Every business needs a website. But, the problem is that websites are not simple things. Every website needs four things to function efficiently and fulfill its objective. One the design should look awesome, secondly, your visitors should be able to browse through it easily, thirdly it needs to be optimized for search engines and finally, it needs protection from spammers. So, how can you manage all this? You can use wordpress and manage it. WordPress is the most popular system for managing your wordpress website development content. The popularity of the wordpress platform can be gauged from the fact that users around the world publish 17 posts on it every second.
Six Important And Free WordPress Plugins Your WordPress Website Needs
Here are six important and free plugins that will help your wordpress website function effectively:
- Jetpack
There are a number of plugins available. However, not all of them are useful for you. If you load more than required on your website, it will become slower. Jetpack as a plugin provides several features at one location. Although, this plugin has over four million active users, many wordpress users still do not understand it. You can start thinking of Jetpack as the ultimate toolkit for your wordpress website. It has in it tools to design your website, track your statistics, improve social sharing and prevent attacks. Additionally, you also have the option of adding advanced features like spam protection, daily backups and SEO tools.
- Yoast SEO
Everybody wishes that their website should rank higher on the search engine rankings. But, SEO is a very complex subject. However, with Yoast SEO plugin on-page SEO efforts become a breeze. This powerful plug-in allows you to select one particular keyword and optimize your website page around it. The plug-in uses a simple traffic-light system to break down the SEO and it gives you tips on how to improve the page. Due to all this, Yoast SEO is among the most popular wordpress plugins available. There is also a premium version with extra functions, which allows users to optimize their page for up to five keywords together.
- Google XML sitemaps
Search engines help index your site. To do this well they need a sitemap. Sitemaps help search engines crawl and index your site efficiently. Without a sitemap, your ranking will take a beating and the information displayed on your site may become outdated. Google XML sitemaps does not let this happen. This plugin creates a sitemap of your site and makes it compatible with Google, Bing and Yahoo. This plug-in also helps you inform search engines about the changes to your sitemap. Whenever you update your website, the plug-in will notify the search engines. This plug-in is a cool time saver and a must have plug-in for any site.
- Akismet
Everybody hates spam, however, if you want to deal with software and internet, spam is inevitable. As soon as your wordpress site gets live, spam comments will start showing up. Much of these comments will sound and look genuine. The spam comments clog up your site and render it bad for users. If this is not dealt with properly, there is a risk of losing readers and damaging one’s brand. However, the Akismet plugin takes care of this. This is the official anti-spam wordpress plugin made by Automatic, a wordpress parent company. This is the free version. If you update to a premium plan, then you will get added security.
- WP super cache
The WP super cache plug-in is elemental in making your webpage load faster. A cache is a location where data is temporarily stored. Your browser will store files from sites you have visited earlier so that if you want to visit them once again, you can do so fast. The WP super cache creates static pages of your site, which are then served. This will obviate the need to process full PHP scripts. This will reduce page serving time and loading time for your website without caching your page. There are many features, however, with this plug-in, if you just turn the caching feature on, you will have saved your site’s load times.
- Smush image compression
Content can become dry without images. Most marketers said that visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, which is second only to blogging. But, putting high quality images on your site or webpage, will make it slow to load. Therefore, you are in a dilemma. Images are important however, inserting them will increase site load time. You manually compressing each image and inserting it on your site to remedy this. However, this will take a lot of time. This is where Smush plugin comes into the picture. This plugin compresses and optimizes your images automatically. Install the Smush plugin so that you can continue publishing visual content on your site without reducing its page load time.
Conclusion
These plugins are elemental in reducing page load times of numerous websites, which we see on the internet. It will not be wrong to say that they are necessary for any website.
Author Bio:
Jade Gardner is a Marketing Manager a Hire Php Developer. She is a resident of United Kingdom. Jade is also an experienced Php developer. She also likes to share her thoughts , cms development, Top WordPress Development Company, and web development techniques.
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