Finest WordPress plugins
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What do sites like Bloomberg, Disney, BBC America, MTV and Facebook have in common?
They all use the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) to power their websites.
In all fairness we are not surprised. WordPress is great.
While it offers a lot of flexibility in the features, the core software still lacks a certain amount of functionality.
WordPress' core software resembles an incomplete puzzle. And WordPress plugins are the missing parts.
A plugin is a piece of code that is added to WordPress. Users add them to improve their WordPress websites in a variety of ways, including article improvement, security, comment management, and content optimization to rank higher on search engines.
In short, it can make a website look more professional, run faster, and improve functionality.
The WordPress Plugin Directory contains more than 55,000 plugins. This excludes at least a thousand more on third-party websites.
The good news? You have a ton of plugins to choose from.
The bad news? You have a ton of plugins to choose from.
How do you know which one you need?
Every company is different, which also means that it has different needs. This guide brings you the top seven plugins that we think every WordPress user should have.
The top 7 options for the best WordPress plugins:
How to choose the best WordPress plugin for you
Let's get one thing straight: there is no such thing as a "must-have" plugin.
Instead, it depends on the type of plugin.
You should choose plugins based on your needs rather than blindly following a list.
We have compiled a list of a few factors to consider in order to narrow your search and determine the right fit for your website.
Each plugin page in the WordPress plugin repository contains detailed information about the plugin, its purpose, its usage and much more. You can use this information to decide whether a particular plugin is right for you.
Search the plugins directory and select a few options that you think best suit your needs. Use the tips below to help you make your final selection:
Free against Premium
We all like free things, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're better. WordPress plugins are no exception.
Free plugins can be great if you don't want to spend money right away. Most of these are enough to do the basic task.
However, if you're looking for more features or higher levels of customization, most plugins need to be updated to the premium version to unlock more features.
In contrast, premium plugins are supposed to ensure compatibility with new WordPress versions and offer better security. It also gives you a wider range of features to customize and improve your website.
If you're worried about the financial commitment, you'll be pleased to know that most premium plugins are quite affordable. So you won't break the bank anytime soon.
In the end, it's your call. Just make sure you are making the right choice for your website's functionality.
General plugin reviews
The overall rating of a WordPress plugin can tell you a lot.
Previous users can rate a plugin with up to five stars, depending on their experience. Skip options that don't average at least (or almost) four stars.
Plugins with a one-star, two-star, or three-star rating are mostly buggy and cause a lot of problems. While higher rated plugins are well maintained, work well, and offer reasonable support.
Otherwise, why would a user give them good ratings and reviews?
Go through as many user reviews as you can
There is no better way to determine the quality of a plugin than directly from users. That way you know exactly if a plugin is successful.
We also recommend looking at the total number of reviews. For example, if a plugin has only been rated by five or seven people, that means it's relatively new. If they give a decent rating, the average rating is automatically higher. It's always better to download plugins with more users and reviewers.
So, in addition to reading user reviews, you should also check the total number of reviews.
See How active the support section is
Every plugin in the WordPress plugin repository has a support forum.
Go through the Support tab to check the activity level on these forums. Regular activity is required as this indicates that the developer is responsive and wants to provide a great experience for their users by solving user reported issues.
If you're evaluating a premium plugin, the official website should be your go-to instead of the Support tab.
Find out how easy it is to get support and if it has the features you need. Send a test email to see how quickly the developers are responding to check their efficiency.
If a plugin has multiple unresolved threads or you don't get a response to your test email, it likely means the plugin has been canceled or developers are not responding to user issues.
It could still work, yes. However, you will not receive adequate assistance when you run into problems.
Find out the frequency of updates
The best plugins are updated regularly. If not, or if it's been a long time since they were last updated, they may not be well maintained.
Of course, there can be some exceptions, but regular updates are still an important consideration.
Ideally, plugin updates should match the core WordPress updates. This ensures optimal compatibility and a good level of active implication by the plugin developer. You can check exactly when a plugin was last updated by visiting the WordPress plugin repository.
Also read the Active Installations section. This will give you an idea of the plugin's popularity and whether it is still relevant to the ever changing market trends.
The different types of WordPress plugins
It's the type of plugin that matters, not a specific developer.
