Did you know that WordPress powers over 35% of all websites globally? WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems because of the tons of features and flexibility it offers. Additionally, the WordPress community is always contributing to improving the ecosystem. Although WordPress is an extremely easy platform, it’s core lacks some functionalities needed to build a complete website. However, this void can be filled up by getting the ideal plugins.
WordPress plugins add features to the WordPress installation which otherwise would only be possible with coding. With over 56,000 free and premium WordPress plugins to choose from, it can be a difficult task to identify the must-have plugins for your WordPress website.
Today we would like to talk about plugins that have been in the WordPress ecosystem for a long time and have ensured to take any WordPress website to the next level. So if you’re looking to start your WordPress website in the year 2020, the following plugins will indeed be a game-changer.
- Yoast SEO:
With over 5+ million active installations and rated the no. 1 WordPress SEO plugin, this is all you need to enable your site to be Search Engine friendly. From building XML Sitemaps to setting canonical URLs, Yoast has been a great tool in ensuring that everyone gets their site SEO friendly. This plugin is extremely easy to set up, and there are tons of reference material online that will help you quickly set up this plugin for your WordPress website. - W3 Total Cache:
We can’t emphasize more on how important site speed is in today’s day and age. One second slower page load can mean lower search engine rankings resulting in lower traffic. Thankfully, the plugin W3 Total Cache provides your site with caching abilities like Browser Cache, Page Cache, CDN integration and much more. When correctly set up, the plugin ensures to reduce page load time significantly, thus providing a better experience for your website visitors. Additionally, this tool is compatible with all our Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, and Dedicated Servers. - WP Smush:
One of the main culprits for a slow WordPress website can be the large image files that are stored on your site. Furthermore, these large files could be utilizing your precious server space. The plugin WP Smush enables a user to cut down unwanted information from the images and considerably lower the image size without compromising on the image quality, only with a click of a button. You can either choose to reduce the size of the images individually or in bulk, of 50 images at a time. A recent update to the plugin has brought the image resizing feature that will scale down the images to predefined height and width. - Sucuri Security
Websites that are prone to hacker attacks have one thing in common – they lack website security. Irrespective of the type of website you run, protecting it from malicious attackers should be your top priority. Sucuri Security is a WordPress Security plugin that monitors and protects your website from harmful attacks like DDoS, brute-force attack, XSS attack, malware threats and more. It monitors, scans and blacklists attacks. Moreover, the premium version of this plugin even offers a website firewall. We strongly recommend this plugin to keep your website safe from security threats. - Social Media Flying Icons:
Our in-house SEO expert once told us that the best form of social media icons is the ones that float as the user scrolls. Why may you ask? Simple, this enables your website visitor to quickly share your content no matter which part of the page he is at. If you want the ability to add a social media floating bar, then you should consider the plugin Social Media Flying Icons. It is one of the easiest plugins to configure allowing you to choose from multiple icon themes.Here’s a quick demo to understand how this plugin works. - Broken Link Checker:
The name says it all, this plugin watches over your WordPress website for any broken links and notifies you via the dashboard or email. Broken links could spell disaster for your website’s reputation and the only way to avoid it is by ensuring all your links are updated correctly. You don’t need to manually update each post to fix the broken link; instead, you can edit the links directly from the plugin’s page. We highly recommend that you install this plugin and scan your website to identify any issues. - Redirection:
Another vital plugin to consider for your site is Redirection. This tool enables you to manage your 301 redirects and also helps you track down the 404 errors and fix them. You don’t need to have any knowledge of Apache or Nginx to perform the redirects. - WooCommerce:
Another vital plugin to consider for your site is Redirection. This tool enables you to manage your 301 redirects and also helps you track down the 404 errors and fix them. You don’t need to have any knowledge of Apache or Nginx to perform the redirects.
While many other plugins deserve a spot here, we think that these are the most critical ones that you must have to enrich your WordPress website. If you are using some other plugins that should have made it to the list of ‘best plugins for WordPress website’, then feel free to share them in the comments section below.
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