Best Plugins For WordPress (7 Must-Have Plugins) Gamechanger

WordPress is one of the powerful and best website building platforms ever. It is an open-source platform, which means you don’t have to pay anything to join it; it is available for free to everyone. To get started with WordPress, you just need a domain name and a right hosting plan. The great thing about this platform is that you can customize and adjust your website’s pages, content, images, videos, etc. as per your desire with the help of plugins available.

You don’t need to be a coder or master in programming for getting started with WordPress. The basic knowledge about websites and other technical stuff is enough for a beginner. It doesn’t matter whether you want to create a blog website, eCommerce website, membership website or any other kind of website, everything is possible with WordPress.

WordPress plugins play a major role in customizing and designing a different kind of websites. Plugins add value to your website. There are tons of WordPress plugins out there, but you must select the best one for getting effective results. If you are a complete beginner, then you might be confused about plugins selection. Also, make sure you don’t install so many plugins because it will have a direct impact on your site loading speed.

 

Best Plugins for WordPress [Must-Have Plugins]

There are some plugins in WordPress through which you can improve your website and its performance. To help you out in discovering the right WordPress plugins for your site, here we have listed some must-have plugins for WordPress:

1. WPForms

WPForms is the first and important plugin you must have on your WordPress website. The task of WPForms plugin is to help your visitors to reach you easily, without any hassle. It doesn’t matter whether you have a blog website, eCommerce website, membership website or any other kind of website, the contact form is essential for every website so that website visitors can easily reach to the website owner.

There are so many contact form plugins available in the market, among them it is essential to select the one which is responsive and user-friendly. This is the reason why we have mentioned WPForms plugin here. This plugin is user-friendly and responsive.

The plugin provides you different crucial features like drag & drop, email subscription forms, online order forms, polls, surveys and many more.  Through its drag and drop feature, you can easily create and customize the form of your choice.

The great thing about this plugin is that it can integrate with all the popular marketing and payment platforms so that you can quickly create beautiful forms of your choice. WPForms comes with two versions: free and pro. The free version comes with basic features, while the pro version is helpful in growing your business rapidly.

By purchasing the pro version of WPForms, you will start getting results and boost in the lead generation. Pro version comes with so many powerful features. Here are advantages of installing WPForms plugin in your WordPress site:

BENEFITS

• It is a user-friendly plugin
• Drag and drop builder helps you in creating all kind of forms
• WPForms plugin integrates with major marketing and payment platforms
• The plugin has more than 2 million users
• You will find powerful features in its pro version

2. Yoast SEO

Search engine optimization is the crucial factor for all kind of websites, whether it is a membership website, blog website or an eCommerce website. Each and every website owner wants to improve the website’s rankings. But, increasing the website’s ranking became a bit difficult due to increment in the competition.

The base of a site’s ranking in Search Engine Optimization. It is one of the most critical aspects. Without proper SEO,  it is very difficult to rank a website due to cut-throat competition. That’s why you need a plugin for your WordPress site which improves your search rankings.

Among so many SEO plugins in the market, no plugin can beat Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO provides proper guidance for improving search engine ranking. To use this plugin, you don’t need to be the SEO expert, you just need to follow the instructions and guidance this tool provides.

It helps you in generating your site’s XML sitemap, add meta tags, connect the site to Google Console, a guide for on-page SEO, and comes with many other features. Apart from these, if you will buy its premium version, you will get access to many more features through which you can improve your site’s rankings faster.

If you are a blogger, then you must not miss out this plugin because by using this plugin, you can create better content with search engine optimization. It comes with a feature called, readability score, this score helps you in understanding whether your text is easy or hard to read. Here are some advantages of Yoast SEO plugin:

BENEFITS

• Yoast SEO plugin helps you to verify your webmaster tools
• This plugin helps you in improving your content
• It has three SEO signals through which you get an idea about the SEO of your blog posts
• Yoast SEO plugin provides you automatic XML sitemap feature
• You can also focus on a particular keyword with this tool

3. MonsterInsights

MosterInsights is another useful plugin for your WordPress website. To understand the growth and data of your website, you will need the MonterInsights plugin. MonsterInsights is the WordPress plugin through which you can properly connect your site with Google Analytics.

Through this plugin, you can understand the behavior of your audience. Understanding the behavior of audience on particular changes is utmost important. This plugin shows all the important stats of your site at your dashboard.

Once you understand the behavior of your audience in a particular situation, it gives you an idea about what are your visitors’ likes and dislikes. If you are planning to start or you already have an eCommerce website, then this plugin is must for you. Through this plugin, you can track your customers’ behavior regarding a particular product/service.

It gives reports about eCommerce transactions, form submissions, etc. In your eCommerce website, you will get a detailed report on what people are clicking, which product has high sales, which product has the lowest sales, which product people are liking and much more.

This plugin comes with a free version. You can go with the free version if you are a complete beginner and want to test out the performance of this plugin. But, if you have some visitors coming to your website, then the pro version is suggested. Here are benefits for installing MonsterInsights plugin on your website:

BENEFITS

• MosnterInsights plugin has a quick and easy setup
• The plugin provides you Google Analytics dashboard inside the WordPress admin
• If your website contains file downloading, then this plugin is for you
• You will get a detailed analytical report of your eCommerce site
• Apart from these, it also offers some other advanced tracking options

4. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is another best WordPress plugin for your site. You invest time, money, energy and efforts on your website to get some output. But, as we know, the future is always uncertain hence we need to backup everything in advance before things go wrong. When it comes to backing up the WordPress website, Updraft is the ideal choice.

At present, UpdraftPlus is the most popular plugin when we talk about backup plugins. It is the most rated and popular backup plugin. The plugin has more than 2 million downloads, hence you can expect the quality of this plugin.

