As the world’s most popular content management system, WordPress comes with a huge range of additional features that web developers of all experience levels can make use of. One of the most useful features is the ability to quickly and easily install plugins on your site.
Although plugins can be extremely useful when used correctly, they can come with their own set of problems. They can slow your website down and impact the user experience, which means that it’s important to make sure that you choose your plugins carefully.
With this in mind, we’ve put together a list of our favourite WordPress plugins for the average website owner. Consider installing the following on your site:
Yoast SEO
Advice from experienced professional Perth SEO company Oxygen Marketing says that SEO, or search engine optimisation, can be a difficult and tedious task for the average web developer. A lot of amateur web developers don’t have a lot of SEO knowledge or experience, which makes a plugin like Yoast SEO extremely valuable.
Basically, Yoast SEO is installed on your WordPress dashboard, allowing you to make sure that you get the most out of every single post that you add to your site. It looks at things like keyword use, meta tags and meta descriptions. It also analyses the readability of written content to make sure that it’s well written and likely to resonate with your website visitors.
MailChimp
Managing your email list can be difficult, especially if you get more than a few subscribers. There are plenty of different plugins out there that are designed to help you get the most out of your email subscribers, but MailChimp is arguably one of the best.
MailChimp lets you create custom mailing lists, helps you easily manage your subscribers and even comes with fancy opt-in forms that you can add to your website. It also comes complete with a range of email templates, allowing you to start email marketing immediately!
Google XML Sitemaps
Having a good sitemap is important for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes. Although a lot of WordPress themes come complete with built in sitemaps, a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps will make sure that your sitemap is optimised for search engine crawler bots.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links can hurt your website in all sorts of ways. They will drive visitors away from your website, especially if you’ve got more than a few. They can also impact your SEO score, and therefore your search engine ranking. A plugin like Broken Link Checker will analyse your website periodically to make sure that you don’t have any harmful broken links.
Final Word
Plugins are extremely useful for anyone trying to build a website on WordPress. They come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, and you can pretty much find a plugin for every purpose imaginable. If you’re building your own WordPress website, then consider installing a few of the most popular plugins.