In the jam-packed directory of WordPress plugins, you certainly won’t be starved for choice. At first you might enjoy scrolling through the selection and browsing your options, but eventually you will find yourself craving a simple list of cream-of-the-crop plugins – that’s where we come in! At 417 Marketing, we have a reputation for building top-notch, reliable websites, and today we’re sharing our seven must-have WordPress plugins. These are plugins that we love and use often, so we’re confident that you will love them too.
7 Must-Have WordPress Plugins
WP Rocket
Want to kick your website into warp speed? Try WP Rocket, a caching and performance optimization plugin that will greatly improve the loading speed of your website. It integrates many of the latest performance features into one plugin, including deferred loading of images and JavaScript, minification (i.e., removing unnecessary characters from source code) of CSS and JavaScript files, and minification of HTML code. This will prevent impatient visitors from leaving your site and improve your SEO performance.
Despite its many features, WP Rocket can easily be used by beginners (no need to be a rocket scientist to understand this software). Plus, it costs just $39 and can be installed and configured in less than 3 minutes.
WordFence
“Wordfence is the most downloaded security plugin for WordPress websites.” Enough said, right? The plugin shields your website from attacks, using a Thread Defense Feed to prevent hackers from infiltrating your site. Plus, on the off chance that your site is compromised, WordFence will alert you promptly so that you can take action. The plugin’s WordPress Security Learning Center is also a great resource for anybody wanting to learn more about security on WordPress sites.
Yoast SEO
Amateurs and experts alike can appreciate the search engine optimization (SEO) support provided by the Yoast SEO plugin. With this one plugin, you can easily optimize your entire site and conduct real-time content analyses. Simply enter your chosen keyword, and the plugin will help you optimize your page with that keyword in mind.
If you’re doubting this plugin’s usefulness, take a look at some of the many capabilities it provides:
- Completely control your site’s Google listing
- Review your Google listing using the snippet editor
- Set templates for titles and meta descriptions
- Prevent robots from indexing single posts, pages, categories, tags, etc.
- Use the plugin in 27 different languages
- Set the correct canonical link for each page
- Add breadcrumbs
- Select primary categories for pages
- Add content to the beginning and end of posts in your RSS feed
- Generate an XML sitemap
Yoast is the most comprehensive SEO plugin available. What more could you ask for? It undoubtedly deserves a spot on our list of must-have WordPress plugins.
WP Smush Pro
When you need to smash down your images, use WP Smush Pro. This quick, easy-to-use plugin will compress your images while maintaining their quality. Without any cumbersome images to hold back your site, its speed should dramatically increase. You can avoid Photoshop, with its complex and confusing settings, and simply rely on WP Smush Pro’s servers to compress images behind the scenes. This will increase your load time, maintain your site’s quality and performance, and boost your search engine rankings.
Gravity Forms
When it comes to form entries, Gravity Forms has you covered. This powerful and customizable plugin simplifies the process of creating contact forms in several different ways. First, it’s incredibly easy to use, so you can quickly adjust forms (perhaps adding a line of input, a captcha, or a file upload) without any programming. Next, it stores contact entries in a database, where they can easily be searched and exported. In addition, creating multi-page forms and limiting entries is a breeze with this plugin’s handy features. You can also schedule forms, add advanced fields, and add pricing fields.
AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) speed up the mobile online experience, allowing pages with rich content (videos, animations, graphics) to load quickly by eliminating extraneous features like JavaScript. The AMP plugin supports this open source initiative by creating AMP-compatible versions of all posts on your site. Although it creates AMP content, however, it does not automatically display this content for mobile users. That portion of the puzzle is handled by AMP consumers like Google Search.
In any case, using the AMP plugin will make your pages load fast. Like, really, really fast. Instantaneously, you could say. In removing all the fluff and stripping away the excess content, you can provide a greater experience for your mobile visitors. Plus, it will help you stay on the good side of Google (a big advocate of AMP). To learn more about the AMP project, check out our previous blog post.
Broken Link Checker
Hyperlinks bridge the pages of our websites and connect them to external sites as well. When these bridges break (due to a page being deleted, unavailable, or missing), your visitors won’t be able to reach the correct page. Broken links can lead to frustrated visitors, a damaged reputation, lower conversion rates, and diminished SEO.
We recommend using Broken Link Checker to spot broken links and missing images within your website’s content. The plugin will monitor your site, watching the links in your posts, pages, and comments as well as the blogroll and any custom fields you choose. If it finds broken links, it will notify you through the WordPress dashboard or your e-mail. Then, you can edit the links using the plugin’s page, eliminating the need to manually update each post.
Although you might wish to add other plugins to your site, these seven must-have WordPress plugins will provide a strong base no matter what your site’s content or purpose.
If you’re interested in improving your search engine optimization (SEO), check out 417 Marketing, an online marketing company based in Springfield, Missouri, that specializes in SEO and web design. Click here to contact us and learn more about what we can do for your company.