Pushleads' Recommended Plugins for WordPress
Learn about our favorite WordPress plugins and how they can help you make your site easier to maintain, more user-friendly, more accessible, and more secure with just a few clicks. When asking the experts “What are the recommended plugins for WordPress?” These listed here, are among the very most loved in the industry.
If you’ve never installed a plugin on your website and want some help, no worries, we’ve got you covered.
All-In-One WP Migration
To begin, we have Servmask’s All-in-One WP Migration, which is the #1 plugin we can’t live without.
We’ve used dozens of solutions to backup and migrate sites during our years working in the WordPress arena. We can confidently say that after having tested them all, no other backup and migrating solution is as simple to use and reliable as All-in-One WP migration.
You may build a backup with one click and download it to your computer using All-in-One WP migration. You can also save it to your preferred cloud storage site (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.). If something goes wrong with your site, you can restore it from your backup. It can also be used to transfer a website to a new server.
So, if you aren’t backing up your WordPress site on a regular basis, we strongly advise you to install All-in-One WP Migration right away. We use this plugin to back up every site we build before making any updates or changes, and we strongly advise you to do the same. For us, peace of mind for the price of a few clicks seems like the best deal!
Yoast
Yoast SEO by Team Yoast is another plugin that we use on practically every website we maintain. For those unfamiliar, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization,” and it is the process of getting your website to appear in Google’s search results.
If you’ve ever tried to improve your Google ranking, you know how difficult it is.
If you have a WordPress site, thankfully, Yoast provides a suite of tools (for free!) that make the art of Google ranking easier. Attempting to rank on Google without Yoast may be likened to sketching freehand. With Yoast, ranking on Google is like drawing with a stencil. It’s still a lot of work, but with the aid, it’s a lot simpler.
Yoast generates complicated “Site Maps” for you when you install it, which you can submit to Google using the Google Search Console. These maps aid in the discovery of your pages by Google’s ranking robots. Yoast also lets you simply customize your “Meta Title” and “Meta Description” so you can manage how your listings appear on Google.
In addition to those fundamental features, Yoast allows you to specify keywords for which each page should rank. Yoast analyzes your content for SEO and readability after learning your goal and suggests actionable adjustments to help you achieve it. Yoast assigns a green, yellow, or red dot to each article to help you understand your SEO and readability analysis. Green indicates that your material is excellent, yellow indicates that it is adequate, and red indicates that it “needs improvement.” We believe that this system exemplifies the term “user-friendly.”
The functions listed above are the ones we like best about Yoast, but they do so much more! They provide a website full of useful information for using Yoast and enhancing your SEO skills in general.
All of this is to imply that if you aren’t already using an SEO plugin, we strongly advise you to do so right now!
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a great example of WordPress’s power. You may create as many forms as you want using Contact Form 7 (also known as CF7) and translate them into as many languages as you want. Aside from the essentials, CF7 also has spam filtering, which, if you’ve ever had a contact form on your website, you know is a must-have tool.
Aside from its trustworthy core features, CF7 was created by a trusted member of the WordPress community and is completely free to use. Because this plugin is available for free, there is no need to add extra complexity to its core.
The fact that forms come unstyled is an illustration of how the absence of complexity is advantageous. When using CF7, unstyled means that forms will use your theme’s stylistic guidelines and won’t slow down your site with unneeded CSS and JavaScript.
To compensate for the absence of functionality that some users who require complicated forms may consider a disadvantage, Contact Form 7 emphasizes its extensibility. Extensible indicates that additional plugins can extend the functionality of CF7.
When comparing CF7 to other form plugins, one can see how extensible it is. Other premium form plugins will save form submissions in your WordPress admin panel as well as send you an email with the submission. By default, Contact Form 7 does not provide a capability for storing submissions. Instead, you can easily install the ‘Flamingo’ plugin, which will save your entries for you. The same may be said for just about any other feature you’d like to include in your website’s forms.
All of this is to suggest that if you’re looking for a free, dependable contact form solution for your website, we strongly advise you to install Contact Form 7 right away!
WooCommerce
Many people may not even realize WooCommerce is a plugin because it is so powerful. WordPress is the foundation for WooCommerce, the world’s most popular e-commerce platform. This fact brings with it the reality that WooCommerce is fantastic for many of the same reasons that WordPress is.
We particularly like WooCommerce since it allows anyone with an existing WordPress site to install it (for free) and start selling online in minutes. WooCommerce is extremely simple to set up for two reasons. One advantage is that it is supported by many popular themes, allowing your store to blend in with the rest of your website. The other reason is that WooCommerce offers one of the most user-friendly setup wizards ever devised. The wizard will ask for a few key details, and once you provide them, your store will be ready to sell.
Aside from being simple to set up, WooCommerce has a plethora of amazing plugins that extend its functionality. WooCommerce Payments, for example, WooCommerce’s default payment gateway, supports over 100 payment alternatives, including Stripe, PayPal, and Square. WooCommerce Payments, on the other hand, cannot help you accept Bitcoin. Fortunately, there is a slew of free plugins that can help you add this feature to your store. The same can be said for nearly any other e-commerce feature you can think of.
We also like WooCommerce because it’s an open-source plugin for an open-source platform, which means you have complete control over your store’s content and data. This is in contrast to other prominent e-commerce platforms like Shopify, which owns every component of your store and effectively rents it to you for the duration of its existence. Shopify’s strategy works for many people, and we like their service, but the importance of owning your own store should not be overlooked.
Smush
Smush has a playful name and image, but the work it undertakes is serious. Image enhancement.
You might be wondering what exactly image optimization is and why it’s such a big deal. Image optimization entails a number of steps, but the end effect is faster website loading. Making your pages load faster is the most important thing you can do to enhance your Google ranking and raise your conversion rates on your site if they take longer than 3 seconds to load.
Smush helps your pages load faster by optimizing images, as we said in our list of reasons why we adore the plugin. How does it accomplish this? Most importantly, it reduces the size of your website’s image files without sacrificing image quality. While a variety of factors contribute to sluggish website loading, large file sizes are the most common culprit. When someone views your website, they must download the entire page’s content. Downloading a page from your site could take the same amount of time as downloading an album from iTunes if your photos are large, uncompressed files (2-5 MB). When you compress them, it’s as if you’re downloading a single song.
Smush has other tricks up its sleeve for optimizing photos on your pages, in addition to making your page size lower for speedier page load times. Smush, in particular, features an easy-to-use sluggish loading feature. Lazy loading allows pages to load completely while only downloading and displaying pictures that viewers should see. It loads fresh photos when visitors navigate down the website, and new images appear on the screen. This feature lets users visit multiple pages on your site without having to view each one individually.
Today is a fantastic day to start optimizing images on your website if you haven’t already. With just 10 minutes of installation and setup time, you can potentially cut seconds off your website load times. We assure you that the time you spend setting up Smush will be well worth it.
Thank you for stopping by today! If you enjoyed this post, you may also like: Research Based Tips for Effective Video Marketing
If you are interested in a FREE consultation, give us a call, or fill out the contact form, so we can set up a time to chat. If you are wanting to grow your business, then partner with the experts at Pushleads! We’ll help you get there! We want you to Be Visible & Grow!
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