Plugins make WordPress as one of the easiest content management systems (CMS). They provide the desired functionality you want to add to your website. But with more than 55,000 plugins available, how would anyone know that which ones of them should always be there on a WordPress website? Don’t worry. I am going to help you. Here I am going to list the top 8 plugins that every WordPress should have. Let’s begin it.
1. Akismet
Akismet comes automatically with each of the WordPress core installations. It means you don’t have to download it from anywhere. When you will install your WordPress CMS and click on the plugin tab at the left, you will see that Akismet is already there. All you have to do is activate the plugin.
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that checks each of comments made on your website and then filters out the spam ones from them. When you have this plugin enabled, you can easily manage all the comments that your website is receiving. It helps you know a lot, such as the comment history, number of approved comments for each user, the URLs in the comment body and removed doubtful links.
Personal sites can use it for free, but if yours is a commercial website, you will require subscribing to a monthly plan. Premium plans provide advanced security solutions.
2. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO plugin makes SEO simpler for WordPress website owners. It’s one of the most popular plugins used in almost all websites for SEO. Optimizing a website for search engines with Yoast SEO is a child’s play.
When activating the plugin, it starts showing its panel below the post editing box. The title, keyword, and description provided here will form a snippet which will be visible as search results show up Google search.
Apart from this, the plugin also analyzes a page/post for the number of focused keywords repeated on it, the length of the content, content readability, and several other aspects.
Also, you can choose to no index, no following if you want Google to not crawl a page.
3. Jetpack (Freemium)
Jetpack is another powerful plugin by the team behind WordPress itself. Seeing its usefulness, every WordPress website should have it as it provides a pack of best features to perform high and become successful. The single plugin takes care of a lot of tings, such as security, performance, traffic, image optimization, website appearance, etc.
4. Google XML Sitemaps (FREE)
Search engines need a XML site map to reach all your website pages. A search engine cannot get the required information from HTML site maps. The XML sitemap is an important component for a website as a search engine, like Google, ranks web pages, not just a website.
Google XML Sitemaps (Free) is an excellent plugin that helps the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc better index a WordPress. Once installed and activated, the plugin does everything on its own. It creates a complete structure of a website and enables search engines to retrieve results more competently.
5. Contact Form 7
If you need a contact form for your website, there is no plugin better than Contact Form 7. It does that effortlessly. All you have to do is install it, configure our mail, activate the plugin and put the short code wherever you want to show a contact form in your website. You can create different forms and name each of them. You can also make some fields in the form compulsory to be filled, such as email address and number box. No need to work on CSS and PHP as the plugin takes care of them.
6.WooCommerce
With the WooCommerce plugin, you can add the e-commerce capability to your WordPress website. This plugin is recommended only when you want to add e-commerce features to your existing WordPress website or want a WordPress CMS based e-commerce website. But WooCommerce requires some learning so that you can easily use the
e-commerce platform that this plugin will add to your website. Also, you will need many other plugins to provide an inclusive e-commerce environment to your website.
7. Simple Social Sharing
If you have a blog in your website or it’s a blog-website, you can take advantage of the social media platforms, which now have become extremely popular among people. Anything published on the social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter etc carries the potential of going viral just in a blink of eyes and providing huge traffics back to a website.
With the plugin like Simple Social Share, you can allow visitors to share website content on social media sites just in a click.
The plugin adds social buttons and several other sharing options to your WP website pages and blog posts.
8. W3 Total Cache (Freemium)
The plugin W3 Total Cache helps your website improve its performance. Caching is all about storing the temporary data of a website in cache so that it can load faster next time when a user opens the same page. This plugin has features like page caching, database caching, object caching, browser caching and a lot more. Also, you can integrate CDC service to reduce the page load time. It also helps in minifying HTML, JS, and CSS that can save up to 80 of bandwidth. Search engines provide better ranking to those website which loads faster.
These are 8 must-have WordPress plugins that every WP website needs to have, regardless of its sort of size or the business or information it is presenting people.
Author Bio:- Sofia is a digital marketing expert in Rapidsoft Technologies which is a leading IT consulting company providing full range it services including, IoT application development, ERP software development , and big data app development solutions.
