Professional website should use these 11 must have WordPress plugins because they are essential to build powerful and secured site.
Fortunately, WordPress is the best online platform you need for any online business. This platform provides unlimited plugins to build any website you want. This amount of plugins make it difficult for you as a beginner to choose the must have ones for your online business.
In this post, i leverage the essential WordPress plugins you should have to build easily your website without any knowledge or experience.
Why WordPress platform is your best CMS?
WordPress platform is the best platform in the market. That grows fast and used by 409 million people all over the world.
According to stats:
- Over 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month.
- Users produce about 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments each month.
- WordPress now is powering 39.5% of all websites 2021.
This means WordPress is the most profitable content management system (CMS) you should use. That helps you to profit from this huge WordPress’users.
Who publishes on WordPress CMS?
WordPress is now powering 39.5 % of all websites. This means more small and big businesses use this great CMS to reach their users and then grow their businesses.
These are some examples of big companies that use WordPress as it main CMS:
- CNN channel
- Ted
- TechCrunch
- Spotify
- CBS radio
- And much more businesses all over the globe.
So WordPress is the best CMS for any business. You can suit it to any business you want. And have unlimited tools, themes, plugins and great community to support you, if you have any issue.
All these features are a goldmine to build the best website you ever need to reach unlimited users and make huge profits.
In other words, the benefits are huge.
What are these must have WordPress plugins?
If you want to take your website to the next level, you need these must have plugins:
1- Akismet
Akismet is a great plugin for spam protection. This plugin checks your site comment and block any spam content. Which secures your content and site from any attack or publishing any malicious content. This helps you to create the best user experience and make your audience more happy.
These are the main Akismet’s features:
- Automatically check, filter and block any comment spam in your website.
- Each comment has its a status history to check it, if you want to check more details about this comment!
- Show URLs in the body comment to reveal hidden or misleading links.
- Show the approved comments for each user. Which saves your time and effort.
- A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam to save you disk space. That speeds your website as well.
Before activating this amazing plugin, you need to get the Akismet API key. These keys are free for personal website but paid for business and commercial sites.
Akismet’s installation:
Akismet’s installation is very easy. You should just upload the plugin to your website, get the API key and activate it.
2- Yoast SEO plugin
This profitable SEO plugin has made a great SEO work since 2008 for many online businesses. This free plugin has helped millions of website to improve their rankings and then get more profits.
Also, this plugin has all SEO features you need to rank higher your online business in search engines for free. You can also use its SEO premuim to get more SEO options such as keyword synonyms, preview your page in Facebook and Twitter, suggestions for internal links, 24/7 email support and much more SEO features.
Here are the best Yoast SEO plugin:
- Automated technical SEO improvement which helps your site to rank higher.
- Get advanced XML Sitemaps that makes search engines better understand your website’s structure.
- Offers title and meta description templating to get more snippets in Google.
- Schema.org integration included. This is crucial in rankings because it helps Google to understand your business.
- SEO and readability analysis to rank better in search engines.
- Full language support for: English, french, Spanish, Italian…
- And much more SEO premium features.
Really, this unique plugin is very helpful for your business online because it easily fixes many SEO issues within your site. That saves much money, time and effort.
The best, Yoast SEO integrates into a huge number of themes and plugins such as the official AMP plugin, the Elementor website builder, Zapier and much more…. This help you build easily professional website with zero coding or tech skills. That’s why Yoast SEO plugin is a must have WordPress plugin for your business.
Yoast SEO’s installation:
For installation, this great plugin is easy to use. You should just:
- Upload the plugin from your WordPress dashboard website or from wordpress.org.
- Activate the plugin.
- Go through the Yoast SEO configuration wizard.
Don’t worry, everything is explained through videos in your WordPress when you activate Yoast SEO.
3- MonsterInsights – Google Analytics for WordPress
This plugin is essential to grow your business because it connects your site to Google Analytics. This offers deep marketing data which you can use to know everything about your audience and your business. And then you take the actions needed to make more profits and grow your business.
MonsterInsights is your best free Google Analytics plugin which you should use to profit from your business. This plugin is powerful and very easy to use and can take your business to the next level.
