The availability of thousands of plugins is one of the features that makes WordPress such an inviting content management system for anyone creating a blog or any other type of website. Plugins extend the functionality of this already powerful and intuitive platform.
The following plugins are a few that you may not have considered for your website, but they might prove critical in improving your website’s visibility, user experience, data collection capability and other factors.
Sucuri
So many of us take the time to download anti-virus and anti-spyware software for our computer but fail to realize that we should also secure our website. Sucuri is a handy little plugin that prevents malware or other attacks on your website. It works by driving all incoming web traffic through their server where any malicious requests are filtered out.
This method of protecting your website has the effect of improving your website’s performance. In addition to this type of protection, Sucuri has a built-in anti-virus program that checks your website every 4 hours to ensure it’s devoid of malware or other similar problems.
Show Plugin Menu Items on Activation
This WordPress plugin may seem unimportant upon first examination, but it will probably save you plenty of time if you install and use many plugins. It’s basically a plugin that makes other plugins easier to use.
If you’ve had the experience of installing a plugin and then having to hunt around for the new menu items that enable you to access its functionality, then Show Plugin Menu Items on Activation is for you.
It does just that by incorporating pointers next to the new menu items that have to do with the plugin you just installed, so you’re quickly able to access its features.
OptinMonster
Whether you want subscribers for your newsletter or leads to send marketing emails to, you’ll need a simple and enticing way for visitors to your site to opt-in to your email list. The professional, eye-catching templates that come with OptinMonster are excellent at converting visitors into leads, which is the critical first step before converting them into customers.
Sophisticated market targeting and segmentation tools enable visitors to receive customized messages that can be based on their geographic location, the site that referred them to your website, the page of your site that they landed on or other criteria.
UpdraftPlus
We all know that it’s important to regularly backup files on our computer in order to avoid data loss, but it’s also critical to do this for your WordPress website. The free version of UpdraftPlus enables you to schedule backups regularly, so your website is being protected from loss over time without you even having to give it any more thought.
You’ll be happy to know it incorporates popular cloud storage options such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon S3. With this plugin, you don’t need to be an expert to easily backup and restore your website, and it will bring you peace of mind.
MonsterInsights
You may be content to only have the capabilities on your WordPress website that make it minimally functional, but this can be shortsighted. If you want your website to grow, this requires getting information, so you know how to change it to appeal to potential visitors and the search engines.
MonsterInsights is a Google analytics plugin that keeps track of things such as downloads from your site, e-commerce transactions, form submissions and basically every other way a visitor interacts with your website. This plugin simplifies and automates a lot of the collection of this type of data that is critical to better understanding your website’s audience and helping you optimize the way you appeal to it.
WooCommerce
Perhaps you are running an e-commerce website with WordPress, or maybe you wish to add the capability to sell some merchandise to people who read your blog. WooCommerce is such a simple and powerful way to do this that it has become the most popular e-commerce plugin on the WordPress platform.
You can sell physical goods or digital products such as e-books, and it even has hundreds of its own free and paid extensions, so you can customize it for your exact needs. Setting up your online store is made easy with simple documentation, and there is online support for any questions you may have.
Thirsty Affiliates
Affiliate marketing is a way for you to monetize your blog or other types of websites by offering people a variety of products that are related to the subject matter of your site. Thirsty Affiliates makes adding and changing links to affiliate sites a breeze.
It comes with click statistics and reports, so you’ll know how many visitors are clicking on your affiliate links. If your blog or website gets a decent amount of traffic and you’re not currently utilizing affiliate marketing to earn more from your site, Thirsty Affiliates can get you started quickly and easily.
Yoast SEO
Search engine optimization can be a tedious task, but neglecting it means your blog or website will be buried under the competition and not found by anyone. Yoast SEO supercharges SEO for your WordPress site and makes optimizing it for the search engines far simpler than trying to manually tweak it for this purpose.
Related article: 15 TACTICS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR HIGHER SEO RANKINGS FOR 2019
If you don’t have the money to hire a digital marketing agency or the time to manually handle the technical aspects of SEO on your own, Yoast SEO will come to the rescue by handling elements of SEO such as XML sitemaps, meta tag editing and so much more.
EWWW Image Optimizer
You probably already know you need some kind of gallery for organizing the images on your website. What some people don’t realize, however, is that images are a big reason for slow loading of websites.
With EWWW Image Optimizer, images you upload will automatically be compressed using its advanced compression algorithm without sacrificing quality. Page load speed is an important factor in search engine optimization and user experience, so make sure your images aren’t holding you back with this simple but useful plugin.
Broken Link Checker
Making sure your website is free of broken links will improve your search engine optimization while also saving frustration on the part of visitors to your site. There are fewer things more annoying when surfing the web than coming across an interesting sounding link on a site and then getting taken to an error page after clicking on it.
This makes your website look unprofessional and will cause many visitors to go elsewhere. Fortunately, Broken Link Checker will monitor your site for broken links, and it notifies you via email or the WordPress dashboard, so you can fix them promptly, and keep the search engines and visitors happy.
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