It remains for me to say that WordPress has been much revered as the CMS for creating quality websites. The global population of all countries in the year 2024 will be approximately 1. At the time, there were 88 billion websites on the internet, and WordPress alone accounted for 810 million websites, or 43%. It was found that there are only 1% of the total existing websites on the internet.
These numbers in themselves act as a testament to the widespread adoption of WordPress amongst developers and companies when they decide to build a website for their venture. WordPress, which, according to the research, began as a simple blogging tool, has become the preferred choice in the industry.
Like any other software, this content management system has undergone significant transformations in the past few years. Whether you are talking about themes, plugins, editors, and the like, the WordPress environment has been flooded with many add-ons.
This may be a long post, but one introduction that we want to look into in this blog is plugins. Let us look at what we understand as a plugin and what these seven essential must-have plugins on WordPress websites mean.
What is a plugin in WordPress?
In IT, especially in the realm of WordPress, a plugin is something that can be described as a program that is inserted into a larger program, like a website in this case, to add more functionality to it.
This is somewhat analogous to how apps can be created and installed to expand the functionality of your phone. WordPress is a robust web platform in its own spirit, but plugins enable you to enhance this commonplace setting and optimize it for what you want.
There are some elements that are required to be present on all websites, regardless of the industry domain and the pages the website possesses. Services that include the creation of contact forms, SEO, tracking of users visiting the website, and so on. It helps the developers in the sense that instead of having to code such features from scratch over and over again and again, it is easier to simply look for the plugin in the directory and integrate it into the website.
In this blog, we discuss the 7 essential plugins that any website should employ.
It is a list of plugins that should be installed on a WordPress website.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a freemium plugin aimed at helping individuals and companies SEO their sites by providing tools for optimizing them specifically for WordPress. In regards to SEO, it provides a range of tools for the enhancement of various aspects of your site to enable easy comprehension and consequent listing by the search engines.
Yoast SEO is a relatively simple, multilingual, and flexible plugin, which could prove especially useful to first-time users who may not know much about SEO. It can also be of help to those users with advanced levels of use who may want to work more efficiently on their SEO projects and enhance their websites’ rankings on search engines.
2. WooCommerce
Technically, WooCommerce is not a plugin, but it operates more like one contained within the WordPress environment. WordPress e-commerce is specially developed for WordPress and is commonly discussed as an open-source platform. It also helps you convert your WordPress site into a full-fledged online business platform and is free to use.
It provides every tool you need to set up an online store with a web page. Create a system, a product presentation page, a shopping cart, credit card acceptance, inventory management, order tracking, etc.
One of the greatest advantages is that it provides great flexibility that enables you to easily make it look like your existing brand, or to design it according to your preferences. We’re going to talk about WooCommerce, which stands as the platform competitor to Shopify and is built on WordPress.
3. Elementor
Elementor is one of the most utilized drag-and-drop page building plugins available for WordPress only. It is a tool that allows a user to design and develop websites using a graphical interface, to develop the web page layout.
This makes it suitable for any WordPress development beginner or any person, as well as any business that doesn’t have a technical background to follow through with its website development.
4. Jetpack
But unlike what its ambiguous name suggests, Jetpack is not a single plugin but rather a set of tools and features that are provided as a plugin in WordPress. As for the version, it was developed by Automattic.
The company that created WordPress.com, Jetpack, endeavors to optimize your WordPress website based on various parameters like security, speed and performance, promotion and marketing, looks and feel, and content generation, among others.
5. Wordfence Security
Wordfence Security is one of the most popular security plugins, intended solely for WordPress-based sites.
It provides numerous tools to safeguard your site against different types of threats so for anyone worried about web security, Sucuri is an excellent resource for Webmasters.
6. CartFlows
Every aspect ends up being more economical and efficient as it is simplified. The wonderful thing about having more time is that you can use that time to scale your business even more.
Finding better and more ways to sell more, figuring out how best to tweak your funnels, or perhaps developing even more products.
To make things more efficient, selling things online is the best approach, as seen when starting an online store.
WooCommerce and CartFlows are significant for small businesses since they assist in simplifying the procedure of constructing Internet shops.
Thus, when you develop your website using WooCommerce, you can create a store section with your products and allow customers to place orders online.
Their numerous features, such as CartFlows funnels, CartFlows email sequences, and many other powerful tools that are implemented in that instant and can be easily adjusted from the dashboard, assist you in turning more of the visitors into buyers.
7. WPForms
Small businesses have to ensure that they can call their customers, and WPForms makes this possible.
In social media marketing, you can allow customers to contact you through easy-to-fill, mobile-friendly forms.
WPForms allows you to integrate seamlessly with popular CRMs such as Salesforce and Constant Contact. The results above make it easy to manage your customer relationships.
This tool is a must-have for any business, especially for those that are small. It also enables you to communicate with your customers and obtain the knowledge necessary for operating your business just fine.
