If you’re building a website on WordPress, the right plugins can support your site’s functionality, whether you’re in need of security, speed, or analytics. With thousands of plugins to choose from, it can be challenging trying to pick the right ones for your site. Here are some of our favorite WordPress plugins to power your site:
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO allows you to optimize your site for SEO. You’ll stand out among competitors, drive traffic to your business, gain more visitors from social media, and increase engagement. This app can scan your content to see if you’re using the right keywords frequently enough. You’ll also be able to find related keywords people are interested in, let Google know what your website is about, and preview what your post or page looks like in Google search results.
2. MemberPress
MemberPress helps you create WordPress membership websites, so you can build, manage, and track membership subscriptions. This app allows you to accept payment securely, sell online courses, and choose who can access your content. You can also integrate this app with other services to add content management, social communities, and forums.
3. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache increases website performance and decreases load times, improving the user experience and SEO of your website. Shorter load times encourage a higher visitor time on your website, so users can view more pages and interact with them faster.
4. WP Mail SMTP
WP Mail SMTP ensures that your emails are configured correctly and delivered to the inbox via trusted third parties. Without WP SMTP, emails sent from your site could be blocked or marked as spam.
5. WooCommerce
WooCommerce helps you build an online store, receive secure payments, customize shipping options, and customize the functionality of your store. You can also automate tax calculations, receive live shipping rates, and generate labels to print at home. If you’re looking to further build your store, you can integrate marketing tools such as Google Analytics or Yoast.
6. WP Cerber
WP Cerber protects your site against spam, hacker attacks, and malware. This app blocks spam on forms and check-out pages. It also identifies and blocks malicious activity before it damages your data. WP Cerber scans your website for malware and viruses, and automatically removes them once detected.
7. Smush
With Smush, you can increase your Google Page Speed by optimizing your images. This app compresses your images without impacting image quality and uses lazy load to improve loading speed.
8. Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a form builder with 30+ form fields that you can choose from. You can also cater the form to the user’s needs with conditional logic, which gives you the option to show or hide form components based on what the user selects. This app also allows users to save a partially filled out form and sends you email notifications once the form is submitted.
9. Smart Slider 3
Smart Slider 3 gives you the ability to build SEO optimized and fully responsive sliders. With this app, you’re able to customize your sliders using layers, so that every detail reflects your brand, powering a beautiful website design.
10. Akismet
Akismet blocks spam comments, so you don’t have to filter out spam manually. By using this app, you can focus on your business and maintain your site’s credibility.
That brings us to our recommendation in this month’s toolbox: PageSpeed Insights. If you’re looking to improve your site’s speed and performance, this tool allows you to see which content might be slowing your pages down. PageSpeed Insights provides suggestions to improve your site’s speed. You can then take that information and use the plugins we recommended to target specific issues.
We hope these plugins help you build a website that reflects your brand well. If you’re looking to build a WordPress site that supports your business, reach out to Deal Digital today.