10 Must Have Plug-Ins For Your Website

As good as WordPress and your theme may look and feel, you will need to add plug-ins to your website for additional functionality or look.

 

What Is A Plug-In?

A plug-in is a piece of software that can be added to a WordPress site that allows people who have no experience in coding to add features to their website.

There are thousands of plug-ins that are available to download – free and paid. Although, it is important to understand that most free plug-ins do not have support available with them.

You can find plug-ins on the WordPress site or there are a number of third-party developers and companies who produce plug-ins that you can purchase.

There are many different views on how many plugins that you should have on your website.

There are a large number of plugins can actually slow down the speed of your site (which can affect your Google rankings).

 

Must Have Plug-Ins For Your Website

 

1 – Akismet (Free)

This plugin reviews all comments on your site and filters out the ones that look like spam.

It gives you the ability to review the comment spam in the admin section of your website.

 

2 – VaultPress (Paid)

At some point in time, something on your site will go wrong.

VaultPress backs up everything on your WordPress site. It protects you against hackers, malware, accidental damages and server outages.

It has daily back-ups, spam protection, 1 click migration and priority support from developers.

 

3 – W3 Total Cache (Free)

W3 Total Cache improves SEO and user experience of your WordPress site through increasing your site’s performance.

This plugin can be a little difficult to navigate for beginners – here are some instructions on how to best set it up.

 

4 – Yoast SEO for WordPress (Free and Paid)

If you are new to the world of SEO and setting up a wbsite, this plug-in is an absolute must-have.

This plugin will help you to better optimise your content for the internet, helping you to focus on keywords, and all aspects of SEO.

Yoast SEO will help you set up all the technical stuff such as sitemaps, robots.txt and permalinks.

This things helps Google find your site more effectively.

 

5 – Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights (Free)

This plugin allows you to track your WordPress site and have access to the latest Google Analytics.

Google Analytics gives you access to information to find out the behaviour of your website visitors.

How they are finding you, and what they are looking at, on your site.

Once you know this information, you can make changes to what you are doing to keep them coming back.

 

More Plug-Ins For Your Website

 

6 – WooCommerce (Free)

WooCommerce is a free plugin that allows you to sell anything and gives you complete control.

If you are setting up a website that sells things (physical or digital), this plug-in integrates with WordPress.

It gives shop owners and developers control over the site.

WooCommerce powers over 30% of all online stores across the world.

 

7 – Wordfence (Free and Paid)

Wordfence is a free plugin you can use in your WordPress site to scan for hacked files and to monitor the access of visitors to your site.

It prevents your site from getting hacked and alerts you quickly in the event that this does happen.

Wordfence also provides you with live information about the traffic that is coming to your site.

 

My Favourite Plug-Ins

 

8 – Social Warfare (Free and Paid)

One of my favourite plug-ins as it looks good and also does not slow down your website like some other plug-ins do.

Social Warfare gives you the ability to include social media sharing buttons for some of the most commonly used platforms including FaceBook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon.

It also gives you the ability to use Click to Tweet, social proof and to display which posts are your most popular.

It is also a great tool to use to speed up the time you spend uploading and creating pins to Pinterest.

 

9 – WP Smush (Free)

WP Smush is a WordPress plugin that allows you to optimize images without losing quality.

This is a great tool as images have the ability to slow down the speed of your site – which is one of the key factors that Google looks at when ranking your site on the internet.

 

10 – Insert Headers and Footers

Another great plug-in for those who do not know how to code.

This plug-in will assist in inserting any code into your site without the need to play around with the code of the site.

It is a simple cut and paste and the plug-in will put the code where it needs to go.

So there is my top 10  must have plug-ins for your website.

Now What?

If you are looking for more assistance in setting up a website or a blog, check out my free eCourse Website Basics.

This eCourse will guide you through step-by-step how to set up a website or a blog quickly and have you up and running in no time.