We love using WordPress at V3 Media! It’s one of the most flexible and handy platforms to use in website development and design. We have standardized our WordPress development using the Divi theme, but we’d like to discuss something we hear a lot about, which is the plugins the WordPress has to offer.
WordPress.com has so many plugins to offer, it’s no wonder people get confused easily about which ones to use and not use! To help you out, we’ve put together this list of ten of some of the best plugins we think you need for your website, no matter what stage of development or redevelopment it’s in.
Yoast SEO
An excellent plugin for SEO purposes, Yoast SEO will help make the optimization step in your website’s development a smooth and easy one. Simply enter the title tag, description tag, and focus keyword of your choice and Yoast will tell you how good it is via its colour indicator designed to look like traffic lights. If it’s green, it’s good to go. Orange means it’s not great, but passable. And red means there’s more work to be done on your optimization, because it’s bad.
Yoast also goes so far as to describe if, when, and where improvements need to be made, such as the word count of the page content, whether you need more outbound links, and so on. The Premium form of Yoast allows you to add multiple focus keywords as opposed to just the one, which also helps to target synonyms of the best keyword for your content. In a nutshell, as far as SEO goes for your website, this would be the best go-to plugin for the job.
WPForms
Having people contact you about anything related to your company is a must for businesses looking to prosper. That’s why WPForms are the best choice for having user-friendly contact forms. You can customize and create forms such as e-mail newsletter subscriptions, orders, payments, contact forms, and more with only a few clicks. This is easily the best plugin for anyone looking to have something simple and useful on their WordPress website.
Woocommerce
If your website is an ecommerce one then Woocommerce makes it easy! Entering pricing information, photographs, and product descriptions are simple to do and you can mark an item that’s either discontinued or out of stock at any given time. Woocommerce also allows for you to match up your website’s design with your brand, and it leaves your customers a venue to leave a comment or review. You can also extend its usefulness further with additional plugins and themes. Best of all, it’s free to use!
BackupBuddy
A reliable, secure system for your website is a must, especially in this day and age when even the slightest weakness in a server can cost you if it’s all lost. Although we do offer specialized services regarding backups and maintenance, an extra plugin such as BackupBuddy will help wonders. So far it is the most reliable and easiest way to back up your WordPress website’s data with just a few clicks (of course, having extra assistance is always nice too!).
W3 Total Cache
One of the most crucial components of having good SEO is speed. The faster your website is, the lower your bounce rate is (see more about that in our post here) and the higher your website will rank on search engines. By using the W3 Total Cache plugin, you can provide your visitors with compressed and cached files which reduces the loading time on your server and makes your website run faster. Win-win!
Buffer
If you have to curate content for social media regularly at your job, then Buffer may be right up your alley. With Buffer, you can link several social media accounts and schedule the content in advance. What we like most about Buffer is that it analyzes your most viral and popular posts and using that data it will schedule your future posts to be posted during the time of day when your customers are most likely to see them and engage with you. No more guessing games when it comes to figuring out when the best time is to post—Buffer does it for you! It allows you to focus on other, more pressing tasks without spending too much time worrying about your social media content’s curation.
Insert Headers and Footers
Headers and footers are necessary for anyone looking to host a good website, allowing you ample room to customize and edit the website’s top and bottom should your logo be rejuvenated or your contact information has changed. The Insert Headers and Footers plugin allows you to add snippets of code to your header and footer without having to edit the main theme files and risk your WordPress theme breaking up and looking messy.
SEMRush
If you need to perform keyword research and want to know more about what your competition is targeting, SEMRush makes for a decent plugin. It helps you identify the keywords your competitors target the most often on their websites and you can check out their paid keywords as well as their organic ones. Using this will allow you to improve your current SEO, update your content’s optimization, and assist with your current marketing strategy.
Slack
Slack is an awesome plugin to use if Skype is something you either don’t care for or are tired of using. It’s great for team management, productivity, and communication between you and team members who don’t live near you but still work for your company, especially if they live in different timezones. It’s convenient compared to e-mail and you can integrate it with many other tools you are using such as Google Docs.
Testimonials Widget
Having testimonials about your company is always going to be something you want featured on your website. The positive ones will help to convince new visitors to use your product or services and keep people returning to use them time and again. Any testimonials widget on WordPress is therefore a must for installing and they are dead simple to use.