The incredible world of WordPress plugins

WordPress plugins are very important for the WordPress community. There are a lot of plugins available in the market and picking the right one is very tricky. The reason for their popularity? they usefulness. Plugins add the extra functionality that can make all the difference when it comes to creating a great website. In addition to this, the WordPress community is getting flooded with plugins, and sometimes you can also find a lot of spammy and low-quality plugins. In this article, we will take a look at different WordPress plugins to understand their functions and let you know all the WordPress plugins you need to have to make your website unique.giphy

When you decide to create a website, unless you hire a professional web developer, the easiest way to create one on your own is through WordPress.
WordPress is an amazing content management system, installed by millions of websites, it is the best way to create any kind of site starting from small-scale personal blogs to large-scale business portals.

But in order to create an amazing website, you need to install different plugins that will help you add features that would otherwise be impossible to include.
(For example, if you need to add a contact form to send newsletters or collect personal data of your users you need a specific plugin while if you want to get detailed analytics of your website and understand the behavior of your audience at that point you will need another plugin.

That’s why you need to understand, before starting to create a website which plugins are essential, which one can help you insert fancy features, and which one is better not to install.

Here is a list of the 10 best WordPress plugins that can help you add almost every feature to your website:

WordPress plugins

  1. Site kit by Google: (Best WordPress Google Analytics plugin)
  2. WPForms Lite: (Best Drag & Drop Form Builder)
  3. All in One SEO: (Best WordPress SEO Plugin)
  4. WooCommerce: (Best Plugin for eCommerce Sites)
  5. Smush: (Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugin)
  6. Envira Gallery: (Best Image Gallery)
  7. Easy Google Fonts: (Best WordPress Google Fonts Plugin)
  8. Really Simple SSL: (Best SSL Tool)
  9. WP-Optimize: (Best WordPress Database Cleanup Plugin)
  10. CF Power Tools: (Best video hosting plugin)

1# SITE KIT BY GOOGLE:

Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the top solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free.

Site Kit shows key metrics and insights from different Google products:

  • Search Console: Understand how Google Search discovers and displays your pages in Google Search. Track how many people saw your site in search results, and what query they used to search for your site.
  • Analytics: Explore how users navigate your site and track goals you’ve set up for your users to complete.
  • AdSense: Keep track of how much your site is earning you.
  • PageSpeed Insights: See how your pages perform compared to other real-world sites. Improve performance with actionable tips from PageSpeed Insights.
  • Tag Manager: Use Site Kit to easily set up Tag Manager- no code editing required. Then, manage your tags in Tag Manager.
  • Optimize: Use Site Kit to easily set up Optimize- no code editing required. Then, set up A/B tests in Optimize.

2# WPFORMS LITE:

WPForms allows you to create beautiful contact forms, feedback forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site in minutes.

Some of the best features you can get using this plugin are:

  • Visual Builder: It comes with a drag and drops WordPress form builder so you can easily create contact forms for your website.
  • Pre-built Templates: A library of WordPress form templates comes complete with the form fields you need, so you can customize your form as you see fit.
  • Mobile-friendly: It’s 100% responsive, mobile-friendly, and is optimized for SEO.
  • Speed: It’s one of the fastest contact form plugins around so you don’t have to worry about it slowing your website down.
  • Email Marketing Integration: With WPForms, you can grow your newsletter and email list quickly with the most popular email marketing services around.
  • Amazing Pro Features : Collect payments, conduct surveys, hire for a new position with a job application form, and even enable smart conditional logic.

3# ALL IN ONE SEO:

All in One SEO for WordPress is the original WordPress SEO plugin that started in 2007. Over 3 million smart website owners use AIOSEO (All In One SEO) to properly set up WordPress SEO, so their websites can rank higher in search engines. They took the pain out of optimizing WordPress SEO and made it easy. Here’s why smart business owners, SEO experts, marketers, and developers love AIOSEO.

Best features of AIOSEO:

  • Automatic Meta Tags: Automatically generate meta tags, then write your own meta titles and meta descriptions when you want to.
  • Additional Keyphrases: Discover and rank for additional key phrases in a single click with AIOSEO’s Semrush integration.
  • WooCommerce SEO: Optimize product listings and category pages with full SEO integration for your eCommerce store.
  • Schema.org Markup: Easily optimize different post types with the correct schema markup, which helps search engines understand the contents of your pages.
  • Smart XML Sitemaps: With AIOSEO, your sitemaps are always up to date. The plugin even notifies Google and Bing when you make changes.

4# WOOCOMMERCE:

WooCommerce is the world’s most popular open-source eCommerce solution. It is free, flexible, and amplified by a global community. The freedom of open-source means you retain full ownership of your store’s content and data forever. In addition, whether you’re launching a business, an online store, or developing sites for customers, using WooCommerce is the best solution for a store that powerfully blends content and commerce.

Why use WooCommerce:

  • WordPress Integration: This online shop creator gives you complete control over the design and functionality of your online store on WordPress.org.
  • Flexibility: Sell anything you want, complete with varying shapes, sizes, product variations, and configurations. And offer a wide range of shipping options such as free shipping or shipping that’s calculated in real-time.
  • Payment Options: Accept major credit cards, BACs, and cash on delivery, so people can make their purchases how they want.
  • It’s All Yours: You own all of it so you never have to worry about a 3rd-party platform packing up and taking your store’s data with them.
  • Grow Sales: Use live sales notifications for WooCommerce to skyrocket your income online

5# SMUSH:

Smush has been benchmarked and tested number one for speed and quality. It is also the award-winning, back-to-back proven crowd favorite image optimization & image compression plugin for WordPress.

