after another, that list will be never-ending, so it is essential to identify critical areas that need improvements. For example, if you want to automate administrative operations like tracking, reporting, and delivery of programs, you should consider the Learning Management System (LMS) plugin.
Some of the essential plugins that every website owner should consider are as follows:
- Security- WordPress security is a must for every website because the number of cyber threats and breaches is increasing daily. If the website has no proper security plugins, it will be vulnerable to exposing confidential information.
- Backup- A backup plugin is another must-have for WordPress websites because they allow website owners to store their data offsite. When we store data offsite, it takes no time to get back online, given that there is a site crash for an extended time.
- Contact Forms- This is one of the most effective plugins to convert readers to customers. Contact forms allow readers to engage with the website and stay long enough to make a buying decision. Different contact forms are used in different scenarios, but many businesses gravitate towards Gravity forms and Winforms.
- SEO- Optimization is vital for website content development, and WordPress's SEO plugins help a great deal to rank higher for different search engines. SEO press and All-in-One SEO are great tools to add to your WordPress website.
Importance of WordPress Plugins
- The blog's speed drastically increases after inserting specific plugins, which builds a good impression when a new reader subscribes to your website.
- Plugins increase your website's security levels and make sure to avoid cyber threats.
- WordPress also has some plugins to reduce the overall workload for the content management team. Once these plugins are activated, they can generate the result without writing a single code.
- It may sound contradictory, but adding new plugins to your website will save you significant money. WordPress has a collection of plugins that can work alongside your design and content strategy, so it is better to pick the right plugins than to go out and pay a hefty price for a professional.
- The last thing you want your website to be a part of is spamming, and WordPress plugins can tackle spam with filtering techniques and allow genuine comments from the user. Many people think this doesn't impact your website, but it is proven that Google ranks websites higher that contain a limited amount of spam.
- 50% work is lifted by applying the correct plugins to your website. You will fulfill the demand without technical knowledge or expert help when you customize your website and give good features.
How do WordPress Plugins Adapt to any Business Environment?
WordPress is incredibly flexible regarding its plugins, and they readily adapt to any business environment. These plugins deal with individual hobbyists, online startups, and large multinational media corporations. Members in each community work on different WordPress sites, such as affiliate websites, membership sites, and media publications. Each of them achieves its goal by using some of the other plugins. Now, we will look at some of the most prominent benefits provided by WordPress plugins while managing your website.
You get Plugins for All Website Operations
How many plugins can be used to extend WordPress? The answer to that would be well over 54,000. The possibilities with these plugins are limitless, and most of them bring in powerful features to develop a website's functionality. They are easy to implement and result in high performance, so you can rest assured that you will find a plugin to meet your website requirements.
For example, you can create a professional landing page using WordPress plugins: no coding is needed.
You Don't Need to Worry about Future Requirements
Businesses evolve, and it is something we cannot control. Requirements change with business expansion, so websites need an upgrade with more powerful and compatible features. WordPress plugins solve this problem instantly by adding new features whenever required. The system automatically adapts to new plugins, and it is all done at a very low cost.
Easy-To-Access Plugin Information
Most website builders need to show clear information about a particular plugin, so business groups tend to hire developers to understand its functionality. In this case, website owners have to pay a large sum to gain information on a couple of plugins. But the same is not required for WordPress plugins. They give a detailed summary of each plugin, and WordPress has a vast community forum that already provides information on many common problems. This information makes it easy for website owners to choose the most reliable plugin.
Identifying Required Plugins and Adding them to Your Website is Easy
Locating desired plugins is extremely easy on WordPress because the search field provides different filters to narrow down to a handful of options to meet your requirement. Once you have what you need for the website, you must install and activate it. This happens in the background and takes up to five minutes.
10 Best WordPress Plugins
Plugins are designed to extend the functionality of a website and maximize its potential. However, finding the right plugins for your task is challenging, and you may encounter some common problems, such as 500 errors, site crashing, unresponsive websites, and a white screen.
To overcome these heartburns and poor development, you have to check the compatibility of that particular plugin you desire with WordPress and read several reviews to understand better. After checking the ratings and reviews, you may have narrowed it down to 2 or three plugins. You should now test each plugin and see for yourself in the staging environment. We have shortlisted the ten best WordPress plugins to fulfill any website demand.
1. HubSpot
Online business and e-commerce require constant marketing effort, and HubSpot equips its users with all the necessary tools to track performance, manage connections, and build email lists. The site also provides different types of engagement tactics like forms and chats.
Users can run the analytics using the dashboard, and the data helps businesses make informed decisions. Online website presence skyrockets with the right strategies. The complete automation that HubSpot provides creates a better and more flexible solution for companies to integrate their sales and inbound marketing software.
2. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is popular in the WordPress plugin community and forum mainly because of its ability to optimize pages and help them rank higher on Google search engines. Yoast SEO plugin makes it an easier task to manage the title and description.
Real-time audits through SEO analysis are beneficial to optimize content to the highest quality. It also simplifies complicated topics such as canonical URLs, a huge plus point for non-technical users. Other features that differentiate Yoast SEO are set-up wizards and free training videos. These features help people get started who have only basic SEO knowledge.
3. WooCommerce
If you want to market your services in the best way possible or create compelling websites to sell your products, consider WooCommerce as an eCommerce plugin. This plugin converts your WordPress website into a fully functional online store with multiple payment gateways and extensions.
The integration with WordPress is remarkable, and the basic plan is free for anyone to use, but the program with extensions costs a lot of money. The extra features and extensions are worth it if you consider scaling your online business.
4. Wordfence Security
As discussed earlier, the security plugin is the most basic integration with WordPress, and one of the most popular platforms to meet any security requirement is Wordfence. This plugin takes care of all cyber risks attached to your WordPress website and keeps attackers at bay.
All of this is put on autopilot, so there is no chance of malware corrupting your website. Notable features of WordFence are security scanners, login security, and a central defense system. It also has server-side protection with other security tools and has been proven to perform better than any cloud-based protection tool.
5. Sucuri
Sucuri is another well-rounded security plugin with different types of malware scanners and firewall features. A unique feature called the WordPress Integrity tool is provided to check for any modifications made while the website owner is not in control. Sucuri is also great at logging all website activities, and you can even generate a complete report for future reference. The only thing that needs to be added is the Sucuri plugin in the backup or restore functionality. The rest is top-notch and can serve any business environment.
6. Jetpack
Jetpack is on every list for the best WordPress plugin because it comes with a wide variety of sophisticated features, including downtime monitoring and spam filtering. These features are essential in all of Jetpack's plans because they create an alert system via mail or remove spam messages using different filters. Jetpack also has a cloud-backup system that keeps you on track during a hack or crash. Some plans of Jetpack backup data in real-time, and others do it daily. It also has many free themes and designs to offer with its unlimited media hosting.
7. Polylang
If you had asked ten years ago to create websites in multiple languages, you would have been charged a lot of money, and it would require translators to get the job done perfectly. Now, all of that is done instantly with the Polylang WordPress plugin. Polylang allows website owners to add as many languages as they want, and it is possible to add a custom language switcher from one content page to another.
Many translation plugins can be added to Polylang for a more professional and automatic service. Once you get WordPress hosting from a reputable service provider, add the Polylang plugin to run your website in any language you want.
8. Monarch
WordPress provides special plugins to make social sharing possible on all platforms, and Monarch is one of the most famous social sharing plugins in the website-building community. Monarch brings modern social media apps with appropriate buttons, which can be placed on desired web pages. These buttons instantly redirect users to a social media platform containing relatable content on their feed. This will increase the reach of new audiences and generate more leads from different social media applications.
9. WP Rocket
Fast-loading sites are ranked higher on the search engine, and optimizing your website with the correct plugins is necessary. WP Rocket is one of them, and it is a premium WordPress plugin that can increase loading speeds by enabling different formats of caching and minifying CSS. One can also implement WP Rocket for different eCommerce sites and checkout pages. With attention span lowering every day, it is essential to grab the reader's attention in the first few seconds, so investing a bit extra in such robust plugins is worth it.
10. Smush
Image optimization is majorly overlooked in WordPress plugins, and it is essential to consider it if you like to increase your loading speed. Smush is an excellent image optimization plugin that reduces the image's size without destroying the overall quality. The Smush plugin automatically completes the work because manual image compressing is tedious and exhausting if done for an extended period. Smush can handle up to fifty images simultaneously, which is the best solution for bulk optimization images.
Conclusion
Now that you have a clear vision of what type of plugins suit your website, you can go hunting and add all the required functionality. You should only add those plugins that reduce workload and increase speed and performance.
Suppose you keep adding plugins that are incompatible with each other. In that case, the website becomes unpredictable, and users will have a bad experience, so consider only those plugins that are reliable and have a higher chance of increasing user engagement. The options provided in the list mentioned above have all the necessary tools to reach a wider audience, so start testing and pick the best WordPress plugin for your online business or personal website.
We recommend reading the following article if you want a smooth experience building and running your website: How to create a website with Monovm.
I'm fascinated by the IT world and how the 1's and 0's work. While I venture into the world of Technology, I try to share what I know in the simplest way with you. Not a fan of coffee, a travel addict, and a self-accredited 'master chef'.