WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for site-building. Its popularity is not a coincidence. The platform is free of charge, and it enables you to control how your website will look and operate fully. By choosing WordPress as your building platform, you can access a wide selection of extensions, add-ons, and plugins. This sounds great, but with over 57,000+ WordPress plugins available, it can be too overwhelming to find the right plugins for your project.
Happily, there are a few WordPress essential plugins that every website should be used for better optimization. Why do we focus on on-site optimization? Well, with site speed and user experience becoming key ranking factors, optimization appears to be an indispensable part of a website’s growth strategy. As suggested by Howtohosting Guide IsItWP, the official Google PageSpeed tool and GtMetrix are online services that give you detailed information about your project and suggest different ideas for speed improvement.
Which plugins are essentials for your business growth?
Plugins are like apps that you add to your WordPress site. By installing them, you can add new features that perfectly resonate with your target audiences’ needs. But the right choice may be challenging with tens of thousands of plugins available. The good news is that, in the following paragraphs, you will find the most-used plugins that guarantee that your project will score the best business results.
No matter what kind of site you’re running, or what niche it belongs to, here are the essential plugins that you’ll want to install.
Yoast SEO
Yoast is probably the top SEO tool for WоrdPress sites. The plugin can be installed on self-hosted projects. It will guide you through efficient search engine optimization steps, which will rank your site higher in search engines. With Yoast, you can precisely choose titles and descriptions in accordance with targeted keywords. Yoast enables you to manage sitemaps, and almost all of its features are free. Still, if you need more functionality, you can purchase premium Yoast SEO extensions.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a useful cache utility. It works for all types of sites and has an intuitive design that is suitable even for beginners. You do not need any additional technical or coding skills to use it. Once you activate WP Rocket, it will trigger its features that apply almost all performance optimizations best practices. WP Rocket caching helps your site load fast. And since speed is of paramount importance for improving SEO rankings and increasing conversions, it will provide growth for your business without a doubt.
Imagify
Imagify can speed up your WordPress site by optimizing images. It is developed to compress the code of images without lowering their quality. It has the most advanced features for optimizing all the images on your blog. Once you enable it, it will automatically optimize all images. Imagify is offered for $4.99/month for its basic version and $69.99/month for a pack of all its features. Prices are really affordable, considering all the features and the time this plugin will save you.
WPForms
WPForms is a convenient contact form plugin for WordPress sites. Adding a contact form is very useful as it helps your visitors to get in touch with you. Visitors’ feedback is always a great opportunity for website owners to reevaluate how their target audience perceives their work. With WPForms, you receive a drag & drop online form builder for different contact forms. You can add email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms,
surveys, polls, and any other online form with just a few clicks. The tool also enables you to create a custom WordPress user registration form and login page.
Keyy
Keyy is a security utility that provides two-factor authentication (2FA) option for WordPress. Robust web security is essential for every website, no matter how big or small it is. With Keyy, you will verify every login attempt to your WordPress site via a mobile device. Key utilizes the RSA public-key cryptography technology but hides its high-tech complexity behind a simple interface. Once you install it, you will be asked to download the Keyy app on your smartphone. After syncing the app with your website, you will be able to log in with a simple scan of a code generated by the website. There’s no need to enter your username and password.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful plugin for eCommerce sites that is powering more than 3,8 million online stores. The plugin comes with an extensive extension library. Extensions come into use for various purposes – payments, shipping, and product management, etc. You can also add a currency converter to every checkout page, activate a live chat feature, set automation for the sales tax, and much more. Furthermore, WooCommerce is compatible with many WordPress themes and other plugins.
Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker is developed to look for links that open non-existing or corrupted web pages. This is extremely important for your SEO as your site rank will drop significantly if there are too many registered missing or broken links. Once activated, this free plugin will check your site for broken links and send a report via a predefined email or directly to the WordPress dashboard. From there, you can edit or remove unnecessary links.
Wordfence
Wordfence Security offers firewall protection for WordPress. It is a security plugin that protects websites from malware, malicious files, spam, and other online threats. Wordfence is also capable of protecting your site from brute force attacks. For the purpose, the plugin limits the number of login attempts and requires strong passwords.
UpdraftPlus
Installing a great backup plugin should be one of your highest priorities when running a website. UpdraftPlus may be your best bet. It is suitable for automated daily, weekly, monthly, or even hourly backups. This way, you will know that you have all the necessary files at hand if something happens to your site.
Better Search Replace
Better Search Replace plugin is a handy option when you want to move your WordPress website to a new server or a new domain. It has outstanding features like a “dry run” that shows how many fields will be updated, support for all tables, and many others. With Better Search Replace plugin, you can replace your database without any issues.
How to test for bugs and conflicts with other themes or plugins?
Sometimes plugins and themes don’t get along with each other, which can lead to critical errors. To figure out which plugin or theme is the reason for the problem and fix any existing issues, follow these steps.
Before making any changes, be sure to back up your site’s current version.
- Deactivate all other plugins from the plugins page on your WordPress. Make sure to leave active at least one plugin. This way, you will have the chance to test whether it is causing the error or not. Each time you activate another plugin, make sure to check on the issue again.
- Test for a theme-related issue. Switch to a default WordPress theme and see if the same error is still affecting site performance.
If you find out that a plugin or theme causes the issue, contact the plugin or theme’s support team for further help.
More tips for better website optimization
SEO
Search engine optimization is probably the best partner of website optimization. When performed together, these two can create miracles. Some of the most critical SEO elements are on your website. Adding a precise title tag and a meta description with the most relevant keywords that describe your website’s mission are two significant SEO steps. Be sure also to add:
- Internal links – to help search engines learn more about your website by different pages on your website.
- Header tags – to help both readers and search engines see the different sections of a given article.
- Image names & ALT tags – to optimize images for selected keywords as part of efficient on-site search optimization approach.
Fast Hosting
If you want a decent web hosting plan, the speed it provides is always a thing you should consider. Nowadays, speed is a crucial factor as regards online performance. Fast-loading websites rank higher in Google as Google’s Search Algorithm is set to measure how long it does take to a website to load its elements.
Here comes the role of your hosting plan. Since it can impact your site speed, you need to choose a provider and a plan that best suits your business purposes.
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