If you’re reading this, chances are you just set up your WordPress site, or you’re a WordPress beginner, seeking to get things right. Either way, you’re in the right place. When you set up a WordPress site, you’ll most likely have a sparse page, and as such, not a lot to work with. But not to worry, plugins exist to help you get set up, and make the most of your new site. Today, we’ll be discussing some of the must-have plugins for your WordPress website.
To back up a bit, plugins refer to a type of software that extends functionality or adds specific features to other software. Doesn’t matter what your website is about, it is important that you ensure security, performance, backup, SEO, a communication channel, functionality among other things. But with over 50,000 plugins at your fingertips, offering you the same thing, how do you choose right? Come learn
Ever wondered why some pages rank first on google, and others don’t? Yes, even if they are about the same topics? Well, that’s because of good SEO. Yoast SEO is a wordpress plugin that was specifically designed to help WordPress websites attract traffic, and rank high in search engines.
We recommend Yoast SEO because of its intuitive design that can help even beginners get a headway. Not only does Yoast SEO flag bad SEO, it also gives recommendations on how to improve SEO, all in your dashboard before you hit the publish button.
Now, because variety is the spice of life, another SEO plugin that you may want to consider is Rank Math SEO. This has been gathering a lot of popularity in the WordPress community of late.
Over 60% of the web is hosted on the content management system, WordPress. While that sounds good, the side effect to that is that WordPress sites seem to be more prone to attacks from hackers. However, if you take appropriate precautions against them, you’ll be just fine.
To that effect, we recommend WordFence as a must have security plugin for your site or blog. You see, Wordfence can do a lot for your website security; from providing a firewall that protects against login break-ins and other general attacks, to scanning for malware, spams et al. Protecting both your website and your visitors, improving site credibility and performance.
Let us let you in on a little secret contrary to popular beliefs, with WordPress sites, there is no actual site. All you have is the illusion of a site. What actually happens is that every modification made, Or every content added is uploaded to and stored in a database. This way, when a visitor looks up a site, a page is made from the stored data on the fly.
But what happens if you lose the database? While you would hope not, facts remain that it could happen even to the best of us.
With WP Vivid Backup, not only can you back up manually, you can also automate and schedule back ups, restore data and even migrate data. How cool is that?
If you provide any service, or if you sell any item on your website, or even if all you do is share your thoughts with the world via blogging, you want to ensure that your site visitors can reach out to you. Communication is after all, a two way street. Unlike forms, or contact mails, the modern way to get this done is via live chat.
By installing a live chat plugin, you can have conversations in real time with your visitors, and foster faster conversions. There are a plethora of live chat plugins to choose from, some of which are free, paid monthly, or even a one off payment.
We recommend WP Social Chat, with a one time payment of $30, or Zendesk and Pure Chat which you’ll pay for, monthly.
Experts claim that a delay in page load time can lead to 8% in conversion and client retention. And, as a website owner or manager, you want to nip that in the bud, especially when you have a lot of visitors. Here is where caching comes in.
Recall that earlier, we said that WordPress sites do not have pages, just a database which creates a page illusion by generating them on the fly. With a caching plugin like WP Rocket, frequently used and requested data are stored as static pages, which is shown to the user. This way, you free up resources, save time and get an overall faster website.
