Best WordPress Plugins that You Can’t Ignore in 2020

08/06/2020

The WordPress.org repository offers more than 55,000 WordPress Plugins to its users to help them enhance the functionalities of their WordPress. There are WordPress plugins for SEO, security, speed optimization, marketing, and social media. These plugins help you to make your WordPress site a robust, SEO-friendly, secure, and feature-rich website. However, many WordPress users have unique demands and hence, look for WordPress plugin customization services. There are several WordPress development companies in the IT market that offer WordPress support services, whether it is related to WordPress development or WordPress plugin customization service, at competitive market price. In the horde of thousands of WordPress development companies, it can be a bit of struggle to find the right WordPress development company for your project. Therefore, if you're planning to hire WordPress experts, make sure you hire them after doing rigorous market research.

If you prefer going with the available WordPress plugins and looking for the essential WordPress plugins for your site, here's a list of the best WordPress plugins available in 2020 that you can use to add awesome functionality to your professional WordPress website.

Best WordPress Plugins for Security

Website security is the primary concern of every website owner. Here are some of the best WordPress security plugins that will protect your website from hackers.

· Akismet Anti-spam

When it comes to security, Akismet is the must-have WordPress plugin to protect your website against spam comments. Akismet is right there by default on your WordPress CMS when you install WordPress into your hosting server. With Akismet, you know that your website is safe as it has been designed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It is preferred by millions of WordPress users for filtering and blocking an average of 75 million spam comments within an hour.

How Akismet Works?

Every time a visitor posts a comment, Akismet actively checks the comment against its database collected from all participating websites since 2005. If it's a spam comment, Akismet deletes it immediately. Also, if a user marks a comment as spam, the comment is stored in the database which helps Akismet to filter similar spam comments in the future.

And, you know what's the best? Akismet is absolutely Free! However, the premium version has got more features.

· Wordfence

Wordfence is another WordPress security plugin that protects your site from hackers and cyber attackers. It puts an endpoint firewall that investigates and blocks malicious traffic. Above all, the Wordpress security scanner serves as a helping hand for the firewall. It scans for malware and compares the core, themes, and plugin files with the available files in the WordPress.org repository while checking their integrity and alerting for security risks to you so you can address them before it's too late. Wordfence also offers login security features so you can enable a two-factor user authentication or reCAPTCHA on your site.

You can download Wordfence for Free! If you want to use more features, you'll have to upgrade to its premium version.

Best WordPress Plugins for SEO

You already know that to gain huge traffic to your website, your website should rank higher and this is possible only if you optimize your website and make it SEO-ready. You can achieve this by integrating a WordPress SEO plugin that can serve the purpose.

· Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO plugin is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin that guides you all the way to create unique, optimized content and boost your ranking on the search engine result pages. It helps you optimize your content like a pro and create content that is useful as well as SEO-friendly. The end goal of the Yoast SEO plugin is to help WordPress users to gain trust and achieve sustainable rankings in search results.

Yoast SEO is a freemium WordPress plugin.

· Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps is also one of the useful WordPress SEO plugins. It facilitates the major search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more to better index your WordPress site using an exclusive XML sitemap.

Once you enable the plugin, it automatically creates an XML sitemap for your website to facilitate site indexing by the search engine bots. The search engine bots gain an overview of your site's structure for better results retrieval. The plugin alerts all the major search engines every time you publish something on your website.

Google XML Sitemap is Free!

Best WordPress Plugins for Marketing & Analytics

Marketing and analytics plugins for WordPress help you track your growth based on analytics and reach out to more visitors for creating brand awareness. You can unlock many hidden opportunities if you use these plugins on your site.

· MonsterInsights

Imagine signing in to your Google Analytics account and looking at a bunch of numbers, pie charts, or bar graphs. What do these indicate? How to make sense out of the data insights?

Need someone who can organize the data for you and present it on your WordPress dashboard without logging into different websites and data analytics tools? MonsterInsights is the perfect solution for this.

