Web Design/Dev

Are you Creating a WordPress website? But do you know a WordPress website is half-done without adding WordPress plugins to it? There are ample reasons for the inclination of individuals towards WordPress, its accessibility, responsive design, SEO friendly optimization, customization, and plugins which makes it more reachable. Plugins have the power to elevate a WordPress website. There are many plugins available for you to choose from with different functionalities, but we have narrowed down the top 10 best WordPress plugins for your website. These WordPress plugins can help you grow your website to the next level. 

10 Best WordPress Plugins

1. Yoast SEO 

According to Lyfe Marketing, websites invested in SEO are getting over 50% of the total traffic across the Internet. Thus, SEO is extremely crucial for your website. The Yoast SEO plugin helps the website to reach the highest technical SEO standards and improves its readability as well. Even if you don’t have knowledge of SEO, this plugin can work as a perfect guide for you.

Pros:

• Yoast SEO is easily accessible. It helps you to identify the SEO errors and keeps a track on your keyword density. It saves your website from being blacklisted.

Cons:

• Yoast SEO, while easy to use and a great addition to your website, will not update your search engine rankings alone. Yoast SEO is not enough for optimizing your website, you need prior knowledge of SEO as well. 
• Yoast SEO doesn’t understand the intent of a keyword also. Google search algorithms are going to know when you meant to use a keyword but opted for a similar-but-not-identical term. For example, if you search “truffle cake recipes” and “best truffle cakes” you will probably get similar results. Since Yoast does not consider intent, it can get keyword density measures wrong and affect your real-life results if you do not consider intent when using Yoast.

Alternatives:

• Rankmath 
• SEO Press 
• All in one SEO Pack
• SEOPressor
• The SEO Framework

2. MonsterInsight 

MonsterInsights is a plugin that allows you to easily add, customize, and manage the Google Analytics website tracking services on your WordPress site. It is one of the essential WordPress plugins to evaluate your website performance. You can also optimize your website to increase your traffic, subscribers, and revenue according to the statistics provided by the analytics

Pros:

• Monsterinsight supports easy installation, customization, a user-friendly interface that allows you to view and analyze the data generated within the WordPress Dashboard, and the ability to import and export the data to back up your website’s analytical data. Everything will be done with your Google account and the plugin can connect to Google Analytics by connecting to Gmail.

Cons: 

• Most of the features this plugin has to offer are premium and the free version is limited to the basics. The cheapest package they have to offer starts from $99 for one website, which is not pocket friendly.

Alternatives:

• Google Analytics
• Heap
• Smartlook
• Looker

3. Floating Social 

Floating social plugin allows you to add social media floating sidebar icons which can be connected with the social media profiles of your website. It helps to increase the traffic to the business profile of your website. This plugin provides a very presentable interface that allows you to make settings for the social media icons, in context to :

• Type of icons (round and square shape)
• Animated Rotation Effect in Icons
• Shadow in icons
• Different size of social icons

Pros:

• Social Floating plugin improves your online exposure, directs your audience to your business’ social media pages, builds your social followings and keeps your site more secure and away from robots. Some blogs and businesses restrict content with a social locking tool, this helps in gaining followers as the user needs to follow to gain access. it adds more visuals to your site and gives a preview of what people can expect from your actual social page.

Cons:

• There is no disadvantage in adding floating social to your website as such. 

Social Plugins:

• Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress
• Novashare
• Social Pug
• Shareaholic
• Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons (Ultimate Sharing)

4. Sucuri or Login Lockdown

The login lockdown plug is one of the must-have plugins for the security of your website. This plugin records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt and allows you to limit the number of retry attempts when logging in per IP.  It also informs the user about the remaining retries or lockout time on the login page. Administrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the admin panel.

Pros: 

• It keeps your website secure, blocks all attacks, monitors website integrity, audit site logs, scans server-side, and services the malware cleaner. It is one of the most essential WordPress plugins, as it is responsible to guard your website.

Cons:

• There are no such drawbacks in keeping your website secure by the login lockdown plugin.

Alternatives:

• Imperva Cloud Application Security.
• Amazon CloudFront.
• Cloudflare.
• StackPath CDN.
• SiteLock.

5. Updraft Plus

One of the most important things in running an efficient website is always having a fresh backup. All the websites are vulnerable to hacking attempts, DDOS attacks, data theft and data loss. No matter how secure your website is, you are liable to any of the above attacks. UpdraftPlus simplifies backups and restoration. It backups your files and database into the cloud and restores with a single click. 

Pros:

• The updraft plus provides simple and easy to use interface, a free version, a pocket-friendly premium plan, on-demand and scheduled backups, Customizable backup options for file and databases, multiple cloud storage options for your backups, migration and cloning tools available, excellent website restoring functionality and extra features for site security available, including migrator and duplicator, automatic backups, extra backup storage destinations, and more

Cons:

• Some users complain of the complexity of using the advanced configurations. It has no lifetime updates. You have to renew licenses annually to keep getting free upgrades, add-ons, storage, and priority support

Alternatives:

• • BlogVault
  • BackupBuddy
  • BoldGrid Backup
  • BackWPup
  • Duplicator

6. Elementor

Customization of the layout of the website makes it more impressive and presentable. Elementor plugin is one of the must-have WordPress plugins with an all-in-one solution—letting you control every part of your website design in a single platform. It is a drag-and-drop page builder for WordPress. This plugin helps you create pages of your website using a visual editor. This plugin helps you create website pages using a visual editor and build dynamic websites quickly. 