All plugins are designed to increase the performance and conversion rates of your website. While you can download as many plugins as you want, that doesn't mean you should.
Downloading unnecessary plugins can even slow down your website and even compromise security.
So what should you do Simplify.
Here are the six types of WordPress plugins you will need.
SEO
SEO WordPress plugins will bring more traffic to your website or blog – provided you get it right.
For example, NeilPatel.com generates 2,530,346 visitors, 1,866,913 of whom are from search engines. As? We have optimized the on-page search engine optimization, created links, published blog posts regularly and optimized it for user signals.
With the right combination, we were able to increase our steadily growing Google traffic.
You can also do this by installing SEO plugins on your WordPress site.
You can add meta tags, titles, and descriptions that make your website and blog posts appear on the first page of Google without a lot of manual work.
security
Security plugins protect your site from malware, hackers, and other forms of cybercrime. They will alert you immediately of any abnormal activity and give you the opportunity to intervene before the problem escalates – and sometimes even before it even starts.
Every website needs a security plugin. Nobody is safe from the prying eyes of malicious hackers.
Analytics
Creating and maintaining a website takes a lot of hard work. So it goes without saying that you want to know if your efforts are paying off.
Analytics plugins give you a detailed report on the number of your visitors, user engagement and other important information to support your marketing strategies. Think of these plugins as a trusted friend who can help you make better marketing decisions.
Caching
Nobody likes going to slow loading websites.
If a site takes longer than three seconds to load, 53% of users give up on it. This is exactly why you need a caching plugin to counteract this problem.
These plugins save data from your website in the visitors' browsers. Whenever they return to your site, the browser loads content locally instead of pulling it from the server, which speeds things up a lot.
List creation
For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you earn $ 42. Basically, email marketing is a gold mine.
In order for your email marketing campaign to be successful, you need to build your email list. A plug-in for creating lists can be helpful. These plugins can simplify the email capture process and also create contact forms.
The more attractive your contact forms are, the more registrations you will receive. Isn't that what everyone wants?
Homepage
Landing pages play an important role in improving conversion rates. This is the key to getting more sales leads through your digital marketing efforts.
Landing page plugins allow you to create effective templates to convince a user to either sign up for your newsletter or place an order for a product or service.
Even better, thanks to these plugins, you don't have to spend a lot of time and effort preparing.
You can assign potential plugins to the categories mentioned above. This way you cover all the important plugins to improve your website without going overboard.
# 1 – WP Rocket – The best for speed optimization
WordPress is a memory-tracking CMS that increases the likelihood of your web server crashing. To avoid such unfortunate situations and to ensure that all of your websites load super fast, you need a caching plugin like WP Rocket.
WP Rocket is a simple and effective plugin designed to increase the speed and performance of your website. It doesn't wait for someone to request a page to be cached. Instead, your website cache is created automatically, resulting in an instant increase in performance.
The plugin activates the recommended WordPress caching settings such as page cache, GZIP compression and automatic cache preloading. You can also enable other features like CDN support, lazy image loading, DNS prefetching, and collapse to improve your page load time and reduce the bounce rate.
Starting at $ 49 for an annual license per site, WP Rocket certainly doesn't come cheap. This is even more true when other premium caching plugins are available. But trust us, it's worth every penny you pay. Learn more.
# 2 – Yoast SEO – The best for driving organic website traffic
Users who are serious about search optimization trust Yoast SEO to achieve their goals. All you have to do is select a keyword and the tool will optimize your page around it.
Not only will this help you improve search engine optimization, but it will also analyze the readability of your content. You get a real-time page analysis to optimize your content, images, meta descriptions, titles and keywords. No wonder it's the most popular SEO tool in the WordPress plugin repository.
Also, Yoast checks the length of your sentences and paragraphs, whether you use enough transition words or subheadings, how often you use passive language, etc. It tells Google whether or not to index a page or a series of pages.
Although a free version is available, you can upgrade to the premium version for $ 89 per year with additional features. You can optimize your content with up to five keywords, among other things.
# 3 – Akismet – Best for Spam Protection
Nobody values the opinion of bots. Unfortunately, spam comments are an inevitable price to pay for a website's success.
