As a beginner blogger, knowing which WordPress plugins you need for your website can be confusing. There are ten of thousands of plugins available; therefore, knowing what you truly need can be a pain.
You won’t need all the WordPress plugins, but there are a few must-haves. This article will take you through ten of the best must-have WordPress plugins and why you need them.
Yoast SEO.
With over five million active installations, the Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most powerful and popular SEO tools.The WordPress plugin helps analyze your content and see whether you have followed the general rules of SEO. As a business owner, the goal of having a website is to get seen on search results.
How people find your business when they search is by how well optimized your website content is, and this is made easy and possible by the Yoast plugin.The plugin ensures that your content is optimized by checking for things such as metadata, images, links, and other SEO rules.
Yoast SEO also helps analyze the readability of your content, something that affects how long people who visit your website stay on it. The Yoast SEO plugin should be a part of your SEO strategy if you want to grow your online business and get more traffic.
This WordPress plugin is free, but you can get the premium features for $99 per year.
Monster Insight.
With over three million active installations, monster insights are the most popular google analytics WordPress plugin available. Monsterinsights plugin helps you view your site’s statistics that matter, and therefore, you can grow your business. With monster insight, you can read from the plugin’s dashboard all the statistics that matter so that you can redirect your efforts to the necessary places.
It is easy to install and set up the plugin, which makes it very user-friendly, especially for beginners and website owners that are not tech gurus. This WordPress plugin is free, but you can get the Monster insight pro with all the tracking features you might need. The pro version allows you to do event tracking, page speed report tracking, custom dimension, affiliate link tracking, video tracking, and many more features.
Updraftplus.
Updraftplus is one of the most popular scheduled backup WordPress plugins, with over three million active installations. This plugin allows you to back up your website’s files and database into the cloud and restore them in a single click. This plugin allows you to back into Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), updraftVault, Rackspace cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email.
The paid version also allows you to back up to Microsoft one drive, Microsoft Azure, Google cloud storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV. Having a website, there are many risks that your website is exposed to. For example, you may get hacked, or something might go wrong with an update, your server may crash, or your hosting company may go bust. If you do not have a good backup, you lose everything, all the time you have invested in building your website.
While taking other security measures against such occurrences is necessary, having your website backed up is overall good insurance. This would mean that if anything bad happens to your website, having it backed up will allow you to restore it within no time.
What I like most about the UpdraftPlus plugin is that I can set it back up and forget, which saves me time and ensures that I do not forget to back up my site.
Sucuri.
As a website owner, the security of your website should be a top priority. Sucuri offers a security plugin and web application firewall, which will give you the best protection for your website.
Sucuri monitors and protects your website from malware, brute force attacks, spam comment attacks, DDoS, and XSS attacks.
The sucuri WordPress plugin is free to all WordPress users. The plugin offers the following security features that are all meant to enhance a website’s security.
- Security activity auditing.
- File integrity monitoring.
- Remote malware scanning.
- Effective security hardening.
- Blocklist monitoring.
- Post-hack security actions.
- Security notification
- Website firewall for premium users.
Optinmonster.
Optinmonster is the best popup builder plugin in the market. It has over one million active installations. This WordPress plugin helps you convert your website visitors, into subscribers, thus increasing your sales and ultimately growing your business.
This WordPress plugin allows you to use their beautiful templates to create forms and popups in any marketing campaign. This WordPress plugin allows you to create email subscription forms, opt-in forms, sticky announcement bars, etc., all in a matter of minutes.
This WordPress plugin also allows you to customize when and how you want the popups to appear to enhance proper targeting and customer experience. The popups are optimized for all devices, ensuring the user’s experience is enhanced, whether on their phone, laptop, desktop, or tablet.
The forms are also optimized for both the website and server, thus making sure they do not slow down your website.
Marketing your blog will be very key to your success as a blogger. One of the best ways to market your blog and gain traffic to your site is using social media. Sassy social share is a WordPress plugin that allows you and your readers to share your blog content on various social media platforms with one click.
The plugin allows you to share your post on Facebook, Pinterest, Whatsapp, Linkedin, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, Parler, Gab, and over 110 bookmarking services.
The social share plugin is free to use and very convenient for users since you do not require to create an account to use it. Also, the plugin allows users to customize it in different ways to suit their needs and is mobile responsive. The plugin is lightweight, thus ensuring that it does not slow down your website.
TinyPNG-JPEG, PNG & WebP Image Compression.
A fast website should be your topmost priority as a blog owner. Some of the things that are most likely to affect the speed of your website are large images. While images are required to enhance the readability of your blog posts and optimize your articles for search engines, optimizing your images’ size helps maintain your site’s speed.
The TinyPNG-JPEG, PNG & WebP Image Compression plugin helps compress your website’s images. Once you upload an image to your website, each image is uploaded to the TinyJPG or TingPNG service. Your image is analyzed, and then the best available optimization is applied. The result is then sent back to your WordPress site with a smaller resized version of your image.
This WordPress plugin resizes JPEG images by 40-60%, and the PNG images are resized by 50-80% without any visible loss in quality.
This plugin automatically optimizes images when you upload them, so you do not have to struggle to do anything. It also optimizes the images already in your media library, saving space and speeding up your website.
LuckyWP Tables of Content.
A table of contents for my blog posts helps me enhance the reader’s experience. With a simple first look at my content, the reader can tell what I have covered in my topic of discussion. Some readers may prefer jumping to a specific part of the article, and by having a table of contents, I allow them to do that without much trouble.
The LuckyWP Tables of Content plugin on my website helps me to automatically insert a table of contents in my blog posts. Also, the table of contents contributes towards SEO, the more reasons you should have this plugin on your website. This plugin has over ninety thousand active installations and can be customized to your preference. The plugin is compatible with both WordPress themes and other plugins.
WP Forms.
This drag-and-drop WordPress builder for WordPress has over five million active installations. This plugin allows you to create beautiful contact forms, payment forms, subscription forms, and feedback forms without having to hire a developer to do it for you.
This plugin will allow you to immediately build an email list from your subscriptions. It will also allow you to stay in contact with your readers by responding to their inquiries. This will help you build online trust and a community around your blog.
You may need to add code snippets to your site’s header or footer for verification when running your WordPress site. How you can easily do this is by using this WordPress plugin, and you will do so without editing your theme files.
Some instances where you may need to add code snippets are running AdSense ads on your website, which is one of the ways to make money blogging.
Finally..
I hope this list of ten must-have WordPress plugins has been helpful to you. Do not forget to download the plugins from the official WordPress plugins directory. Also, read the users’ reviews, as that may help you know how well the plugin is coded and the possible effects it will have on your site.
As always, leave any questions you might have in the comments below, and I will be more than happy to help.
