Did you know that WordPress powers over 35% of all websites globally? WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems because of the tons of features and flexibility it offers. Additionally, the WordPress community is always contributing to improving the ecosystem. Although WordPress is an extremely easy platform, it’s core lacks some functionalities needed to build a complete website. However, this void can be filled up by getting the ideal plugins.
WordPress plugins add features to the WordPress installation which otherwise would only be possible with coding. With over 56,000 free and premium WordPress plugins to choose from, it can be a difficult task to identify the must-have plugins for your WordPress website.
Today we would like to talk about plugins that have been in the WordPress ecosystem for a long time and have ensured to take any WordPress website to the next level. So if you’re looking to start your WordPress website in the year 2020, the following plugins will indeed be a game-changer.
With over 5+ million active installations and rated the no. 1 WordPress SEO plugin, this is all you need to enable your site to be Search Engine friendly. From building XML Sitemaps to setting canonical URLs, Yoast has been a great tool in ensuring that everyone gets their site SEO friendly. This plugin is extremely easy to set up, and there are tons of reference material online that will help you quickly set up this plugin for your WordPress website.
| New: Find & add high-performing keywords right in Yoast SEOFind data about your keyphrases in Yoast SEO. Boost the relevance of your content by optimizing for related keywords people actually use. Available for 100+ countries & powered by Semrush. | |
| Keyword optimizationOur intelligent word forms recognition automatically takes plurals and other word forms into account. Add synonyms and related keyphrases to write totally natural content. No more stressing over green bullets! | |
| Available in multiple languagesWord forms recognition is available in English, Dutch, German, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Turkish, Czech and Indonesian & more languages to come! | |
| Tell Google exactly what your page is aboutMake sure that Google, Pinterest and other platforms all know exactly what your page is about, by adding schema.org data the right way. Faster indexing, rich results! | |
| IndexablesYoast SEO 14.0 introduced a revolutionary way of gathering data in WordPress, creating a faster, safer and better experience. For you, the web and the world. | |
| No outdated contentWe’ll keep an eye on your most important pages and warn you when these haven’t been updated for six months. | |
| Preview snippets for search and social mediaTake control over how your pages show up in Google, Facebookand Twitter. Attract more visitors by tailoring your titles, descriptions, and images for each platform. Allows you to set default templates too. | |
| Readability check We analyze the readability of the copy you wrote and calculate the Flesch Reading Ease score. | |
| Full control over your breadcrumbs You can set a primary category for your post, and determine the taxonomy for every single page on your website. | |
| No duplicate content Avoid confusing Google with duplicate content, by setting canonical URLs. | |
| Mark your links as no-follow or sponsored Immediately mark your links as no-follow or sponsored while you’re writing! | |
| Works in the block editor and classic editor No matter how you like to write your posts in WordPress, Yoast SEO works in both the classic editor and the block editor! | |
| Technical stuff in the background It doesn’t matter whether you know about robots.txt, .htaccess files, clean permalink URLs or sitemaps – Yoast SEO makes sure your technical configuration rolls out the red carpet for search engines. | |
| Internal linking suggestions Get suggestions for links to other pages on your website, as you write. | |
| Internal linking blocksQuickly add proper (hierarchical) internal links with Yoast Internal linking blocks to improve your site structure. | |
| Content insights We show you the 5 words or phrases you use the most on your page, to check if they’re a match with your chosen keywords. | |
| Redirect manager Easily redirect old URLs to new ones. So you don’t lose visitors because they get stuck on a 404 Not Found page. | |
| New: Seamless integration of Yoast SEO in Elementor Are you one of the 6+ million users of Elementor? Good news! The Yoast SEO plugin now fully integrates with the Elementor page builder! | |
| Automate your publishing flow in Yoast SEO With the Zapier tool in Yoast SEO Premium you can easily send out your published posts to any of its 2000+ destinations. | |
| Focus keyword export |
We can’t emphasize more on how important site speed is in today’s day and age. One second slower page load can mean lower search engine rankings resulting in lower traffic. Thankfully, the plugin W3 Total Cache provides your site with caching abilities like Browser Cache, Page Cache, CDN integration and much more. When correctly set up, the plugin ensures to reduce page load time significantly, thus providing a better experience for your website visitors. Additionally, this tool is compatible with all our Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, and Dedicated Servers.
3. WP Smush:
One of the main culprits for a slow WordPress website can be the large image files that are stored on your site. Furthermore, these large files could be utilizing your precious server space. The plugin WP Smush enables a user to cut down unwanted information from the images and considerably lower the image size without compromising on the image quality, only with a click of a button. You can either choose to reduce the size of the images individually or in bulk, of 50 images at a time. A recent update to the plugin has brought the image resizing feature that will scale down the images to predefined height and width.
Websites that are prone to hacker attacks have one thing in common – they lack website security. Irrespective of the type of website you run, protecting it from malicious attackers should be your top priority. Sucuri Security is a WordPress Security plugin that monitors and protects your website from harmful attacks like DDoS, brute-force attack, XSS attack, malware threats and more. It monitors, scans and blacklists attacks. Moreover, the premium version of this plugin even offers a website firewall. We strongly recommend this plugin to keep your website safe from security threats.
Our in-house SEO expert once told us that the best form of social media icons is the ones that float as the user scrolls. Why may you ask? Simple, this enables your website visitor to quickly share your content no matter which part of the page he is at. If you want the ability to add a social media floating bar, then you should consider the plugin Social Media Flying Icons. It is one of the easiest plugins to configure allowing you to choose from multiple icon themes.Here’s a quick demo to understand how this plugin works.
The name says it all, this plugin watches over your WordPress website for any broken links and notifies you via the dashboard or email. Broken links could spell disaster for your website’s reputation and the only way to avoid it is by ensuring all your links are updated correctly. You don’t need to manually update each post to fix the broken link; instead, you can edit the links directly from the plugin’s page. We highly recommend that you install this plugin and scan your website to identify any issues.
7. WooCommerce:
Build exactly the eCommerce website you want
WooCommerce is a customizable, open-source eCommerce platform built on WordPress. Get started quickly and make your way.
Everything You Need to Start Selling Online
Add the WooCommerce plugin to any WordPress site and set up a new store in minutes. Get secure payments, configurable shipping options, and more, out of the box – for free.
8 Redirection:
Another vital plugin to consider for your site is Redirection. This tool enables you to manage your 301 redirects and also helps you track down the 404 errors and fix them. You don’t need to have any knowledge of Apache or Nginx to perform the redirects.
