There are times when you want to add certain features by using plugins to your WordPress website. These plugins are the tools that add extra features to your WordPress website. The kind of plugins to use on your website depends upon your particular needs that meet with your required product. For example: Services and offerings of travel websites are different from a real estate website, so they are different in required requirements.
There are a few plugins that every WP website should have. These plugins serve different purposes for the website such as caching, security and search optimization etc.
The plugin directory of world’s No.1 content management system (CMS) contains over 50000+ plugins. That means there are plugins available for almost every function or feature you need for your website.
Moreover, these plugins could be separated into three categories – free, premium, and freemium.
- 1) Free Plugins and they are free to download and use.
- 2) Premium plugins are paid. Means use these plugins after buying in a few dollars.
- 3) Freemium plugins are free with their basic features and limited options. However, to unlock and utilize their advanced features, you need to pay some specified amount.
Now back to the business. I am listing here top 10 WordPress plugins that you should install today to make your site robust and competent.
1. Jetpack
WordPress itself owns this plugin. The plugin offers a set of stunning and inevitable features and enhances its importance for website performance, traffic growth, and website appearance etc. Some of its incredible features include enhanced distribution and ability to create sitemaps. Using enhanced distribution, you can share your published content to third party services like search engines and social networks.
In addition to that, its inbuilt security features keep your website protected.
2. Akismet
Akismet is also a plugin of WordPress. It’s a default WordPress plugin available with every new WordPress core installation. The plugin weeds spam comments out from your website. This is No.1 anti-spam plugin as of now. The plugin generates a comment status history for each comment to let site moderators find spam comments and view the number of approved comments for each user.
Akismet is a freemium plugin. It’s free for the personal site and blogs, however, to use its advanced security features and spam protection for commercial sites, you need to subscribe to its premium plans.
3. Yoast SEO:
The amazing plugin Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin in the WordPress catalogue. Yoast SEO is an indeed an awesome WordPress plugin that helps you through better content creation, content optimization for better ranking on search results. The plugin guides admins to curate content that’s impressive, engaging and technically SEO friendly. The motive of the plugin is to provide users great content, infuse trust and sustain the search rankings of the website.
4. Google XML Sitemaps:
This happens to be the one of the most popular Google XML Sitemaps from the WordPress plugin list. A great plugin that helps website admins to get their site indexed in the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo etc. As soon it’s installed and activated, automatically creates an XML sitemap for your site to make its indexing easier.
Search engine bots use XML sitemap to view the complete structure of your website and fetch the result quickly.
5. W3 Total Cache
Website caching is a method to improve a website’s performance and boost its loading speed and performance. W3 Total Cache is one such plugin that helps admins to achieve this. This appears to be the smartest cache plugin WordPress ever has. To recall, Caching is the process of storing the website data temporarily in the cache for faster loading of web pages.
You need to install and activate W3 Total Cache to enable caching in WordPress. The plugin caches your posts and pages as static HTML files then they are rendered to the end users. Caching incredibly reduces page loading time, thus helps to optimize overall site performance.
