The reality is that there are just too many WordPress plugins in existence. Which makes it increasingly difficult to decide which plugins to use.
However, the real question to ask yourself is what are those essential WordPress plugins you need for your website?
Because not every plugin is essential or a must-have to make your website function efficiently.
Your choice of plugins is important for your site’s optimum performance and seamless functionality.
Plugins are the components that allow your site to perform a variety of functions that will help you achieve your business goals faster. They make your site easy to navigate and user-friendly for your visitors.
So regardless of your niche or business goals, the following WordPress plugins are essential for your website:
1. OptinMonster
The major goal of a business site owner is to convert their site visitors and this plugin is perfect for that. With OptinMonster, you can reduce your bounce rate and convert your website traffic to subscribers, leads or sales.
Over a million websites use OptinMonster to maximize their website traffic potential.
They provide you with multiple result-driven templates that enable you to create lead-capture forms, pop-ups, slide-ins, and other great business conversion tools.
Furthermore, this is one of the essential WordPress plugins, as it provides you with a variety of features that drive sales to your website.
OptinMonster helps you to personalize your campaigns based on your visitor’s behavior, target your leads through segmentation, and let you retarget returning visitors.
2. Yoast SEO
You don’t create content just so it can sit pretty on your website; you need that content to be easily discoverable and to appear on SERPs.
That’s where Yoast SEO comes in.
Yoast SEO has carved a name for itself in the SEO atmosphere. This plugin simplifies SEO for everyone.
It allows you to optimize your content and pages to meet the criteria for ranking high on search engines.
Additionally, Yoast SEO provides you with great SEO tools and features that enable you to reach a lot of SEO requirements for your website.
3. MonsterInsights
You need your website’s analytics to assess your website performance and data that will influence you to make better decisions.
MonsterInsights is a great Google Analytics WordPress plugin. It easily connects your website to Google Analytics which gives you easy access to important data.
With this plugin you don’t have to log in to Google Analytics separately; you can view crucial reports and actionable insights inside your WordPress dashboard.
MonsterInsights has a lot of helpful features like Real-time stats, enhanced eCommerce tracking, page-level analytics, etc all on your WordPress dashboard.
4. WPforms
A website without a contact form is telling its visitors: “Don’t reach out to me”.
WPforms is the best WordPress plugin for not just contact forms but all types of forms.
WPforms allows you to easily create forms like lead magnet forms, surveys, payment forms, online order forms, and more with its drag-and-drop features.
Furthermore, WPforms provide you with distinct features, the likes of instant notifications that allow you to respond to leads quickly.
Additionally, conversational forms, form abandonment, entry management, geolocation tracking, etc are all features of WPforms.
5. UpdraftPlus
If you don’t back it up, you are ready to lose it.
Updraft is a trusted WordPress backup plugin that helps you automatically back up your site data in safe locations like the cloud.
It further allows you to effortlessly restore your WordPress files, databases, plugins, and themes from a backup.
Additionally, you can set your preferred backup schedules to match your needs and maintain consistency.
Finally, with UpdraftPlus you are not limited to backup and restore, you can also clone alongside migrate your WordPress site with just a few clicks.
6. Constant Contact
Email marketing is the major way business owners create long-term relationships with their customers. Therefore, you must have a plugin that helps you accomplish your email marketing goals.
Constant Contact is an authoritative email marketing software that will enable you to easily set up email marketing strategies.
You can build your email list using the wide variety of email template builders optimized for every purpose, either promoting or launching a product.
Constant Contact allows you to customize your emails to your taste with their drag-and-drop editing tools.
Finally, this plugin helps you track your results in real-time to make instant adjustments or improvements where necessary.
7. WP Rocket
The speed of your site determines the quantity of your website traffic. Slow websites equal high bounce rates.
Website visitors don’t have the patience to watch a website take forever to load.
A study revealed that 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
That’s why you need to ensure your website loads in an instant.
WP Rocket is a trusted WordPress caching plugin that can instantly increase your site’s speed.
This plugin is easy to use with no coding required and applies 80% of web performance best practices upon activation.
Furthermore, WP Rocket also preloads the cache anytime you make changes on your web pages automatically.
Additionally, it caches browsers too by storing the frequently accessed resources of your site like images or CSS in the local memory of the navigation device.
8. Redirection
One of the things you have to deal with whilst running a website is occasional errors like 404 or broken URLs.
These errors are bad user experiences for your site visitors you should avoid.
Therefore, you need a redirect manager like Redirection to lessen errors and keep everything on your WordPress site in check.
Redirection allows you to set up 301 redirects for pages displaying 404 errors. It further enables you to set up conditional redirects for different case scenarios.
It also helps you keep track of all 404 errors and display them to you.
9. iThemes Security
Running a WordPress site means having access to unlimited resources on everything WordPress. Guess who also has access to those resources? Hackers.
They find it easy to seek and target the vulnerabilities attached to a WordPress site, which means you have to protect your website.
iThemes security comes to the rescue of many site owners as a powerful security plugin that goes beyond the usual points of protection.
This plugin gives you over 30 ways to secure your WordPress site. It strengthens your user credentials, stops automated attacks, fixes any loopholes, and much more.
Additionally, the iThemes security plugin provides you with great features like malware scan scheduling, which automatically scans your site for malware each day.
Another essential feature is that of Google reCAPTCHA which protects your site from spammers.
To get comprehensive protection on your WordPress site, iThemes Security is an essential plugin.
10. WooCommerce
If you run an eCommerce business, WooCommerce is a must-have for your WordPress site.
WooCommerce is the best and most popular plugin for e-commerce sites. This plugin has everything you need to easily set up your online store.
Additionally, it has features that make running an eCommerce store easy; you get automated tax calculations, live shipping rates, and mobile apps amongst others.
Also, WooCommerce makes getting payments easy-breezy as it accepts a wide range of payment options alongside integrations with powerful payment platforms.
11. LiveChat
Customer service has evolved in many ways and one of them is embedding a live chat pop-up on your website.
This way, your customers can easily connect to your customer representatives.
Live chat is a customer-centric plugin that offers all the essential features you need to set up the live chat feature on your WordPress site.
Also, it is very easy to use with its AI automation that helps you greet customers and route chats easily.
The AI feature also allows you to segment visitors based on their activities on your site to customize it appropriately.
Furthermore, Livechat allows you to easily integrate with over 200 tools which means a seamless connection to your existing software.
Conclusion
All of the plugins mentioned in this post are relevant and essential to all WordPress sites irrespective of niche.
They all help to make your WordPress site fully functional and operational. These plugins also simplify running your business operations online.
Finally, you can quickly reach your business goals with these plugins installed rather than without them.
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