Best WordPress Plugins You Should Install in Your Website
After building over 100+ WordPress sites in the last 12 years of doing digital marketing. Today I have the list of the most amazing and the most essential plugins that will make your WordPress sites 10 times better.
WordPress Speed Optimization Plugin on Your Website
The first and the most important plugin for any website owner is a speed plugin. Since all my websites are hosted on the Namecheap hosting, Earlier I used to use wprocket as my speed plugin. It’s a paid plugin out there. It’s a super amazing plugin and it is super easy to configure. All you have to do is upload it, install it and it will make your website ultra fast. It has all the functionality that a good speed plugin should have, it has as you can see all the image optimization for the frontend optimization I have minify, HTML, JAVA Script, minify CSS all the options enable this is making my website extremely fast. If you don’t have the money to invest in wp rocket then you can go for W3 Total Cache. It’s a very popular speed plugin out there in the WordPress plugin department. So once you install it just play with the settings or stream youtube tutorial on how to configure it and your website will be extremely fast. So having a speed plugin is a mandatory requirement. If I must tell you the faster your website the better SEO for your website. The faster your website is more traffic you will be able to drive because people will be happy with your website and google also prefer a fast loading website so I highly recommend a speed plugin. Just a side note, whenever you are installing a speed plugin and whenever you are enabling the options such as minify, the HTML, minify the JAVA Script and combine CSS whenever you are enabling any option just make sure you open your site because sometimes what happens is that website behave abnormally to certain settings. So just make sure you enable setting one by one and then see the response of your website if everything is loading fine then it’s working perfectly.
WordPress Backup Plugin on Your Website
The next extremely important plugin every WordPress website owner should have is a backup plugin and the plugin I use for creating a backup of my website is UpdraftPlus. This is a free plugin again, it has a pro version but even its basic free version is more than enough. With this, you don’t have to worry about backup but just for precaution I also take manual backups using this updraft plus plugin. It is one the most popular plugin one it comes to backup as you can see the 5star rating here. 2.879 votes of 5stars rating. It is a very popular plugin and so many WordPress websites are using it and the plugin deserves applause because it has so many amazing features the best part is that you can schedule your backup and you don’t have to do it manually and you can store your backups from Google Drive, Amazon S3 server or even by the membership of updraftvault and you can store your backups there. I am using google drive to store all my backups.
Install WordPress Image Compressor Plugin on Your Website
Just like I told you earlier that the website speed matters a lot and one other plugin that really help you speed up the website is the WP Smush Plugin which was earlier called WP Smush it’s not Smush Image Compression and Optimization. As you can see the star rating here also has 3.841-star rating because what it does is whenever you are uploading an image to your webpage you are adding size to your web page. Similarly, this is an image, the more images your page will have the slower it will load and you don’t want a slow loading page because you want your visitors to be happy.Because people are impatient now they don’t want to wait for 5 to 10 seconds for a webpage to load they will press the back button. So you want your webpage to load as fast as possible and one such way to do it by compressing the images and this is where Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin comes into play what it will do is will automatically compress the images. So let’s say if your images of size 100kb so by using this particular plugin it will reduce the size of your image by 30 to 70% without impacting much in the quality of the image. So, just like in this article I have so many images out there so just by using the WP Smush Plugin I can save the size of all these images, and hence my webpage will be loading at a much faster rate. Although I was using it earlier nowadays I don’t use this plugin rather I use this website called compressjpeg.com so whenever I have a which I need to compress so all I do is just select the image here and upload it here. So the 4.7mb image was reduced by 81% and the quality of the image has not been compromised much this is why I use this website call compressjpeg.com the one reason why I have stopped using WP Smush Image Compression is that the more plugin that you will install on your website the slower your website will become this is why I recommend having as low plugin as possible but using this particular website is a manual process because you have manually uploaded the image and download them then upload them to your WordPress server. But by using WP this Smush Image Compression and Optimization all you have to do is press a button and it will automatically compress all the images of your website so I highly recommend this particular plugin as well.
