WordPress is one of the most famous Content Management System with 35% of total websites in the world are powered by WordPress. It is popular because it offers a wide range of features and flexibility. Moreover, the WordPress community is always contributing to enhancing the ecosystem. Though WordPress is an extremely simple platform, it lacks a few functionalities required to build a website. However, this space can be filled by obtaining the optimal WordPress plugins. But, with more than 56,000 free and premium WordPress plugins available in the market, it becomes quite difficult to pick the right WordPress plugins for your WordPress website.
Besides WordPress, there are other few CMS which you can know in brief by reading our following guide: Comparison of Top CMS: WordPress Vs Joomla Vs Drupal
Now, we will be looking at some of the essential WordPress plugins that will indeed be a game-changer for your site.
8 game-changer WordPress plugins
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO, with over 5 million+ active installation is highly rated as the no. 1 WordPress SEO plugin. It is one of the most recommended plugin to make your website Search Engine friendly. From building XML Sitemaps to setting canonical URLs, Yoast has always been a great tool in making SEO friendly website. Setting up this plugin is very easy, and there are lots of reference material online that will help you instantly set up this plugin for your WordPress website.
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W3 Total Cache
You may know the fact of how crucial website speed is in the current digital age. Just a second slower page loading speed can mean lower search engine rankings and thereby resulting in lowe traffic volume. Fortunately, the plugin W3 Total Cache offers your site with caching capabilities such as Browser Cache, Page Cache, CDN integration, and many more. When accurately set up, the plugin guarantees to minimize page load time notably. Hence it provides a more enhanced experience for your website visitors. Additionally, this tool is compatible with all our Virtual Private Servers, Shared Hosting, and Dedicated Servers.
Moreover, you can read this article on “Best Web Caching Solution for your website” to get clear idea about caching solution that may work for your site.
WP Smush
If you are experiencing a slow WordPress website, one major reason could be the huge image files that are stored on your website. Additionally, these huge files could be eating up your valuable server space. The plugin WP Smush allows a user to compress irrelevant data from the images and remarkably reduce the image size without compromising the image quality, with just a click of a button. You can either pick to minimize the size of the images individually or in bulk, of 50 images concurrently. A recent update of the plugin has brought in the image resizing feature that will scale down the images to predefined height and width.
Related: Few Important Image SEO Tips You Need to Know
Sucuri Security
One common thing is found among websites that are prone to cyber threats. i.e: Lack of website security. No matter what website you operate to protect against malicious attackers, security should be your foremost priority. Sucuri Security is a WordPress Security plugin that observes and protects your website against harmful attacks such as brute-force attack, DDoS, XSS attack, malware threats, and many more. It monitors, scans, and blacklists attacks. Furthermore, the premium version of this plugin likewise offers a website firewall. We highly suggest this plugin to keep your website safe against security threats.
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Social Media Flying Icons
SEO experts suggest that the best form of social media icons is the one that floats as and when user scrolls. The reason is that it allows your website visitor to quickly share your content regardless of the part of the page he/she is at. If you need the ability to add a social media floating bar, then you should consider the plugin ‘Social Media Flying Icons’. It is one of the simplest plugins to configure enabling you to pick from versatile icon themes.
If you are Kneen about social media marketing tips “Few Social Media Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid“
Broken Link Checker
As the name says, the plugin monitors your WordPress site and if any broken link is found then it will notify you through dashboard or email. broken links can be a disaster for site’s reputation and the only way to prevent is to making sure that all your links are updated correctly. You don’t require to manually update each post to resolve the broken link instead you need to edit links directly from plugin page.
Related: What are Broken Links, How it Affects Your Website and How to Fix them?
Redirection
Another crucial plugin to rethink for your website is Redirection. This tool allows you to manage your 301 redirects and track down the 404 errors and resolve them. You don’t need any knowledge regarding Apache or Nginx to execute redirects.
Related: Simple Tutorial to create 301 redirect WordPress (Using plugin and .htaccess)
WooCommerce
WooComerce is a powerful platform on its own. You can easily build power packed eCommerce store for that your needs. It is particularly designed for small to large sized online merchants using WordPress.
If you own a eCommerce store then your read our blog post on “Best Softaculous E-Commerce Apps For Your Business“
Conclusion
Though several other plugins deserve a spot here, we think that our list mainly covers all the crucial WordPress plugins that will enrich your WordPress site.
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