WordPress Plugins are add-ons to your WordPress Site. It’s similar to the apps in your tab/mobile device.
To understand easily, let’s take an example of your tab/mobile when you buy your brand-new tab/mobile or even laptop. There you will find some default application that comes with the device.
Then you will add the apps according to your necessity mostly free apps. Apps for your device’s speed, security, malware, additional functionality, and features that make it easier to use your device in your daily life.
Similarly,
- To make it easy to work with your WordPress website,
- To add new functionality or extends the functionality,
- To improve or add a specific feature to your website
- To improve or change an aesthetic element of your website
- To enhance the visual elements that a user sees when they visit your website
- To make a minor tweak to transform your website into a fully functioning eCommerce store……..
………….the WordPress plugins are there for the WordPress website.
You had a piece of code that you can “plug in” to your WordPress website. That piece of code like an app for your mobile device is known as WordPress Plugin.
Table of Contents
WordPress Plugins You Need to Know For Your Business Website
You are building or creating your website for your digital marketing business or blogging business. But it is not a simple thing.
Your design should look great. Your customer needs to be able to navigate your website easily. You need to protect your data and website from hackers and spammers. You need to optimize your website for search engines. And the list goes on.
With the help of WordPress (the most popular and famous open-source website builder and content management system) which has 43.3% of the Market share of all websites on the internet, you can create your customized website as per your necessity.
Source: kinsta
WordPress plugins are one of the reasons that the piece of software becomes so popular. That means WordPress allows you to install plugins on your website to add or improve a specific function or feature.
The problem is which one is good and which to choose. There are over 50 thousand free WordPress plugins available in the official plugins directory and the numbers have been growing each year.
Even if you don’t count the premium WordPress plugins offered and sold by third-party companies or developers, you have thousands of choices. But you don’t have to be overwhelmed.
Every plugin has been developed to improve or add some functionality and features. In the early stage and to run your blogging or digital marketing business, Free WordPress plugins are enough to make your website great and successful.
This blog is written for you to erase this overwhelm and confusion in choices. Basics but you must need to install these 15 WordPress plugins on your business website.
1 Yoast SEO
The first WordPress plugin you need for your WordPress Website is Yoast SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the foundation of your website’s visibility and ranking. Creating a great website with design and look won’t work alone until you know the SEO. SEO brings prospects to your website and gives you an opportunity to convert them into customers.
This plugin is officially recommended by WordPress. It allows you to select a keyword. With the help of that keyword, you can optimize your blog post. There is no doubt that Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins with a user-friendly interface. A readability check is another best feature of this plugin. Yoast SEO has over 176 million downloads.
2 Akismet
Nobody wants unwanted, unsolicited, and junk messages in a mailbox, message box, and/or comment section of the blog post. But It has become an inseparable part of the online world.
The worst part of spam comments is they look genuine. Because of these spammy comments on your blog, your brand image and user experience can ruin if it is not dealt with properly.
That’s why you need this plugin on your WordPress website to take care of the spammy comments on your blog posts. This reliable, effective anti-spam plugin is also recommended by WordPress officially.
The free version of Akismet is well enough for your website. This plugin has 133 million downloads. It has become one of the most anti-spam plugins among a lot of others because it catches some 5 million pieces of spam per hour. An API key is the central part of the plug-in which you should integrate into your WordPress site.
3 Google XML Sitemaps
It is another plugin you need to know for your website’s SEO and Ranking. A sitemap is a file that acts as a roadmap to your website and its pages. It helps to search engines crawl and index your site and pages properly.
The main purpose of this WordPress Plugin is to notify search engines about your new post and/or anything changes you have made to your website so that search engines like Google can find and understand your website’s structure, essential pages, blog posts explanation, and more quickly. In this way, your site, page, and posts index fast and speed up your content discovery to your targeted audiences.
Google XML sitemaps plugin is a huge time saver that creates a dynamic sitemap of your WordPress Website that is compatible with popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Therefore it is a must-have feature for your website to boost your site’s ranking on search engines.
