Got your website up and running on WordPress? Now it’s time to make it work seamlessly for you. WordPress comes with tons of plugins that will make your life easy.
Installing WordPress plugins can help you with your website in a number of ways. You can increase security, productivity and also your sales through multi-functional WordPress plugins. The free versions of most of them are sufficient to get the work done for you. But when you need some more advanced features, you can choose from the premium packages.
You will also be able to save when you pay for a WordPress themed website. For example, the Hostgator package for WordPress starts from Rs. 259 per month. But with online coupons, you will get 50% off on shared hosting packages. Moreover, there are many other discounts and offers on hosting that you can enjoy when you use online coupons.
Here is a list of the must-have WordPress plugins
1. Yoast SEO
Your website needs SEO to rank higher on search engines. Yoast plugin can help you with your website’s SEO. There are a bunch of exciting things that you can do with Yoast SEO. Get to know about your meta tags, descriptions, connect your site to Google Search Console, optimise it for social media, and more. The plugin will also assist you with content optimization for our website.
What can you do with Yoast SEO tool?
Free features: Improve canonical URLs and meta tags, Advanced XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, Title and meta description templating, innovative way of managing data.
Paid features: Email support, addon extensions.
2. WPForms
Getting leads is an important part of any business. At the same time being open to your customers by asking them for feedback, or making it easy for them to contact you can also help your business. Thus a WordPress website can make it all simple for you with a WPForms plugin. This is a simple and easy to use drag and drop tool that lets you create different forms.
What do you get in WPForms?
Free features: Contact forms, feedback form, subscription forms, payment forms, and more types of forms.
Paid features: Email subscription forms, multi-page contact forms, file uploads, conditional logic, payment integrations, form templates, and lots more.
3. HubSpot
Hubspot offers you features that will make marketing easy for you. And the best part about Hubspot is that you get to use them through an easy-to-use plugin. With this plugin, you get the tools you need to build your business. Additionally, Hubspot is a stand-alone email marketing software which you can simply integrate with your Yahoo, Gmail or other emails packs.
What do you get with Hubspot?
Free features: Forms, contact management, email marketing, and more
Paid features: Blogging, landing pages, email scheduling, search engine optimization (SEO), team email, retargeting, lead scoring, bots, NPS surveys, calls-to-action (CTAs), knowledge base, and more.
4. WooCommerce
WordPress lets you create an entire eCommerce website on its platform with customised themes and more You can get all the eCommerce features with a simple to use plugin WooCommerce plugin. You can configure different payment methods from 100+ payment methods, and can also connect with leading shipping partners. Additionally, you have access to a variety of delivery, inventory, and fulfilment solutions that you can use to make your business run smoothly.
You may have to upgrade to a paid tool in order to use some of the features.
5. JetPack
Download the JetPack plugin to get assistance with multiple features from one plugin. Jetpack can take care of your website’s security, marketing, and even design tools. Jetpack also takes care of performance and works even better with AMPs. This is one tool that you need to scale up your website on all fronts.
What do you get?
Free features: brute force protection and downtime/uptime monitoring, site stats, automated sharing to social networks and more.
Paid features: Real-time backups, security scanning, premium themes, spam filtering, video hosting, site monetization, SEO (search engine optimization) tools, search, priority support, and more.
6. WP-Optimise
You can optimize your website with WP-Optimise and welcome a super fast site your way. The plugin keeps your website running fast by clearing the database, compressing the images and more. It also caches your site.
7. Smush
The size on your website is a major factor that decides how fast the page loads. You can either compress all the images before uploading it can simply use Smush that compresses and resizes all your images improving the loading speed. As per Google blog: The Keyword, your page loading time should be less than 2 seconds. Slow loading ages drives traffic away and also affects rankings.
The plugin is absolutely free to download and install.
8. Bloom
Local SEO is extremely important for a business to succeed. Especially cafes, shopping malls etc. that are based out of a location need to optimise their websites locally to gain the visitors that will convert. Bloom lets you geotagging for your website. The tool enables readers to find personalised experiences by searching and saving for your location.
9. iThemes Security
Security is one thing you cannot compromise on with your website. Open-source websites can be vulnerable. Hackers get creative. Thus what you need is a security plugin that locks down WordPress, fixes common holes, stops automated attacks and strengthens user credentials. iThemes security’s advanced features for experienced users can even help harden your WordPress website.
10. Tawk.To Live Chat
Greeting users when they come to your website, or simply making it possible for them to get answers to questions without any delay. The Live Chat plugin helps you to simply create a chatbot and place it on your WordPress website. This works on a simple drag and drops feature where you can also customise the columns as per your product or service. A live chat tool will increase leads for your business. And the best part is that it is for free.
Installing plugins will sure make your WordPress website management easy. So now that you know which plugins will help you the most, you can try with the free ones and then upgrade as you need them.
About the author
Aamer Hussain is a content writer and marketer.