4 Essential WordPress Plugins Every Website Must Have
Building a website with WordPress is, without a doubt, quite easy and affordable. However, the core code only helps you create a basic framework. With nearly 400 million active websites sprawling across the internet, having a generic website just doesn’t cut it. As WordPress website maintenance and optimization professionals, believe it when we say that plugins are of key importance to your online success.
WordPress plugins are designed to take the functionality and performance of your website to a whole new level. Not only do they add new features to your site but also enhance user experience and streamline online business management. The best part is that there is a WordPress plugin for virtually every possible requirement of website owners.
For example, there are WordPress speed plugins to improve your site’s loading time. On the other hand, WordPress security plugins protect your site from hackers and spam. WordPress SEO and social sharing plugins help increase your site’s search engine rankings, boost visibility among your audience, and so on.
So what are the best WordPress plugins you should use? With a plethora of options available, it can be hard to figure out which plugins you should start with. Don’t worry, we’ve done most of the leg work for you!
Here are some of the most important WordPress plugins every website needs.
1. Jetpack
If you don’t have vast know-how of the technicalities involved in website maintenance and management, Jetpack is the ultimate plugin to use.
This aptly named plugin is a smart toolkit that provides several features in one place. With Jetpack, you can enhance your site design, track visitors, monitor statistics, and even boost social sharing. In addition to optimizing user experience, Jetpack also helps prevent cyber attacks on your site. All of these features are available for free.
If you would like to add extra features like data backups and spam shields, you can sign up for the premium plan.
2. Akismet
It is common for business owners with comments turned on on their WordPress sites to fall victims to spam. Fortunately, you can steer clear of this dilemma by installing an anti-spam plugin such as Akismet.
Akismet is WordPress’s official spam protection plugin designed by its parent company Automattic. More than 35 million WordPress websites use this tool for website support against spammers and other malware bots.
Akismet runs automatic tests to check visitors submitting comments on your blog and filters out the ones that look like spam. It saves the deleted comments in a separate folder so you can view them later if you want. However, it also features a discard option to get rid of spam instantly, thus saving you disk space while increasing WordPress speed.
It’s a handy website maintenance tool that can save you from various spam-related problems down the road.
3. WP Rocket
Your site’s loading time has a direct impact on your bottom line. Did you know that a 1-second delay in page response can reduce your conversions by more than 7%?
This is why a caching plugin, such as WP Rocket, is a must-have!
The developers of WP Rocket have exclusively designed this web tool to help site owners speed up their websites with a few clicks. It is exceptionally easy to use, requires no configuration, and is compatible with eCommerce platforms as well.
Almost 1.5 million websites use WP Rocket. One could say that they’re already ‘in orbit’ enjoying improved conversions and optimized search engine rankings.
Apart from the automatic caching function, this plugin also offers lazy loading (asynchronous loading), defer JS loading, and minification for HTML, CSS, and JS resources. Together, these features help keep your site running smoothly, preventing the need for temporary shutdowns for website maintenance.
4. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
No site is complete without images. Whether they are close-ups of your products of just general pictures to illustrate your business concept, images make a website more attractive and engaging.
However, it’s also true that using a ton of high-quality images can drastically slow your website speed. This is where Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin can prove to be of immense help.
This WordPress web tool enables you to maintain fast page load times even with large sized image files accompanying the text. You just have to install this plugin and select ‘automatic smushing.’ It will then compress all images currently published on your website. Upon process completion, Smush also shows you the number of megabytes you saved so you can manage space efficiently.
It’s worth noting that Smush performs lossless compression. This means it reduces image size without affecting the image quality. Moreover, it processes different formats (png, jpeg, gif etc.) accordingly to provide optimum results.
Final Note on Website Maintenance
WordPress offers more than 50,000 plugins for different site features and functionality. For site owners looking to maximize conversions, it can be tempting to use a bit too many. Take note, though, that too many plugins can affect your WordPress speed.
Moreover, regardless of which plugin you install, remember that these chunks of code are often constantly updated by their developers. Not following suit with regular website maintenance to update existing plugins can leave your site vulnerable to attack. It can introduce bugs and compromise your site’s overall performance.
Yeshourun Digital can assist you with the general upkeep and website enhancements. For more info, contact us at +1 (833) 460-2035. Or try our website maintenance services for free now. Click here to get started.
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