Published on December 13th, 2022 | by Sunit Nandi

5 Essential Plugins Your WordPress Site Should Have By Now

WordPress is a widely used open-source content management system (CMS). It offers users a diverse range of plugins to make building a website easier, without needing coding experience. They can benefit your website in different ways, including optimizing speed, enhancing performance, and promoting customer satisfaction.

Nevertheless, limiting the number of plugins to only those that improve your WordPress site’s functionality is advisable. This is because having too many of them minimizes performance and makes your site look bloated. Additionally, not all plugins provide security to your site, as some increase its vulnerability to security threats.

This article lists the five essential plugins your WordPress site needs, as well as their benefits. Stick around to know more.

5 Crucial Plugins To Install On Your WordPress Site

WordPress has different plugins, each with a different function. For example, the WordPress translation plugin is used to translate your content inside your web structure.

Plugins help maintain your site’s functionality, boost performance, and grow your audience. Numerous types exist in the market today. Nonetheless, only a select few can benefit your site. These include:

1. Yoast SEO

This popular WordPress plugin enhances your site’s SEO (site engine optimization). Some of its features are keyword optimization and meta description analysis. For example, it allows you to visualize how your keyword will perform on search engines so you can modify it to your satisfaction before publishing a post.

For example, it calculates keyword density in your content and notifies you when it’s too low, ensuring it doesn’t affect your SEO. Similarly, it evaluates the use of the focus keyword in your content, such as in alt attributes for images, subheadings, the SEO title, and the URL. Focus keywords are essential in improving your content’s ranking on search engines. Therefore, this analysis helps you make the necessary adjustments to ensure your ranking isn’t compromised.

Additionally, Yoast SEO enables you to alter your meta description to help improve your SEO and bring more traffic to your website. For example, it helps you maintain your meta description within the appropriate length to retain its appeal to your target audience. The plugin also evaluates the use of the focus keyword in the meta description, which is essential in enhancing your SEO.

The plugin also includes a readability score that allows you to see your content’s ranking in terms of its comprehensibility. Therefore, when the score is below the recommended one, you can make the necessary adjustments to improve it before publishing your post.

Furthermore, the plugin analyzes the use of inbound and outbound links within your content. Inbound links, also called external links, direct users from other websites to your website, increasing traffic. These links signify that your website contains useful, high-quality content, thus, increasing your search engine ranking.

In contrast, outbound links point your site’s visitors to other websites, enabling them to find more information on your subject of discussion. Therefore, using such links supplements your content and guides your visitors to the best information sources, building trust and recognition. They also help search engines understand your website better, consequently improving your ranking.

The great thing about this plugin is that all these features are available in the free version. Therefore, you don’t need to pay for a premium account whenever you want to boost your website’s performance. This makes Yoast SEO an efficient and cost-effective plugin for both beginner and experienced individuals.

2. Google Site Kit

Google Site Kit is an essential WordPress plugin, especially if you use Google products and services, like AdSense, Analytics, and Tag Manager.

Initially, using Google Analytics required the use third-party plugins, such as OptinMonster and MonsterInsights. Nonetheless, this plugin has reduced the need for third-party plugins whenever you want to add any Google product or service to WordPress. Consequently, this minimizes costs as some third-party plugins operate under premium plans, unlike Google Site Kit.

One feature you can access by using Google Site Kit is AdSense revenue reports. If you’ve monetized your site using AdSense, you can use this plugin to integrate your account with the site. This enables you to easily monitor your earnings and access performance reports directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Google Site Kit also integrates with your Google Analytics account to help you track your statistics from your WordPress dashboard. This saves time as you no longer have to keep logging into your account to access these data. You can check visitor analytics, as well as the total clicks, impressions, and activities on your posts and pages in one place.

In addition, Google Site Kit is fitted with Google Tag Manager, making it easy to integrate the latter with the former. Consequently, this allows you to manage your tags in the same place, saving you time and energy. This, in turn, streamlines registering with new Google products or services, as you no longer have to paste codes in your header section.

