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What Are The Best WordPress Plugins To Install?

Sezmi

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You’re proud to have chosen WordPress as your website platform. Now what?

WordPress plugins are what make it so powerful.

Plugins are an essential feature of WordPress. Plugins can be used to add almost any functionality, from eCommerce to social networking to dancing unicorns. What are the most important WordPress plugins?

There is a balance. WordPress comes with tons and tons of functionality already in the box, since WordPress core includes the most requested and popular features.

As a rule of thumb, WordPress plugins should be kept to a minimum.

Plugins can cause overhead and slow down performance. WordPress hosting providers have banned some WordPress plugins.

Many plugins aren’t well coded, so it is important to choose the right plugins.

What WordPress plugins should I install? These are the top 11 WordPress plugins you should have.

1. Backups
2. Security
3. SEO
4. Analytics
5. Website Speed
6. Social Media
7. URL Management
8. Webforms
9. Shortener
10. Email Optins
11. Compress images

I use these plugins every day and highly recommend them.

Backups

Sezmi’s Take

Security and backups are essential to maintaining your WordPress blog. Your web hosting provider should not be relied upon to create backups of your website. You must be in complete control of your site and ensure that you have off-server backups. BlogVault is a simple-to-use backup service and security monitoring tool for malware.

8.5 Out Of 10

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You can never have enough backups of your website. Consider all the hours you spent creating your website, including the writing, theme customizations and the installation of plugins.

It could be that hackers delete all of your files or that your web hosting disk drives crash, and you lose everything. It happened more times than you might believe in my 20 years of hosting.

This doesn’t cover problems with WordPress caused by your own mistakes. My website has crashed many times after I installed a new WordPress theme or plugin. It’s possible that your website has been completely corrupted without a backup.

Backups are important, even if the web host offers them. Nobody cares more than you about your data.

BlogVault plugin is my choice as they back up every night. It’s easy to restore if I need it. It saved me many times from problems with my blog.

BlogVault is much more than a backup service. They include:

• Builtin Stage – Don’t break your site by installing any new theme or plugin.
• Offsite Storage Upload to Dropbox to create multiple backups.
• Backups Archive– Available for backups up to 90-365 days (depending on the plan).
• Automatic Backups – You don’t need to recall if you did a backup. You can also make on-demand backups.
• One-Click Website Repair – Your website will be back online in no time
• Malware Scanning– Find out if hackers have altered your WordPress software
• Update software – Receive notifications about updates to WordPress, plugins, and your theme.

Security

Sezmi’s Take

Since 2015, this is my number one WordPress and website service. It has helped me protect my business. It provides protection against malware, DDoS attacks, DNS, SSL, and hacking. This has helped me avoid intrusions. Sucuri was prompt to respond to my request for malware removal. Their only problem is the price, but it could be worth it in one attack.

9.5 Out Of 10

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BuiltWith reports that WordPress is used by 42% of all websites.

Hackers have a lot to gain from the increasing popularity of hackers.

Most importantly, WordPress and any plugins that you use should be kept up-to-date to ensure your site is secure. Most people don’t update their WordPress. Bloggers are often busy with other tasks and don’t check their WordPress daily for updates.

A compromised blog can look terrible in front of your visitors. In many cases, hackers don’t even know that your website has been hacked. Hackers can then gather information about you and your visitors. Emails, names, and even credit cards can all be used to gather personal information.

Hackers can place code on your site which could cause Google to deindex your blog. Literally, your search traffic could drop to zero overnight.

It can take hours or even days to clean up the mess left by hackers.

Hackers have the ability to install backdoors on WordPress and make changes that allow them to come back.

The best way to stop hacking is to do it right away.

Here is where the Sucuri plugin comes in.

Sucuri monitors your blog for any possible changes to the website code. They ensure that your website is protected from the top. They offer:

• Security scans
• Malware Detection
• DNS Monitoring
• SSL Monitoring
• Web Application Firewall
• Intrusion Detection System
• DDoS Attacks
• Backups

They will also clean up your site if it is hacked.

Sucuri pricing starts from $199 per annum Although it may seem expensive, I assure you that it will cost you much less to remove a hack in the future.

Since 2015, it’s been my favorite WordPress security plugin.

SEO

Sezmi’s Take

SEOPress, a competing WordPress plugin to Yoast SEO is lighter and offers more functionality. SEOPress Pro is the best version. It includes structured data types, breadcrumbs and Google Page Speed. You can also rewrite URLs.

9.0 Out Of 10

Around 80% of website traffic comes from organic search. You are missing a large audience if you don’t optimize your blog for search.

WordPress is an SEO-friendly content management system. However, there are many areas for customization and improvement.

This is why the SEOPress SEO plugin is so important. This plugin is the exact same one that’s installed on this blog.

This plugin does more than just fix meta descriptions and title tags. It also fixes a lot of technical SEO problems and integrates cutting-edge SEO features directly into WordPress.