A lot of image compression tools destroy images with as much as a 30% loss in quality. with Smush strip hide bulky information from your images and reduce file size without affecting the appearance.

In addition, they will provide to you:

  • WordPress Integration: This online shop creator gives you complete control over the design and functionality of your online store on WordPress.org.
  • Flexibility: Sell anything you want, complete with varying shapes, sizes, product variations, and configurations. And offer a wide range of shipping options such as free shipping or shipping that’s calculated in real-time.
  • Payment Options: Accept major credit cards, BACs, and cash on delivery, so people can make their purchases how they want.
  • It’s All Yours: You own all of it so you never have to worry about a 3rd-party platform packing up and taking your store’s data with them.
  • Grow Sales: Use live sales notifications for WooCommerce to skyrocket your income online.

6# ENVIRA GALLERY:

Envira Gallery is a drag & drop photo gallery plugin. It’s an easy, fast, and powerful tool highly optimized for web and server performance.

The best part of using Envira Gallery:

  • Easy to Use: Create responsive photo and video galleries with ease using the drag and drop photo gallery builder that lets you upload your images, rearrange them how you want, and publish them to your site within minutes.
  • Advanced Tools: You can use Envira Gallery Pro for even more awesome features.
  • Integrations with eCommerce: Sell on the popular WooCommerce platform as a way to make more money online.
  • Lightning-fast: Optimized for speed and SEO.
  • Mobile-friendly: Works great on mobile devices so all site visitors can view your images perfectly.
  • Social Media Integrations: Share photos using the social sharing integrations.

7# EASY GOOGLE FONTS:

A simple and easy way to add custom google fonts to any WordPress theme without coding. This plugin integrates with the WordPress Customizer so you can preview google fonts on your site in real-time. In addition, it’s compatible with any theme. It also allows you to create custom theme specific font controls in the admin settings area to control particular CSS selectors. Once created, these custom font controls are instantly available in the customizer without any coding required.

Some of the features on Easy google fonts:

  • Easy to Use: This free plugin integrates with your WordPress Customizer, so accessing the 600+ fonts is easy to do.
  • Preview Changes: See your font changes in real-time.
  • Use Stylesheets: Create your own font controls and rules and automatically pull in stylesheets, all without any coding or editing of the main stylesheet.  So when your theme updates, you don’t lose your custom work.

8# REALLY SIMPLE SSL:

Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over HTTPS. To keep it lightweight, we kept the options to a minimum. Your website will move to SSL with one click.

Features:

  • Automatic Redirection: This 1-click solution redirects and updates all old URLs to reflect the change to a secure site.
  • Easy to Use: Handles everything that comes with migrating your site to HTTPS.
  • Won’t Slow You Down: It’s a super lightweight plugin.
  • It’s completely Free.

9# WP OPTIMIZE:

WP-Optimize Cache is a revolutionary, all-in-one WordPress performance plugin that caches your site, cleans your database, compresses your images. The easy-to-use WP-Optimize helps optimize your WordPress website for speed and performance by cleaning up the “insides” of your website.

Some of its features:

  • Total Site Cleanup: Get rid of spam comments, pingbacks/trackbacks, and any other stale data that’s sitting around.
  • Flexible Control: Schedule automatic clean-ups, control which optimizations you run, and even trigger an automatic site backup if you use the UpdraftPlus backup solution.
  • Responsive: This free plugin is 100% mobile-friendly.
  • Multilingual: Can be translated into several languages.

10# CF Power Tools:

CF Power Tools is the best solution to upload and protect your videos on your website, it is also the complete solution to integrate Cloudflare Stream and WordPress.

In just a few clicks, you’ll be able to install and protect your videos by preventing them from downloading while still allowing streaming. You’ll also get detailed analytics right within WordPress and other important features such as:

  • Prevent download: Prevent download of your video by signing their URLs and domain whitelist you want to stream from. Everything is done behind the scenes in a few clicks and is completely under your control.
  • Easy Video Import: Easily import all of your videos from Cloudflare in bulk or one by one. You can also upload a video from a public URL ( ie. YouTube) and let CF Power Tools do the work for you. You’ll get all of those videos in Cloudflare and within WordPress.
  • Manage all your video: Manage all of your videos from within WordPress. Easily copy-paste your shortcode from within the interface, and see all the video’s details in one single click.
  • Shortcodes: Fully compatible with WPBackery, Elementor, Gutenberg, and any WP theme by simply copy-pasting the generated video shortcode in any of your posts or pages. Compatible with standard Cloudflare parameters ( loop, poster image, autoplay, mute, etc…).
  • Analytics: See video analytics directly from within WordPress- number of views, duration, average view time, average view %, etc. Search and filter them by date. Fetch the previous days, weeks, or months stats and export everything to CSV in one click.
  • Updates & Support: CF Power Tools is regularly maintained and updated. They continually improve it.

CONCLUSION

WordPress plugins can really make the difference between a poorly structured website and a super functional and visually appealing one, you just have to understand which plugins to download and how to use them to make your site look better.

We hope this list could have been helpful for you to know new WordPress plugins.

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