We all know how popular and powerful WordPress CMS is. Apart from the in-built functionalities of WordPress, Plugins are the most used components as WordPress Plugin lets you take your business to the next level. As of today, there are more than 54,000 WordPress plugins available that you can choose from. Many users, including me, get overwhelmed when we score the perfect plugin for our website.
The reason why WordPress has so many plugins is that they allowed Third-party vendors to develop plugins that they feel would make an impact on WordPress Interactiveness. They even made WordPress Plugin development easier by providing a comprehensive guide on plugin development. The only catch here is – Plugins developed should be compatible with WordPress and must not interfere with WordPress’s Core functionalities.
Being an avid WordPress user both for blogs and for business purposes, I too had my fair share of experiences with a number of WordPress plugins, some of them were beneficial, some weren’t. This trial and error method allowed me to curate a list of the top 10 crucial WordPress Plugins for your blogs and businesses.
So let’s dig in and check out these crucial WP Plugins. These plugins are important for both beginners as well as established WP users.
7 significant WordPress Plugins for Blogs & Businesses
YoastSEO WordPress Plugin
SEO is the one thing that lets your website rank higher on search engine platforms and helps you in collecting more visitors. WordPress is somewhat popular due to its SEO friendly structure in the first place.
Therefore, in order to get more accountability from search engines, Yoast SEO was developed by Team Yoast. It actually offers a comprehensive range of SEO services that you need to enhance the SEO of your website. Yoast Plugin lets you add Meta tags, Create Sitemaps, Offers a streamline connection and uncomplicated connection between website and Google Search Console, Allow you to optimize your website for Social Media, and helps you carry out every essential step for SEO.
It also allows you to add 301 redirects to your webpages, ensuring there aren’t any broken links, which is extremely helpful.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the best website optimizations plugins out in the market. The reason for its popularity is because it allows merchants to optimize their website in order to increase the loading speed of the webpages, for both the desktop as well as for Mobile Version.
Once installed, it’ll automatically activate the recommended cache settings including cache pre-loading and page cache. WP Rocket also offers you to activate key features like the Lazy Loading, DNS Prefetching, CSS minification, Image Optimizations, and many more for minimizing page loading time.
Further, It automatically saves a page’s details in the cache without any crawl requests once it is loaded, enhancing the page load time and giving you a performance boost.
Akismet
Although most of the plugins are developed and deployed by third-party, Akismet is one of those plugins developed by WordPress Itself that helps you in preventing spam comments in WordPress.
It is one of the first plugins that one should install in your WordPress panel as if you don’t, your website will be spammed from unnecessary comments. Comments that are not related to your article are posted on your website just to get a backlink from the site. These spammers are not interested in your website’s content, as they probably haven’t even read the blogs’ content.
This plugin will move the spam comments under the request section, from there they will be deleted after some time.
Contact Form 7
Adding a contact form within your website and accessing it every time with the help of a developer might affect your efficiency. The whole point of WordPress is to make you independent of developers as things within WP can be managed even without any technical knowledge.
When you look for a Contact Form plugin, you’ll see more than 100+ recommendations. Choosing the right one from them will create confusion. Solution: go for Contact Form 7, the simplest plugin among all the suggestions, and easier to configure than the rest.
I’ve been using Contact Form 7 since 2012, and let me tell you it is one of the easiest plugins I’ve ever used. The key feature of CF 7 that makes it popular is its customization ability. You’ll be able to mold the form based on your requirements. Furthermore, it offers you the option to send all the details after someone fills a form directly to your email address.
Wordfence Plugin
Security is one of the major concerns while working on any type of online platform. The need to secure your website must be treated with the utmost priority. Several plugins out there offer different types of security but in order to ensure complete security, go for the popular one, Wordfence.
Wordfence is the best security plugin on WP, and you’ll be overwhelmed with the features and functionalities it offers to ensure your website is safe from unwanted attacks. Further, Wordfence developers keep on releasing new updates every now and then to make their platform invulnerable to trending threats.
No Self Pings
No self ping is a simple plugin to use and you don’t have to configure it much. This small plugin can save you from a lot of trouble. When we link another blog in our article, it sends a pingback to the admin of that blog, notifying them that you’re using some excerpts or some data from their website.
No Self Pings allow you to stop these pingbacks from your blogs. This plugin is also easy to use, you just need to install the plugin and it’ll start working automatically.
Jetpack
Jetpack plugin of WP is a power-packed all-in-one plugin catering to the needs of admin with an extensive range of features.
Here are some of the things that you can achieve using this multi-featured plugin:
- Contact For integration
- Secures your website from hackers
- Offers you the power to auto-share your blogs on social media
- Sitemap Creation
- Scheduled daily or weekly backup
- Notify site issues and analyzes downtime
- Offers Subscription options in form of pop-ups
- Traffic Tracking and search query analytics
Using this all-in-one plugin, you’ll be able to discard the use of multiple plugins.
Wrapping Up
Using Plugins WP has made the WordPress Website Development process much easier. This list consists of just a bunch of essential plugins that you should have on your WP website and which I’ve personally used for my projects. I trust these plugins with my website.
However, there are more and alternatives available to these plugins that you can use. Let us know some of the alternatives or more essential plugins that you’ve used for your project in the comment section.
