Important Plugins for Any WordPress Site

While many competitors have entered the hosting market over the years, WordPress continues to be the world’s most popular content management system. Developers tend to prefer WordPress sites for their customizability and the staggering variety of plugins for site optimization.

Whether you are starting a humble blog or trying to build out a brick-and-mortar business’ online presence, WordPress and its myriad plugins are almost always a good bet. With that in mind, below are some of the most important plugins that any WordPress site should have.

Simply Schedule 

Simply Schedule Appointments is a simple appointment scheduling plugin that, according to WordPress.org, is active on thousands of sites and has a flawless 5-star rating. Read its reviews, and you will see why so many online business owners rely on it for communication with their customers.

Simply Schedule Appointments makes it simple to get started with your first appointment scheduling form with a five-minute setup process. You can offer a variety of services, set durations and buffer times, and add numerous employees, among other things. Alternatively, consider a third-party scheduling software and integration for your site. It is important to note that some online businesses and services do better with different kinds of scheduling applications.

Yoast SEO

Yoast is the go-to SEO optimization plugin for most WordPress users because of how easy it is to use and see results. It aids in the optimization of your website for search engines by helping you perfect your content’s readability, keyword density, title, meta description, targeted keywords, and much more with its content analysis tool. Yoast SEO is one of the most powerful SEO tools available to WordPress site owners.

If you have or are planning on building out a blog for your website, Yoast does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. As you write out your content, Yoast lets you know where it is lacking and what needs to be added, changed or removed in order for you to cross off all of the important SEO best practices while you create. Blogs are the norm for most businesses across all industries, and they provide a powerful SEO platform that is easy and cost-effective to implement.

WPForms

WPForms is a simple and powerful drag-and-drop WordPress form builder. Without needing to hire and pay for a costly developer, WPForms allows you to create attractive contact forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site in minutes.

Every business website needs at least one type of form, whether it is so that customers can get in touch with you, schedule appointments or let your customer service team know how to best serve an individual in a live chat. There are plenty of forms plugins out there, but WPForms continues to be one of the most widely used and downloaded.

Jetpack

There are many reasons to have Jetpack, but the primary one is undoubtedly its ability to cut down on the total number of plugins you need to install. WordPress is a powerful CMS with a plethora of capabilities. While a premium WordPress theme will usually improve those capabilities by including a lot of carefully selected plugins, site owners still usually need a variety of additional ones in order to provide all of the nitty-gritty capabilities their website ultimately needs.

The WordPress Jetpack plugin comes jam-packed with such features to cut out a bunch of the plugin developer middlemen, so you don’t have to install a new plugin for every new feature you want for your website. Another benefit of fewer plugins is fewer cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Elementor

With so many options and ways to build a website, Elementor can be a little overwhelming to use at first. Fortunately, it is ultimately quite simple, and there are nearly unlimited text and video tutorials on places like YouTube that demonstrate how to use the program’s essentials.

If you sign up for a trial account, you can always contact a customer representative via email if you have more specific questions. If you have a premium subscription, you get the added benefit of access to live support from Elementor professionals at any time, as well as a greatly expanded list of drag-and-drop web design options.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is the most comprehensive and fastest WordPress speed optimization plugin available. It enhances your site’s user experience by boosting server performance, caching every component of your site, lowering download times, and integrating with a content delivery network while maintaining transparency. If you want to give site visitors the fastest browsing experience possible, you need to cache data, and W3 Total Cache is the go-to caching plugin.

Conclusion 

It can be hard to determine which WordPress plugins to download for your site, and there are endless lists out there with suggestions and recommendations. While it is impractical and potentially damaging to your SEO to download all of them (an excess of plugins can slow your site down considerably), there is plenty of overlap among those lists regarding which ones are truly essential. Above are 6 of the most recurring recommendations and ones which will set your site up for optimum performance and user-friendliness.