WordPress is one of the most popular and flexible platforms to build websites. It is estimated that 35% of the web is built with WordPress which ranges from simple blogs to complex websites.
One of the most important things that makes it so powerful is its large collection of plugins. The WordPress repository contains thousands of plugins that help extend your website’s functionality to greater heights.
Although most of the plugins are for extending its default functionalities when scaling your website, some provide essential functionalities that are a must for running a website.
This article lists some of the must-have plugins for your WordPress website to ensure its proper functionality. Give a read, learn about them, and add them to your website.
Monster Insights WordPress Google Analytics Plugin
Monster Insights is one of the most popular Google Analytics plugins for WordPress with over 2 million active installations. It makes it easy for you to connect your website with Google Analytics. This plugin is an excellent way to learn about your website's performance and improve it further from the insights derived from it.
Key Features Of The Plugin
- Universal Tracking: It lets you set up universal website tracking across devices and campaigns with just a few clicks.
- Google Analytics Dashboard: It allows you to view your website analytics report right inside your WordPress dashboard.
- Real-time Stats: Avail real-time stats right inside your WordPress dashboard to see who is online, what they are doing, etc.
- Page-level Analytics: Get information on the detailed stats for each post and page so you can see the most popular posts, pages, and sections of your site.
- Affiliate Link & Ads Tracking: It allows you to automatically track clicks on your affiliate links, banner ads, and other outbound links with the link tracking feature of the plugin.
- Enables Custom Dimensions: Easily set up tracking for authors, categories, tags, searches, custom post types, users, and other events with just 1-click.
- Powerful eCommerce tracking: If you wish to scale your website to an eCommerce platform, you can make use of the eCommerce tracking feature of the plugin to analyze its performance.
- Additional Features: Enable Google optimize for A/B testing, adjust speed, and sample rate.
SeedProd
This coming soon page maintenance mode plugin for WordPress is a great option to provide your site visitors with a great experience on your website while your website is under maintenance mode. It is one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins that you can completely rely on for creating a professional coming soon page in minutes.
Key Features Of The Plugin
- Real-time Page Builder: Its powerful page builder with built-in design controls lets you build an amazing custom coming soon page in minutes.
- Pre-made Themes and Background Images: Choose from over 50+ pre-made themes or over 700,000+ background images from UnSplash.
- Easily Collect Emails: It lets you collect Emails with your favorite 3rd party email service providers like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, etc., or lets you save emails directly to the WordPress database.
- Restrict Access To Your Website: It allows you to password protect parts or your entire website, allows your clients with special access, limits access by roles or IP address, includes or excludes URLs that display the coming soon page, etc.
- Multi-lingual Support: Translate or change any text that appears in the Coming Soon Page to your native language.
Blog2Social
Blog2Social is a social media auto-posting and scheduling plugin for WordPress sites and blogs. It auto-posts, cross-promote, schedule, and automatically share your blog posts with multiple social networking platforms. This plugin is undoubtedly one of the important plugins that you must have on your WordPress website for improving its traffic.
Key Features Of The Plugin
- Social Media Sharing: It cross-shares on all the social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google My Business, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium, and more.
- Auto-Posting: It automatically shares your posts whenever you publish a new one.
- Customize Social Media Posts: You can easily customize the social media posts by editing your text message or adding individual comments, hashtags, and handles for each network.
- Time Scheduler: This feature automatically shares your social media posts at the right time on each social media network (different social media platforms are said to have different peak hours).
- Custom Scheduling Of Posts: You can use the custom scheduling feature to schedule, re-post, re-share, and re-schedule your social media posts and images at any time and to any network.
- Individual Images For Each Social Media Post: You can select any image you want for your social media posts and channels.
- Select The Post Format For Your Posts: It lets you choose custom post format for each of your social media posts and select individual images for your posts.
- Social Media Reporting: It offers an easy-to-use social media reporting dashboard where you can view all your published blog posts, scheduled and published social media posts, etc.
Yoast SEO Plugin
It’s a well-known fact that search engine optimization has a huge impact on your website’s performance. The better you optimize your website for search engines the greater the results. Yoast SEO plugin is the right tool to help you with that.
Key Features Of The Plugin
- SEO Analysis: This feature helps you optimize your site’s content for keywords, keyphrases, synonyms, related keywords, etc., by ensuring keyword density and distribution of keywords throughout the content.
- Readability Check: The plugin also checks your content for its readability and informs you of the required changes for improving its readability factor.
- Internal Linking Suggestions: With this feature, you will automatically receive all the internal linking suggestions, which saves you from having to remember all the posts on your website.
