Plug and Publish: 9 Essential WordPress Plugins For Beginners

Plugins are something that are truly essential in running a successful WordPress website. WordPress Plugins are essentially the bones and structure to your website, rewarding you with a highly efficient, visually appealing website that is rock solid and serves any purpose to the best of its ability. If you are someone who is looking into starting a brand new website for your business, here are 9 essential WordPress Plugins for beginners. Below is all you need to start, and maintain, a fantastic WordPress website of your own.

  1. Smush

Large images that take heaps of time to load is a great way of driving traffic away from your website. In today’s fast paced world, no one is willing to wait around for large images to load. This is why Smush is such an essential tool for any website. Smush is a great plugin that helps compress all the images you upload to your website, ensuring that load times do not suffer. As we know, the faster your website loads, the higher chance of people actually looking through it, and hopefully even making purchases off it.

  1. VaultPress

One of the most important things when you have a website is to ensure that your entire site is backed up. Imagine having year’s’ worth of content, only to lose it all one day. In comes VaultPress. VaultPress is one of the the most reliable backup plugins available on WordPress today. VaultPress backs up your website, inclusive of all posts, comments, uploads, pages, revisions and settings. You will also be able to download your backups and save them locally. Furthermore, when creating a backup, VaultPress scans your website and points out any potential issues that your website may have. This is a plugin you definitely want to download.

  1. Jetpack

Jetpack is an amazing plugin that hosts features and uses such as infinite scrolls, spelling and grammar checks, URL shortening, related posts, social media sharing, mobile themes, custom CSS, extra widgets in your sidebars, contact forms and a so many other little goodies for you to use.

  1. W3 Total Cache

If you feel like your website is underperforming, the W3 Total Cache plugin can be of great assistance in increasing your server performance, shortening load times and improving overall user experience on your website. Websites that underperform drive traffic and customers away, so W3 Total Cache is definitely one plugin that we believe is essential to running a successful website.

  1. Google Keyword Planner

One of the key things when running a website is ensuring that you pop up on the first page of a Google search. This is why Google Keyword Planner is such an essential tool that you should be making use of. This plugin shows advertisers the keywords that they can bid on for advertising campaigns. Google Keyword Planner assists advertisers in choosing the correct keywords by showing them search volume estimates, number of results, and difficulty level. There is no point in having a fantastic website that no one visits due to poor choice of keywords, so get downloading today.

  1. Broken Link Checker

Broken links on websites not only turn users off, but also can negatively impact your SEO. As a matter of good practice, you should set aside one day or so a month to check your website for broken links and fix them immediately. Broken Link Checker is a great plugins that takes a lot of the hard work away by locating broken links for you. Once located, all you have to do is edit your post and amend where necessary.

  1. Simple Share Buttons Adder

Simple Share Buttons Adder is a great plugin that adds social media share buttons to your website. In today’s age of everything Social Media, you definitely want people to be able to share your content or your products to their social media pages. This plugin does just that. A bonus is that you are also able to customise your share buttons, ensuring that they fit in perfectly with the aesthetic of your website.

  1.  SEO Friendly Images

Did you know that optimising the images on your website can really help boost traffic to your website? SEO Friendly Images is a great plugin that optimises the images on your website by inserting proper ALT and TITLE attributes for the search engines to read. Image search on Google is one of the biggest search factors at the moment, so go ahead and make the best use of your imagery with this fantastic plugin.

  1.  Disqus

Disqus is a fantastic plugin that allows visitors to leave comments on the entries on your website. The Disqus commenting system is a third party system for commenting on WordPress websites, meaning that comments  will not affect your server. Disqus does not affect your website’s page speed and also comes equipped with anti-spam filters.

With these 9 essential WordPress Plugins for beginners, you’ll be set to watch your new website soar to great levels in the blink of an eye.