The open-source WordPress platform is one of the most used content management solutions around the world. A WordPress plugin is used to add functionality to the website, without doing any “coding”.
Here are the top 7 plugins which are very helpful in making an exceptional WordPress website.
- Visual Effects & Animation Kit for Elementor
- Yoast SEO
- WP Rocket
- Elementor
- Prepostseo
- SecuPress
- TablePress
- MonsterInsights
You can get the plugin extension in two ways:
- From the Official WordPress Directory
- From the dashboard of your WordPress Website
You can access the same plugin in both ways. But, before installing any WordPress plugin, we recommend you to consider the following features:
- The number of active installations:
The number of installations indicates that how many people trust on the particular plugin. But, this is not always the case, sometimes you find a more confidential and high-performance plugin with fewer activations.
- Check user reviews
If a plugin has good feedback, it is a positive sign that you can use it without any concern. On the other hand, if a plugin has negative feedback, then think carefully before installing it in your site.
- Take a look at the number of updates
If the security of the plugin is not maintained for a long time, do not add that plugin in your site since it can be harmful to your assets.
- Check the compatibility with the version of WordPress
Before installing a plugin, make sure it is compatible with the version of WordPress. Sometimes, such type of plugins work but sometimes not, so it is recommended not to waste time on these plugins.
- Avoid third-party extensions
Beware of free extensions that are not present on the official directory. These extensions or plugins can harm your website very severely.
There are premium and free version of these plugins, but there is a difference between both of these.
Many people spend money to buy plugins when there are a lot of free plugins available; this is because premium plugins have a lot of advantages that their free counterparts do not have.
These advantages are:
- Additional Features:
Many free extensions are available on the WordPress directory, but if you want additional features, then you have to upgrade to the paid version of the plugin.
- Regular updates:
In the paid version of the extension, the developer is required to update it again and again. So, you get the free updates with additional features now and then.
- Dedicated support:
Paid plugins also provide customer support to configure the plugin correctly on your site. This facility is not available in the free plugin.
In the start, you may hesitate to spend on a plugin, but when you see the lot of time it can save, you will willingly invest in it.
So, let’s find out what “our top 7 plugins” offers us:
Visual Effects & Animation Kit for Elementor
Visual Effects and Animation Kit plugin is a great choice for bloggers and businesses who would like to spice up the visual presentation of their sites. It’s a package of 6 modules that you can activate right after the plugins’ installation on your site.
Visual Effects and Animation Kit plugin is fully compatible with the Elementor Page Builder and lets you take advantage of the code-free modification of the visual effects on your site.
If you are looking forward to adding image effects to your site, the dedicated module lets you add waves, ripple, swap, smudge, and tint effects to the selected images.
Yoast SEO
This plugin has over 5 million active installations. It is the most popular plugin for search engine optimization, and it is one of the most downloaded extensions of all time.
Every mature blogger or website designer know how much SEO is essential to increase the visibility on the search engines.
Yoast SEO allows you to optimize your site for search engine with green, yellow and red lights. This plugin is essential if you want to appear on the first pages of Google, Bing, and Yahoo etc.
This plugin mainly allows you to:
- Define title
- Meta description tags
- Create an XML sitemap
- Configure the types of content
Both free and premium versions of Yoast SEO are available. The paid version worth 89 dollars for one site maintenance.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a cache plugin that allows you to increase the loading speed of pages in your WordPress.
This plugin has multiple options to boost your website, which includes minify of HTML Code, concatenation of JavaScript and CSS files.
It is effortless to use, you activate it after installing, and it already works without having any adjustments.
The primary feature of these plugins are:
- Minimal configuration with immediate results
- Page caching
- Cache preloading
- Minification of HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Images are loaded only on scrolling
- Developer friendly
- E-commerce friendly
This plugin also has both free and premium plans. The premium version worth 37 dollars for one website with one year of support and updates.