4 W3 Total Cache
The speed of your really matter for the SEO. Search Engines like Google has includes the speed factor in their ranking algorithm. That’s what fulfills the same objective as yours and Google are making sure user find what they are looking for quickly.
Speed is among the most important factors for your website’s success. Because it directly affects your traffic, conversion, and revenue. That’s why you need the Cache plugin to improve the site’s performance. And W3 Total Cache gives you the solution for faster websites, happier visitors, and better results.
A cache usually pronounced as CASH is reserved storage that can be found in both software and hardware that collects temporary data to help websites, browsers and apps load faster. You will find a variety of caches in computers, laptops or phones, web browsers, or apps.
This cache plugin improves overall site performance at least 10x, reducing page load time and increasing visitor time on site. And thus, improving search engine result page ranking and conversion rate.
5 WP Forms
A web form among other many aspects of your website contributes to the overall user experience. Forms are one of the best ways to get input from potential customers and indirectly make good relationships with them.
Without web forms, digital marketers would have a tough time because the forms will help them to obtain information about prospects, potential customers, new leads, and other information like tracking data regarding purchases, customer feedback, survey responses, and more. Digital marketers use the forms for different purposes such as contact forms, lead generation forms, order forms, surveys, shipping forms, registration, quizzes, etc.
Hence you too need a form on your website of any type. Without a form on your website, you cannot get successful in your digital marketing business. If there is no plugin like WP Forms and thousands of other forms plugins, it will be difficult for you to create a form with HTML or code and embed it on your web pages.
That’s why you need a form-creating plugin for your website and its necessity to fulfill your website by WP forms. It is one of the incredibly user-friendly, and powerful features of drag and drop from creating plugins on the internet. It will help you create a beautiful form according to your purpose.
6 BackWPup
Backup anything is simply securing your important data or files if anything happens. The reason could be anything such as hardware or software failure, data corruption, human-caused event, attack by hackers, viruses or malware, accidental deletion, etc.
If you back up your data properly in a separate medium, you can easily restore them. As you know WordPress is an open-source website builder and CRM, so there is always a danger of hacking and spamming on your site. That’s why you need a backup plugin for your website.
BackWPup is one of that backup plugin among thousands of others.
It has both free and premium versions with advanced features. But for the starting phase of your website building, the free version will be enough. This plugin is a security-oriented plugin built for real-time automated backup for your website.
7 Smush
Again, it comes to the overall website ranking, SEO, conversion, and user experience which are all connected with your website speed.
A picture is worth a thousand words as it is said. On average around 64% of a website’s weight is comprised of images. The users of your website like most humans love to interact with visuals rather than words. That’s why you should include images in your pages and posts.
But the images take a heavy weight in your website as mentioned above – 64% makes your website’s loading speed slow. And you know how drastically the speed of the website can make a success of your website or a failure of your website.
Therefore, you need this Smush plugin for your website. It is an image optimization plugin. Image optimization on the internet or web means processing and delivering high-quality images to users in the right format, dimension, resolution, and size while keeping the smallest possible size.
8 WP-Optimize
Optimization of your website’s pages, images, posts, and website as a whole is necessary for your site’s performance and speed.
Removing the unnecessary contents of your database like auto drafts, spam comments, trashed, unapproved comments, stale data, pingbacks, trackback, expired transient options, etc., will keep your website’s performance high.
That’s why you need this revolutionary all-in-one optimization plugin for your website. It caches your site, cleans your database, and compresses your images. The simple but highly powerful and effective plugin WP optimize has everything you need to keep your website high in ranking to get success in your digital marketing business.
9 All in one Schema Rich Snippets
Although the Schema markup and Rich Snippets are confusing in the early day of the blogging/digital marketing business. It is very important for your business’s success.
To understand easily, think of the Schema markup as your business card which you circulate to others. Schema markup provides context to your content to help crawlers of search engines determine what it’s about so the search engines index your content properly.
Similarly, the Snippet is a piece of your content in a search result in a set that generally consists of a title, a URL, and a description of the page. It is your website’s doorway, a valuable piece of online real estate. It is the way to beautify the appearance of your page or post in a SERP. Snippets are brief descriptions of your page or product that highlight the main points increasing the click-through rate of your page or product.
