If you operate a WordPress website and you are looking to take your business to the next level, then you will want to start to think about the ways that you can leverage available plugins as effectively as possible. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of plugins available for WordPress, and many are highly useful. No, you should not install every plugin you come across that you think will be “nice to have.” First, your site loading and performance will take a significant toll when there are so many plugins loading all at once. Secondly, and equally important, is that certain plugins get abandoned by their developers and can seriously impact the usability of your site after a WP core update.
The following WordPress plugins come highly recommended and offer a range of benefits that we will discuss in the following list. Keep in mind that you may not actually need each of these plugins, depending on your goals and your site targets. Something else to consider is that if you feel like your WordPress is struggling with traffic or conversions, you may want to work with a WordPress development company that can come in and manage your build and help you achieve the goals that you are focusing on with their years of professional experience.
1. Yoast SEO
Search engine optimization is an essential digital marketing tool that relies on your ability to create and share compelling content and information with your target audience. Yoast SEO simplifies this process by providing you with templates for your posts, including metadata and title tags, and analyzes your content for both readability and SEO value for your target keywords. The only thing it won’t do is write the content for you.
2. DragDropr
Part of the drawback of WordPress is that even though you can get away without coding to build a basic site, you may quickly run into limitations – not with DragDropr. With this valuable plugin, you can skip the coding entirely by dragging and dropping your desired elements into their desired spots on your site, and let the plugin do the heavy lifting on the back end.
3. WooCommerce
If your website relies on transactions, whether for services or products, WooCommerce makes it easy to operate a storefront on your website that is secure, intuitive, and organized. WooCommerce gives you complete control over your inventory in a clean and simple dashboard and will help you take your web sales to the next level.
Also Read: 6 Step Guide to Building a Profitable WooCommerce Dropshipping Store
4. Jetpack
Jetpack is an all-in-one plugin that gives you tools that range from traffic stats to visitor engagement, and lots more – all for free. When people migrate their site from wordpress.com to wordpress.org, they make the decision to take more control of their site, but this control comes with the loss of a significant amount of insight on the wordpress.com dashboard. Jetpack solves this problem by giving you all of these features and more back on your dashboard.
5. Monarch
Social media sharing is an essential feature for any content that you create on your site, and can help your SEO rankings as well as can allow you to reach new users when your existing users share an article or piece of content that they find particularly interesting. Monarch is a seamless social media sharing plugin that will boost your reach and get your brand in front of a wider audience.
6. WP-Optimize
This performance plugin will clean your database, compress your images, and cache your site to ensure that your load times do not suffer as your database grows and that users can still access your site quickly regardless of the number of pages and content waiting to load on each visit. Caching your site with WP-Optimize can help with things like quality score, and will encourage a user to stay on your site instead of heading back to the search engine results pages to find a faster site.
7. Contact Form 7
When a user visits your site and wants more information, it should be easy for them to contact you to initiate a follow-up conversation. Contact Form 7 is the easiest way to manage these contact forms on your WordPress site by providing you with a simplified form template, as well as an easy and navigable dashboard to handle your contacts and queries from your web users. This plugin supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and all of the other essentials for anyone with a contact form on their site.
8. Broken Link Checker
If you are familiar with the important details about a successful SEO strategy, you already know that linking out to other sites is absolutely essential. Simply put, search engine crawlers rank a site’s value based on a number of factors including the quality of their content as well as the number of outbound links on your site, and the number of inbound links pointing to your site from across the web. Broken links are frustrating for your users, and they will cause your ranking to slip as the crawlers recognize this as an indication that you are not keeping up with the quality of your content. Broken Link Checker will make sure that you are not sending your visitors to a dreaded 404 page.
9. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is an excellent analytics tool for WordPress that offers a range of tools including real-time stats, universal tracking, a Google Analytics dashboard, e-commerce analytics, page-level tracking, affiliate link tracking, and much more. If you want to have a granular look at all of the activity on your site and relating to it, then this is the plugin for you. Experts around the world use this plugin due to its robust capabilities and its ease of use.
10. WPForms
Another form plugin, WPForms gives you extensive control over the layout and design of your forms with a simple drag-and-drop interface. In addition to the simple interface, you can design your own conditional logic flows, use template forms, receive instant notifications, collect payments, and streamline all of your submissions so that you can make a simple sense of all of the information that you are collecting. If you want to have a lot of control over your forms, take a look at this plugin.
Also Read: 12 Ideas for Improving WordPress Performance