Some of you may have attended our Techboost workshops put on by Hackforge Windsor about Building a Simple Website for Small Businesses in WordPress. If you have, you know that I talk about some of the plugins that we use on our site.
In our workshop we touch on just a couple but our friends at Gretathemes have let us share this great article with you that touches on a few more that are great for your site. Take a look at what they have to say!
If you are looking to start a website, WordPress is probably is the best website builder out there. The amazing plugins and themes furnished by the WordPress repository make it a highly popular Content Management System. The icing on the cake; WordPress powers up to 30 percent of all the websites over the Internet.
Before you start building your website, make it a point to analyze the requirements of your website. By that, we mean to say that you need to be aware of the functions that will be served by it such as the audience it caters to, the features expected by them, its speed issues, steps for optimization etc.
So, if you are planning to start your own WordPress website, here are the top 10 plugins that you must have for a smooth and wholesome WordPress experience.
Yoast SEO
Search Engine Optimization makes your website visible to the Internet world. It is an imperative measure to help your target audience find you. To get started with your site’s SEO, you must have the Yoast SEO Plugin which is touted to be the best WordPress SEO plugin with over 5+ million active installations.
You will be able to supercharge your site’s content by exercising SEO instructions offered by the plugin through its content & SEO analysis. The premium version of the plugin gives you 1 year of free access to their support team. Also, you will be able to expand the Yoast SEO with the News SEO, Video SEO, Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO extensions with the premium version.
The Yoast SEO plugin is truly an effective and powerful SEO tool. It offers a huge scale of functions that make it a plugin for all.
Akismet Anti-Spam Plugin
If you are starting a new blog and are not already aware, Spam is a huge problem for websites and blogs around the world. Apart from being generally irritating, Spam contributes to cluttering your site’s database, making your site look unreliable, or just messing up the site’s SEO with user-generated Spam. However, WordPress offers an anti-Spam plugin that checks your site for Spam and eliminates it.
The Akismet Anti-Spam plugin checks the comments and contact form submissions on your WordPress website, filters out the Spam, and deletes them. A rather intelligent Spam combat plugin, it also lets you manually review comments and flag them as Spam/Not Spam. It speeds your website by clearing the disk space and offers a paid version for business users.
JetPack
Brought to WordPress users by Automattic, the JetPack plugin is a must-have for all WordPress websites. It powers your site’s design, takes care of the marketing aspect, and even enhance the site security.
JetPack really has tons of wonderful features to offer such as powerful customization tools, a high-speed CDN, Lazy image loading, Site stats and analytics, Brute force attack protection, spam filtering, downtime monitoring and a lot more. It even offers the option of data backup, secure login, and priority support from WordPress experts.
This plugin is meant to help you tackle your site from the very beginning to the finish. You can also take care of your site’s marketing efforts as the plugin offers automated scheduling and social media posting, best of advertising programs, etc.
It’s worth to mention that all of our premium WordPress themes are fully compatible with Jetpack.
W3 Total Cache
Implementing Caching on your WordPress site has a benefit for both your site’s SEO as well as the User Experience. It enhances your website’s performance, reduces server lag, and with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in place, it also reduces download times.
If you are looking for a website with features mentioned above, you must install the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin. When fully configured, the plugin claims to bring about at least 10x improvement in your site’s overall site performance. It also accelerates the loading time in repeated viewing on the browser’s end so that your visitors don’t have to wait up an extra second to access your website. It also saves up to 80% bandwidth via minification and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds.
Overall a wonderful Caching plugin, the W3 Total Cache also comes with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and SSL support.
Also, when it comes to performance and speed, minimal WordPress themes are something you should consider to user for your WordPress website. They’re not bloated, lightweight and fast. The combination of minimal WordPress themes and a good performance plugin like W3 Total Cache result really fast website that your users are going to love!
WordFence Security
Your site’s security must be a prioritized task while you are setting up your site. Not an issue to be compromised with, ensuring robust site measures helps you protect your website from unsolicited security mishaps.
To keep the site’s security worries at bay, the WordFence security plugin must be your go-to choice. Its Malware scanning feature scans several points on your website such as core files, SEO spam, themes and plugins, backdoors, code injections and malicious redirects that might affect your site’s integrity.
The plugin’s security tools are designed to help you monitor site visits and any hacking attempts, in real time. This information furnishes the time and day, the origin and the IP address of the visitor/hacker.
With its premium version, you can expect a lot more: Two-factor authentication, an advanced comment spam filter, Country blocking etc.
Even if you review website builders available in the market and assess their security arrangement tools, you will find that WordFence plugin for WordPress is really a great one. Hence, if you are looking for a great site security plugin for your WordPress site, you must go ahead with WordFence security.
WP Smush
While we optimize our site’s content for a better SEO reach, we always underestimate image optimization and the benefits it can provide. However, if you are using the Smush Image Compression plugin, you are tapping that as well. This free plugin works to resize, optimize, and compress the images on your WordPress site to makes it fast to load and cut the slack.
WP Optimize
The fact that the WP Optimize plugin features over 700,000+ active installs is enough to pay attention to the need of optimization and cleaning the site’s database.
When in place, the WP Optimize plugin runs an automatic and scheduled clean-up as per the time set by you. It removes unnecessary post revisions to make space and can perform optimizations without the need for running manual queries. A powerful optimization plugin, every WordPress website must install and run this plugin to make their site run efficiently.
Broken Link Checker
A rather simple plugin, the Broken Link Checker plugin does what it says. It scans your site’s content for any broken links that are no longer working, any missing images, or redirects. It then notifies about them to you via email. Having this plugin is essential because you wouldn’t want your site visitors to come across a dead link and ruin their user experience.
Sassy Social Share
As important as other site functions, always ensure that your website and its content are well marketed for the audience to find and go through. With Social sharing plugins in place, you can take care of announcing your latest site updates for your followers and also enhance your site’s SEO.
The Sassy Social Share plugin lets you share your site’s content over 100 more social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Reddit. Its aesthetic looking social sharing icons make sure that they stand out for your visitors to see. It even lets you put your share counts on display.
It does not need a user registration to get started. Its responsive icons are good to look at even on the mobile devices. The lightweight code of the plugin makes the icons quick to load. The best thing about this plugin: it’s absolutely free!
Conclusion
The above-mentioned plugins are a must have as they take of your site’s security, speed, optimization, social sharing and a lot more. Having these plugin saves you the cost and effort off many manual tasks that could otherwise be daunting. All-in-all, every WordPress website must exploit the features of these top 10 must have WordPress plugins to ensure that their site keeps running efficiently.
If you like what you just read, make sure you check them out in the link I have included to their website. If you need help with your site, we are here to help as well!
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Nick Russell
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