- Preview Of Your Page In Google: With this feature, you can see how your post or page looks in the search results, on mobile screens so you can make changes accordingly. Facebook and Twitter preview can also be enabled with this plugin.
- Full Control Over Your Breadcrumbs: Your breadcrumbs may get messy sometimes. Hence, this feature allows you to set a primary category for your post, and determine the taxonomy for every single page on your WordPress website.
- Set A Canonical Link To Avoid Duplicate Content: Your website can show the same content on various URLs which might cause a duplicate content issue. You can solve this issue by indicating one URL as the original one aka the Canonical link.
- Redirect Manager: With this feature, you can redirect your deleted page to a new page with relevant information, thus saving your visitors from getting stuck on a 404-page.
Tidio Livechat
Live chat is the most efficient way to connect with your visitors by answering their queries immediately. You can easily enable such a feature on your website by adding this live chat plugin. It is designed specifically for the WordPress community.
Key Features Of The Plugin
- Faster Communications: It allows you to communicate with your visitors via live chat, email, or messenger (all in one simple dashboard) in seconds.
- Chat Automation With Chatbots: You can make use of the AI-powered chatbots to react to your customers’ behavior and boost your sales.
- Customize The Chat Widget Look: Make the widget’s look resonate with the appearance of your website by customizing it.
- Keep In Touch With Your Clients 24/7: By using this plugin’s mobile app version you will be able to reply to your clients anytime and anywhere.
- Track Your Client’s Movement On Your Website: See how clients move through your website and interact before they even start typing. This will help you anticipate the probable questions and prepare their answers.
- Third-Party App Integration: You can enable easy integration with many third-party applications such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, Wix, Shopify, etc.
GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin
The GDPR Cookie consent plugin is one of the easiest ways to comply with the GDPR regulations. According to the GDPR law, you are required to deal with the cookies on your website as per the guidelines put forward by the law. The plugin makes it easy to deal with them.
Key Features Of The Plugin
- Automatic Cookie Scan: The feature allows you to scan your website for cookies and list all that present in it. You can use add this list to your cookie policy using a simple shortcode. This will inform your website visitors’ about the cookies used on your website.
- Automatic Script Blocking: As per the cookie law compliance, you need your visitor’s consent before enabling cookies on it. This feature will block all the cookies until the consent is given. The list of cookies blocked automatically by the plugin are Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar Analytics, Google Publisher Tag, Youtube And more.
- Display Of Customized Cookie Banner: You get to choose from multiple pre-designed templates and layouts to display cookie banner on your website. It is also possible for you to customize them as per your requirements.
- Easy Cookie Management: With automatic cookie scanning and identification, it becomes easy for you to categorize and list them accordingly.
- Granular Opt-in For Cookies: You can let your visitors enable or disable cookies based on the categories it belongs to.
- GeoIP Based Cookie Notice Exclusion: Since GDPR is only applicable to visitors from the EU, you can choose not to display the cookie notice to the non-EU citizens based on their GeoIP.
Smush - Image Optimization Tool
Images cover a large portion of your website’s content and their proper optimization is important to ensure your website’s speed. Smush is an awesome tool that can reduce the size of your images without compromising with its quality. In addition to image optimization, it also takes care of image resizing and lazyload.
Key Features Of The Smush Plugin
- Easy Image Compression: With its advanced compression algorithm it becomes easy for you to compress images without a drop in its quality.
- Bulk Image Optimization: You can optimize an unlimited number of images on your site with just a click.
- Enable Auto-Optimization: The plugin lets you enable the automatic optimization of images as you upload them to your website.
- Smush CDN: You can serve your images from 45 locations around the world to ensure faster loading time for your website.
- Backup Original Images: You can optionally store original images as a backup so you can quickly restore full quality images at any point in time.
- Automatic Resize & Scale: You can properly size images as per Google’s recommendation so that images fit within the container correctly.
- Enable Lazy Loading: It lets you can easily enable lazy loading on your website.
- Auto-Conversion Of PNG To JPG: Convert PNG to JPEG automatically if it results in smaller file sizes without a visible drop in the quality.
WPML
WPML is a plugin that makes it easy to create websites that are multi-language compatible. With WPML you can translate pages, posts, custom types, taxonomy, menus, and even the theme texts.
Key Features Of The WPML Plugin
- Great Compatibility: Every theme or plugin that uses WordPress API runs multilingual with WPML.
- Excellent Multi-Lingual SEO: It lets you fully optimize your website for multiple languages by allowing you full control over URLs and SEO meta information.
Conclusion
Plugins are integral to ensure the proper functionality of your WordPress website. All the above-listed plugins are a must for your website regardless of the niche it belongs to. If you think I missed any plugins that should be on the list, please let me know in the comment section below.More Related Articles:
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