Have you ever tried creating a website or a blog? Or do you have one already? Either way, you might have come across WordPress!
WordPress is a very popular platform, especially for content creators who want to get their written work out there in front of millions of people sitting on the internet. From easy-to-use website building features to tons of customizable themes, WordPress provides a variety of tools to help out its users to create ideal websites of their own.
To someone who has a lot of experience using WordPress, the platform is quite simple to get around. But for someone who has just started using it, WordPress will throw a lot of new words and vocabulary for you to get used to its working space. If you know these terms and vocabulary, then it’s a cakewalk for you! But if not, you might struggle with understanding the system and your website as well.
So today, we’ll be diving deep into one of those WordPress terms that is called a “WordPress plugin” or “plugin” and get to know how these work. We’ll also learn more about how to insert one into our website and take a look at my top 10 favorite WordPress plugins and their functions.
What Is A WordPress Plugin?
Like a cherry on a cake, a WordPress plugin is a piece of information that adds extra layers of goodness to your website. It may add some new features to your website or might just extend the functions of the already existing feature that your website may have. If you want to make your website more professional, adding plugins is the best way to go about it.
Believe it or not, WordPress has thousands of plugins available for various uses. Whether you want to add contact forms and online stores to your website or you want to improve your SEO and help your site rank better on Google, the WordPress plugins can help you do all of that. By inserting some effective plugins into your website, you can make your website more functional and attract more traffic. From small changes like adding an Instagram feed to enormous changes like turning your website into a forum, these plugins are a great way to make some excellent changes to your website.
How To Install A WordPress Plugin To Your Website
There are three ways by which you can install plugins into your website. You might find it a little difficult if you’re not used to the platform yet. So, feel free to ask me for help anytime!
I also want to add that if you’re a WordPress.com user, then you can’t install WordPress plugins into your website unless you upgrade your current plan to a business plan. Only self-hosted websites are allowed to install plugins without upgrading.
The first method is the easiest. You just need to go to the WordPress Plugin Directory and can install any free plugin that you’d like. However, if you want to install paid plugins, you have to use the second method. In this method, you have to upload the plugin from the WordPress admin area.
Sometimes, WordPress might restrict your file, which puts a limitation on installing plugins from the Admin area. In this case, you should always consider installing your plugin manually using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This method is a little trickier than the last two methods. So, if you’re still not too good with WordPress, then it’ll be a challenge for you to install plugins using this method.
My Top 10 Favourite WordPress Plugins
As you already know about my love and affection for these WordPress plugins, I want to let you know about my top 10 favorite plugins that helped my website get more professional and useful. These plugins have helped me be more productive and have added the best features to my website. So without any further ado, let’s get right to the top 10 list…
UpDraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the most important plugins that I’ve used on my website. It’s the highest-rated plugin that WordPress has to offer because of how simple, fast, and user-friendly it is. It simplifies data and backs it up on Cloud or any other options you can possibly think of! It can also restore data pretty easily. With this plugin, you can schedule a backup of your website data in case anything was to go wrong (such as your website getting hacked).
iThemes Security
Fun Fact – More than 30 websites get hacked in a day!
Yes, this fact might not seem fun in the slightest but it’s quite true. But no worries, WordPress also has a plugin to make your website more secure and protect it from hackers and unwanted guests. iThemes Security, previously known as Better WP Security, is a WordPress plugin that makes your website safer. Offering over 30 different security measures, it does its job like a pro! Although the basic plan isn’t that effective, compared to the Pro plan, it’s still quite useful and mainly focuses on having strong passwords, double-authentication, log-in details, and many more. For more security on your website, iThemes Security is a lifesaver.
Elementor Pro
Now, let’s get to one of the most fun parts about building a website, the one where you probably put most of your time and effort into- the website design. Everyone loves to check out websites that are beautiful and aesthetic. That’s why WordPress offers you a plugin to increase the beauty of your website. Elementor Pro, the Pro version of Elementor, offers you a vast variety of tools for designing. Some of the tools that it provides you with are theme builder, professional widgets to add to your website, visually appealing forms, 300+ templates, and many more. Make your website more beautiful with Elementor Pro!
RankMath
RankMath helps you optimize your website and rank in on Google. It’s one of the best SEO plugins offered by WordPress and I’m not the only one saying this; over 1 million people are saying this with me. This plugin helps you get more discoverable on Google. With its amazing suggestions, you can know more about SEO and how to rank on the top pages of Google. You can also customize your SEO settings for better results. A few features of this plugin are 15+ modules to figure out your requirements, measuring and tracking keywords on Google, making changes with one click on your website and many more. Install RankMath on your website and get a higher Google rank.
WP Rocket
Did you know that you can lose your audience if it takes 3s or more to load your website? Living in this time and age where people use the internet, website speed is super important. People aren’t patient enough to wait for your website to load for content as they can simply check out the same content on other websites. WP Rocket improves your website speed and makes it more SEO- friendly.
MonsterInsights
Another WordPress plugin that I love is MonsterInsights. It’s considered one of the best Google Analytics plugins which help you get closer to your visitors and viewers. Google Analytics helps you know the traffic that your website gets. With this plugin, you can find out which of your posts or pages are the most helpful ones to your visitors. You can also know where the traffic of your website usually comes from and what kind of things get more attention from your viewers. This simple yet effective plugin will make your day with its real-time stats, most viewed posts, pages, etc, and many more.
Code Snippets
Code Snippets is an excellent plugin that helps you with installing custom code on your website in an easy way. Usually when you want to add custom code, you need to get into your functions.php file inside of your theme. If you don’t know your way around code, that can be really overwhelming! Code Snippets adds the option to easily input custom code right from your dashboard.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is one of the most effective and user-friendly plugins to make contact forms for your website. It’s a drag-n-drop contact form builder for WordPress with an easy-to-use interface. It’s perfect for making professional yet stunning contact forms for your website. Some of you might know how time-consuming it is to build contact forms. With the drag-n-drop editor, it’ll take a few minutes for you to create beautifully designed contact forms for your website. It works like magic and saves you time as well as energy. Create forms for newsletters, subscriptions, surveys, and many more with this plugin.
Akismet
Fact – out of every 100 comments on your website, the rate of spam comments can be as high as 85% which means only 15 genuine comments!
Yes, this is rather unfortunate. No one wants to open their website just to get spam comments, right? Even Comment moderation takes so much of your time away, giving you even less time to create content. Akismet removes all the spam comments that land on your website and makes it clean and spam-free.
Broken Link Checker
The last plugin I want to recommend is Broken Link Checker. I recently found out about this plugin! Just as the name sounds, this plugin scans your entire website for broken links. Be it internal links or external links, this plugin provides you with the data within minutes. Broken links can really affect your SEO quite a lot and give you a lot of trouble. It can also be annoying for your viewers to click on a link only to find out that it doesn’t open any page. Broken Link Checker has quite a few features that include monitoring all the links on your website, comments, or other pages, notifying you of the links that don’t work via email or dashboard, as well as updating links directly from the plugin’s page. With a great user-friendly interface, Broken Link Checker makes sure that you’re doing a good job editing these links as well.
Need help installing some of these plugins? Contact me today and let’s get started on improving your website!
