Have you ever installed WordPress and thought about what plugins you should be installing? WordPress has thousands of plugins which makes it challenging to choose. Plugins are a software that acts as an add-on feature to your website. In this blog post we want to make it a bit easier for you by giving you OUR list of essential plugins for WordPress.
IMAGE OPTIMIZATION
WP Smush.it – image optimization
It’s an image optimization tool that uses advanced algorithms to compress your images while maintaining their quality and dramatically improving your website’s page speed.
- Fast load time
- Flexibility and control
- Results you can see
SOCIAL MEDIA
It allows you to maximize your social media visibility without impacting your site speed.
- Adds a horizontal share bar
- Results in increase in social media shares
- Faster and better than any other
FORM BUILDER
Visual Form Builder – Contact Forms
It allows you to build custom forms which your visitors can use to get in touch with you and send you information.
- Adds anti-spam verification
- Include automatic validation
- Stores submission in the WordPress database
SEO
Forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere. When writing the meta information, it shows you a Google search result snippet preview, so you can see exactly how your content will look when someone searches for it in Google.
- Helps create XML sitemaps
- Notifies search engines when content published
- Allows to add custom RSS footer
PERFORMANCE TOOL
Adds powerful features including customization, traffic, mobile, content, and performance tools.
- Simple and concise statistics
- Social networking enabled
- Monitor and manage your site’s activity with notifications.
SECURITY
It backs up your entire WordPress install and it can do it on a schedule.
- Remote storage
- Whole site restoring
- Trustworthy and reliable
It is a security suite meant to complement your existing security posture. It offers users four key security features for their website.
- Security activity monitoring
- Security file integrity monitoring
- Security blacklist monitoring
It’s a service that makes websites load faster and protects sites from online spammers and hackers.
- Restores the original visitor IP to your WordPress logs
- Helps optimize your server database
- You can report spam in the plugin
IMAGES
It’s a powerful engine for uploading and managing galleries of images. It also provides two front-end display styles.
- Centralized gallery management
- Thumbnail management
- Edit individual images
CATCHING PLUGIN
It improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network integration.
- Reduced page load time
- Improved web server performance
STATISTICS
It’s a super easy to view Google Analytics within your WordPress dashboard. It eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging
- Supports universal (analytics.js) and traditional analytics (ga.js)
- Supports outbound and download link tracking
- Support site speed tracking
CONTACT FORMS
Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes.
- Allows to export entries to the CSV
- Conditional logic
- Routing notification emails
MOBILE FRIENDLY
It’s a mobile plugin for WordPress that automatically adds a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website.
- Support for multiple WordPress menus
- Content-specific featured image slider
- Previewing mobile theme
It allows you to use SMTP instead of mail and creates an options page that allows you to specify various options.
- Adds an Options > Email page which allows you to configure the settings from the admin interface
- Specify an SMTP host and port
- Choose SSL / TLS encryption
These are our go-to plugins we choose to use when working on a site, always making sure it fits the client’s’ request. We recommend them because they get the job done in the best way possible and some even go further than what they are supposed to do.
Leave us a comment if you think there are plugins that are better than the ones we like!
