5 Best WordPress Plugins
WordPress powers 28.4% of all websites on the internet and it’s no wonder why. WordPress is simple to use, has many robust and low cost capabilities, and requires very little coding to get up and started with a great looking website. Many from small business websites, artists, blogs, to giant media websites like TIME and CNN use WordPress.
But whether you build your own WordPress website or work with a web design company to help you take things to the next level, you’re going to want to know about plugins — modular software components that add functions and features to your WordPress website.
Many of the plugins are free while others include paid add-ons from third-party developers. In fact, because they make possible such a nearly infinite range of functionality and customization, a well-known saying within the WordPress community is: “There’s a plugin for that.” It’s no exaggeration, considering that WordPress itself hosts a library of over 50,000 plugins.
Plugins enable you to:
- Sell products online
- Collect and manage email contacts
- Optimize your site for search engines
- Speed up your website’s performance
- Keep it safe from hackers and spammers
- And much more
Here is a run down of what we consider to be some of the best WordPress plugins available right now.
5 Best WordPress Plugins
Yoast SEO
If you build out and invest in a website, it’s most likely becuase you want others to find and search for it. Search engine optimization is so crucial that nearly everyone should know a little bit on how it works and how search engines index websites. One of the most popular of all WordPress plugins, Yoast SEO helps you optimize your website’s pages, your content, your meta descriptions and more. Yoast SEO lets you determine a target keyword for each page or blog post, analyzes your content to see if this keyword is mentioned an optimal amount of times in the right places, and give you a score. Try and get each page or post in the “Green” status and you’ll have a good start with your website. You can also automatically create XML sitemap and integrate with your social media channels and giving you a preview of what each post or page will look like in search results. This is all free by the way.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce makes it easy for anyone to set up and manage an online store by seamlessly adding full eCommerce capabilities to WordPress. While it’s a free plugin, it provides endless flexibility and access to hundreds of free and optional paid extensions. You have a full range of payment options, inventory tracking, analytics for deep insight into your business and the ability to grow as you add more products — and customers.
Contact Forms 7
Contact Forms 7 is a super easy to use and flexible contact form builder that lets you create forms to collect information and contacts. What makes this plugin unique is its ability to let the user customize any and all fields with custom rules and designs. This simple customization and styling ability makes it a great plugin to have for any website.
iThemes Security
About 40,000 websites are infected with some type of malware each day, iThemes Security . This plugin is an essential part in keeping your WordPress website secure. The software provides two-factor authorization, strong password enforcement, automatic daily scans for malware, brute force protection and much more.
w3 Total Cache
As we discussed in another post, performance is everything. If a user has to wait for your website to load, they will most likely exit out and go somewhere else. By adding browser, page and object caching, W3 Total Cache is designed to give WordPress sites an enormous speed boost, which in turn boosts user experience. Speed is also essential because page loading time is an important factor in search engine rankings. And when it comes to eCommerce, Kissmetrics reports that a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
Conclusion
Above are some of our favorite and what we deem some of the best WordPress plugins available. Share this list with anyone you know who may be interested and stay tuned for our next list!
If you would like us to share and provide more information on any specific kinds of plugins, let us know in the comments.
Thanks!