While WordPress is an amazing website-building platform by itself, there’s no doubt that its vast array of plugins extends its abilities to a level unmatched by other CMS software. The tens of thousands of plugins available offer new features and enhanced functionality to ensure that you can meet the evolving demands of running a site. With this in mind, here we look at eight indispensable plugins that will transform your WordPress functionality.
- Yoast SEO
Arguably one of the most renowned plugins for WordPress, Yoast SEO helps website owners optimise their sites for search engines. Brilliant for those new to SEO and experienced pros alike, Yoast offers guidance to improve on-page SEO, produce SEO-friendly content and ensure that your website has a better chance of ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Its features include readability checks, breadcrumbs control and meta description suggestions. It will even automate some of the more complicated SEO tasks for you, saving you time and hassle. - WooCommerce
For anyone aiming to turn their website into an e-commerce platform, WooCommerce is an invaluable tool. This free WordPress plugin offers the essential features required for setting up an online store and is so popular that there are over 5 million businesses actively using it to sell their goods online. From listing products to setting up payment gateways, WooCommerce is user-friendly and highly customisable. There’s also a wide range of extensions available for those who wish to make additional enhancements to their online stores. - Akismet Anti-Spam
Many websites, especially blogs, enable comments to get valuable feedback on their content and interact with their visitors. Unfortunately, one of the downsides is that there are plenty of spammers out there who will leave comments in order to send your readers to their website, or worse, will include links to malware or fraudulent websites.
Akismet Anti-Spam is designed to help you combat this. The plugin automatically checks comments against its global database to filter out any that appear spammy. This ensures a cleaner, more professional appearance for your website and enhances user trust. The developers at WordPress think this plugin is so essential that it is automatically installed with WordPress itself. - W3 Total Cache
Website speed is vital in retaining visitors and ensuring a good user experience. Even a one-second delay can result in a 7% decrease in conversion rates as frustrated visitors leave the site. W3 Total Cache enhances server performance by caching elements of your site, essentially reducing the amount of data your server needs to send in order to load. This reduces loading times, which can also help improve your search engine rankings. - Contact Form by WP Forms
Whether you’re running a blog, an e-commerce store or a business site, having a contact form can be extremely beneficial. Contact Form by WP Forms has long been one of the most reliable plugins you can use to add this feature to your site. It enables you to create custom forms simply by using drag and drop and these can be used for a variety of purposes, including payment forms. - Smart Slider 3
Visually engaging content is often the key to capturing a visitor’s attention. Smart Slider 3 can be really helpful if you want to create responsive sliders that showcase your content in an appealing way. Whether it’s images, videos or posts, this plugin ensures that they’re presented in an attractive and dynamic manner. - UpdraftPlus
Backup solutions are indispensable for any website owner as they enable you to restore your website quickly in case of malware infection, ransomware, hacking, accidental deletion or hardware failure. UpdraftPlus, one of the most popular backup plugins for WordPress, allows you to easily set up automatic backups and store them remotely in locations such as Dropbox, Google Drive or other cloud services.
Thankfully, if you have a WordPress Hosting account with eukhost, we provide free daily backups as part of your plan, so you won’t need UpdraftPlus or any other backup plugin. - Sucuri Security
Online security is paramount, and Sucuri Security assists WordPress site owners in ensuring that their platform is safe from threats. This plugin offers a variety of features such as malware scanning, blacklist monitoring and security activity auditing.
If you have eukhost WordPress Hosting, you’ll get rock-solid security as part of your plan. This includes firewall protection, free SSL, spam filtering and more.
Conclusion
If you are a WordPress user, there are thousands of plugins you can install to add new features and functionality to your site. As a long-established, open-source platform, if there has been a need for something, someone will have developed a plugin to satisfy that need. Hopefully, from reading this post, you’ll now have a clearer idea of the plugins that we think are indispensable for most WordPress websites.
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