WordPress is a robust platform for online publishing. We believe in WordPress so much that it’s the only platform we use for our clients. However, it is not perfect.
Numerous plugins have been developed to address important features that WordPress does not come with out of the box. There are some critical plugins every WordPress site should have.
If you’re not sure you have these or you’re not sure they are working properly, let us know. Our developers are experienced in WordPress plugins and customization that can make sure you’re getting the right performance for your site. Here are the top 3 plugins every WordPress site should have.
1. SEO plugin. We use Yoast. The Yoast plugin is considered the premiere SEO plugin for WordPress. We have used SEO Ultimate in the past but it was buggy, especially for social media.
2. Performance/caching plugins. Caching drastically reduces the processing requirements of your website by serving the same page from a cached file instead of doing dozens of queries to rebuild it for every user, when it doesn’t change anyway. In other words, this helps keeps your page loading times low.
Performance plugins work especially well to combine and minify (programming language for minimize, or remove unnecessary characters from code) the various scripts and stylesheets of your plugins/theme into fewer files. We use and recommend two plugins for this.
WP Rocket is a paid option but is easy, powerful and simple. W3 Total Cache is free but has a plethora of options (which may be overwhelming for people who are unfamiliar with the subject).
3. A plugin related to your business model.
While there are some plugins that every site should have, like the ones above, a smart choice is to add one that is specific to your business.
Gravity Forms is recommended if you need to take information from users, for example, through a contact form.
Relevanssi is an excellent choice if your site would benefit from more accurate search results.
We recommend WooCommerce if you are running a store. WooCommerce offers the most customizeable ecommerce platform for WordPress.
If you are running a store the plugin AffiliateWP is a great way to introduce an affiliate program to your website. It has everything that you need, and tools to aid your affiliates in promoting your products.
There are approximately 40,000 WordPress plugin options to choose from, so it’s understandable that you might have questions about which ones really work and which ones your site needs. Unnecessary plugins or ones that don’t work well can make your site slow and introduce errors that you might not be aware of. Get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to explain the basics to you.
