When it comes to WordPress website design, plugins can help save you a lot of time and effort. They can add functionality, improve user experience, and streamline your workflow, alongside providing many other benefits.
In this post, we’ll cover 10 essential plugins that we think every WordPress website should have.
- Yoast SEO: SEO is crucial for improving your website’s visibility on search engines, and is our SEO plugin of choice. Yoast SEO helps you optimise your content for better rankings with its user-friendly interface and handy suggestions.
- WooCommerce: If you’re running an e-commerce website, WooCommerce is a must-have plugin. It allows you to set up an online store with ease, manage products, accept payments, and more. We use WooCommerce for all our e-commerce sites and it’s powerful, capable of hosting many thousands of products and millions of pound in sales.
- Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms is a powerful drag-and-drop form builder that lets you create contact forms, registration forms, surveys, and more. Its intuitive interface makes form creation a breeze, and we use it on almost every site we build.
- UpdraftPlus: Don’t risk losing your hard work to a website crash. UpdraftPlus is a reliable backup plugin that automatically backs up your WordPress site and allows you to restore it with a single click. Your hosting provider should provide backups for you (ours does) but holding your own backups can only ever be a good thing.
- MonsterInsights: Understanding your website’s traffic is essential for making informed decisions. MonsterInsights integrates Google Analytics GA4 into your WordPress dashboard, providing you with valuable insights without any coding required. Add-ons are available for ecommerce tracking and Google Consent Mode, alongside over benefits such as conversion tracking.
- Akismet: Say goodbye to spam comments with Akismet. This anti-spam plugin automatically filters out spam comments, keeping your website clean and secure.
- Wordfence Security: Protect your website from hackers and malware with Wordfence Security. This all-in-one security plugin includes a firewall, malware scanner, and login security features to keep your site safe.
- Smush: Optimise your images for the web with Smush. This image compression plugin reduces image file sizes without sacrificing quality, improving your website’s loading speed and performance.
- Elementor: Take your website design to the next level with Elementor. This drag-and-drop page builder allows you to create stunning layouts and customise every aspect of your website without any coding knowledge. We mainly use the built in Gutenberg page builder, but we manage many websites for customers who come to us with Elementor, so it’s worth a look if you want to do work yourself.
- Redirection: Manage 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors with Redirection. This handy plugin helps you maintain good SEO practices by ensuring that visitors always land on the right page.