Install WordPress SEO Plugin on Your Website
The next plugin needs no introduction it is one of the most popular plugins out there and when we talk about SEO. It’s called Yoast SEO. You can see the star ratings here 25 thousand + 5-star rating. It is one of the most popular SEO plugins out there and I use it myself the best feature is that free you don’t have to buy it, and the features are tremendous so whenever you are adding an article, let say I’ll just show you one of my article here and income report here and so whenever you want to add the meta title all you have to do is, once the plugin is installed you can add your own meta title, you can add your own meta description, you also have other options like whether you want to add the Facebook title whether you want to allow search engines to index the page or not, whether you want the search engine to follow the links on your post or not, so all these functionalities given by Yoast SEO plugin its free to use and it’s one of the best plugins out there. I think I don’t need to explain this plugin more because already it’s very popular out there and as for the features I’ll recommend that you turn off the readability analysis of this plugin, go to Yoast SEO plugin here – go to the general settings, disable the readability analysis because I have seen that it’s not that effective so I don’t use it and also it provides the XML sitemap so you don’t have to install any other plugin to generate the sitemap. This again helps you in saving one more plugin so you just enable the sitemap and you can also submit the sitemap to google webmaster just using the plugin itself similarly you can go to search appearances of this plugin setting, here you can play with the settings which type of content you want to get indexed and which type of content you don’t want to get indexed like I am using thrive plugin so I don’t want them to get indexed, I only want my post and pages to get indexed. Similarly, when we talk about taxonomies I don’t want my categories pages to be indexed because that a good SEO practice to not get your categories or tags pages indexed because that a good practice to not index your tags and categories pages because that leads to duplicate content similarly I have also disabled the author archives that again results in duplicate content, so you can play with the settings here. So Yoast SEO is a highly recommended plugin and a must-have plugin for every WordPress website owner.
The next useful plugin that I will recommend is the LIMIT LOGIN ATTEMPTS RELOADED PLUGIN so what’s this does is it makes your website more secure because generally all the website owner have their WordPress dashboard in this particular URL that is your website name slash wp-admin, so what LIMIT LOGIN ATTEMPTS does is, so whenever someone enters the username and password wrong for three to four times, its just blocks the IP so they won’t able to login because, in the end, your website is in online real estate your investing your time, your energy, your hard work, your money onto your website. So you want to keep it safe from hackers. So this plugin will really help you with that. I will also highly recommend you guys to install this particular plugin for your website security.
And the next plugin is for the people who have already have an established website and who are driving enough traffic on their website so that they can make money from your website so this is where Thirsty Affiliates Affiliate Link Manager comes into play. I have the pro version of this plugin and I have already installed it on all my websites I already have an affiliate marketing course on youtube. You can check the link on the course in the YouTube description below. So if you don’t know about affiliate marketing you must check out this course. So affiliate marketing is when you refer other people products to your audience and when your audience purchases you make a commission out of it. So one of the major problems that affiliate marketers face is the handling of the links so what this plugin does is you can also go to the website thirstyaffiliates.com they cloak very long ugly URL, affiliate URL so if you have very long ugly affiliate URL you can cloak it by creating a beautiful looking URL you can also track the number of clicks on a particular URL on a particular affiliate link on how many clicks happen and also you can check reports, comprehensive reports like you can see here these are my affiliate link report so I’m an affiliate of Aweber, Bluehost, Digitalocean, Drip, etc. So instead of having very long link destination you create beautiful looking cloaked link url and redirect type of 301 and it also give you a stats summary of the number of click that happened in the last 7 days/30 days in a total clicks you can also generate reports here and the report session is really useful if you’re an affiliate marketer because it helps you understand which link is performing well what’s the geolocation which is driving the most links the stats table which keyword and which particular link is driving the most clicks as you can see majority of the link clicks is in india because my website is targeting the indian users so some of the functionality is available in the free plugin the Thirsty affiliates but if you want the more advanced functionality then you can go for the pro version you can see the pricing here and you can see the pro features like these are the free and the pro and these are the feature that are added in the pro version like automatically keyword linking, the geo location link, redirect and so much more so buy the pro version only if you’re driving enough traffic to your website. if your website in the beginner stage and you’re not driving enough traffic just go for the free version till then but then again if you’re making money through affiliate marketing in your blog or in your website then I highly recommend you guys to invest in a thirsty affiliate plugin.
