If you are a WordPress user, you might have come across a range of plugins that could enhance your website with new features. Plugins allow you to choose only the features you need most, rather than taxing your site with unwanted features. With the right combination of plugins, you can do almost anything in a WordPress website. Here is our pick of the top WordPress plugins that will make your WordPress website feature rich and amazingly functional.
The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is among the most widely used SEO plugin in WordPress. This plugin helps you keep your website optimized and it comes with many innovative features. You can optimize page titles, meta description, canonical URLs, breadcrumbs and XML sitemaps etc. using the Yoast SEO plugin. Furthermore, this plugin could also edit your robots.txt file and enhance your RSS feeds.
This is an alternative to the Yoast SEO plugin and it mostly performs similar functions. Some of the crucial on-page optimization factors like page title, meta description and meta keywords etc. can be optimized with the help of this plugin. This plugin can also help you avoid duplicate content on your WordPress blog.
This plugin lets you add Facebook meta data for any of your posts. While the plugin automatically extracts the meta data from the SEO plugins you’ve installed, you also have the option of editing this data and customizing them specific to each posts.
Comments are essential for getting feedback from visitors and improving interactions on your blog. As a site owner, it is your duty to provide a solid platform for your visitors to participate in discussions and knowledge sharing. Disqus is a commenting tool that makes it easier for visitors to interact. By default, Disqus makes all external links in the comments ‘nofollow’ thereby dissuading spammers from posting their links. You also have the power to approve, reject or block comments.
Hello Bar plugin resides on the extreme top of your blog page and is another innovative tool that allows you to direct your traffic to important pages of your website. When the target visitors get driven to that particular page, it could result in more conversions. Hello Bar also provides you nifty analytics on the number of clicks. Though not a completely free tool, the basic free version should be good to start with.
This WordPress plugin drives user engagement by displaying a string of related posts. The related posts are grouped together based on their matching topics and they get displayed at the bottom of a post. This is a critical factor in making users stick to your blog and browse multiple pages upon every visit.
Worried about losing your website content? WordPress Backup to Dropbox is there to help you. This is an effective plugin to create an automatic backup copy of your entire website. The content you regularly add to your website gets automatically saved in your Dropbox account. While large business websites need premium tools like BackupBuddy, the Dropbox plugin is ideal for small websites.
This is a performance optimization plugin that caches various aspects of your website. The plugin promises up to 10 times improved site performance when it is fully configured. This plugin is also instrumental in reducing page load time despite sustaining high traffic periods.
If you are worried about someone copying your website content, you can use the content copy protection plugin. This one discourages content theft by disabling some of the commonly used copying methods. Features like right click, drag and drop, hold to copy and keyboard shortcuts etc. can be disabled with the help of this plugin.
SEO Crawlytics isn’t just another SEO plugin; rather it is a tool that helps site owners understand the search engine bots visiting their site. Crucial information like most crawled pages, robot visit details, crawl history and peak crawl times etc. can be obtained through this plugin. You can use this information to optimize your site’s performance.
This is an extremely handy plugin, especially when your site has lots of images. The NextGEN Gallery plugin helps in managing images on your website. Features like batch upload, resizing and sorting etc. are possible with the help of this plugin.
It is worth noting that WordPress has thousands of plugins and the ones listed here are handpicked to be the most useful ones for almost any website. Depending upon your specific needs, you may also require a few other plugins in addition to the ones given above. If you think we have overlooked your favorite plugin please let us know through your comment.
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