More notable in Google Site Kit’s list of essential features is the per-page insights. This function helps you monitor data for each post or page. For instance, once you have the plugin installed, viewing the performance of specific posts will be much easier. That’s because visiting the URL of a particular post will show you its statistics, including visitor counts, and total impressions and clicks.

3. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet Anti-Spam is a built-in WordPress plugin designed to filter spam on your site. However, using it requires you to activate it. The activation guidelines are quite simple.

Popular websites tend to have a higher percentage of spam in their comments. While moderating them is an option, it can be time-consuming and repetitive if your site attracts many visitors. Additionally, manual moderation is prone to errors, which is why an automated spam filter plugin, like Akismet, works best. This plugin is highly recommended for numerous reasons.

For one, it’s quick and easy to set up because it’s pre-installed and only needs to be activated to start functioning. Secondly, Akismet is reliable based on its huge database and the number of spam it’s filtered to date. In addition, the plugin functions automatically, meaning that your involvement once activated is minimal, exemplifying its efficiency.

Furthermore, the plugin’s status history allows you to track statistics of all identified and cleared spam. It’s also convenient in that it provides an analysis of both monthly and yearly data. More significantly, Akismet is integrated with other crucial plugins, like Jetpack and Contact Form 7, further enhancing your site’s performance.

Jetpack boosts your site’s security and performance. On the other hand, Contact Form 7 is a tool that enables you to organize multiple contact forms and customize them or the mail content.

4. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is a plugin that automatically backs up your files and data. Then, if something happens to your site and you lose your data, it ensures your original data are restored. UpdraftPlus is one of the most efficient backup plugins there are, with over three million active installations.

One feature that makes it so efficient is its ability to back up data to more than one cloud option, which include Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, Dropbox, Openstack Swift, and Updraft Vault. Another feature of this plugin that makes it worth your time is its high speed, which promotes efficiency because fewer server resources are used. Additionally, you can restore the backup with a single click if you ever lose your data.

Besides safeguarding your data, UpdraftPlus minimizes financial loss and protects your reputation, especially if you’re running an e-commerce website.

More importantly, the backup process is automated, saving you time that’d otherwise be spent creating manual backups.

5. All In One SEO

All in One SEO, abbreviated as AISEO, is another popular WordPress plugin due to its comprehensive SEO features, including readability improver, copywriting SEO, and content paraphrasing.

The readability improver tool works similarly to the readability score for Yoast SEO. This tool enables you to evaluate the ease or difficulty your site visitors may experience when reading your content. Consequently, you can use such insights to make changes to fit their needs.

Similarly, copywriting SEO enables site users to develop SEO-friendly headlines, product captions and descriptions, carousel ads, and Google Ads. This feature is available for both free and paid AISEO plans.

Additionally, AISEO’s content paraphrasing tool allows you to modify the structure of your content to enhance SEO without affecting its meaning. This ensures that the posts you publish are unique and plagiarism-free. This also helps search engines associate your site with high-quality content, which increases its visibility and enhances website traffic.

Winding Up

WordPress is a popular open-source content management system that offers a wide range of plugins to make building websites easier. For starters, Yoast SEO and All in One SEO, as their names imply, are great for enhancing your site’s SEO. The free versions of both have features that can boost your site’s performance without needing you to upgrade your plan.

In addition, Google Site Kit enables you to access all your Google products and services from the same place, saving you time.

Furthermore, Akismet is an efficient tool that upholds your site’s credibility and reputation by automatically filtering spam content. More significantly, UpdraftPlus is an essential backup plugin that backs up your data and securely stores them in case your server crashes, and you accidentally lose vital information.

Above all else, it’s advisable that you choose your plugins based on the needs of your site for maximum efficiency.

Tags: essential plugins, have by now, WordPress

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.