WordPress offers a vast amount of customisation, however with over 55,000 options available in the WordPress Plugin Directory, it can be hard to figure out what the best plugins are to use. We’ve put together our top five WordPress plugins which are essential for your website and the reasons why.
WORDFENCE
When it comes to a website, one of the most important aspects is security. Wordfence is a full-fledged security plugin which is available in both free and premium versions, improving the overall security of your WordPress site.
YOAST
If you’re new to SEO and want to do some basic optimisation to your website, the Yoast plugin makes this easy for you. It’s simple to use as you just enter the keyword or keyphrase that you’re interested in optimising for then it will run a check on the content, giving you recommendations. There’s a free and premium version however the biggest difference is that in the free version you can only set one keyword or keyphrase.
SHORTPIXEL
Large images can slow your website down and it can be time consuming to resize your images before they are uploaded. ShortPixel is an image optimisation plugin that compresses your images (including previously uploaded images) and improves your websites performance.
WP SUPER CACHE
Website speed is now an important aspect for SEO as Google is known to favor websites with fast loading speeds. WP Super Cache is a plugin which can speed up your website significantly by running lots of different processes.
GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS
An XML sitemap is a file which lists all of a websites content in an XML format, making it easy for search engines (e.g. Google) to discover and index your content. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin is great as it quickly creates a XML sitemap for you and is free to use.
They’re all of our top five essential plugins for WordPress websites. All of these are free to use unless you want to upgrade to the premium version which isn’t always needed, it depends on your business needs. If you would like more information about our WordPress websites or how you can improve your current website, you can contact us at 01865 989899 or email hello@cleverbusinesswebsites.co.uk