Data is crucial in marketing. You can’t do well, if you don’t know your audience, what they need, what pages to focus on, where and when your users leave your site, what your users are doing in your pages…
All this data can help you to reach the profitable audience. That will increase your sales and profits.
That’s why 3 million active users use MonterInsights plugin in their sites including big companies such as: Microsoft, Bloomberg, FedEx… All these businesses use this plugin to setup Google Analytics for their websites.
Also, this plugin has a premium level to leverage advanced features that can help your business online to grow fast such as:
- Events tracking
- Ecommerce tracking
- Customer dimensions tracking
- Page speed reports
- Affiliate link tracking
- And more advanced features
For more information, watch this video!
MonterInsights’ installation:
This unique plugin is also easy to use you follow these simple steps:
- Upload the Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights from your WordPress dashboard (section plugins) or from wordpress.org.
- Activate the plugin.
- Navigate to the insight tab in your WordPress admin menu and configure the plugin.
In other words, MonsterInsights is a powerful Google Analytics WordPress plugin to get deep insights about your website.
4- Contact form by WPForms
This amazing plugin create you professional WordPress contact forms through an easy drag & drop builder. This save you more time , time and the headaches of hiring developers.
WPForms helps you to easily create many great forms for:
- Contact forms
- feedback forms
- Subscription forms
- Payment forms
- And many other forms
The best, this contact builder includes integrations for many popular page builders like the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg), Classic editor, Elementor and Divi.
WPForms are 100% mobile responsive contact forms. This creates the best user experience for your audience. Also, these contact forms are very optimized for SEO which will increase your profits.
Also, WPForms has the pro level which includes more features like multi-page contact forms, files uploads, payment integrations, form templates and other great options.
Watch this video for more details!
WPForms is a must have WordPress plugin to create professional contact for any website. That you should use in your site,if you want to create unique user experience for your audience.
5- Smush-Optimize and compress images
Optimize, resize and compress images is a must-need to improve your page speed. That’s why you need Smush. This free plugin saves you more money by image optimization. This optimization is the easiest way to make your website load super fast with any hiring any developer.
So Smush is the best plugin you ever need for image optimization and image compression.
These are its best features:
- Compress images without affecting its quality.
- Automated optimization.
- Turn your images on lazy load which speed up your pages.
- Optimize and compress 50 images with one click.
- Image resizing. It fixes your images sizes to fit web content. This create unique user experience.
- Locate any image that can slow down your site and fix it.
- There is no monthly limits. You can optimize all of your images up to 5MB in size for free.
- Process all your files: PNG, JPEG and GIF files. This save you money and time.
- And much more features…
Smush also has pro level too, if you want advance options to speed more your website.
For more information, watch this video!
Smush is best compressor plugin you need to optimize your images and speed up your website.
6- WP Fastest Cache-Best cache plugin for WordPress
WP Fastest Cache is the best plugin you need for cleaning and caching your website and your database as well. This great plugin can compress your images and cache your site too. So you can use it for both which increase your site’s speed and increase your rankings. As Google loves speed website.
The best, WP Fastest Cache is an easy plugin because you don’t need to modify the .htacces file. All is done automatically.
These are its best features:
- All cache files are deleted when a post or a pages is published.
- You can delete all cached files from the options pages.
- You can also delete minified css and js files from the options page.
- Block cache for specific pages or post with short code.
- Cache time out. All cached files are deleted at the determinate time.
- Enable/disable cache option for mobile devices and for logged-in users!
- SSL, CDN and Cloudeflare support.
- And many other features.
Also, WP Fastest Cache has the pro level where you get more advanced options such as:
- Minify Html and css
- Enable Gzip compression
- Leverage browser caching
- Add Expires Headers
- Combine CSS and JS
- Disable Emoji
- Mobile cache
- And more other features
Fortunately, free version is enough to speed your website if your budget is small.
WP Fastest Cache’s installation:
This plugin is a simple one that doesn’t need any skills to use it. You should just:
- Upload the plugin!
- Activate it through the plugins menu in your WordPress dashboard in your site.
- Permission of .htacces must 644.
- Enable this plugin on option page.
Then profit from your website.