Beamer
Beamer is a no-code changelog and notification center that will help you announce important news, product updates or special offers in your website or webapp.
- Share posts with text, images and videos – Share your latest updates including visual elements (images, videos, GIFs) for more engagement.
- Custom design – Change your Beamer’s newsfeed design to perfectly fit with your app (and look native!). Change color, position, notification icon and more.
- Post scheduling – Schedule your posts to be published at a specific day and time.
- User segmentation – Segment and personalize your announcements for specific groups of users based on behavior, location, demographics, etc.
Push notifications – Bring users back to your site with push notifications. Users who have opted-in will get an automatic notification from important posts.
User feedback and reactions – Collect user feedback on each announcement to better measure each update’s impact. - NPS – measure your customers’ satisfaction with Beamer’s Net Promoter Score. Segment and analyze your NPS score and comments over time.
Beamer offers a free plan and paid plans starting from US$49 per month. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.
Elementor
Elementor is known as one of the famous web page builder for WordPress users. Elementor is very useful and easy to use with many elements and templates.
This page builder has many things to offer like:
- Drag & drop editor
- 300+ designer-made templates
- 90+ Widgets
- Responsive editing
- Popup Builder
- Theme Builder
- E-commerce Builder
If you are new to creating sites or know nothing about the code, it will do you a favour for sure, and it will save you a lot of time.
This plugin has a lot of modules to use. You can build the sections of your pages according to your tastes and the request of your customers.
Everything happens in drag and drop, and you can immediately see the results in real-time.
Premium version of this page builder on one site costs 49 dollars per year.
Prepostseo
Another SEO plugin which is very useful for your site is Prepostseo.com. It offers a lot of various features for the optimization of your website on search engines.
This SEO friendly (check plagiarism) plugin is free, and their developers are planning to provide up to 1000 free search queries to their users.
This extension has a variety of features to offer, which includes:
- Check Plagiarism
- SEO score checker
- Grammar Checker
- Warn you about broken links in your post
- Calculate keyword density
- Analyze meta tags
- Make suggestions to improve your SEO.
SecuPress
Well, the security of the website is one of the essential aspects of a company or a product. If it is impossible to protect yourself 100% against malicious attacks, applying good practices will help you seriously defend yourself to some extent.
SecuPress is an extension that ensures the security of your WordPress website. It is effortless to protect your website from attacks using this extension.
It is a toolbox that applies several security settings to your WordPress website.
- Protection against brute force attacks
- Blocking malicious IP addresses
- Firewall
- Security alerts
- Malware scans
You can use its free version, but if you want additional features, you have to spend 60 US dollars to purchase security for one website per year.
TablePress
If you know a little bit about HTML, you know that creating a complex table takes time. TablePress provides us with the facility to make these tables without any coding of HTML.
This plugin has a 5-star rating with 800,000+ activations. The interface is straightforward, as a Microsoft Excel document, and you just have to fill the columns with your data.
You can insert images, links and even can import data from Excel to save time. After entering the data, pate its shortcode wherever you want to add it.
MonsterInsights
This plugin allows you to connect your WordPress website to Google Analytics account. This plugin is also very famous with two million-plus active users.
Through this plugin, you can access a lot of statistics, directly on the dashboard of your website like:
- Page visited
- Number of visits
- Geographical visits of the origin
- Actions that visitors have performed on your site
Premium version of this plugin costs 100 dollars yearly, which is efficient for small businesses and publishers.
How Many Plugins Should Be Installed on a WordPress Website?
Well, there is not a specific number of plugins that should not be exceeded to some limit. The only important thing is the quality of the extensions you use.
It would be better to have 50 well-coded plugins on your site rather than ten bad organized plugins.
If your website is running very slow, it is not because you have installed too many plugins, it may be because they are poorly coded.
Conclusion
By using these extensions which have the ability to maintain security, show excellent performance and marketing of your content, you can make your WordPress website like a war machine.
Thanks to these plugins which provide all the essentials that we need on our website.