All in one Schema rich snippet summarize your page or product in the search result page. And help you rank higher in search results. The components of rich snippet photos, star ratings, price, points, author, etc., make it very interactive and let your page/product stand out from the competition.
10 Wordfence Security
Being a digital marketer or blogger in the online world, it is your important job to protect your website and the data it holds. This is a very vital and sensitive matter to you as well as your customer. Because thousands of websites get hacked every day.
It is your responsibility to protect the sensitive information of your customers, protect your online real state and protect your reputation building trust and securing your business very well.
That’s why you need this Security plugin among many others. This plugin secures your website from everything. Firewall protection, Malware scan, Blocking, Login Security, Live traffic monitoring, and a lot more are the features of this security plugin.
This plugin lets you monitor all your traffic in real-time including robots, humans, 404 errors, logins, logout, etc.
11 Broken Link Checker
The broken link as the name suggests is the link that does not work properly. It gives a negative impact on ranking your site on a search result because of less trustworthiness, 404 errors, and bad user experiences.
The internal links and external can be broken from time to time. It is impossible to check those broken links manually when your blogging business grows. That’s why you need this popular plugin to get help with your website. It has over 400,000 times downloads.
From monitoring links to detecting those that don’t work to notifying you, this plugin does all the heavy work for you. Automated scans, smartness, notification, and control of search engine behavior are some best features of this plugin.
12 Shared Counts
Wring blog posts on your business website is not enough for success. It is said that 20% of the time you should give time to writing and 80% of your time should give to promotion and networking. Then only your digital marketing business will succeed.
Even though social media traffic is temporary, it is one of the great sources of traffic to your website. It is an opportunity to build natural links on your website. Social media is a great channel for your blog promotion that positively impacts online influence.
That’s why you need this plugin on your website. There are hundreds of social sharing or social icon plugins on the internet. But the shared counts are one the best among them.
These social sharing buttons encourage and make it easy for readers to share website content which ultimately drives traffic to your website. These buttons increase traffic and engagement in your website.
13 Insert Headers and Footers
On the way to success in digital marketing or blogging business, you need many statistics to measure your website’s performance. To get the correct statistics for your website from analytics tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and many others, you need a code provided by these tools and insert it into your website.
If you know the coding and HTML programming language, it will be easy for you to insert the provided code into your website. Not everyone in the blogging/digital marketing business is technically advanced enough. That’s where this plugin comes into use.
This plugin helps you to add code provided into your site’s header or footer section to enable certain functionality like tracking or custom CSS. Besides custom CSS, you can use this plugin to insert PHP code, JavaScript code, HTML code, and many more.
14 Jetpack
Jetpack WordPress plugin is like a one-stop-shop plugin for your website’s needs. It is a collection of tools and features offering many functionalities and capabilities to your website.
Jetpack handles lead generation, backups, security, and speed all in one tool. It can make your website from the overload of plugins that can cause your page load time slow.
15 Elementor
In today’s era, you can build a website fully functionally. It’s not like some decade before when only a programmer or coder can build a website.
All this becomes possible because of the plugins like Elementor website builders. You don’t need to be tech-savvy or need to know and learn coding or programming languages. It is a drag-and-drop page builder for WordPress. All in one solution to design your beautiful website.
With help of this effective tool, you can build anything from an entire website to a specific landing page. You can design your promotional page, sales page, and even custom forms. The free version of Elementor comes with all the features you need to create a strong user experience on your site.
Related Post: The Best Free Blogging Tools
FAQs on the topic – WordPress Plugins
Now you have got 15 necessary WordPress Plugins for your website. But lots of questions are there which you haven’t got yet in your mind right? That’s why this section is included in this blog post to make clearer about the WordPress Plugins.
You see, there are thousands of plugins on the internet that’s why it is called “there is a plugin for this and that”. You have so many choices that it sometimes makes you overwhelmed and confused. But don’t worry, you will get all the answers to your questions below.
How many plugins are too many for WordPress Websites?