The next plugin that I’ll recommend is thrive, architect, although there are free version like elementor available in the market you can go for elementor as well, it’s just that I have the thrive membership so I’ve all the plugins of thrive installed on my website in a monthly membership but if you just want a page builder then you go for elementor as well it has a free version as well which doesn’t have all the functionality but still it’s a very popular plugin. So what thrive architect or elementor does it helps you create a beautiful post and beautiful looking pages as you can see I have the proper indentation I have this box again then proper column structure these buttons proper formatting here. This is all possible again I have this template here with different background color with different heading structure different button so all this was possible because I created this in a thrive architect page builder so by using the page builder you can create a beautiful looking post I’ll show you another post on my website this is another post on my website you can see here it has a proper table of content it’s very hard to do in normal WordPress editor but the thrive architect or any other page builder like elementor you can do it easily.You also have this listicle format with various different icons as well. You can embed an image, you can embed a video, you also have such various template like you can click these different tabs and add information you can also change the icons so all these functionalities available in the page builder so I’m using thrive, architect. But if you’re building a blog or website for money and if you want to drive more traffic and you thinking for making money from your website then you’ve to make it look really really good and a page builder is a must-have plugin for any website WordPress website owner.
T next plugin that you can install is a Disqus comment system. Disqus is a very very popular comment system and is used by so many popular websites out there the best part is it automatically blocks the spam and thus, Because if you’re using the normal comment system of your website, you’ll see that so many spam comments will be automatically becoming onto your websites which are not relevant to your content at all so this adds on too extra work and also your comment normal comment system doesn’t look that clean and that good looking but Disqus comment is really nice looking it also highlights the top comments and it is used by all the top populisize out there so I’ll highly recommend you guys to check this out it’s not a mandatory plugin and i think i only recommend disqus for people who are actually driving good traffic to the website because they’ve actual engagement in the comment section if you just started out or much have that traffic then installing this comment system won’t help you guys much so if you’re driving good traffic then i’ll highly recommend you guys to check disqus it’s free version is more than enough you don’t have to buy the pro version or you the pricing, you don’t even check the pricing because the free version is enough for you.
Another next amazing plugin that I’ll highly recommend is the one signal push notification, you can install the plugin you can just go to the add new plugin session, here search for one signal and install the plugin for this you also have to create an account on onesignal here. what one signal does is it gives you push notification. you’ll see that so many times if you’re using OYO rooms or any other websites or Flipkart or amazon, you’ll see whenever you open the website there’s the pop up which says do you want to subscribe to the push notification, you can add the same functionality on your website as well. So you can see I’ll just search for Onesignal. You can see the Onesignal- web push notifications 100,000+ Active installations 4-star ratings above, so I’ve not activated on my website because right now we’re not driving much traffic to this particular website but on my other affiliate website, we’re using the Onesignal push notification. You can create an account here and also you don’t have to pay any money if you’re not crossing any line so you can use the free version if you’re not crossing the 30k subscriber mark. Yes there is the pro version and starter the pro version which offer more functionality so if you’re driving a good amount of traffic to your website then you can think of purchasing a pro or a starter plugin and then you can think of purchasing a pro or a starter membership and also push notification is an amazing way to keep your subscribers coming back to check your website so let ay if you publish a very high-quality post on your website then all you have to do is send a push notification to all the people who have opted in and they will be coming on to check your article and they will be than sharing your article and this will drive in again more traffic and then again you don’t have to pay money because it’s free right until 30k subscribers so I’ll highly recommend you guys to install the once one signal plugin as well it’s an amazing way to drive extra traffic to your website. It’s more building an email list and rather than I’ve seen that the interaction rate on push notification is really high.
Install WordPress Woo-Commerce Plugin For Ecommerce Activity on your website
A must-have plugin for and last but not the least is the woo-commerce, I think you might know about this plugin it’s the most popular plugin if you want to sell something on your website, if you want a shopping cart, if your want Flipkart like functionality if you want checkout pages if you want the payment processing all of that will be provided by WooCommerce, it’s a very very popular plugin you can see about 2800+ 5 star rating.