Your basket is currently empty!
Your basket is currently empty!
I know WordPress is a pretty popular CMS, and it’s my preferred platform to develop websites. You’ll find the biggest of companies use WordPress to power their websites. And what you’ll love most are the pretty cool plugins that help you improve functionality of your site to help it grow and attract more visitors. And that’s what you want!
Many a time I get customers asking me to optimise their site or speed it up or connect it to social media. And this can be done very easily though WordPress if you know what plugins to use. So on this post, I am going to show you. By the way, I have personally used these plugin so I can attest to their usefulness.
So, let’s get to it with 10 Essential plugins for your WordPress website that you may not have heard about but will siginificantly improve your users’ experience.
Keep a keen eye on the performance of your site, particularly if you have a slither of hope in managing and growing your site effectively. The Google Analytics plugin will allow you to do just that within your WordPress dashboard. Making it simple for you to monitor website visits, page views, bounce rates, average visit duration and where your traffic is coming from. This is the sort of information that is crucial in making website growth decisions. There are also advanced settings that allow you to identify your site’s demographic and their interests vital in creating targetted content and ads.
Turn your website vistors in customers through the use of opt-ins. Opt ins are what you will use in your email marketing campaigns. Once you’ve got people visiting the site, you want a way to keep them interested and coming back. This nifty plugin will help you put opt-in sign up forms on any page you wish with pop up triggers including time spent on site, how far down the page your visitor has scrolled. It’s a good way to grap your vistors attention once you’ve seen they’ve shown interest and you want to keep it that way.
In return for them visiting your site, you give away free vouchers, regular discounts and eBooks. Once you have built your email marketing lists, you can sell your goods and services to those who are subscribed to your lists.
Hackers are always on the look out for an unsecure out of date website. The WordPress platform, your plugins, your themes are constantly updated by the authors for improvement and bug fixes. If you are not aware of these update changes, your site becomes vunerable. The Wordfence plugin will alert you of updates required to any part of your website as well monitor and block unathorised access. It’ll also inform you of unauthorised changes to core WordPress code and ensure you have strong admin logins as well hinder bruteforce attacks against your site.
A plugin like wordfence gives you great protection security against hackers. This plug in is a must have.
Good SEO is essential in making sure your website can be found by internet users. Yoast SEO is a popular plugin, which I have used for many years and it will help you write posts that are SEO optimised each and every time. With this plugin you can also make sure your entire website is SEO optimised. You’ll receive regular alerts of any issues that require your attention and be provided with a rank of each blog post or article for SEO quality
Visitors won’t be staying on your site if it takes forever for pages to load. This trusted plugin will help improve your website performance, reduce page load times and dramatically improve user experience and search engine ranking. Another must have.
In the world of technology anything can go wrong, so it’s only right you make sure you regularly back up your site. Updraft will not only that do for you but it will allow you to store your back ups in a preferred location and restore whenever you need to. Make the choice to backup just the database, your WordPress themes, plugins or the entire website at scheduled intervals using this popular plugin.
If you don’t want the headache of having to start your site from fresh when things don’t go according to plan, you’ll want to have this plugin.
Let’s say you need to insert a bit of code for Google analytics or for Facebook ad pixels. You won’t need any coding knowledge with this plugin. This plugin will help you insert the third party code or pixel provided into the header or the footer on any page you require, no hassle.
Hope this list helps. I personally use most of these plugins, if not all on every WordPress site I develop. So, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to install these plugins straightaway. And, if you have any questions regarding plugins or improving the performance of your website further, be sure to leave a question in the comments.