With MonsterInsights, you can have all the relevant data on your WordPress dashboard to monitor how your website is performing. You can gain access to

  • Website visitors categorized on the basis of their age, gender, geographical location, interests, devices, and more.
  • Top referral websites, keywords and phrases, and landing pages with metrics like unique visits, conversion, and bounce rates.
  • E-commerce data sets such as top products, average order value, conversion rates, etc.

MonsterInsights also offers several add-ons that help you integrate things like forms, advanced e-commerce tracking, and EU compliance improvement.

MonsterInsights is absolutely Free!

· Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is easy to use and allows users to create basic as well as complex multi-page forms with conditional logic, file uploads, payment integrations, and many more. It comes with a drag-and-drop form creator with plenty of field options to create a standard contact form.

You can also extend its functionality by integrating special add-ons such as email marketing tools, CRM systems, online payment platforms, and so on.

Gravity Forms is a premium plugin. You can also use Contact Form 7 as a free alternative to create and manage multiple contact forms.

· MailChimp for WordPress

MailChimp is a great tool for email marketing campaigns, manage subscribers, send bulk emails, and track results. You can easily integrate MailChimp for a WordPress using the MailChimp WordPress plugin. It is free to use and helps you create simple yet attractive subscription forms in your WordPress site. You can try its premium version if you want to use it for commercial purposes.

Best WordPress Plugins for Site Optimization & Performance

Google as well as users always look forward to sites that are fast-loading and powerful. So, you need to ensure that your website loads within 3 seconds. The following WordPress plugins are the best plugins for site optimization and speed.

· WP Smush - Image Optimization

Images have the power to attract visitors to your website. However, these can either make or break your business. Uploading high-quality images makes your page look more attractive, engaging, and visually appealing, however, it's worth noting that these images can take up a lot of storage space and can make your website slower. The only way you can deal with this is by compressing your images.

WP Smush plugin helps you to optimize and compress the quality of the images using advanced compression techniques. It automatically smushes all your uploaded image files while you can also do it manually in the media library.

WP Smush is a free plugin.

· W3 Total Cache

WordPress caching is one of the easiest and effective ways to improve your website's performance. Cache stores website data temporarily in the computing environment to facilitate faster loading speed of the website the next time when the user opens the same page.

W3 Total Cache is a widely used WordPress caching plugin that comes with a page cache, browser caching, database caching, object caching, and a lot more. On top of that, it allows you to integrate CDN services to reduce page load time. It also features options to minify and HTTP compression of the HTML, CSS, and JS files so you can save up to 80% of the bandwidth.

With the fast loading speed of your website, you can rank higher on search results, drive high traffic, and more conversions.

W3 Total Cache is a freemium WordPress plugin. W3 Super Cache is an alternative plugin that works like W3 Total Cache.

· WP-Optimize

If you need to clean up the WordPress database and WordPress, WP-Optimize is the plugin that you need. It automatically cleans up clutter from WordPress without feeding manual queries. WP-Optimize always keeps your database optimized to ensure the peak performance of your website. It removes spam or unapproved comments, trash posts, trackbacks, pingbacks, and more.

Download WP-Optimize for Free!

Best WordPress Plugins for Backup

Before creating a major change for site improvement, it is wise to create a backup of your website. WordPress.org offers great WordPress backup plugins to keep your data safe

· VaultPress

This security-oriented WordPress plugin creates real-time automated backups for your website. It is bundled together with Jetpack and the Jetpack-enabled theme seamlessly syncs up every piece of content, comment post, and media file on your WordPress site and provided protection against many web issues or cyberattacks.

You can create optimized backups regularly and restore your website in a couple of minutes with a single click. Using multiple subscriptions, you can even track, backup, and manage several websites through a centralized dashboard.

VaultPress is a freemium plugin and its subscription is bundled together with Jetpack.

· UpdraftPlus

With UpdraftPlus, backup and restoration have become much easier than before. You can easily backup your database and files into your cloud folder (Google Drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox, and more) and restore them in a matter of seconds with a single click.

