In this article, I will share the must-have WordPress plugins for your business websites and blogs Here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the WordPress plugins that can help take your site from good to great.
1. Jetpack WordPress Plugin
Jetpack offers a suite of effective elements for your WordPress site. Enhanced security, improved site performance, plenty of content tools, and visitor engagement features are all part of this plugin. Additional elements include spam-free, Social Sharing, Related Posts, posts by Email, and much more. It also offers a mobile theme option that is lightweight and responsive, designed for phones and tablets.
2. Google Analytics +
It helps to tracking how and when users visit your site is important if you want your site to gain popularity since it gives you the opportunity to see where you can make improvements to your site. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for this purpose and the Google Analytics + plugin brings this information right to your admin dashboard.
Not only you can track visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration and referrers, but you can also enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
It will automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site. Having an XML sitemap is crucial in helping search engines better index your blog. With a sitemap, web crawlers can see the structure of your site and retrieve the results more efficiently. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will be notified every time you create a post about your new content.
4. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache enhances the SEO and user experience of your site by expanding site execution, diminishing download times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration. The only web host agnostic WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework recommended by countless web developers and web hosts.
5. Defender
It searches your site for vulnerabilities and lets you know if any were found so you can patch them up in a single click. This means installing it can also help you clean up your site if you have been hacked. The defender also works to harden your site’s security to save you from future disasters in one click. Now that’s a superhero.
6. Sucuri
If you don’t have a firewall on your website, then add one today. Sucuri’s web application firewall is probably one of the best protection you can get for your site. Security is going to be a big concern for online business owners in 2017. They monitor and protect your site from DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, and basically every other type of attack.
7. Hummingbird
Hummingbird scans your site, then gives you an analysis of your site. You can see the overall score for your site’s speed, then fix any issues in a couple clicks. Hummingbird also goes above and beyond the clouds because it doesn’t just do page caching. It also minifies, compresses and merges.
8. MaxCDN
MaxCDN is the most reliable CDN service, and it integrates easily with WordPress. Images and other static content on a website take the longest time to load. If you want to make your website even faster, then you will need to use a CDN to deliver your static files.
9. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is also known as WordPress SEO by Yoast. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. Yoast enables you to improve your WordPress site for search engines. It not only helps you to add meta tags, it optimizes your site as a whole.
10. WPForms
WPForms is the beginner-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag and drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other type of online forms with just a few clicks. There’s a free WPForms Lite version available for those who are looking for a simple solution.
11. Duplicator
The Duplicator plugin can duplicate, backup, move, and transfer a site. This plugin can also serve as an easy utility for those administrators looking to backup their sites. Duplicator is ideal for making a backup of a WordPress site for testing and validation.
12. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin distinguishes any links that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects.
Once broken connections are distinguished on your site, connections can be altered directly from the plugin page to avoid manually updating each post
13. Disable Comments
It enables administrators to globally control comments on their site. comments can be disabled by post sort, on pages, attachments , and so on.
This plugin works well if you want to disable comments on certain post types or on your entire site. If you plan to selectively disable comments on individual posts, then this function is better handled directly through WordPress.
14. Easy Updates Manager
Easy Updates Manager enables you to manage all of your WordPress updates for a single site or Multisite install. There are huge amounts of settings included inside the plugin making it exceedingly adjustable.
Features include choices to automatically refresh WordPress major and minor release. Site admin can likewise pick to automatically refresh plugins, themes, and much more.
15. MonsterInsights
It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. That allows you to connect your website with Google Analytics, so you can learn more about your website visitors such as where are they coming from and what are they doing on your website. You can then optimize your site accordingly to improve your earnings.
16. Buffer
Buffer allows you to easily schedule your posts for the entire day. It also allows you to keep your social media accounts active while you work on other things.
17. Insert Headers and Footers
Insert Headers and Footer allows you to easily add code snippets to your WordPress site without editing your theme files. While managing your WordPress sites, you may sometimes need to add code snippets to your WordPress site’s header or footer. This means you will have to edit the theme files which could get messy and break up your WordPress theme.
18. MarketPress eCommerce
MarketPress eCommerce gives your customers a delightful user experience while simultaneously integrating with your site and its pre-existing styles. MarketPress also makes it easy to manage your sales, inventory, shipping requirements and products. You can even manage an eCommerce network.
It also comes with everything you need to sell physical, digital or external items without needing to resort to installing other plugins to take care of important tasks. MarketPress can handle it all, including VAT tax
19. Membership WordPress Plugin
Managing users can be somewhat tricky, particularly when you need to redo the user experience and what they approach on your site. Membership 2 Pro can do this, plus offers every feature you could need to run a scalable membership site.
Membership 2 Pro can do it all. You can offer free or paid enrollments, present content over time, offer free trials, customize the registration form or protect anything on your site from posts and media to plugins and categories.
20. Smartcrawl
It can create a sitemap, customize how your titles and descriptions appear on search engines, add automated keyword linking and you can also view industry-leading reports by Moz.
This plugin makes your site more visible to search engines by informing web crawlers when your site has important content that needs registering instead of waiting for web crawlers to find you.
21. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
YARPP can display a list of posts or pages that relate to the current post. This feature provides a great opportunity for your readers to see other relevant content from your site. Users have the option of displaying only content found on their site or can make extra money by displaying sponsored content.
22. Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery enables you to make excellent responsive displays in WordPress. While you can easily create image galleries in WordPress without using a plugin, these galleries are fairly basic. You can create multiple galleries, add them anywhere on your site, create albums, open images in lightbox popups, and much more.
23. CSS Hero
CSS Hero is the definitive WordPress plugin to easily customize the look of your Themes and Plugins with an easy and intuitive point and click interface. It is a WordPress plugin that allows you to customize any WordPress theme without writing a single line of code.
24. Beaver Builder
It is a powerful drag-and-drop page builder tool for WordPress. Beaver Builder allows you to easily create your own page layouts using a simple user interface. Beaver Builder is a complete design system that includes a page builder plugin and a framework theme.
25. Google Apps for Work
It is a suite of web applications like email, docs, spreadsheets, etc. Created by Google, this powerful suite of office applications is cheaper, easy to deploy, and hassle-free. Most importantly, it allows you to use your own business domain name for emails.
Bonus
26. Last Updated DateTime in Posts WordPress Plugin
This is a more unique and simple plugin that made our blogs so fresh. Most of the themes still show the Published date instead of the Modified Date on the Single Post. This tiny plugin just changes the Published date into Modified/Updated date in all single posts. Awesome, isn’t it? Try you too.
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