Why WordPress Plugins are confusing
WordPress plugins really are a great addition to the WordPress development process! With over 55,000 plugins to choose from there is a plugin for just about anything!
However, if you are a beginner it’s quite easy to become overwhelmed with all the choice and wonder which are the right plugins for you to use and why they are needed.
We decided to make an easy to read infographic that explains the top 6 WordPress plugins we recommend that you install on your website and why they are important!
Top 6 WordPress Plugins infographic
Feel free to embed this image your website or use it elsewhere!
The Top 6 WordPress Plugins explained!
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is essential when it comes to your WordPress website. It offers help and guidance in a simple to read format on how to optimise your site to rank well on search engines.
Yoast updates in real time so as you are typing, Yoast is updating and checking what you type to give you advice on how it could be improved and what search engines are looking for. For example it adds an easy way to add in Meta Titles and descriptions, it also monitors the number of times you mention keywords, text length and recommended text improvements.
The plugin also creates a number of things for your website which search engines will look for. This includes: social imagery, site maps, breadcrumbs, keywords, schema and more.
It really is great when it comes helping your site to get ranked by search engines, with alot of the boring work being done for you, a must have for any website and thats why its our number one.
You can download Yoast SEO here.
2. Woocommerce
Once your site has been created and you are at the point where all your content is in place (if you aren’t there yet please check out our guide!), you may be wanting to make your website into an e-commerce store! Woocommerce makes this super easy.
When installing Woocommerce onto your WordPress website it is literally a case of following the setup process and you are ready to start selling. Woocommerce will create a checkout, basket, confirmation pages, shop and product pages automatically with very little input required from you.
What’s more, Woocommerce is integrated with hundreds of major payment gateways such as Stripe, Paypal, Amazon Pay and many more, meaning you can offer as many payment methods as you want!
You can download Woocommerce here!
3. Akismet Bot Protection
As your website gets bigger and it becomes easier for users to find your website, bots will understandably find your website as well, we need to prevent them from sending you annoying spam!
Akismet does exactly that, its been around years and has advanced features to detect what traffic is bot traffic and what is a real human being. It will also stop bots being able to submit your contact form with pointless emails about how they can help transform your website!
You can download Akismet here!
4. Wordfence
Again, as your site gets bigger and more well known malicious users will start to find the website. If your site is an e-commerce website as well, this will make it more of a target. Wordfence helps to combat this, it adds in protection for well known exploits in WordPress and will automatically start monitoring traffic and attacks.
Wordfence automatically adds security features such as limiting account login attempts, firewalls, 2 factor authentication and blocking known malicious ip addresses. You can even go as far as blocking entire countries from accessing your website. A must have for any WordPress website.
You can download Wordfence here!
5. Caching
The next WordPress plugin we would recommend you have on your website is a caching plugin. There are a number of caching plugins out there that all do, just about, the same thing.
Their main purpose is to save a copy of your website that can be instantly displayed to your users when they load the website. This prevents users from having to download all of your images, styles and javascript everytime they load the website.
With search engines putting more and more emphasis on site speed and usability, adding a caching plugin can increase your site speed massively which all has an impact on where your site ranks.
You can find caching plugins here!
6. Redirection
Last but not least, Redirection! Redirection is a plugin that makes it really easy to add htaccess redirects into your website without the risks associated with a htaccess edit or the knowledge needed to do it.
It creates a simple interface where users can simply add the url they are redirecting from and add the url where they want it to go instead and press update, simple!
It’s good practice to add a redirect everytime you update a page’s link or if you are deleting legacy content. Simply add a redirect to the new link or the homepage rather than letting the page go to a 404 page.
404 pages can have a negative impact from a search engines point of view as it indicates the site might not be being maintained anymore. If users are clicking to your site from an external site and go to a 404 page that is also valuable lost traffic that could have been a sale!
