WordPress powers 35% of all websites on the internet.
This stat indicates how good WordPress is (it’s the best) and suggests what could be available at your fingertips. WordPress uses software add-ons called Plugins that extend its capabilities, from increasing security to adding sliders. And, because it powers 35% of all websites on the internet, many people have created plugins to make WordPress even better. Below are our top WordPress plugins to boost your WordPress website.
1. Woocommerce
This is a very popular one as it allows people to create something very popular online – a shop! Woocommerce has over 5 million active installations and its own add-ons and shop.
The plugin keeps the user in mind as it offers a guided tour on initial installation, enabling you to add your shop’s details, products and pages easily.
However, Woocommerce has hundreds of ways to be customised, using hooks, extensions and themes.
This means your shop doesn’t really have any boundaries!
We use Woocomerce for our e-commerce projects and find the plugin easy to set up and full of options for our clients.
2. Scroll Triggered Animations
Want to add creative animations to your site to make it stand out? Or give your competitors a run for their money?
Scroll Triggered Animations is a highly customisable, user-friendly plugin for creating professional-looking animations on your WordPress website.
It allows you to select elements on your site and give them animations with a range of CSS classes.
You also have settings so you can disable the animations on mobile and select when to start the animations in a distance from the bottom of the screen.
This plugin is code-free so you don’t need to worry about your technical know-how. However, if you have some coding knowledge, you can push this plugin further and make your animations even more powerful and customisable!
And even if you do want some advice, it has a technical support team available!
The scripts on this plugin also make sure to keep your site moving nice and fast – as some animator plugins can slow it right down.
It was also created by some of the amazing guys here. So we can really vouch to you that it’s good!
3. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is an essential plugin if you want to nail your SEO on your site.
Do you have a great website that’s not being found?
You can put a lifetime of work into getting your website the way you want it. But there is not much point if you aren’t going to put any work into getting it found!
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of improving the quantity (and quality!) of traffic entering your site by increasing its visibility in search engines.
Yoast SEO claims to be the number one WordPress SEO plugin, and we can agree. We add this to all of our sites to ensure our clients get the best possibilities in SEO.
The plugin has a wide range of tools and a premium and free version. So if you’re looking to improve your work but don’t want to commit to payment straight away, that’s no issue!
Whilst the premium version has many more tools, both have the most useful one, the traffic-light rating system for both readability and SEO factors.
You can add a keyword or keyphrase for each page and then edit your content based on factors like internal links, image alt tags and the number of times the keyword was used in the content.
The plugin will then give you a red, amber or green light that will change based on your edits.
It’s a very user-friendly plugin which can make SEO more understandable and easy for your site.
4. WP Smush
Do you have lots of products on your site? Or maybe big galleries to show off all your work?
Big images can slow down site speed, which is an important factor in getting and keeping visitors on your site.
Research has shown that people 40% of people abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
So, if you have a great site and have been doing great work on your SEO, but have slow site speed, you could be driving people away.
WP Smush is a very user-friendly plugin that allows you to reduce the file size of images and improve your website speed.
The initial setup will walk you through your options and then enable you to compress all of the images on your site with one button.
It makes the job so much easier and makes your site faster!
5. Internal Link Finder
Internal linking has some powerful SEO benefits, including helping to establish the structure of your site and helping Search Engines to crawl through it and find it’s content.
Internal Link Finder is a plugin like no other as it takes all of the back-breaking work off of you.
When it comes to SEO, many people can worry about Backlinks. These are the links from other websites to your own.
But you don’t have much control over these as you must get those website owners to add them.
And whilst many say they’re going to, many never get around to it.
So, you can focus on the links you control – the ones within your site.
Many people neglect their internal linking as it takes time and effort, but it can give great results.
Backlinks help create a great structure on your site, which helps keep readers on it.
This plugin uses advanced filters to find which pages should be linking to your other ones.
And it has full integration with popular content management systems, including ACF (Advanced Custom Fields).
So it really does have everything!
The benefits of WordPress.
Plugins are one of the many benefits of the WordPress CMS, but it’s essential to not use too many plugins on your site as this can slow it down.
As with all things web, you need to balance the benefits (functionality and ease) with the costs (more plugins mean more code) and go from there.
