Top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins: Boost Your Site
If you desire to boost the functionality of WordPress and want to customize your website by adding new features and capabilities without having to learn hardcore coding, then plugins can be really helpful. Plugins have the capability of adding a wide range of features to a WordPress website. These include improved security, SEO optimization, backup and restore options, social media integration, image optimization, etc. WordPress Plugins are quite beneficial as you can easily add cool features to your WordPress website without having to write a single line of code.
Essential Plugins to Boost Your Website:
There are several plugins available for WordPress that can help to improve the performance, security, and user experience of your website. Here are nine plugins that can be particularly useful for your WordPress website:
Jetpack
This versatile WordPress plugin helps to increase the performance, functionality as well as security of your WordPress website. It offers features like site acceleration and lazy loading through content delivery networks (CDN) which helps to improve the speed of the website. It also has a social media integration option that helps you to link your website to Facebook, LinkedIn, and more and helps to share your content with a large group of audience. Apart from this, it offers automated back-ups so that you do not have to worry about data loss. It also helps you to secure your website from hackers and other vulnerabilities by providing various security features like malware scanning, spam filtering, protection from brute-force attacks, etc.
WPForms
This is quite a popular form builder plugin that offers a drag-and-drop feature. You can easily create various types of forms such as survey forms, contact orders, donation forms, etc. using this plugin. The best thing is that you don’t have to have coding knowledge in order to create these forms. There are a lot of pre-built templates for all sorts of form types that are very much responsive. This plugin offers spam protection with Google ReCaptcha. You can also create multi-page forms and can integrate them with email marketing and payment platforms. The basic version of WPForms comes with some limited features but if you go for the premium version then you will get additional features that will give you more additional functionality.
W3 Total Cache
This is a pretty powerful cache plugin that focuses on improving the speed and performance of your WordPress website. Be it a blog, a commercial website, or any type of website, this plugin can help you in better optimization of your website. This plugin reduces the load on the server by storing the static HTML version of your web pages. It helps to reduce unnecessary whitespace and comments by minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Besides these, it offers features like browse caching, database caching, object caching, and GZIP compression. It integrates well with other plugins like Yoast SEO, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.
Rocket
This is a caching WordPress plugin that aims at increasing the performance of the website by improving the loading speed. You can boost your site’s speed with this amazing plugin. What it basically does is that it reduces the load on the server by caching pages and thus you can see a significant improvement in the speed of your website. It also packs in other smart minification, GZIP Compression, lazy loading, etc. and helps to optimize various aspects of the website. It has a user-friendly UI which has been very popular among users who are concerned about their site’s performance and speed.
Smush
This is a very popular image optimization WordPress plugin. It helps to reduce the image size maintaining the original quality because of which the loading speed of your website improves drastically. The large image size can slow down your website and this can hamper the reputation of your site. If you are a blogger or a business owner who has to manage tons of images on your site, then Smush can be very helpful for you, You can optimize your images in bulk in case you want to optimize all of the images at once. This can save you precious time. Apart from this, it offers features like auto image optimization, image resizing, other plugin integration, etc.
Yoast SEO
This is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that can help you to optimize your WordPress website for search engines. This plugin can rank your website in popular search engines like Google by analyzing the content of your website such as keywords, meta tags, title tags, etc. It generates an XML sitemap for your WordPress website automatically which facilitates the search engines to index your website more easily. It also offers social media integration so that you can connect to a larger audience and easily share your content. It also repairs outdated and broken pages of your website.
Elementor
This is a very powerful page builder WordPress plugin that helps you to create web pages without any prior coding knowledge. It provides tons of tools and cool features that help you to create a professional-looking website. You can create custom web pages and add them to your website quite easily. It offers a drag-and-drop interface with many widgets to choose from. You can add images, text, buttons, videos, etc. quite easily using this function. You also get a lot of pre-installed web page templates to begin with. The web pages created in Elementor are mobile phone-friendly too. There is extensive documentation of Elementor that can help you troubleshoot any issue that arises while creating pages.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is a WordPress security plugin that prevents your websites from security breaches and other critical issues. In fact, it is a powerful backup and restoration plug-in that can help you back up your website against any kind of data loss. You can schedule backups of your database, themes, and plugins so that you never happen in case your website crashes. You can create backups from a variety of storage options like Google Drive, FTP, Dropbox, etc. Besides these, it also offers you a website migration feature that allows you to shift your website from one domain to another with ease.
MonsterInsights
This is a very powerful analytics plugin that helps you track your website’s performance and gain insights into your website’s traffic and user behavior. It offers a very easy process to connect your website with Google Analytics. It offers you real-time status of your website like how many users are currently on your website and what are they doing. You can easily customize the dashboard and choose the stats you want to see. It also provides features like file download tracks which let you track the popular files on your website and also the least popular ones so that you can add content to your website accordingly.