It is available for free, however, you can upgrade to a premium plan to enable more features such as incremental backups, duplicate and migrate WordPress, integrate more storage places such as OneDrive, Azure, BackBlaze or SFTP), database encryption, advanced reporting and many more.

Best WordPress Plugin for Redirection

Redirection resolves a lot of WordPress website issues such as broken links, page errors, or registration spams. It's good to know that there are WordPress plugins built exclusively for this as well.

· Redirection

This Wordpress plugin can help you manage all the 301 redirections and 404-page errors. Redirection plugin automatically adds a 301 redirection every time you change a post's URL while you can also add 301, 302, and 307 redirections manually for the post. This way you can easily redirect all the URLs and have a complete record of all the redirected URLs.

Redirection is primarily used when you need to move web pages from an old website or modify the directory of WP installation.

Redirection is a Free WordPress plugin.

Best WordPress Plugin for E-commerce

If you're running an online store or a large-scale e-commerce business, you should consider adding WordPress plugins for e-commerce to enhance the functionality of your e-commerce website. If you specific needs for your e-commerce business, you may approach a WordPress development company and they can help you with WordPress plugin customization or development services. You can always rely on a professional WordPress development company for it offers 24/7 WordPress support services.

· WooCommerce

WooCommerce plugin is an ideal option if you want to sell anything through your website. WooCommerce comes with extended shipping options such as free shipping, local pickups, discount rates, and many more. It also offers various payment options such as cheques, cash on delivery, or PayPal for hassle-free checkouts. With WooCommerce, you can sell anything, from physical products to digital products such as event tickets, software, and service plans. By proving multiple options to your customers, you'll be able to increase your e-commerce sales.

WooCommerce is a Freemium plugin.

Best WordPress Plugin for Social Media

Content sharing on social media platforms can drive tremendous traffic to your website and help you increase your conversion rate. Therefore, you must make it easy for your visitors to share your content with others. This can be done using a WordPress plugin.

· Social Icons

Social media marketing plays a pivotal role in content marketing strategies. In order to steer your social media marketing efforts in the right direction, you can use a social media WordPress plugin such as Social Icons.

Social Icons is a free WordPress plugin that helps you integrate popular social media icons on your website. You can easily add social media icons to a webpage or a post using widgets or shortcodes. The plugin is simple, user-friendly, and supports more than 100 popular social media platforms. You just need to install the plugin and add social media icons in an impressive layout.

You can also leverage WordPress plugin customization with Social Icons as you can easily resize icons, create square, rounded or grayscale background icon layouts, and do many more. You can do this by the drag-and-drop feature offered by the plugin.

Best WordPress Plugins for User Registration

You can use WordPress plugins to create standard user registration forms for your users to sign-up, login, or make payments more easily.

· User Registration

WordPress user registration is a core feature that you won't miss in any case. When you install WordPress, a "Register" feature is available by default which can be enabled from WordPress dashboard using the following steps:

  • Visit WP admin > Settings > General
  • Check on the "Anyone can register"
  • Once it is enabled, you can find a register option on your WordPress login page.

You can also use the WordPress User Registration plugin which is a simple and user-friendly way to login to your account. It is a drag-and-drop plugin that can help you create a beautiful front-end user registration form within a couple of minutes. The main features of this free-to-download plugin include unlimited registration forms, multi-column support, ReCaptcha support, email notifications, and more. You can upgrade to a premium version for additional features.

Go with WordPress Plugin Customization to Fulfill All Your Needs

WordPress.org is an exquisite hub of a diverse range of WordPress plugins. If you want to turn your WordPress website into a well-lubricated machine, you can add these essential WordPress plugins to your site and enhance the functionalities of your website. These WordPress plugins serve a general purpose for all types and sizes of businesses. If you're seeking more powerful WordPress plugins that can fulfill your unique requirements, you should consider investing WordPress plugin customization or development services. The best way to get the job done is by hiring a professional WordPress development company for its expert WordPress support services. When you hire WordPress experts, you can discuss your unique requirements for WordPress plugin customization with them and they can develop the best WordPress plugins tailored to meet all your needs.

© 2020 Anthony Garfield. All rights reserved.
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