Just like apps add more utility to your smartphone, WordPress plugins turn a basic website into one with unique features to make your life easier and keep your visitors happy.
Not all plugins are good though and you need to be careful about which ones you pick as part of your WordPress website development.
To make it easy for you to pick the right ones, we bring an assortment of 8 essential plugins that your WordPress developer should consider using.
#1 Yoast
Yoast is an essential plugin that every website developer should use to optimize their website for SEO. It helps you improve your blog posts and website with keywords, checks for readability, and also provides tips to improve your posts using various techniques.
#2 Elementor
When working on your WordPress website, your website designer would often have to create sales & landing pages to attract more visitors and promote your products.
Elementor is one of the most popular and free page builder plugins for WordPress. It comes with a WYSIWYG editor that allows you to create unique pages just by dragging and dropping design elements into a canvas.
#3 Ninja Forms
Your WordPress web developer will need to create various kinds of forms, such as submission, contact, registration, etc., as part of WordPress website development.
Ninja Forms is an all-in-one powerful plugin that helps you create all kinds of forms; however you like. The plugin also comes with an easy to use editor which can be used to develop forms including various fields.
#4 UpdraftPlus
You never know when you may have to deal with a hacker attack or a server breakdown. It is always better to have your own backup system for your website.
UpdraftPlus is an essential WordPress plugin that supports automatic backups for websites. With the help of this plugin, your website developer can setup automatic schedules to back up your site to a cloud storage you like.
#5 WP Super Cache
Your visitors want your website to load fast and perform well. At the same time, Google uses performance and speed into consideration when ranking your website.
WP Super Cache is a website caching plugin that compresses frequently used code and elements. This will help your WordPress developer improve performance of your website.
#6 Smush
During your WordPress website development, you will probably end up including a lot of images. This is especially true for blogs & e-commerce stores. Therefore, it becomes important to optimize & compress your images to reduce the file size, else your web pages will get heavy and take longer to load.
Smush is a free WordPress plugin that your website designer can use to automatically compress every image uploaded to your website to reduce its file size without compromising on its quality.
#7 Monster Insights
Statistics and Analytics are an important part of any website development. The collected data can be used by your marketing experts to find out what works best. Though you can use Google Analytics, you would need to take things further to achieve the best results.
MonsterInsights is a free WordPress plugin that provides you access to site visitor details and analytics directly within your WordPress dashboard. The plugin is also loaded with useful tools, such as statistics on downloads and product purchases.
#8 Sucuri
You just cannot ignore having a strong firewall in place to protect your site from hackers. All that the hackers need is a simple vulnerability on your website to gain access and infect it with malware.
Sucuri Security is a free and powerful WordPress security plugin that comes with brute force protection, malware scanning, and a lot more to help your website designer easily add protection to your website against malware and hackers.
Do bear in mind that installing too many plugins can affect performance of your website. Pick only the most useful and important plugins that are fully compatible with your WordPress theme to keep your site performing at its best.