Pros: 

• The core product is 100% free. It has a great user interface, extreme customization and regular updates. The global widgets are awesome.

Cons:

It has a Forced styling by default. The global vs static templates can be confusing. It lacks some marketing-oriented features and has fewer page templates than some competitors

Alternatives:

• Beaver Builder. 
• Divi Builder. 
• WPBakery Page Builder.
• Themify Builder. 
• Page Builder by SiteOrigin

7. Google XML Sitemap 

Google XML sitemap plugin is useful for indexing your website to various search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. . The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. 

It’s an essential WordPress plugin with such a sitemap that also helps improve your SEO. It makes it easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

 Pros:

• A Sitemap can list all of the URLs that you have on your website, that helps the search engines by enabling their crawlers to crawl and index those pages that the crawlers couldn’t locate previously. The priority of your webpage can be set by tapping into the optional tag in the sitemap that enables you to assign a priority to your pages. Hence, search engine crawlers can crawl and index your pages, as per the pages’ priority. There are optional tags such as “lastmod” and “changefreq” that should be used more frequently to keep the search engines informed about the changes that you’ve made to your website and the frequency at which you make the changes in your pages. Use the “lastmod” to let the crawlers know as to when the page was last modified. “changefreq” can be used to mention as to how frequently a page changes.

Cons: 

• One of the major disadvantages of using the XML Sitemaps is that when you assign priorities to your pages then not only crawlers have access to them but even your competitors can view them,which could create an unwanted surge in the competition.
• Due to the ever-evolving nature of search engines and their crawlers, it becomes an almost impossible task to keep your sitemaps young. Sitemaps generated from a database become obsolete, the moment they are crawled and indexed.

Alternatives:

• All in One SEO Pack.
• Jetpack.
• Sitemap by BestWebSoft.
• Premium SEO Pack.
• Simple Sitemap.

8. Push Engage

PushEngage is the best web push notification plugin for WordPress. It allows you to send targeted messages and announcements to your website visitors using the browser push notification technology. Push notifications are consistently a top 5 traffic source for WPBeginner. PushEngage comes with all the powerful features like drip campaigns, a/b testing, dynamic user segmentation, opt-in reminders, powerful analytics, goal tracking, and more. 

Pros:

• Visitors can subscribe to your notification with just 1 click. And no need to enter email id and other details. Push notifications deliver to visitors in real-time even when they are not on your site. Click-Through Rate (CTR) for Web Push Notifications will be 5 to 10x higher than traditional Email and will range between 10 to 40%. The ROI will be 3 to 5x higher as compared to Email. This helps the website to achieve a higher open rate. With email, the open rate is 10-20%. And with web push notifications, the open-rate is as high as 50-90%

Cons:

• There is no disadvantage in the PushEngage plugin to your website as such.

Alternatives

• Webpushr
• OneSignal
• SendPulse
• PushAlert
• iZooto

9. Uncanny Automator 

Uncanny Automator is the best WordPress automation plugin as it allows you to bind all other plugins to work together without the help of the developer. You can automate routine admin tasks and save time as it lets you connect your existing WordPress plugins to work together without writing any code.

Pros:

• Uncanny Automator has the most plugin integrations available for WordPress and easy to share and sync data between multiple sites (if you have Automator installed on each site). It allows you to turn your free forms plugins into user registration forms without extra paid addons. The Pro version supports anonymous recipes that allow you to automatically create user accounts and integrate apps using webhooks. There’s a dashboard for viewing activity logs at the recipe, trigger, and activity level. This can be a lifesaver when you’re troubleshooting an issue or testing out a new recipe. It’s well documented, and the documentation is easy to find. This includes developer-specific knowledge base articles.

Cons:

• You can’t delay or schedule triggers, copy (clone) or import/export recipes. There’s no versioning of recipes. So, you can’t revert to a previous version if needed

Alternatives: 

• Talend Data Fabric.
• Salesforce Platform.
• Celigo Integrator.io.
• Fivetran
• Adverity

10. SEMRush

SEMRush is an all-in-one marketing toolkit for the website. It comes with powerful tools to help you improve your SEO, paid traffic, social media, content & PR strategy. It also helps you gather the competitive intelligence of your competitors, so you can outrank them and dominate your industry. It helps you do keyword research, backlink audit, track brand mentions, spy on competitors, discover best-performing posts and pages on social media, ad strategy analysis, and much more. 

Pros: 

• Semrush is a one-stop solution for all your SEO, digital marketing, and business intelligence requirements. It provides an Intensive Keyword Research and lets you pick the right ones according to your niche. Except for the Pro plan by Semrush, all the plans are reasonably priced for small and midsize businesses. It provides detailed demographics of your visitors, such as age, gender, the location which helps you to offer the right products or services to them. It also helps in identifying toxic elements that can lead you to get blacklisted.

Cons:

• It doesn’t have a user-friendly interface. Some Semrush users complain about SEMrush sending out too many warnings to keep the subscribers hooked to their services, which sometimes does just the opposite. It also sends inaccurate data regarding the ad spend, export and other things. 

Alternatives:

• Advanced Web ranking
• Searchmetrics
• Serpstat
• Google Keyword Planner
• Monitor Backlink

These were the top 10 best WordPress Plugins that can assist your website to grow in a way you want. With the precise usage of these plugins, you can run a successful and thriving website. There is a web development company in India, which serves you with their web development services to build you an engaging and profitable website.