SEOPress offers two versions: a free and a pro version. The Pro version has this added functionality, which I recommend.

• Google Structured data Types – Helps Google understand your content using JSON schema markup.
• Redirection Management – Stop 404 errors from occurring and prevent site structure changes from negatively impacting SEO.
• Breadcrumbs Give Google hints about where your content is located on the site to improve user experience.
• and Much More.

It is much better than Yoast SEO plugin. SEOPress has no bloat features or other unnecessary features.

Analytics

Sezmi’s Take

You can get Google Analytics set up without worrying about Javascript tags being correctly configured or not accurately tracking all events on your blog. MonsterInsights makes it easy to set up Google Analytics.

9.0 Out Of 10

It is impossible to improve what you don’t measure.

Google Analytics is the answer. Google Analytics, a free analytics package for enterprises, is available to any website.

Without a plugin , you can implement the Google Analytics code. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin is important for several reasons.

• It is easy to set up Google Analytics.
• It unlocks many features that Google Analytics cannot be set up consistently without a plugin, such as event tracking on linked pages.
• This makes it easy to implement the latest version of Analytics

This WordPress plugin, while simple to set up, does so much more than just telling you what’s happening. It is a must-have for any blog I create.

Website speed

Sezmi’s Take

Page load speed is critical for SEO and users. This plugin will speed up your website’s loading time by compressing your files and using a CDN. WP Rocket is my favorite WordPress plugin to speed up your blog.

9.5 Out Of 10

WordPress is very fast right out of the box. WordPress is very fast once you add images, plugins and themes to your website.

Google uses website speed to rank sites in organic searches.

Slow sites can hurt your Google rankings. Your blog should load as quickly as possible.

WP Rocket is a popular WordPress caching plugin.

Social Media

Sezmi’s Take

This plugin creates buttons for social media sharing on WordPress blogs. This plugin is essential for creating social media links on your site. This plugin creates social proof and counters for popular social media platforms.

9.0 Out Of 10

WordPress’ creator used to call the share buttons “mullets” of the Internet, but they are now essential for traffic and visibility. The functionality is not included in WordPress. Social Warfare allows website visitors to share your content.

Although it is possible to manually install share buttons without a plugin it can be tedious and easy to break when networks change code. It doesn’t allow for you to concentrate on the things that are important.

URL Management

Redirection is an easy, yet powerful plugin that redirects URLs to another URL.

This is important because links to and within your site can change over time. Users and search engines will see a page called 404 Not Found. This is not fun.

Redirection allows you to take an old URL and 301 redirect it permanently to another URL. This helps to preserve user experience as well as search engine signals.

Read More About Redirection

Redirection is not necessary if you use SEOPress Pro or Yoast Pro as an SEO plugin. It includes a redirection management manager.

I use SEOPress Pro, which requires only one plugin.

Webforms

Sezmi’s Take

This versatile WordPress plugin allows you to create webforms. It allows you to collect personal information and integrate with various email marketing services. It’s better than the bloated Gravity forms.

8.5 Out Of 10

WPForms is the best WordPress plugin to create contact forms or collect email.

This plugin allows you to create a “Contact Us” web form, as well as a shopping cart and surveys. This plugin will hide your email address from hackers.

Link Shortener

Sezmi’s Take

Pretty Links Pro is an affordable WordPress plugin that tracks links. This plugin is ideal for affiliate marketers just starting out. It can be used for as low as $79 per annum.

7.5 Out Of 10

The Pretty Links plugin is essential if you plan to use affiliate links. This plugin lets you manage all your affiliate links. It makes it easier to swap out links and makes them look better.

These can be used not only for affiliate links, but also for shareable links that are easier to remember and could be used in social media posts.

Email Optins

Sezmi’s Take

OptinMonster is a great choice if you’re looking for a service that works with WordPress and SaaS apps. There are many templates available and you can easily make your customized forms to match your brand. OptinMonster supports six different campaign types. These can be used with your products as well as for email forms.

OptinMonster Review

9.5 Out Of 10

Pop-ups and interrupted user experience are not my favorite things. But I love email segmentation and email. OptinMonster, which is lead collection and call to action software, was created by the same people who made Google Analytics for WordPress.

Although it’s not a WordPress plugin, the plugin adds even more power to the software. It’s used on my site and on many clients’ sites of clients. It is as elegant as you like and well worth the price compared to other options due to its versatility, scalability and ease-of-use.

Compress Images

Sezmi’s Take

ShortPixel can preserve similar quality images to your photos, but only take up a fraction of the disk space. This not only speeds up the loading of your pages, but also helps with SEO. ShortPixel is my favorite image optimization tool. They provide both lossy compression and lossless compression options.

9.5 Out Of 10

Images can be great, but they can slow down your website. When someone visits a website, they must request and download the images. Your images will look better the smaller they can be.

ShortPixel speeds up the loading time of WP Rocket, just like WP Rocket. It reduces the size of your images without affecting the quality.