The best answer to this question is – any more than the amount you need for your website type to function. There is no hard and fast rule as to how many plugins you need on your website.
If you can get something without a plugin, then go without the plugin. Because not all plugins are optimally coded. Every plugin you add to your website will consume resources, and add additional strain to server resources. If the plugin is poorly coded then it can considerably slow down your website, not only this, plugins even can crash your website.
Always go for quality over quantity when choosing plugins for your website. More plugins don’t necessarily result in better performance. Too many plugins can affect your site’s performance, SEO strategy, and conversion rate.
If you go for numbers, it is recommended by many WordPress bloggers and digital marketing companies’ CEO that having up to 20 plugins on your website is a pretty good number.
Why should I follow the list in this blog post?
Yes, you are right, you don’t have to. But what you need to understand is – the list of WordPress Plugins is all popular with millions of downloads, and tested and most importantly all the plugins are reliable and credible.
With too many plugins on the internet available for free, it will be hard to determine which is reliable, trustworthy, and credible and which is not. Many of them cause issues that go unresolved due to the lack of support and plugin updates.
WordPress, the website builder, and the content management system is an open source. Any developer who knows the coding and programming language can develop a plugin that integrates with WordPress. That is nobody tested to see if the Plugin works well or not. If the plugin is not compatible your website can crash.
Adding a new plugin to your website is your responsibility whether it will work well or damage your website. That’s why you should always go for reliable, tested, and compatible plugins for your website.
Which one is better – Free or Premium?
What we all know that the price of the plugin is correlates with its quality of the plugin. And it is right too as money gives you the ability to purchase higher-quality resources.
Free plugins are somehow limited to features and functionality. Whereas the premium plugins are more versatile with lots of advantages.
So, it is advisable that the premium WordPress plugins are better to choose and use.
But in Plugins what you should understand is – many free plugins are exceptionally well coded and many premium plugins will greatly slow down your website. It all depends on the reputation of the plugin developer. Hence, in choosing the plugins for your website, you should always go for quality, compatibility, supportive whether it’s free or premium.
How to pick the best WordPress plugins?
The question is big and difficult. Because choosing from thousands of plugins is really daunting and confusing. Also, not all WordPress plugins are created equally. But it’s not impossible. It is possible to choose the best one depending upon some factors and your necessity.
To get detailed answers to this question, there are lots of blog posts out there on the internet. Here only the main points are included so that you get a clue to choosing the best plugin for your website. The factors when you choose the plugins for your websites are:
- Developer reputation
- Update frequency
- Coding quality
- HTTP requests
- User Reviews
- Active installations
- Compatibility
- Support and documentation
- Security features
- Plugin ratings
- Personal need
Where to find WordPress plugins?
Depending upon your need whether you want free or premium plugins, there are some places where you can find WordPress plugins.
- WordPress.org
- Code Canyon
- Wpplugindirectory.org
- Third-Party developers – sell plugins through their own sites
What are the WordPress Plugins’ best practices?
- Only use the plugins you need
- Update existing plugins to patch vulnerabilities
- Only install reputable and credible plugins
- Test before installing
- Prioritize multifunctional plugins
- Always remove inactive plugins
- Avoid duplicate plugins
- Watch out for conflicts
What plugins are necessary for a WordPress website?
The purpose of your website and the theme you are using in your website affect the necessity of plugins in your website. Because each theme is different and so the plugins will be different for each website.
Commonly used plugins in most websites are:
- SEO plugin
- Security plugin
- Caching plugin
- Image optimization plugin
- Page building plugin
- Form plugin
If you have noticed, the list of WordPress plugins in this post is most of the common plugins that are used mostly every WordPress website developer.
Final Thoughts
Adding new features and functionality or polishing the existing features and functionality, plugins will do for you. There are around 58,000+ free plugins out there. Among them, you have just learned the most commonly used 15 plugins.
As a blogger or digital marketer, these will be enough for you to make a dashing and beautiful website for your business.
Which plugin do you like most?
Which different type of plugin mentioned in this post, do you use for the same purpose?
Please mention it in a comment section so that your colleague will be known what you are using on your website.