However, Akismet allows you to remove spam comments – no matter how real they look – effectively and effortlessly. After all, it's the official anti-spam plugin developed by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.
Chances are the plugin may miss some spam comments or not identify any false positives. All you have to do is tell and the plugin will learn and get better with time.
The plugin also compares your contact form submissions to its global spam database to weed out unnecessary and fake information.
Although it is free to download, you will need an Akismet.com API key to use the plug-in. These keys are free for personal blogs, but businesses and commercial websites must opt for paid subscriptions.
# 4 – Wordfence Security – The best way to address security concerns
Wordfence Security is a WordPress firewall and security scanner plugin. It provides your website with complete protection from malicious hackers, malware, spam and other online threats.
It looks for malware and compares code, design and plugin files with the records in the WordPress.org repository so that their integrity can be verified and changes reported to you.
The plugin comes with a web application firewall (WAF) called Threat Defense Feed that Wordfence can use to identify and block malicious traffic. It also prevents brute force attacks by ensuring that you set stronger passwords and restrict login attempts.
Wordfence firewall and security scanner give you security risk warnings before your website is hacked, keeping you safe. It also includes login security features that you can use to enable reCAPTCHA and two-factor authentication on your website.
A free version of Wordfence is available. You can also buy the Premium plan for $ 99 per year for additional security features like real-time IP blacklist and country blocking option, as well as assistance from professional support engineers.
# 5 – UpdraftPlus – The best for site backup
A lot of people don't think about the importance of a backup plugin. Don't make this mistake.
Almost 30,000 websites are hacked every day. Just hoping you're not next on the list is just wishful thinking. You need to be prepared where backup plugins come in handy.
There are many WordPress backup plugins online, but few are as powerful and easy to use as UpdraftPlus. You can use it to set up automatic backups and save your files to a remote location such as Google Drive, FTP, email and Dropbox.
Restoring your website from a backup is also very easy and can be done right from the dashboard. Other features include advanced reporting, database encryption, additional storage destinations such as OneDrive, Azure, SFTP and backup scheduling.
You have the option of either using the basic version of UpdraftPlus or purchasing the premium version, which costs between $ 195 and $ 399 per year, depending on the plan you choose.
# 6 – MonsterInsights – The best for data tracking
Data tracking is critical to scaling and improving your website. Without facts, you only have assumptions.
With Google Analytics, you can improve your website, your content and your user experience by providing important insights into the performance of each website and the online campaigns that are driving the most traffic and conversions.
Some of you may have heard of Google Analytics for WordPress. It was the previous name for MonsterInsights. The name may have been changed, but the purpose remains the same.
MonsterInsights lets you add, customize, and manage your Google Analytics-related web tracking services – all from your WordPress dashboard.
You can use it to view active sessions, conversion and bounce rate statistics, and to track outbound and internal links and downloads. More details like your total sales, top products, and top referral sources are also included.
With all the information available, you can work on creating a data-driven strategy for growing your business.
MonsterInsights has a free version that allows you to install Google Analytics, track data, view metrics on the dashboard, and run reports. There's also a premium version that is more of an investment but includes post and page tracking, custom tracking and reports, AdSense tracking, and more. The premium version starts with the Plus plan at $ 99.50 per year.
# 7 – WPForms – The best for designing contact forms
WPForms lets you create engaging and highly effective contact forms pretty quickly thanks to the drag-and-drop builder.
It has several cool features like smart conditional logic to make sure your visitors have a great customer experience, which in turn increases the likelihood of them submitting their contact information.
In addition, WPForms can be integrated into all common marketing and payment platforms.
The free plan makes it easy to create a secure contact form. However, if you want access to more templates and advanced features to enhance your lead generation efforts, the paid version is better. The paid version starts at $ 79 per year for one website.
Conclusion
Choosing the best WordPress plugins can be overwhelming, but it's an initiative that you need to take.
WordPress plugins can do anything from designing and maintaining a website to optimizing it for search engines to improve the user experience.
Use Yoast to keep your SEO up to date and block spam and bots with Akismet. Next, make sure your WordPress security is not compromised with Wordfence.
WP Rocket keeps load times short, while UpdraftPlus can help you if you run into compatibility issues or want to migrate your site.
Do you have a favorite plugin that we didn't mention? Comment below to let us know!