WordPress is the most popular website CMS system in the world. Approximately 30% of the websites in the world use WordPress to manage their websites content. Its no wonder why, it’s easy enough for the most basic user to build a website, while at the same time be powerful enough to build some amazing websites.
The power and versatility of the WordPress comes from being an opensource platform. This has resulted in countless theme and plug in providers creating amazing addon feature for the platform. These addon features will put your website on steroids. This article is going to cover five WordPress plugins and why you must have them.
First off is Yoast SEO is probably the most popular SEO plugin available on the market. It offers both a free and subscription version. The free version is powerful enough to help you with all your on-page SEO.
The great thing about Yoast SEO is it evaluates each page on your website to assess the on page SEO for your chosen keyword. It will tell you what things you need to change to get the on-page SEO perfect. This plugin allows you to change the meta title and description on the page, it measure keywords density, internal linking and page alt tag. Other factors such as heading tags and keyword placement will also be evaluated by the plugin.
Gravity forms is by far our favourite plugin for building online forms. It’s an easy to use plugin and integrates well with third party application such as PayPal, Mail Chimp, Stripe, Signature, Strape, Coupons, to mention a few.
What we like most about Gravity Forms is it’s a drag and drop functionality which makes it easy to build forms quickly. In addition, Gravity forms records the enquiries in WordPress dashboard and tracks the conversions.
Although Gravity forms is a great plugin it does have a few small downfalls. Firstly, there is a lack of customisation of the appearance of the forms means you’ll need to write of bit of custom css to style it. Secondly, it is an expensive plugin, a license for one website comes in at $59 per year, and a developer’s license is $259 per year. This is a lot more expensive than comparable plugin, though we believe it’s worth it.
WP Live Chat is one plugin that really impressed us. As a web design agency, we get a lot of requests to enable live chats on our client’s websites and this is the one we highly recommend. WP Live Chat is the most popular live chat plugin for WordPress. It comes in both a free version and a premium version that has extra features.
What we like the most about WP Live Chat is how easy it is to set up, all you need to do is click enable and the plugin is ready to use. One thing is you must be logged into WordPress to send people messages, however the plug-in developer has stated that they are in the process of building a desktop app.
We originally used backup buddy for all our websites and migrations, however we found that it was a bit difficult to migrate sites websites. With All in one migration you can easily backup your website with one click, and migrate it with another. There is no uploading the file using ftp or anything difficult like that, its just simple and easy migrations.
Like most plugins it has a free and a premium version. The premium version of the plugin will be required if you have a large website (more than 512mb) you will need to purchase the premium version.
Another great feature of the All in one migration plugin is that it offers automatic backups to cloud storage. This means your website can periodically backup to your OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive accounts for added peace of mind.
In our opinion MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market. This plugin allows you to connect with your Google Analytics account to track your websites progress on the home page. This will give you easy to understand metrics to help you learn more about your website visitors such as where are they coming from and what are they doing on your website. Monster insights comes in both a paid version and a free version.
