If you run a WordPress website or a WordPress consultancy service, then you must be using a couple of plugins to add functionality and design to your website or that of your clients. As mentioned above, plugins help in adding functionality without necessarily adding code snippets to your CSS or HTML.
In this article, I will be listing the 7 essential WordPress plugins I use for my website and that of my clients.
Note: These are the general plugins I use and have not included plugins for eCommerce and complex sites. If you would be interested in a more comprehensive list, comment down below.
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Now let’s get into it.
Updraft is a backup plugin that allows you to schedule regular backups to your Google Drive. Scheduling backups is a crucial aspect of website design. This ensures that in the event your website crashes, you have a saved copy of your website files that you can restore. The free version of this plugin is more than enough.
Elementor is the best drag and drop page builder on the market. The Elementor page builder is great for both beginner designers as well as the advanced ones. It provides a host of templates and features such as customizable forms and widgets.
As they state on their website, they are the only complete design platform to offer pixel perfect design, yet produces 100% clean code.
The free version is amazing but if you want more features and control, the paid version would be the best option.
For the paid version, you can add CSS code to change the layout and design of your pages. They added an absolute positioning feature that allows you to move a widget to any position on the page. Pretty cool.
This plugin helps you push the SSL certificate on your site. Once you purchase the certificate, the plugin will automatically detect your settings and will configure your site to run over https.
The plugin comes in handy when you have purchased the SSL certificate but you still cannot see the green padlock sign or the word ‘secure’ at the address bar of your site.
Another great plugin is Yoast SEO.
Yoast is an SEO plugin that helps with optimizing your website for search engines such as Google. It allows you to add Title tags, meta descriptions and also gives you a preview of how your web pages will look like on both desktop and mobile on the search engine results page.
Yoast also helps in creating and editing of your robot.txt file.
SiteKit is a new plugin developed by Google. WordPress websites account for more than 38% of all the websites in the world. Google being Google, they decided to want a piece of the pie and therefore developed a plugin that enables WordPress users to view information from their other applications such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console on the WordPress dashboard.
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As the name suggests, duplicate post allows you to clone a page or a post with just a single click.
By default, WordPress does not provide functionality for duplicating or cloning a page.
for more than 38% of all the websites in the world. Google being Google, they decided to want a piece of the pie and therefore developed a plugin that enables WordPress users to view information from their other applications such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console on the WordPress dashboard.
The seventh plugin is a bonus: WP Rocket.
This is a paid plugin that helps you speed up your site through page caching, compressing and minification of some website files, browser caching among other features.
Page speed is a ranking factor according to Google and other search engines.
Therefore, ensuring that your users have a smooth experience through fast page loading is essential to rank higher in Google.
