WordPress is the largest website-building platform in the world with a massive selection of WordPress plugins to customise your site. However, all websites should use these WordPress plugins for optimised speed, performance, and customer satisfaction.
WordPress is the world’s most popular website-building platform, with 43% of all websites operating on its CMS system. Many people use WordPress for its ease of use, wide-ranging capabilities, and diverse array of plugins to make your website as powerful and efficient as you need it to be. If you’re not already using WordPress, the simplicity and an enormous selection of themes and plugins make for a compelling case to switch.
WordPress is incredibly popular, and you should consider using it when developing your website. The WordPress system allows anyone with a computer, whether it’s a PC, Mac, Linux or even a tablet/smartphone to build a website for their business or personal use. WordPress has some impressive statistics which speak for themselves about its capabilities:
- 62% of the 100 fastest-growing companies in the United States use WordPress
- Over 500 sites are created daily using the free version of WordPress.org
- Over 70 million new blogs are built on WordPress each month
- There are over 455 million WordPress websites worldwide
There’s no doubt that WordPress is one of the most popular and valuable website-building platforms worldwide. One of the main reasons is that you can customise your website with whichever plugins you want or need to build pretty much any type of website you can imagine.
While you can pick and choose WordPress plugins to customise your site for efficiency, these are the essential plugins that most websites should have to run as smoothly as possible.
Yoast SEO
The Yoast SEO plugin is hands-down one of the best and most popular WordPress plugins you’ll need for your website.
Not only will Yoast SEO enhance your website’s SEO, but it will also help you improve its readability. About 79% of people will only scan your website, so you need to make sure the right words stand out. Yoast SEO takes care of all your SEO needs with one convenient plugin. Here are all of the areas it covers:
- Keyword optimisation on your posts and pages, including meta description analysis
- SEO analysis and suggestions to improve your content
- XML sitemap creation
- Search results appearance optimisation
- Readability analysis and recommendations for improvement
- Internal link analysis
There is a base version of Yoast, which is free, and a premium version with extra features.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the more handy WordPress plugins because it allows you to backup all the data on your website including your database to an outside source. Websites can be a major (if not the only) source of income for many businesses. Having a backup of all your information in case of a crash or virus is essential to keeping your business running in an emergency.
UpdraftPlus allows you to set up automatic backups of your data stored in places like
- Google Drive
- Amazon S3
- Dropbox
- Rackspace
- FTP
- Direct download to your computer system
The base plugin is free. They also have a premium edition available for purchase.
WPForms
Today’s websites are all about marketing. One of the best ways to build a client base for repeat customers and increased income streams is to get information from your users. The WPForms plugin is a simple, easy-to-use, and fantastic way to get customer contact information, such as email addresses and phone numbers. Once you have their information, you can send out marketing emails and materials for more sales at less cost (assuming you comply with GDPR and any other requirements depending on what country you market to).
The WPForms plugin can create all types of forms, including:
- Contact information forms
- Online order forms
- Email subscription forms
- Payment forms
- Polls
- Surveys
- Any other online forms you might need
WPForms Lite is free. There are premium versions available as well.
WordPress is a massive website with many different plugins (about 59,000) that you can use. You’ll need some help navigating all of those plugins to ensure your website operates at peak efficiency. WP Support Specialists is a One-Stop-Shop for all things WordPress.
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MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is used by over 3 million websites globally. It is one of the best Google Analytics WordPress plugins. Google Analytics is widely considered the most comprehensive and effective analytics tool available, and MonsterInsights integrates with it to show you exactly how customers interact with your website.
One of the most popular features is that it distills all the information from Google Analytics and shows you the relevant information and data. As there is a ton of analytical information available, users love the simplistic breakdown of the data. With this data, you can optimise your website to increase traffic, revenue, subscribers, and more.
MonsterInsights has a free version and premium versions that have many more features.
WP Rocket
Your WordPress site needs to be fast to compete in modern times. WP Rocket is the best caching WordPress plugin there is. It will allow you to instantly improve your website’s speed and performance with little to no technical expertise needed.
Here are some of WP Rocket’s features:
- Automatically turns on WordPress caching solutions like gzip compression, page cache, and cache pre-loading
- Optional enabling features include: lazy loading images, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, minification, and more
- Automatically crawls and builds your site’s cache, resulting in an instant performance boost
- Offers Imagify, which boosts performance even further
WP Rocket is easy to use and has tons of great features. It has one downside, and that is it’s solely a paid plugin. If you don’t have the budget for this then you will find a variety of free plugins to optimise images and other content on your site.
As a WP Support Specialists client, you receive WP Rocket (the premium version) at no additional charge.
Akismet
Spam is a massive issue for websites today. Many internet trolls out there love to bog down a website with spam, whether for their own personal gain or pleasure. Spam can clog up your site, your email inbox, and ruin the experiences for the rest of your visitors. Spam comments can also damage your reputation and cause you to lose customers if not handled properly.
Akismet is one of the most effective anti-spam plugins for WordPress with over 82 million downloads, making it the most popular plugin ever. If you want to improve customer experience on your website, install the free software, get your API key, paste it into the appropriate box in “Settings,” then choose where you want to send spam comments (the trash or a spam folder).
There is a free version and a premium edition with added security features.
Smush
If you want a faster site, image optimisation is one of the best ways to make your WordPress site quicker and more efficient. Smush’s image compression and optimisation, especially when combined with caching WordPress plugins (such as WP Rocket, seen above), can dramatically improve your website’s performance and speed.
High-quality images are essential to having a popular and engaging website. About 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most critical form of business content, while blog content was just barely just number one at 38%. However, high-quality images can slow your site down if you don’t have a plugin like Smush.
Smush is a free and paid plugin.
As a WP Support Specialists client, you receive Smush Pro (the premium version) at no additional charge.
Final Thoughts
There are so many plugins it’s hard to list them all in our article. All of the above have competitor options, and depending on your needs, one of those may be better than what we have on our list. Hopefully, the options above give you something to think about and a good starting point.
There are over 59,000 WordPress plugins available for you to customise your website any way you want. The volume of customisation options is one of the reasons WordPress is the most popular website builder worldwide. With all these plugin options, you’re sure to find the right ones that will make your site do business as efficiently as possible.
The plugins listed here should be pretty standard for most websites, as they take care of site speed, optimisation, ease of use, and customer service/satisfaction. By implementing some or all of these WordPress plugins on your site, you’re guaranteed to be running a better, faster site on WordPress that will make more of your customers happy.
If you need some guidance on the other 58,993 or so plugins available to you, check out WP Support Specialists. We have the experience and knowledge in the vast universe of WordPress plugins. Check out WP Support Specialist’s services, and see how we can help you improve your WordPress website.
