10 Essential Plugins for Your Website
Today, almost everybody has and needs a website in order to have an online presence. If you are planning to have your own website, there are things you need to know. First, you need to find a web host to host your site. Secondly, choose a web hosting account among options such dedicated hosting, shared hosting, or VPS hosting. Most website owners prefer a VPS web host. Next, buy your own domain. Afterward, build your website.
Most websites nowadays are built through WordPress CMS. When you build your site through WordPress.org CMS, you have the opportunity to build your website easily with the help of plugins. Here are 10 elegant plugins you can use for your website:
1. Yoast SEO
This plugin is the most important plugin that many website owners never forget downloading and installing. This plugin will help your site improve its search engine visibility. A website without any visitor is useless, and visitors come from search engines. When they type in some keywords that are present in your site, there is a probability that your site may become one in the search results, but there is no guaranty.
In order to strengthen the probability of site being one of the search results, Yoast SEO plugin must be installed on your site. In Yoast section, just enter your target keywords and a suggestion prompt will tell you where you should place such keywords. In this way, your site will immediately give a signal to Google what your page is all about so that your site will easily get chosen in some results.
2. jQuery Pin It Button For Images
A site that is being pinned and shared through social book marking sites such as Pinterest enjoys the opportunity to be exposed not only through search engines but also through social bookmarking. Moreover, a site that is always pinned increases its search engine ranking. This is the reason why it is important for a site to have a “Pin It” button.
You can put that button on your website using this plugin. With this plugin, you can choose where you want to place the button. The good thing about it is that it won’t allow you to put a button on smaller images such as your profile picture and other small images, which are not appropriate to be pinned.
3. Jetpack
With this plugin, you will be able to put share icons and share buttons on your website, and these are very important, too. Users who are currently logged on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and the likes are able to share our site through such social media networks.
Jetpack also includes image widget. Without an image widget, you can’t put any photo on your website. Using Jetpack, you can even customize images based on your preferences.
Another important service this plugin will provide is statistics. You can check how many visitors you have, countries of origin, how they found your site, or how long they stayed.
4. Akismet
This is a popular plugin used to protect and secure your website from hackers, malware, and spam comments. It works like an antivirus platform but is focused on your site only.
Spam comments happen when unscrupulous users promote some products in a very wrong way. Most of the time, the links they put on spam comments have virus or malware. Besides, spam is very annoying.
Using Akismet, you will never have problems blocking such spam comments because the plugin will do that for you. If you are running a WordPress-based website, Akismet is already there. All you have to do is to activate it.
5. Related Posts by Zemanta
A website without a blog is like a product without a salesman. In order to get found, your site must include a blog. Since blogs need to be posted continuously, it gives a signal to Google that your site has fresh new content. Google prefers a site with fresh content. Moreover, blogs are easily shared through social media.
However, blogs on your website must not be boring to prevent increasing its bounce rate. The solution for this is to make it like a magazine type that includes other related topics below the blog. Related Posts by Zemanta plugin will automatically do it.
6. UpdraftPlus
It is a rule of the thumb for every website owner to perform backups so that they can restore the site to a more previous version in case a mistake happens along the way. This plugin will automatically perform such backups regularly depending on how you set it. Furthermore, UpdraftPlus can be synced to several storage platforms such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
7. WP Super Cache
If your site has a lot of high-resolution images, it will load very slowly thereby driving away your visitors. Using this plugin, your site’s data are saved to cache memory. When someone visits your site, the cache memory will use the data to load the page instead of loading it again separately. In this way, loading will be much faster.
8. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize simply cleans and empties your thrash box on your dashboard. Whenever you delete a page or an image, the deleted files just stay in the thrash, and this consumes much space even if you are using a VPS web host. With this plug in, you will simply be able to empty the thrash.
9. Insert Headers and Footers
Inserting something on header or footer requires knowledge in HTML and CSS coding. But if you don’t know anything about coding, this plugin will help you a lot because it is the plugin that will generate codes for you. All you have to do is to copy them and paste them to appropriate boxes. That’s it!
10. SumoMe
If you want to expand your email list, this plugin will help customize smart bars, scroll bars, and other pop-up boxes that may convince visitors to sign up.
Conclusion
Building a website through WordPress CMS offers lots of advantages and most popular of which is the opportunity to use plugins that will ease the process. Nevertheless, you can hire the services of web developers if you are busy or still unprepared to do it all yourself.