WordPress is perhaps the most popular platform for building blogs as well as professional Websites. It currently powers over 24% of the Web. Plugins (pieces of compatible software) help you get the best from the basic features of your blog, & to extend its functionality beyond just the basic. There are several WordPress plugins available for downloads, free or paid premium.
Here are some well-known WordPress plugins that are essential for improving your websites & blogs.
It is hard to get far with blogging without Search Engine Optimization. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins on WordPress. It is trusted by many WP Site owners looking for ways to make their Sites more SEO friendly & more compliant with the search algorithm of Google & other search engines.
Yoast SEO has different features targeted at making your blogs more effective & search engine friendly. It can analyze your posts for readability, scan for synonyms & keywords & optimize your Site images all in a bid to increase how your site is ranked by search engines. Yoast SEO is available as a free version. There is also a paid version with additional functionality.
Powered by Automattic, the team behind WP, Askimet is another well-known WordPress plugin that makes life easy for bloggers & Website owners. The fact that this plugin is targeted at one of the most annoying problems people face Online makes it one of the most important tools you most likely would want to have on your Site.
Askimet is an anti-spam plugin. What it does essentially is to check all the comments on your posts & flag those that seems spammy making it easier to remove them. It helps you identify spammy comments & helps moderators edit or delete them. Akismet is available for free for non-commercial sites & blogs while commercial sites will have to subscribe to a premium plan to use.
This is another plugin from Automattic. Originally meant for WordPress.com, it’s now even popular on WP.org. Just as its names implies, Jetpack is a pack of several features meant to boost your Site’s performance on many fronts. It comes with some packages for a generally more effective & functional site. It enhances your Website’s performance, improves security & prevents attacks. Jetpack also boosts your Website’s appearance as well.
Jetpack plugins helps to create sitemaps of your Website making it easier for your it to be indexed by search engines. It has features that make it easier to publish your site Content on other third party services thus increasing your reach. To ensure that your site is kept at optimum performance at all times, Jetpack checks it for downtime & gives you instant notification on event of any failure.
One of the most important pages on a Website is the ‘Contact Us’ page. This page allows users of your Site to send their queries & questions to you easily. Everest form is a free plugin that makes it possible to add forms to your website using simple drag & drop functions. This plugin makes it possible to add a simple contact form but also provides advanced features such as radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdown menus, date & so on.
With Everest, you can create unlimited contact forms free of charge with multiple layouts & designs to explore. Forms created with Everest are fully responsive & will work on all types of devices. It also supports Google reCaptcha, translation features & so much more for adding beautifully laid out & interactive forms for your users.
Social media is one of the essential tools for publicizing a blog. Thus a plugin like this is necessary for extending your reach to a broader audience. It provides a way to share Content from your site directly to up to 18 social media platforms with a single button. This feature is responsive & works on all types & size of devices.
With the Easy Social Sharing plugin, you can add a share button to the bottom, top or on both ends of every post. There is also a feature which helps you to monitor the number of social media shares for your post, & it is also possible to see a preview of how the shared posts will look like at the WordPress backend.
Conclusion
These are some of the well-known WordPress plugins but there are thousands of WordPress plugins you can take advantage of to improve your Site’s performance. There is pretty much a plugin for every purpose. Some of them are available for free, some offer both free & premium features, while some plugins are entirely premium & you have to pay a token to use them.
- “Tokkingheads” uses AI to animate photos – Startups - 2023-06-05
- Branding made easy with “Simplified” – Startups - 2021-06-08
- Send across video proposals instead of text ones – Startups - 2021-06-04
