How to Find and Choose Great WordPress Plugins For Your Website
How can you discover and then choose great WordPress plugins that you may need for your business website? We explain this and more in this detailed guide.
Why WordPress
WordPress has a lot of advantages, from hosting to the simple fact that it is simply so easy to use, even if you don’t have a lot of technical knowledge. Over 28 million people use WordPress, with over 6.5 million websites using the platform in one way or another, according to the CMS eCommerce website.
WordPress has an unbeatable way of making a website easy to make, from the initial design to any of the regular updates. By far, the best feature of WordPress is the seamless way in which it integrates with other websites or third party platforms.
The one downside of WordPress, however, is that it is really easy to make it very hard to do anything without first ensuring you have been to the right tutorials and resources.
What are WordPress plugins?
Plugin means one of the types of software that can be installed on WordPress. Most plugins can do anything that you may need a WordPress plugin for. They come with support, allow users to access their website without internet or also allow them to make other websites without internet available for them.
They can also help you solve your problems faster. So, in this article we will be talking about the best WordPress plugins that can help you improve your site in the best way. Download WordPress Plugins This is a lot of companies providing free and paid WordPress plugins.
WordPress is a powerful web content management system that allows anyone to create a unique website and edit the content easily, allowing you to post anything, with the platform using some powerful web design tools.
WordPress Plugins function similar to widgets. With WordPress plugins you can add simple and useful features to your website. WordPress plugins can be placed anywhere on your website, such as the footer of a website. With that said, some WordPress plugins are free and some are commercial, but we have a guide that can help you select the right WordPress plugin for your website, here.
Before you begin, you will need to go to your WordPress Dashboard, if you have not already done so, and navigate to Plugins -> Manage Plugins.
Why you need WordPress plugins
WordPress is a flexible and powerful blogging platform which enables you to easily create a variety of exciting websites and blogs, some of which are used as online ecommerce stores, B2B services and much more.
However, you may still need the help of a handy plugin that helps you to enhance the website and make it look like a professional site.
Choosing a great WordPress Plugin
In order to use a particular plugin, you must first choose which plugins to install. The Plugins category is one of the most popular categories on the plugins page. Within this section you will find a multitude of plugins available to you.
These plugins are required for their site to function as it should.
These plugins should not have any vulnerability which could allow an attacker to steal money from them. We are of the opinion that in-house plugins should not be installed in order to prevent potential attack vectors or vulnerabilities.
How to install a WordPress plugin
You can install plugins by either clicking the “Plugins” box on your admin page, or by searching the “Available Plugins” section on the main site page. Alternatively, you can search through a search engine to find a plugin that’s good for you.
Step 1: Visit the plugin’s download page. Click on the Download button on the page, and download the zip file to your computer.
Step 2: Unzip the .zip file. You’ll see 3 folders, main, stylesheets, and scripts, and 3 sub folders, stylesheet, scripts, and flash.
The best WordPress plugins for your site
Search engines love things that are consistent, well organised and responsive. They also tend to get the most updates, and we love being able to install plugins without having to think too hard about anything. In this article, we’ll explain some of the best plugins that you may need for your WordPress site.
We share with you our favourite WordPress plugins and explain why we feel you need them for your blog or website.
There are thousands of plugins out there that we could never include on our list as we simply couldn’t list them all. So here are the five essential plugins that are installed on the majority of websites.
Akismet
A lot of websites get punished by hackers and spammers, without even knowing it. And a lot of these servers end up in a hell of a mess, with crashes, blank pages, empty links, inappropriate or gross comments on your posts or page content, and all sorts of other problems.
Hackers, spammers and other abusers like to stay anonymous, and these tools can help you detect them from far off. This is especially true if you are relying on a live chat system. Akismet is free, secure and effective.
It scans for suspected attacks by comparing your comment to a database of suspicious content. If it finds a match, it will block the comment. Akismet is smart, and will adjust its level of blocking depending on the content and the author of the comment.
All In One SEO Pack
All In One SEO Pack is a tool that helps you discover and learn all SEO-related tactics that will help you rank higher in search engines such as Google. All In One SEO Pack allows you to set up new SEO tactics, learn the other tactics you have installed and customise SEO campaigns based on your specific requirements.
All In One SEO Pack is an extremely useful tool for any site owner that wants to optimise their site’s SEO. You can find out more about the tool by visiting their website.
Google Analytics
If you are planning to monetise your site or want to know how traffic to your site is generated, then I recommend to use Google Analytics. This free dashboard has great tools to understand the website visitors and the behaviour.
By using this dashboard, you will know where your website visitors are coming from and what product they like or how many likes you are getting for each of your social media posts. If you want to know how visitors are reading your post, go to the “Audience” tab and press the “Create Segments” button.
Once you have done so, click on the “View Trending” section on the right side of your screen. Once you have analysed the segment data, you will get to know what the segment did and how well they responded to your content.
Interlinks Manager
We use Interlinks Manager on a number of websites, and for less than $40, this professional plugin is a steal. It allows you to set up links from keywords throughout your WordPress site or blog from one page or post to another, all automatically.
It literally boosts your SEO in no time at all, and you update it as and when you need to.
Jetpack
Jetpack is an essential WordPress plugin. It’s one of the biggest ones and it’s known for being great and for having a massive list of plug-ins. Get to know it by now and it’s getting bigger because Jetpack has been gaining users fast, which in return means they need more content in order to attract visitors and actually show off their best stuff.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO is one of the popular and well-loved WordPress plugins. It helps improve your website search engine ranking through useful tools such as Yoast Analytics. This plugin also has a free version which works well for most websites with 1,000+ visitors a month.
According to Google, Yoast SEO has over 6.8 million visitors, whereas it generates over 1 million monthly searches. The free version allows 5,000 monthly searches, where the paid version supports up to 5,000 daily searches.
This plugin has been downloaded millions of times. Yoast SEO has well over 1,300,000 active installs.
More WordPress Plugins
There are so many WordPress plugins out there, it’s hard to name them all. You can look in the Envato Marketplace for some fantastic plugins.
Conclusion
Depending on what you want from your WordPress site, you will need a particular set of plugins. Be realistic about what you expect your site to do, and choose a plugin that matches your goals. You need to consider what type of plugins your users will want to use too.
As you can see, it’s actually really simple to install a plugin on your WordPress site or blog, as long as you know what you’re doing and you’re a fast reader.
If you follow these above steps, you’ll have discovered and chosen some great WordPress plugins in no time! We hope that this article has helped you.
