WordPress powers 27% of the entire internet with well over 1 billion plugin downloads a year. Many people favour WordPress as it gives users the ability to add extra functionality (through the use of plugins) to your site without needing to know how to code. Whatever you are looking for there is likely to be a plugin created for it. The following are fifteen popular and powerful WordPress plugins that you should consider using with your WordPress site.
WooCommerce is thought to be the most popular eCommerce platform on the web and powers over 28% of all online stores. It is 100% open source and comes with pre-installed payment gateways. This eCommerce solution gives both store owners and developers complete control.
Currently the number one WordPress SEO plugin, Yoast SEO aims to get you more visitors from Google and Bing, attract more visitors from social media and increase your readers’ engagement by allowing you to optimise your WordPress site for search engines.
Slack is a team management, productivity and communication tool that more and more companies are starting to use. It is more convenient than email, and it can integrate with tons of other online tools you may be using such as WordPress.
All WordPress themes reply on CSS for their styling and the visual appearance of your website. In order to customise a theme you will need to be able to understand and write CSS in order to change the styling that has already been coded. CSS Hero is a WordPress plugin that allows you to customize any WordPress theme without writing a single line of code or having any previous CSS knowledge.
Beaver Builder is a powerful drag and drop page builder tool for WordPress. It allows you to easily create your own page layouts using a simple user interface.
This appointment plugin allows you to easily add a complete online booking system to your WordPress site. It is ideal for businesses where users need to book and pay for appointments online.
BackupBuddy is an easy and beginner friendly plugin that allows users to backup and migrate their WordPress sites. It also allows you to quickly setup an automatic backup schedule for your website where your backups will be stored on the cloud giving you peace of mind.
WP Smush Pro has been said to be the best image compression and optimisation plugin. It works in a way that saves storage space and helps your site load faster, without reducing the quality of your images. You can compress and optimize images automatically, manually or in bulk and also Super Smush for 10 times the compression power while still not losing out on image quality.
As the name suggests, Memberships allows you to manage the memberships and users on your site. Membership 2 Pro offers every feature you would need to run a scalable membership site. You can offer free or paid memberships, present content over time, offer free trials, customise the registration form or protect anything on your site from posts and media to plugins and categories.
As with any website, WordPress sites are also susceptible to hackers. It is important to stay on top of your security and the Defender plugin helps you do this. Defender 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. It also works to harden your site’s security to save you from future disasters in a single click.
Google suggests that your site should load in two seconds or less, otherwise your visitors are likely to leave before they even have a chance to check out one element on your site. Another important thing to consider is that the load time of your site has an influence on your Google ranking. Caching is one of the best ways you can speed up your website. 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. This plugin also minifies, compresses and merges amongst other features.
Jetpack is an extremely useful plugin that offers a suite of powerful features for your WordPress site such as enhanced security, improved site performance, plenty of content tools, and visitor engagement features. Jetpack also offers a mobile theme option that is lightweight and responsive, designed for phones and tablets.
This plugin is one of the most popular email marketing services used to manage subscribers, send emails and track results in the bulk. It is a great marketing tool for webmasters and business owners. Integrating this plugin into your WordPress is very easy and allows users to add beautiful subscription forms in your WordPress blog, create opt-in forms to add more subscribers to your email list and a variety of other options.
If you are wanting to add your own testimonials directly to your website then Good Reviews for WordPress is the Plugin for you. It’s very well-coded so you can depend on it and it only has enough features to do its job. Good Reviews is a smart, well-planned system for adding and displaying customer reviews and testimonials to your site.
Akismet provides spam protection for WordPress sites. One of the biggest issues with WordPress comments is spam and Akismet is here to assist with this. Akismet helps to filter out any comments on your blog that look like spam. The plugin automatically checks comments against the Akismet Web service.
