Useful WordPress Plugins We Swear By

Stephen McCance March 4, 2019

WordPress plugins are an essential element of any WordPress site. Without a (carefully selected) army of plugins behind the scenes of your site, you’re stopping it from reaching its full potential. With the right plugins, you can greatly improve the efficiency, aesthetics and overall performance of your site.

 

However, there are a plethora of plugins on offer, which can make it hard for anyone to sift through and select the ones that are relevant to them. If that’s something you’re struggling with, here’s an insight to the useful WordPress plugins we love:

 

Useful WordPress Plugins

 

Yoast SEO

You guessed it, this plugin geared towards optimising your SEO is one of our favourites when it comes to useful WordPress plugins. Yoast SEO enables you to get to grips with your on-page optimisation in quick, easy steps. Once you’ve uploaded your content, Yoast SEO will give you tips and pointers on how you can make it more SEO-friendly. A colour coded system of red, yellow and green will alert you to the areas that you’re doing well, as well as the ones that could be improved. From toning down your keyword density to better sentence structure hints for readability, this plugin is designed to make optimising content as simple as it can be.

 

SEOquake

SEOquake is available as a browser add on for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. It’s extremely useful when you’re trying to get more of an insight into the effectiveness of your chosen keywords. It’s popular because you can navigate to a page and conduct your own on-page SEO analysis without going through the usual dashboard.

 

WP Smush

If you’re uploading images to your content, you should be making sure they’re compressed. Large image files can dramatically affect your page load speed, which we’ve learnt can have a detrimental impact on your site. WP Smush will allow you to compress and resize your images so they’re ready to go.

 

Google XML Sitemaps

As soon as you activate this plugin, it will create a sitemap of your website. This makes it easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index your site. This means that the search engines can now easily crawl your site to find the information they’re looking for. Hopefully resulting in a boost in your rankings.

 

WooCommerce

For those ecommerce businesses that haven’t got on board with Shopify, WooCommerce is often the preferred choice. It’s an all-in-one plugin with an abundance of features, customisations and extensions that allow you to sell directly from your site. Ideal if you’re just getting to grips with selling your products online for the first time.

 

WP Super Cache

We’ve talked about page speed quite a lot. So, it makes sense that one of the most useful WordPress plugins we recommend is designed to improve your website’s speed. Essentially, this plugin will generate static HTML files from your WordPress site so that the web server can use that file instead of processing the heavier, and therefore slower, PHP scripts.

 

For more information on any of the services we offer, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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