7 Best WordPress Plugins For Your Website

7 Best WordPress Plugins

There are thousands of plugins on the market that you can install in your WordPress site. Some are way more useful than others. How do you know which are the best WordPress plugins you should use for your site and which ones you should avoid? Well, everyone’s needs are different but you won’t go wrong by starting with the plugins on this list.

SEO by Yoast

This is the first plugin I would install if I were building out a new WordPress site. It’s one of the best WordPress plugins you can get on the market.

Search engine optimization is crucial to growing your site over time with organic traffic and SEO by Yoast makes this simple. You set your focus keyword and the plugin will tell you how effectively your post will target it. It will even give you tips to make your writing more readable.

Price: Free with premium options

Download: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

Pretty Link

URL’s can get pretty ugly sometimes, Pretty Link is a plugin that makes sharing links a breeze. Instead of a string of numbers and letters like this http://www.smoothbusinessgrowth.com/thisisareallylongurl234886abdpurplemonkeydishwasher, Pretty Link will make it into http://www.smoothbusinessgrowth.com/simple.

This makes it super easy to share your landing pages on a podcast, social media, or on a video. The easier it is to remember your links, the more likely people will come visit your site.

Price: Free

Download: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/pretty-link/

Jetpack by WordPress

Jetpack is another big one. Jetpack simplifies managing your WordPress site by giving you easy to understand stats, security services, and optimizing your images for speed. Jetpack is pretty much a swiss army knife for your website.

With over one million installs, Jetpack is probably one of the most popular plugins on the internet and for good reason.

Price: Free

Download: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/

WPForms

A contact page is an important component of your site. It’s how leads and potential customers will reach out to you.

WPForms is one of the best WordPress plugins for building beautiful contact forms in minutes instead of hours. Its drag and drop interface means you don’t need to be a coder to create compelling forms. It also comes with a variety of templates to get you started quickly.

Add in the fact that you can accept payments and integrate the plugin to your email responder and WPForms becomes a no brainer.

Price: $39/month for the basic package

Download: https://wpforms.com/

WP Smush

According to surveys conducted by Akamai and Gomez.com, most web users expect a website to load in under 2 seconds and tend to abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load. Making sure your website loads quickly should be a high priority. Even a tiny difference of a single second could be costing your business money.

WP Smush helps you keep your website light by “smushing” the images on your site and making them easier to download. Since images will probably have the biggest impact on your site’s load time, WP Smush is a good step in the right direction.

Price: Free with premium options

Download: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

WP Sweep

While we’re on the subject of load times, having a bunch of extra clutter on your WordPress site isn’t going to help very much. The longer you have your site, the more it will accumulate old drafts, meta tags, and duplicated data. Not only will this stuff hurt your search engine rankings, it can make your site load slower, and we already know how that can impact a business.

WP Sweep goes through your site and cleans up the clutter, kind of like a very thorough digital house keeper.

Price: Free

Download: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-sweep/

Revive Old Post (formerly known as Tweet Old Post)

Creating content is a primary strategy for driving traffic to your site. As bloggers we spend a lot of time writing blog posts, recording podcast episodes, and creating videos, but what happens after we hit that publish button? The posts inevitably wind up in the archives where they’re rarely seen again.

Revive Old Post does exactly what the name implies, it gives new life to your content by automatically sharing it every so often to your social media accounts. Once you have the plugin installed and set up, your Twitter and Facebook pages will be automatically updated with the content you spent so much time creating.

Price: Free with paid options

Download: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tweet-old-post/

There you have it. Seven of the best WordPress plugins for building and growing a new or existing website.

For help with your content marketing, implementation of your blogs, increasing blog traffic, and social media efforts – know that we at Smooth Sailing Online Support have your back! Give us a call at 484-284-0933 or go to www.ssonlinesupport.com.