WordPress has been the world’s most popular content management system (CMS) for years now. It powers more than 30% of all websites, growing daily. WordPress has evolved to include many features and capabilities for site owners, developers, and businesses. But there’s also a huge ecosystem of free-and-open source plugins available for WordPress users—and these can be just as important in creating your site as choosing the right theme or hosting provider. So which ones should you install? In this article, we’ll look at some of our favorite WordPress plugins that will help you boost traffic, optimize your site performance, increase security measures, and more.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the WordPress plugins that allow you to sell anything. It’s the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress, with over 2 million active installs and over 40% of all online stores built with WooCommerce.
The flexibility and community around the platform make it a great choice for any type of online business, whether you’re selling physical products or digital downloads like ebooks or music files.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a great plugin for WordPress. It helps you to create an SEO-friendly website, optimize your content for search engines and create a sitemap.
The plugin has many features, such as:
- On-page analysis that checks the readability of each page on your website. This can help you improve the quality of your content so it’s more readable by humans and bots alike!
- Sitemaps are used by Google so that they know what pages are available on your site, which makes it easier for them to crawl through all the information present on it (and thus index).
E-Commerce
E-Commerce is a WordPress plugin for selling digital and physical products online. It’s an extension of WooCommerce, which means you get all the features of that platform as well as some additional ones. For example, E-Commerce includes features such as order tracking and management, inventory management, product import/export (including CSV imports), coupons and discount codes, sales tax calculation, and more.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a caching plugin that speeds up your site with no configuration effort. It’s one of the most popular and powerful caching plugins and works well with new and existing sites.
WP Rocket has been around since 2013, which means it has plenty of time to iron out any bugs or issues that may arise during its lifetime as a product. It’s also easy to use: all you need to do is install WP Rocket on your WordPress website, then activate it under Settings > WP Rocket in your dashboard. From there, you can see how much faster your site loads when using this plugin–and if your host supports Cloudflare DNS services (which many do), then they’ll even help speed up load times further by redirecting traffic through their own servers instead of going directly through yours!
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a powerful form plugin for WordPress. It has a lot of features, including automatic form-filling, conditional logic, and more. It’s one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress repository and has been downloaded more than 8 million times.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP is a great plugin for WordPress. It’s simple to install and configure, but it has a lot of features that make it easy to use.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP gives you the ability to:
- View your Google Analytics data on your WordPress site in real-time, with no need for an account or login information from Google.
- Get alerts when certain things happen on your site (like when someone visits).
- Track conversions from within WordPress- you don’t have to leave the dashboard!
iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)
If you’re looking for a security plugin, look no further than iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security). This is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for a good reason: it protects your site from hackers by blocking brute force attacks and automated attacks. It also protects against DNS poisoning, cross-site scripting (XSS), denial of service (DOS) attacks, and more!
bbPress
bbPress is a forum plugin that can be used to create a community around your website or blog. It’s open-source software that allows you to easily create forums and discussions on your website, with the ability to customize them and add custom features like user profiles and private messaging. This plugin has been downloaded over 1 million times and is among the most popular WordPress plugins available today.
BackupBuddy Pro
BackupBuddy Pro is a WordPress backup plugin that allows you to create backups of your website. It provides a range of backup options and restores, including the ability to restore from a remote location.
CloudFlare for WordPress and W3 Total Cache
CloudFlare is a content delivery network that speeds up your website and protects it from attacks. W3 Total Cache is a free WordPress plugin that speeds up your website, improves its performance, and ensures it’s secure.
Together, these two plugins can do wonders for your site speed and security–and they’re easy to set up!
Conclusion
The WordPress plugins ecosystem is constantly evolving, and staying up-to-date on the latest developments is important. The plugins listed above are some of the most popular ones from 2018 and will likely remain so in 2023 as well. However, many other plugins could prove useful for your site, so don’t hesitate to check them out!