Are you on the hunt for the best WordPress plugins to make your website look and function like you want it to? You could spend hours browsing the plugins stored in the WordPress database, or you could check out our top 9 hand-picked plugins that are among the best you’ll find for your site.
What are the Best WordPress Plugins to Add to My Site?
The following plugins are must-have tools that bring functionality, simplicity, and user-friendliness to your WordPress site:
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is an absolute essential for any WordPress site, regardless of what type of website you own. This tool targets key areas of SEO to ensure that your site’s content is up to par when it comes to searchability on the web. Yoast has convenient “green light” indicators that tell you if your content is readable, uses enough keywords, has optimized images, and uses the best SEO practices. It’s never been easier to make sure your site is ready for Google.
2. Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress
Google Analytics is one of the most comprehensive analytics tools you can have for your site. It tracks how many visitors come to your website, how they get there, how long they stay, what actions they take on your site, and several other factors that help you plan your content, navigation, and more. The Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress plugin places valuable information about how your audience is interacting with your site within your WordPress dashboard. You can dive deeper into page views and users, bounce rate, pages per session, top traffic sources, and more without switching between browsers or tools.
3. WooCommerce
If you’re building an eCommerce site on WordPress, then WooCommerce should become your go-to plugin to set up shop easily. It gives you the tools you need to transform your site into an online store, like product additions, payment options, order management, and more. WooCommerce also works with Extensions to customize every facet of your online shop, from appointment bookings to email marketing.
4. CSS Hero
Dabbling in WordPress code is not something that every site owner can or wants to tackle. That’s why there’s CSS Hero, a plugin that adds a simple, yet incredibly functional, interface to WordPress that allows you to customize the look of your site. Change colors, fonts, paragraph styles, and more with just a few clicks of your mouse. The best part is that it makes the changes live, so you don’t have to keep saving and previewing to view the changes you’ve made.
5. Akismet
Akismet has consistently made it to the top of many lists of the best WordPress plugins over the years because of its ability to keep spam away from your site. Spam comments can affect your SEO negatively, make your website look unprofessional, and may prevent real people from leaving comments. This tool filters spam comments from your WordPress site without them ever appearing on your content, allowing you to review and delete them in bulk instead of manually going through each one.
6. WP Rocket
Did you know that your page loading speed affects your site’s SEO? That’s because people are less willing to wait around for your site to load than they are to hop over to another faster-loading site to find what they need. WP Rocket can fix that problem by automatically caching your site’s pages and using that information to preload elements of your website, giving visitors a quicker loading experience.
7. ShareThis Share Buttons Plugin for WordPress
No website is complete without share buttons that allow visitors to share its content with their social media followers, email list, or wherever else they want to share it. Our Share Buttons Plugin for WordPress is incredibly easy to install and free to use. Choose from more than 35 popular social media platforms and easily customize the alignment, shape, and size of the buttons to align with your site’s design. You can even choose where you want to display them on your pages or blog posts.
8. Elementor Page Builder
Not into building a theme from scratch or tweaking code to get your site to look how you want it to? Try the Elementor Page Builder, a plugin that works seamlessly with almost any WordPress theme to allow drag-and-drop editing. Create landing pages from scratch, make templates to use later, and customize your current theme to your heart’s content.
9. Pretty Links
If you use affiliate marketing as a monetization strategy, you should consider adding the Pretty Links plugin to your WordPress dashboard. You can use it to create shorter, better-looking links for added professionalism. The plugin also stores all the affiliate links you create for easy access later if you need to use them multiple times in your content.
The plugins above can make your website completely functional from the get-go so that your visitors can benefit from your full website experience. Website analytics is a must for any WordPress website, but switching back and forth between tools or browser windows is time-consuming and disrupts your workflow. Install our Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress plugin to put essential website and visitor data at your fingertips – right within your WordPress dashboard!
