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Great news for WordPress lovers! Yes, you read that right. There are over 54000 WordPress plugins to choose from. While some are really happy about this fact, while some find this extremely overwhelming to find the right plugin. With right WordPress plugins and tools, you can grow your business online and upgrade site. WordPress plugins are one of the best tools to add and extend functionality to WordPress site. However, with the niche of your website you are able to determine what plugins you should have on your website. WordPress plugins are available in both free and premium subscriptions for WordPress.
We all know that a building and managing websites can be a daunting task, but WordPress has proven to be a fantastic platform to do this. Apart from being user-friendly, it has endless functionalities apparently.
Let’s first clear what is a WordPress plugin, anyway?
Plugins are basically apps for the website. WordPress can function on its own, but you want to make it do exactly what you want, plugins are what you need. Some examples are mentioned below:
- Selling digital products on your blog? Plugin is there.
- Don’t wish to publish anything by accident again? Plugin is there for that.
- Want to turn your website into a thriving eCommerce store? Why not? There’s a plugin.
Like I mentioned above, WordPress has more than 54,000 plugins and there are a few that stand out from the rest. You might be curious to know which plugins are these. Here is the list of best plugins to help you out with your website.
1. SEO Plugins
Digital Marketing has taken the world and if you don’t know which is the best free plugins for wordpress right SEO plugin for WordPress, you need to read this. WordPress plugins for SEO is almost always a must. SEO plugins make it easy to create sitemaps, managing page titles and optimizing the website.
A. Yoast SEO – Free
Yoast SEO is a popular plugin and acts as a great alternate for setting up your onsite WordPress SEO. The plugin adds an SEO tab on dashboard which enables you to make necessary changes to your titles & meta, sitemap, RSS, breadcrumbs, and more.
Yoast SEO offers:
- Title and meta description templating
- A state-of-the-art Schema implementation
- Setting canonical URLs automatically to avoid duplicate content
- Advanced XML Sitemaps functionality
- Full control over your site’s breadcrumbs
Yoast SEO gives you:
- The analysis of SEO: An invaluable tool to write with the right keywords in mind.
- Analysis on readability: It ensures that your writing is able to engage for both visitors and search engines.
- Our snippet preview that shows you how your post or page will look in the search results.
B. Google XML sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is another very useful SEO plugin that generates a special XML sitemap that helps the search engines for better indexing of the website. We all know that more the website is indexed, better are the chances to rank it on the first page of search engines. Just grab the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to cut the efforts of creating your own sitemap. The plugin helps various search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc. for better indexing by automatically creating an XML sitemap for efficient site making.
2. Security Plugins
Security is prominent for any website, and it is important to tackle hackers, spammers or any type of possible threatening elements. Here are some of the security plugins.
A. Wordfence Security
Website security is the primary concern for all the website owners. Keeping the website secure from the hackers is among the primary things to do. However, it is not among the things which you cannot afford to ignore. Believe it or not, there are number of malicious bots present to attack the website at any time, which have the capability to destroy your entire work in no time. This is the reason that you must prevent the spams and keep your website secure.
So, to keep our website secure, we can install Wordfence Security plugin. Some of the prominent plugin features are login security, malware scan, firewall protection, blocking, live traffic monitoring. More to this, this plugin is highly helpful in letting you monitor traffic in real-time such as humans, logins, 404 errors, robots, logouts, and many more. Wordfence Security plugin will let you monitor the real-time traffic and keeps you aware of security threats that your site might be facing.
B. Sucuri Firewall
Another name that has been added to the list is Sucuri Firewall plugin that can protect your site from any kind of attack. When we say attack, it literally can protect you from brute force attacks, DDoS attacks, malware, etc.
Features:
- Limitless malware and hack cleanup
- A detailed 5-step process
Need to install it:
- The plugin keeps your site and users’ information safe
- Blocks the attack before reaching the server
- Your site is monitored every 3 hours
- It checks for malicious JavaScript, spammy link injections, suspicious redirections, malware, malicious iframes, and more.
- Ensures that site isn’t blacklisted
3. Contact Forms Plugin
Every site needs to have a contact form and for the same, here some of the best plugins to use.
A. WPForms
Contact forms makes it easy for the visitors to contact you and reach you. And, WPForms is among the most user-friendly contact forms for WordPress website. WPForms is a drag & drop online form builder, which allows to create:
- Contact forms
- Online order forms
- Polls
- Payment forms
- Surveys
- Email subscription forms
More to this, WPForms integrates with all the most used marketing and payment platforms. It allows you to build the form in less than 5 minutes. Apart from that this plugin comes with the options to create custom WordPress user registration forms and login page.
B. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is an amazing WordPress plugin which can pull off various contact forms. Also, it gives the option of customization of the form and the mail contents. It can be done flexibly with a simple markup. The form assists submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and much more, which are Ajax-powered. Contact Form 7 plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms seamlessly. This is a simple plugin, which allows you to skip extra coding so that you can create and publish beautiful contact forms.
Having the default configuration the plugin does not:
- Use cookies
- Track the visitors by stealth
- Storing personal data of user to the database
- Send data to the exterior servers
By activating few characteristics in this plugin, you will be able to receive personal data and IP address of the submitter. Thus, it is important to confirm the user’s privacy policy.
These features comprises:
- reCAPTCHA
- Akismet
- Constant Contact
4. Google Analytics plugin
A. MonsterInsights Lite
For WordPress, MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin as it allows you to “properly” connect your website to see exactly how people find and use your website. This plugin shows the important stats which matters right inside your WordPress dashboard. With this plugin, you can see how site visitors find your website and you’re able to know what site visitors like so as to keep them coming back for more.
Features:
- Dashboard Reports — Watch real-time stats in an easy to read report which can be found right in the dashboard of your WordPress site.
- Universal Tracking — With universal tracking system your stats are never skewed. Basically, even if a visitor switch from a mobile to a desktop, you’ll get accurate data counts.
B. JetPack
Jetpack enables you to quickly watch your statistics without going anywhere. Jetpack has a lot of functionality beyond statistics. The best thing about this tool is that your stats can be viewed right on your WordPress dashboard. It is truly a beast of a plugin with many useful features, such as being able to do social sharing. You can also add icon or text social sharing links to your posts. However, the free version of this plugin comprises characteristics such as integration with 200 popular social networks and page display settings.
5. Email Marketing Tools
A. MailChimp for WordPress
MailChimp is among the fantastic email marketing services, which enables you to send emails, manage subscribers, and trail results all together. It is a great marketing plugin that is helpful for webmasters and business owners. For integrating MailChimp is easy with the plugin for WordPress site. It is a free plugin which enables a business owner to add beautiful subscription forms in blog. The plugin enables to create aesthetic opt-in forms to add more subscribers to the email list. Moreover, it supports major plugins such as WooCommerce and Contact Form 7, etc.
B. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is among the best email providers which can always be recommend for new users as it offer quick and easy setup. This plugin is perfect to send personalized anniversary, welcome and birthday emails. Apart from this, you can also keep your audience engaged by setting a regular series of emails to.
Key Features:
- Email marketing can be automated by auto-responder
- To track email campaigns, real-time reporting can be done
Why you need it:
- It is the best way to get conversions.
- Sending targeted series of individualized emails.
- It easy to build relationships.
- Staying in compliance with the anti-spam laws.
Constant Contact helps you to keep a track of:
- Emails opened
- Spam reports
- Bounces
- Click-through
- Opt-outs
6. eCommerce Plugins
A. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the best WordPress plugins, which enables you to add anything to sell on your website. This plugin can be utilized quite effectively if you want to create an online store. The plugin consists of a lot of features to grow your website. From providing customers with multiple options, you can extend shipping options such as local pickups, flat rates, free shipping, and many more. Moreover, with WooCommerce, you can sell anything from physical products to event tickets, software, and service plans. Comprises of payment options, it enables them to checkout using credit cards cash on delivery, or even PayPal.
Features:
- WordPress Integration: It gives complete control over the design and functionality.
- Flexibility: Sell anything in variety of product variations, shapes, sizes, and configurations.
- Payment options: You can accept major credit cards, and cash on delivery.
7. Live Chat Software for WordPress
A. LiveChat
LiveChat is a simple plugin that makes it easy to add a live chat feature on your business sites. More to this this plugin offers customer support instantly. Being a powerful live chat software, it is hugely demanded by website owners. Setting up live chat on your business website just takes a few steps. And, once you have done that, it can help with real-time responses to their queries.
8. Contest Plugin
A. RafflePress
If you are looking for best WordPress giveaway plugin, RafflePress is what you need. It makes it easy to run a successful contest online for users to engage them. RafflePress provides a built-in viral sharing options and rewards the users with bonus entries if they refer-a-friend or share your giveaway on social media. This plugin is perfect for you and enables you to grow your email list, drive more traffic, and social media followers.
Features:
- Drag and drop giveaway builder
- Pre-built giveaway templates
- Making giveaway viral by incentivizing social sharing.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that WordPress powers maximum of the websites on the internet. Being an incredibly versatile platform, it is widely popular and its gigantic variety of plugins has made it a compulsory thing for the business you run. I have just gave you a list of super WordPress plugins available. Although, one article is not enough to mention about the plugins that a WordPress has to offer. Don’t worry, I am going to write another brief version of this to ensure I covered maximum for you.