In UpdraftPlus, you can also install its free version, however, the features of the free version would be limited. But, it helps you in simplifying your WordPress website’s backup process by providing you an automatic backup option.

According to a research it was found that around 30,000 websites get hacked every day and from those 30,000 websites, they have around 30% of WordPress websites. This is the reason why we should install a plugin which can backup our website’s data automatically so that we don’t end up losing our website. Here are some benefits of installing UpdraftPlus backup plugin on your WordPress website:

BENEFITS

• If we compare other backup plugins with Updraft, most of them don’t provide free version just like Updraft provides.
• You can have an automatic or manual backup with the help of UpdraftPlus.
• UpdraftPlus plugin can backup your website data to top cloud storage service providers like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
• Another great thing about this plugin is that you can also schedule the backup time of your website.
• Through the UpdraftPlus plugin, you will have an easy and quick restoration of your website.

5. OptinMonster

Email marketing is one of the most crucial parts of digital marketing. If you, as a website owner don’t build email lists for email marketing, then you won’t be able to retain your old customers fully. To convince your visitors to subscribe to your website, you have to be conscious about minor factors as well.

Whether you have a blog website or eCommerce store, OptinMoster plugin would be useful to you in both cases. OptinMonster is a lead generation plugin which will help you in increasing your website leads. This plugin is the perfect opportunity for you to convert your first-time visitors into regular visitors.

Through OptinMoster plugin, you can create beautiful and attractive opt-in forms on your WordPress website so that you can gather more and more emails of your visitors. One of the best methods for collecting more emails in short-run is to provide something valuable to your visitors for free.

For example, your blog or website is focused on weight loss niche, then you can provide free ebooks related to weight loss, and ask your visitors for email. By doing this, you add value in the life of your visitors and because of this reason, they will provide you their email. You will get their email address and they will get valuable content for free.

However, opt-in forms have a big impact on the visitors’ behavior, hence it is utmost important to customize the form in such a manner that it can grab the attention of visitors. This is the reason why you will need an effective lead generation plugin like OptinMonster. Here are some benefits of OptinMonster plugin:

BENEFITS

• OptinMonster is essential in growing your email subscriber list faster.
• Through this plugin, you can turn your first-time visitors to regular visitors.
• In OptinMonster, you have so many options available to display, like slide-in opt-in forms, lightbox popups, mobile-friendly popups, below the content opt-in, sidebar opt-in forms, and many more.
• If you are an E-commerce website owner, you can display special discount offers to encourage your potential customer.
• Apart from these, there are tons of many features available in this plugin, like, time-based triggers, A/B testing, Geolocation targeting, and many more.

6. Compress JPEG & PNG Images

Visual contents are more appealing than textual content. A blog post without any image could be very boring for your users. Images and other visual content grabs the attention of visitors and makes them stick to your content. Images are crucial for all websites, but do you know around 63% of the website’s file size covered with images?

Now you might be confused, whether to add more images for visitors’ engagement or decrease images to reduce file size. Don’t worry, this is where WordPress plugin helps. Compress JPEG &PNG Images is the WordPress plugin through which you can optimize your website images without any hassle.

This plugin compresses the image’s size without losing its quality. If a website takes loading time of more than three seconds then it has to suffer from a higher bounce rate. This plugin has an indirect relationship with SEO.

When we use compressed images on our website, it increases the page loading speed. Faster page loading speed reduces the bounce rate, hence it impacts search engine ranking of your website. Your website performance and users’ experience are the two main factors that decide whether the new user will revisit your site or not. If you fail in improving your site’s performance and delivering customer satisfaction, then you will find a decline in website visitors.

Through Compress JPEG and PNG Images plugin, it would be very easy for you to compress and optimize a single or bulk image at once. The plugin does not charge a single buck for up to 500 images per month. Here are some benefits of using this plugin:

BENEFITS

• Through this plugin, you don’t have to worry about compressing individual image, because this plugin automatically compresses added images.
• You can optimize both, JPEG and PNG format images.
• This plugin will also help you in optimizing your old images in bulk.
• You will get resize the image option in this plugin.

7. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is another best plugin for the WordPress website. A website’s speed has a big impact on the search ranking factor. It is not only effective in gaining search engine rankings, but it also helps in improving users’ experience. There are so many caching plugins available, but choosing the best one is very important.

With WP Rocket plugin, you don’t need to have any technical skills. You can instantly improve your website’s ranking through this plugin without getting into complex processes. Once you install this plugin, it will activate five things by default: Page caching, browser caching, GZIP compression, Cross-origin support for web fonts, detection & support of different third-party plugins.

Some other settings you can change are minification, cache loading, defer JS loading, lazy loading image, combine Google fonts file, and disable embeds. Each of these factors has a great impact on your site’s loading speed. Once you are all set, you will find a reduction in your website’s page loading time. Here are benefits of WP Rocket plugin:

BENEFITS

• Lazy loading feature makes your website to load images only when the user comes to the image screen.
• This plugin helps in reducing the weight of your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code.
• If we compare this plugin with other caching plugins, it is eCommerce friendly, while other plugins are not.
• It improves the website speed by removing query strings from static resources.

Final Thoughts

WordPress made easy for everyone to make any kind of website. Through this open-source platform, people create different kinds of websites like membership websites, blog websites, eCommerce websites, etc. The only thing it makes different from other website building platform is its plugins.

Through different plugins, we can do a lot of stuff. For every problem related to the website, there is the plugin available. However, it doesn’t mean that we should install more and more WordPress plugins. Installation of so many plugins would lead to a reduction in the website’s speed. Hence, we should know about the best plugins for WordPress. So, in this post, we have explained about the top seven must-have plugins for WordPress.