Top 10 Plugins that Increase Your Website’s Performance

Why settle for a mediocre website when you can super charge it with powerful plugins?

WordPress plugins allow you to extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress website without paying for expensive custom coding. You can add features to your website without even knowing how to code. Plugins allow you to employ many different functions and features on your website.

WordPress has a plugin for almost anything you imagine. There are thousands of plugins you can download from the official WordPress plugin directory. Having so many choices can make choosing the right plugin a daunting task.

To make choosing a little easier, we’ve provided the top 10 WordPress plugins that can help you transform your plain website into a high performing, lead-generating machine:

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO, formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins and it is even considered to be the number one SEO plugin available today. After you install the plugin you will be able to do real-time content analysis that can help you optimize your page content, image titles, meta descriptions and more. You will get SEO control over custom post types, tag pages, archives, category and author profiles. It also incorporates a snippet editor which allows you to see how your content will look when someone searches for it in Google.

2. SEOPressor

SEOPressor is an out of box concept for SEO which is very easy to use and has all the latest SEO and SMO features. With SEOPressor, you will receive:

• Improved On-Page SEO Analysis – SEOPressor will provide you systemized, prioritized and actionable suggestions for how to improve your On-Page SEO signals
• SEO Intelligence – With SEOPressor you are instantly alerted if it detects a potential threat to your website
• Comprehensive Semantic Builder – SEOPressor can measure your website’s semantic quality and help you to improve search relevancy for your content
• Crawler Control – With SEOPressor you can customize crawler pathing for definitive indexing
• Link Manager – It allows you to have control over your website’s link profile

3. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights

Google Analytics for WordPress is the most comprehensive analytics tool in the market. The most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, with roughly 11 million downloads, is the Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights. Adding this plugin to your WP business website will help you track site visitors, know what they’ve been looking at and know from what site they came or were referred so you can then optimize your site accordingly and improve your rankings.

4. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most popular popup and conversion rate optimization software. It can help you convert abandoning visitors into customers and email subscribers. OptinMonster allows you to create very effective opt in forms like lightbox popups, floating bars, sidebar slide-ins, after post forms, sidebar forms, welcome gates, and many more. Also, with their exit-intent technology you can detect the behavior of your visitors and prompt them with a targeted campaign at the precise moment they are about to leave.

OptinMonster has a very popular free version and a premium version for a fee.

5. BackupBuddy

Every business owner knows that the best way to protect his/her business website from hacker attack or a hardware failure is to have adequate safety measures in place. Today information is everything and no one can afford to have their site go down and not have a reliable real-time backup available to restore it quickly. Having dependable website backups will prevent loss of business and customer data should you suffer the loss of your website.

BackupBuddy is a comprehensive and secure website backup plugin for WordPress. With this plugin you can create full or partial backups, schedule regular backups and restore any backup in a very short period of time. You can also use the BackupBuddy plugin to move a WordPress site to a new host or domain.

6. WPForms

WPForms is one of the most popular drag & drop WordPress contact form plugin. It allows you to quickly create visually appealing and professional-looking contact forms, email subscription forms, payment forms, and other type of online forms in matter of minutes. It is an easy to use, mobile friendly plugin and it is highly optimized for speed and SEO. If you are on a tight budget, you can use WPForms light which is free and has all the basic features that you will need.

7. W3 Total Cache

With more than 6 million downloads and more than million active installations, W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for caching. It creates cached HTML files for each page. Caching is the process of storing data from existing requests to re-use for subsequent requests. This process significantly improves performance and speed of your website.

8. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open source eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It is very customizable and flexible platform with hundreds of free and premium WordPress extensions and designs that allow you to sell anything from your website or blog. With WooCommerce you can offer free shipping, flat rate shipping, or make real-time calculations. You can also offer extensive payment options to your users (Direct Bank Transfer (BACS), Cash On Delivery, Credit Card and PayPal). According to the plugin description page WooCommerce now powers over 37% of all online stores – more than any other platform.

9. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a powerful, user-friendly WordPress gallery plugin. You don’t need to have any coding knowledge to turn your photos into beautiful galleries. This plugin allows you to create responsive mobile friendly galleries, create albums, open images in lightbox popups, and much more with just a few clicks. You can customize your gallery with built-in templates or create your own. You can even share your photos to social media or sell them to your users.

Envira Gallery also has premium options with extended features.

10. Akismet

With over one million active installs and more than 42 million all-time downloads, Akismet is the most popular WordPress antispam plugin. This plugin automatically checks your website comments and filters out the ones that look like spam. According to WordPress, the most important features in Akismet include:

• Automatically checks all comments and it filters out the ones that look like spam
• Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see the comments that were caught or cleared by Akismet, including those that were marked spam or unspam by a moderator
• URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links
• Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user
• A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

Improving Your Website Performance

Hopefully, this top ten list will help you find the WordPress plugins that you need.

Are you looking to add new functions and features to your website and need a little help?

Give us a call or contact us here. We are happy to talk with you and help you find the resources that will help you outperform the competition and rise to the top of the search engines.

If your website needs a little love and you aren’t sure what to do first, I recommend our complimentary Website & SEO Analysis. It’s FREE and it will tell you exactly what you need to do to get your website in top shape. We’ll even throw in a competitive analysis so you can see how your competition is doing and gain insight into opportunities you can leverage to surpass their performance and stay ahead of them.