12 WordPress Plug-Ins You Should Try

WordPress features tens of thousands of plug-ins to use for your unique website. Whether you need plug-ins to focus on eCommerce, blogging, marketing, communication, coding, or anything else your website could need, there’s a plug-in to meet those needs. Here are 12 WordPress plug-ins to get your website started, or keep it growing in the right direction.

• Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is at the top of our list of 12 WordPress plug-ins. It is the premium search engine optimization tool for WordPress and is arguably the most widely used plug-in for any company that uses WordPress. Yoast does not have optimization as a function, making your website and blogs easy to find, but it also has a built-in content analysis function. Using content analysis, Yoast can optimize your content on top of your website for search, meaning double the ease of finding your website when searching the web.

• W3 Total Cache

Website caching speeds up the load time of your website for customers. This plug-in stores a static copy of your pages and makes the files smaller so that customers are able to save on load times while you save on bandwidth costs by adding it into WordPress.

• nRelate

This plug-in makes it easy to showcase articles, blogs, or other content that are similar to your website. By quickly and easily incorporating related content into your articles or website content, it makes it more appealing to the customer and will keep them around for more.

• VaultPress

If you have ever been scared of your website crashing, this is the plug-in for you. VaultPress is a backup that completes daily security scans, and content backups, and gives support from WordPress experts when needed.

• Wassup

For analytics, this plug-in is a great way to monitor web traffic without delays. You are able to get detailed information about what your site visitors are doing such as looking at specific products if it is eCommerce, signing up for newsletters, or leaving comments on posts. You can add this in addition to Google Analytics.

• Broken Link Checker

Gone are the days of manually going through and double-checking all of your links. This plug-in does all the hard work for you to make sure all internal and external links on your site work properly. It can make broken links display differently in posts, and will notify you on your dashboard and in your email. It’s a highly configurable plug-in that should be a no-brainer for any website to lower your workload.

• WPForms

To make it easy for your website viewers to get in contact with you, WPForms offers over 300 pre-built form templates to make your job seamless. You’re also able to drag and drop to build your own contact form. WPForms easily transfers over to tablets and mobile phones without compromising the look of the form, meaning it is 100% responsive. It has instant notifications and integrates with most major payment options including PayPal and Square. The features seem endless, making WPFroms one of the most useful and popular WordPress plug-ins on the market.

• MonsterInsights

This Google Analytics plug-in for WordPress allows you to connect your website with Google Analytics to clearly see exactly how customers find and view your website. You can optimize your website according to the flow of the traffic, and change as your traffic changes. There is a free and premium version of MonsterInsights, but I recommend the premium to get access all of the features.

• Constant Contact

This plug-in allows for easy email interactions and creates an effective marketing tool. You are able to communicate with your customers after they leave your website, which is why creating an email list is so important. Constant Contact helps you build your email list and send newsletters to those subscribers.

• SearchWP

Just as it sounds, SearchWP allows your visitors to easily find what they are looking for on your website. You do not have to know any coding to adjust the scale and algorithm of your search functions, so you can easily create different relevances as you see fit with your site. You are able to see what visitors are searching for most frequently through metrics so that you can rearrange your site as needed to put the more desired articles or products on the home page.

• Google WorkSpace

Another one of our 12 WordPress plug-ins is a popular one you most likely already know about. Google WordSpace, formerly G Suite, it is a group of applications for email, documents, spreadsheets, chats, etc. You can even use your professional email address for your business inside Google. This way, you do not have to end your email with “@gmail.com” to use this plug-in. You are able to use “@yourwebsitename.com”.

• WooCommerce

For eCommerce sites, this plug-in is a lifesaver. WooCommerce makes it easy to create an online store using hosting, themes, and plug-ins within the plug-in itself. It’s free, and open-source, meaning you maintain ownership of the store’s content and data.

Conclusion

Now that you know 12 of the best WordPress plug-ins and their functions, you have a baseline of knowledge and can use this list to get your website started, or improve the one you already have.