Do you have a WordPress website? Here are the five must have plugins for 2017. Please read till the end, I have got a bonus suggestion for you. It will definitely be helpful to you. The rich collection of plugins and themes makes the WordPress widely popular CMS framework on the internet.
WordPress has 58% of market share compared to all other CMS frameworks like Joomla, drupal and others.
Here are the top six my personal favorite plugins you may consider installing on your WordPress website:
1. Yoast SEO
2. Contactform7
3. W3 Total cache
4. Wordfence
5. Akismet
6. Updraft
1 Yoast SEO
In my honest opinion the SEO is very hyped term. If you are just starting up and very much concerned about SEO, Yoast SEO plugin may help.
There are two main things you may need to know about SEO, on page SEO and off page SEO. Having Yoast plugin installed solves your on page SEO problem efficiently.
If you are writing a good quality content and insightful blogs or article then on page seo is what you need to care about initially.
As you can see from the plugin image, it has a strong indicator for your content’s SEO score. The score is indicated in form of Red, Yellow, and Green lights.
The Red is the bad SEO signal, Yellow is ok you can take action or you can go ahead and publish the content. Whereas the Green signals the good SEO score for the page.
The plugin helps you create SEO friendly title, slug, description, focus keyword, content optimization, readability, twitter card and open graph tag optimization and some other functionality.
2 Contactform7
WordPress is indeed a powerful CMS framework but it is missing some of the common features like contact forms.
Consider a case: You are the owner of X product company. You get a beautiful website with elegant product display and information. People seem loving your product(s) but they find no way to send direct inquiry from your website! What’s the use of such website?
The Contactform7 is there to bridge that gap. It’s one of the most easiest contact form generation plugin in WordPress plugins collection.
Along with easy setup and integration process it offers many customizations. You can
Select the fields to display on contact form, make a field required or optional, change your mailing information, apply custom styling, add Google captcha, and create any number of contact form you want.
3 W3 Total Cache
Faster loading website increase the user experience. We all love the faster loading websites and so does the search engine. Faster loading websites gets an extra edge in search rankings.
This is one of the widely used and trending plugins of the year 2016. It comes with lots of features and customization.
What it basically does is it creates the cached version of your page/post for a once. Whenever the site receives the subsequent request for the page/post, instead of fetching data from database, it server the cached version directly.
Additionally, it makes use of client browser caching. Meaning it request client browsers to cache the images and other static resources for some time(You can define).
It helps you lower the resource request and database trips and thereby it helps your website load faster.
4 Wordfence
Security if our first concern and Wordfence is one of the best security plugin available on WordPress.
It’s a freemium plugin. Meaning the basic security features are covered under the free tire but you may need to spend few bucks to get some extra functionalities and security features.
WordPress is the soft target for hackers. Plugins like this may help you add an extra layer of security to your website.
It help you keep form a firewall over your website, it keeps the bad boats away, scan your files for malwares and keeps you updated on latest security updates. The plugin is actively developed and maintained. You may expect timely updates.
5 Akismet
Spammers are everywhere, they are not just in your email inbox. They do appear on your WordPress website as well.
How if you manually need to delete all those hundreds of comments every single day? It would be a tiring and frustrating process.
Akismet is there to save you from this situation. This plugin is from Automatic the original creator WordPress framework itself.
The free tire of this service should be more than enough for your website. It keep those spam comments out of your sight. If you choose it directly delete those spam comments.
In most cases, a WordPress framework ships with this plugin installed by default. You just need to create an account and activate the plugin. It handles the rest.
6 Updraftplus
As mentioned earlier, Updraftplus is an extra bonus plugin suggestion form our side. Thank you for reading the article this further.
In experience majority of the WordPress website owners never take backup of their website. It’s like allowing someone to mess you years of effort without any restoration option!
The backup is a repetitive and boring process. And this is the reason why users don’t generally take backup of their website.
How if this process can be automated? How if a plugin can makes the complete scheduled backup task an automated process?
Well, UpdraftPlus do it for you, for free! They do have premium option available for cloud storage and some extra functionality. But the core automated backup system is free.
The beauty of this plugin is that it allows you to configure your preferred cloud storage service for your backups. All you website’s backup automatically stored on your cloud server.
Conclusion:
WordPress is the best CMS framework for building your website. We have suggested five plugins that will make your website feature rich, faster, secure and fault tolerant. Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
