11 Most Important WordPress Plugins That Every Website Should Have
WordPress is an amazing piece of PHP Art I’ll say. It’s easy to setup and it’s even easier to work on it. It’s so good to see that the developer community is so much activity for this particular CMS. Initially called as a Blogging platform it no longer revolves around blogs. It has extended way past that and the possibilities are endless. Think of anything and you have some or the other solution for it in WordPress.
In this post, I’m going to highlight some of the essential WordPress plugins that I feel every WordPress powered website should have.
SEO Plugin
Every website very much requires SEO. It gives an easy and quick way to showcase every page to a search engine. There are so many plugins available today but out of them I’ll suggest – WordPress SEO by Yoast or All In One SEO. Both equally feature rich and have almost the same functionality give and take. You can choose either one of these and trust me you’ll not be sorry.
W3 Total Cache
As you add more posts and images to your website, it eventually becomes heavy. And since you start getting more visitors, the bandwidth increases too much. For this, a cache plugin is must needed. This is where W3 Total Cache comes handy. It creates static pages of your website and presents the same to your visitors. It helps you optimize your WordPress site for speed and performance. It allows you to setup page quickly and browser caching, compress pages for quicker downloads, and setup a content delivery network known as CDN for your static files. This is a must have.
WPForms / Contact Form 7
You will need some kind of Forms to be added to your website. This is where WPForms shines. It is a beginner friendly contact form plugin. Its functionality is also very straightforward and very easy. As it is a drag & drop online form builder so it helps greatly in creating contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms and so on. You will save so much of time with this plugin. Both Lite and Pro versions are available.The other plugin that you can opt for is Contact Form 7. Its free first of all. Though it does not provide drag & drop functionalities, but its pretty quick. Create a form, add the codes to a page or post and its done. Takes a little workaround and makes quick forms. Quite powerful too.
Optin Master / PopUp by Supsystic
A website with no followers is a let down in its own. Seriously! You put in so much of hard work and what’s the use if you don’t have any followers. Let people read your precious articles that you think and write. For this Optin Master plugin is very much required. It is a lead generation plugin for WordPress which allows you to create beautiful optin forms and popups which you can use to convert website visitors to subscribers. You must use this surely. BUT its paid. No worries… we have another one for you. It’s PopUp by Supsystic. It is free and gives you lot many options. Though it does not looks or creates as pretty forms like Optin Master but it gets the job done. Try it out and decide for yourself.
TinyMCE Advanced
WordPress editor is a plain one with no bells and whistles. Though it gets the work done but is not as feature rich as TinyMCE Advanced. It is a WYSIWYG editor first of all. It includes 15 plugins for TinyMCE that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen. Features like choosing a font style and font size are also available. It’s free and amazing.
Soliloquy
There are many WordPress slideshow plugins available but Soliloquy might be the best of them all. It is responsive in nature and works very well on any device. It does not slow down your website and so doesn’t have any effect on SEO. It has both free and paid version.
WP-SpamShield
An extremely powerful and user-friendly all-in-one anti-spam plugin that eliminates comment spam, trackback spam, contact form spam, and registration spam. No CAPTCHA’s, challenge questions, or other inconvenience to website visitors. Enjoy running a WordPress site without spam! Includes a spam-blocking contact form feature. What else can one ask for?
Vuukle
Every website needs a commenting system so that visitors to the site can take part in discussions and hence make your website popular. Vuukle is a free plugin with added advantages other than comments. It offers Facebook like Post Reaction system. This way anyone who is reading your posts will be able to express their feelings at that very moment. It is a great way to make your website more dynamic.
TablePress
WordPress does not come with the ability to create tables and that is quite unfortunate. If you need tables in your posts then you will need TablePress for this. The only plugin that lets you create any number of tables quickly and then you can add them to your pages, posts and even widgets. Exporting table data is also supported.
WP-Touch
These days WordPress themes are responsive in nature. They greatly help in adjusting your website according to the screen size it is being viewed on. But WPtouch is an amazing plugin which gives you more features and a truly optimised mobile website. Give it a try. Too many features really.
All 404 Redirect to Homepage
Sometimes you delete a post. We all do. Without thinking that it might be indexed in the search engines or maybe somebody bookmarked it or shared it with their friends. In such a scenario when a person visits that page it gives a 404 not found the error. So for this, All 404 Redirect to Homepage plugin helps a lot. As the name suggests it redirects all 404 error to the homepage.
These are the 11 WordPress plugins that I feel are the most important ones and everyone should really use them to extend the functionality of their websites.
Do you think that there is another plugin that is a must have? Tell us about it in the comments below, and we will add it here in the list.