One of the great things about WordPress is its ability to be used for almost anything, if you download the right themes and plugins. WordPress is easily customized with plugins, and there are plenty of plugins that can handle the more complex aspects of your website, if you don’t want to deal with the coding yourself or lack the technical knowledge to do so. These are the top plugins available for WordPress.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
This is one of the most downloaded SEO plugins for WordPress, and is great for optimizing both the technical aspects of your website and your content for SEO. This plugin lets you create SEO-friendly titles, meta descriptions for your pages, and meta keywords for every post. It offers advanced XML sitemaps functions, and a snippet preview to let you see what your page will look like in search results. Social media platforms are integrated into this plugin, allowing you to easily share your content. This plugin is available in both free and paid versions.
Gravity Forms
This is one of the best plugins to use in your WordPress site to collect contact information from website visitors. This is a paid plugin, but it’s well worth the price because it offers forms that are easy to customize, with an option to create multi-page forms, and it allows you to schedule forms. For example, if you only want a form to appear for a certain period of time, you can set dates for it to be used. This plugin offers conditional logic, and it can be integrated with third-party services, such as PayPal. It works with most browsers on self-hosted WordPress installations.
W3 Total Cache
This is a caching plugin that can increase your WordPress website performance by reducing download times. This plugin caches pages, posts, search result pages, and database objects. The creation of static cache pages mean that those pages don’t have to reloaded each time the pages is loaded. This is particularly helpful for mobile-friendly websites and websites that use SSL. There is a free version, but you can access paid assistance for a fee.
iThemes Security
WordPress is known for its website security, but it’s always a good idea to have additional security with your website to protect your information. This plugin offers
two-factor authentication for an added layer of protection. It allows you to enforce strong passwords for anyone with access to your website, including users, and it can limit the number of failed login attempts by users. You can also get email alerts when changes are made to your files, to ensure that you know about the changes.
This plugin can also provide malware scans, for added security, and it’s available in both free and paid versions.
NextGEN Gallery
This is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress galleries, and it works great for general use of images, along with offering some options for higher-end photographers. The galleries are mobile-friendly, and it works with the majority of WordPress themes. This plugin is easily customized, and allows you to add watermarks to protect your images. This is another plugin that is available in both free and paid versions.
All in One SEO Pack
This is another of the most downloaded WordPress plugins that is focused on optimizing your website for SEO purposes. Available in both free and paid versions, this plugin features automated SEO, so there is less for you to manually configure with your website. It offers XML
sitemap support and Google Analytics support, and can automatically optimize your titles for search engines and can create meta tags. It also automatically notifies the search engines when you make any changes to your website, which allows your changes to be quickly indexed.
Broken Link Checker
This is a free WordPress plugin that can find every broken link on your website, along with any missing images. Broken links are one of the problems that can damage your rankings in search results, and this plugin offers the option to prevent search engines from following the broken links on your website. It monitors your links in posts, pages, and comments, and gives you the option to fix the link without editing the post itself, which will save you some time.
Spam Protection by CleanTalk
Spam is something that every blog website owner has to worry about, and this plugin can block spam in most forms from your website. It’s available in both free and paid versions, and it offers protection from spam with comments, registrations, orders, surveys & polls, and widgets, among others. You can even block users by specific countries and block comments that contain certain words or phrases. It can provide you with daily or weekly reports, and has a low false/positive rate, so you can trust its results. Best of all, it can work in conjunction with other comment plugins, so there are no conflicts.
Bottom Line
WordPress is a great platform to use, no matter what kind of website you need. These plugins will make the process of designing and maintaining your website even easier than you expected. Try them out and you’ll surely notice the difference.
Author bio: John Stone is a web entrepreneur and SEO expert. Through years of experience, he became a devout believer in the notion that form should always follow function and that developing the ability to think outside of the box is a prerequisite of being a successful entrepreneur. He currently advises companies about Web Design in Sydney. You can find him on Twitter.