7- Really Simple SSL plugin-Most popular WordPress plugin
This powerful plugin automatically detects your settings and configures your website for HTTPS. Then your site moves to SSL with one click. This makes your site more secure and trust by search engines and users too. That increases your rankings and profits.
Really Simple SSL installation:
You can easily use this plugin:
- Upload and activate the plugin.
- Go to settings and enable SSL with one click.
You can watch this video for more details!
So this amazing plugin saves you money and time. As you don’t need to pay for SSL option. You can also upgrade to pro level for more advanced security features.
The choice is yours!
8- MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress – Newsletter WordPress plugin
MC4WP allows your visitors to subscribe to your website’s newsletter. This plugin helps you to easily grow your email list through professional opt-in forms and integrate them into your website content. You can add these opt-in forms within your comment, contact page, checkout page and so on…
This is the best newsletter service you need for your business to send out email campaigns to a list of email subscribers and make more profits.
Here, some great features of this plusin:
- Connect easily with your Mailchimp account.
- Good sign-up forms which are mobile friendly.
- Complete control over these professional forms.
- Integration with other great plugins such as:
- Contact Form 7
- Woocommerce
- Gravity forms
- Ninja Forms 3
- WP Forms
- MemberPress
- Events Manager
- And much more plugins
Also, this WordPress best plugin includes the premium level where you get other great options like multiple forms, email notifications, detailed reports, statistics and other features.
Watch this video for information
MC4WP: Mailchimp is your must have WordPress plugins that allows to grow easily your email list and generate more revenue.
9- Redirection
Redirection is top WordPress plugins to easily manage your 301 redirections; keep track of 404 errors or any other loose ends your website may have. That reduces errors and then improve your rankings.
If your your WordPress supports permalinks then you can use this plugin to redirect any URL. This means you create and manage your redirects without any skills or knowledge.
In addition, you can use this Redirection plugin based on: Login status, browser, cookies, IP address and many other conditions.
Redirection’s installation:
You can easily use this plugin through these simple steps:
- Upload the plugin and activate it.
- Go to the plugin management and enable it.
- Configure the options from the tools (settings).
Redirection is essential WordPress plugin that helps you to keep your visitors and offer them the best user experience.
10- Broken Link Checker
This profitable plugin checks and tests all your internal links and external links on your site looking for broken links. Which helps you to fix these bad links and then improve your SEO to get more profits. That save you money and time.
Broken Link Checker’s features:
- Monitors your internal and external links in your posts, pages, comments and custom fields.
- Detects broken or bad links or images.
- Prevents search engines from following broken links.
- Sends you notification through email.
- And many other options!
Broken Link Checker’s installation:
Follow these simple steps to set up the plugin:
- Upload the plugin and activate it.
- Go to settings to enable or disable many features.
This simple plugin will save you more money and time. As it helps you to fix your links which increase your rankings and profits.
11- Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR and CCPA
Cookie Notice offers simple and customizable website banner which makes your website comply with some cookie consent requirements under the EU GDPR cookie law, CCPA regulation and the last updates to existing consent law.
This great plugin includes all features you need to make your business online comply with cookie and all existing consent law. That avoid you any problem zith the EU GDPR law or CCPA regulations. This saves you money and time.
So cookie compliance covers all current and upcoming regulations such as:
- GDPR (EU)
- ePrivacy Directive
- ePrivacy Regulqtion (EU)
- PECR (UK)
- LGPD (Brasil)
- PIPEDA (Canada)
- PDPB (India)
- CCPA (California, US)
- VCDPA (Virginia, US)
- Colorado Privacy Act (US)
- CPRA (California)
These are some regulations that Cookie Notice covers but you can read more details here.
Conclusion:
These are 11 must have WordPress plugins you should use in your website. They are the best ones which save you more money and time.
Really, you don’t need to hire any developer to fix your website’ s issues. You can just use these 11 top WordPress plugins to create powerful site for any business and then increase your rankings and profits.
Thank you for reading, commenting…
If you need any help, feel free to contact. I will be happy to help you.
What do you think about these 11 must have WordPress plugins?
P.S: Feel free to add any other WordPress plugins that you think are essential?
