When it comes to WordPress plugins it is crucial not to get carried away by adding too many because there are plenty of plugins. Too many plugins could easily damage your website speed, therefore we have listed just the top 8.
We have covered the essential areas and grouped them as follows: SEO, Backup, Performance, Useful plugins & Trending.
SEO
Yoast SEO
Given that Google is the most visited website it is without question why search engine optimization continues to be a powerful channel to increase website traffic. Statistics from 2019 show that it has been visited over 62.19 billion times that year alone. So no matter what you do people are looking for your product or service. Nonetheless, despite the high search
91% of content gets no traffic from Google, therefore you need to put an extra effort to be listed amongst this 9%.
Attracting customers from the world’s largest search engine is the key.
Implementing strong, quality SEO on the website and digital assets are always going to be beneficial and it is considered a ‘new age’ marketing technique.
Yoast SEO gives you full control to rank higher in search engines. The tool offers title and meta description templating, keywords implementation, snippets, and it automatically sets canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content which makes it quality ranking.
Backup
UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin
UpdraftPlus plugin is a widely popular backup WordPress plugin on the market. It simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest-ranking plugin, with over two million currently-active installs.
It has both a free and a premium version to serve all types of users. Even with the free version of the plugin, you have backup scheduling and it supports various external cloud storage options (Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email).
Not only that it is good for its features but it is fairly easy to use and all could be done with a single click!
Performance
Smush
The Smush plugin is like many other freemium models that have both free and premium plans. It is excellent for optimizing your images into the pages. Even if pictures have not been previously optimized and reduced in size in photoshop this plugin will do that for you. It will compress them down, make them smaller, make them load faster which is crucial for a fast website.
Useful plugins
Contact Form 7
Both useful and essential Contact Form 7 should be present everywhere whether it is for the site’s visitors to be able to get in touch with you as contact form or newsletter form. It is fairly easy to use, it has a drag and drop interface where you could arrange it in the order that you want and then drop it on the page or post that you want. Furthermore, it enables you to include a reCAPTCHA solution on your forms to combat spam.
Slider Revolution
Slider Revolution with over 395,284 sales is another very popular plugin that’s included in many premium WordPress themes but it can be bought separately.
The plugin helps in the site’s design by enabling amazing features, animations, graphics. It provides lots of effects such as a paintbrush effect and for those of you who like video background this slider cover with a library of objects, images, and video backgrounds. For this reason, you do not need to look elsewhere because it already has too much to offer. Besides, it has more than 200 templates to start from.
Trending
Instagram feed
If you have an online store embedding brand’s Instagram feed onto your website is almost mandatory. Social media platforms have become a crucial element in brand-building especially if we talk about selling physical products. By including Instagram content on the website, you can considerably increase your exposure. It allows an easy way for followers to communicate with you on both platforms, and it streamlines the process on your end.
Instagram Feed is the number one best-selling premium Instagram WordPress plugin.
It provides options for how your photos are being presented (carousel mode, multiple images in one post using a slider format, the pop-up gallery just like on the Instagram website).
The distribution of content from Instagram displayed on your site can be adjusted with the help of 60 parameters. However, there are also 10 pre-built color schemes to work with.
Seriously Simple Podcasting
Podcasting is rapidly growing as a popular content platform for consumers, better yet now when people are not in the position of attending seminars, etc. There are now 62 million Americans listening to podcasts each week and listeners are engaging with all types of topics, from news to pottery to TV shows. This type of content is easy for people to consume in various settings. Driving a car, listening while in the gym, and numerous others.
Seriously Simple Podcasting makes it easy to submit an RSS feed from your WordPress site to several podcast directories. Episodes are fully compliant for Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.
RSS feed is customizable by editing the podcast’s name, description, cover art, and category.
