In Case You Didn’t Know… WordPress is the KINGPIN.
WordPress is kind of a big deal. According to W3Techs, over 32% of all websites are WordPress sites. In the Content Management category, the WordPress dominance is even larger, with 59% market share.
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And if you thought maybe that was going to change anytime soon, the data shows its dominance is getting even stronger:
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kinsta.com/wordpress-market-share/
Now don’t get me wrong…
WordPress is not without its shortcomings. See [When WordPress is a Good Idea and When it’s Not]
But without question the one thing that has kept this behemoth on top for so long, is that EVERYTHING works with WordPress. It’s almost as if the entire web has made a way to integrate with WordPress. And in a world of integrations, that’s kind of a big deal.
The eco system of tools (aka plugins) for WordPress is ENORMOUS. There is a WordPress plugin for just about anything you can think of. So many, that it is easy to get lost, and hard to know which ones are fluff, and which ones are essential.
This post is about the essential ones.
Warning! Plugins Can Slow Down Your Site
Speed matters.
Google warns that a website can loose up to half of its traffic if pages load in over 3 sec. Because of that, Google penalizes slow websites in search results. They just don’t want to send people to slow sites.
That’s why it is so important to choose your WordPress plugins wisely, and to optimize everything else as best you can to allow these tools to do their job quickly.
A WordPress plugin is just a batch of code that gets calculated by your server. The more code your server needs to calculate, the slower it goes. The other challenge is that WordPress is built using the PHP coding language. PHP is fine, but by modern standards, is not the fastest way to render a website. That means it can get clunky & slow if you’re not careful (one of the major set backs of using WordPress).
Optimizing for speed needs to be at the forefront of everything you do in developing on WordPress.
Essential WordPress Plugins
Now that you know speed is important, and that plugins can slow down your site, you may be thinking I’m crazy for recommending 26 plugins!
But, every one of these plugins serves a critical function, which is why it is so important to make sure everything else is as lean and fast as possible.
If you haven’t done it already, download my [Wordpress Site Speed Checklist] for some quick tips on how to make sure your site is performing at optimum speed.
Part 1: Plugins for Development
The first category are the plugins that I recommend most for developing the layout & design of your website.
1. Elementor
I honestly can’t recommend this tool highly enough. This is by far the best WordPress page builder I have ever used. It is fast, stable, user friendly and packed with features. The development team behind Elementor is constantly adding new features to expand its capabilities.
There is both a free version and a premium version. One benefit of the premium version is it allows you to visually design all elements of your site, including header, footer, index pages, etc. This post is not intended to be a full review of Elementor, but suffice it to say, I have used them all, and Elementor stands head and shoulders above the rest.
(Honorable mention to runners up Beaver Builder & Thrive Architect)
2. Elements by Envato
This is another reason why Elementor (& Beaver Builder) are so incredible. Envato is the largest marketplace in the world for graphical templates. Envato recently released this free plugin with dozens of free professionally designed elements & pages for either Elementor or Beaver Builder. Any one of these designed pages or elements can be easily applied and edited on your website in seconds.
This sort of functionality was not possible in WordPress just a few years ago. Elements by Envato is an incredible free resource of design elements.
3. Advanced Custom Fields
4. Custom Post Type UI
5. Safe SVG
Gravity Forms
If you need more than Elementor forms. Contact Form 7, and Ninja forms get honourable mention.
2. Duplicate
Part 2: Plugins for SEO
There is no sense builder a website that no one ever finds. Investments early on in Search Engine Optimization will pay dividends in the long run if done properly. These SEO plugins will help you build content that search engines love.
SEO isn’t about tricking the search engines. It’s about helping them do their job.
1. Yoast
The first, and most popular WordPress SEO tool is Yoast SEO. This plugin comes in both a free and a premium version. You will get great value from both. Naturally, the premium version comes with added features and benefits worth considering.
Yoast can help you center your content around target keywords, help you build internal links, and manage 301 redirects. It’s an incredibly helpful tool.
2. SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant
SEMrush is a premium SEO tool with far too many features to rattle off here. It is an investment, but well worth it for those serious about SEO.
One of the dozens of features that come in the SEMrush platform is the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin. This plugin (which requires a SEMrush subscription) is the most helpful writing assistant for SEO on the web. Just enter in a few keywords that you’re writing about, and tells you how long it needs to be, which related keywords should be included, a list (with the content) of the top 10 pages ranking for those terms, ideas for headlines, etc. It is brilliant! (but head ups… it’s an investment).
3. Broken Link Checker
This handy little nugget will keep and eye on all the links on your site (including images & videos) to make sure non of them are broken. Broken links are bad for user experience and bad for SEO.
4. Google XML Sitemap
Remember that SEO is about helping search engines do their job. An XML sitemap does it exactly that. It’s just a little document that tells Google bots all the pages on your website they should crawl for content. You can submit a site map yourself manually in the Google Search Console, but since pages on WordPress sites get added so often, wouldn’t it be nice if you had your own little robot to do that for you every time there was a change?
Enter Google XML Sitemap plugin. This is a free plugin that will do exactly that!
5. Related Posts
When Google sees people stick around on your site, and click through to other pages, it tells Google that your site is delivering on what people are looking for. Internal links are a really important step in making that happen. This simple related post article is a great way to help encourage people to check out some of your other content that they may be interested in.
Part 3: Plugins for Lead Capture & Calls-To-Action
For this section I need to present these a little differently. You really only need ONE of these tools, but they are all worth mentioning. Pick the one that best suits your needs.
These are listed in my personal order of preference:
a. ConvertFlow
I am diverging here slightly, because ConvertFlow is technically not a plugin, but I would be doing you a disservice by NOT mentioning it in this category…
ConvertFlow is a relatively new tool at the time of writing. But it is ushering in a new wave of tools that allow you to customize a user’s experience based on information you know about them, or have stored in your CRM. ConvertFlow at its core is a Lead Capture &Calls-To-Action tool. Whereas other tools allow you to specify WHERE on your site you’d like some Calls To Action to appear, ConvertFlow allows you to also decide to WHOM those Calls To Action should be made.
For example:
- Why ask people who have already subscribed to subscribe, when you can pitch the next offer in your value ladder instead?
- If this visitor has bought a product from you, and has visited another product page 2 times, would that change theCalls-To-Action you would like to make?
ConvertFlow turn your own website into a re-marketing wizard by allowing you to customize Calls-To-Action based on the visitor, not the content of the page.
…Super Powerful.
b. Thrive Leads
Thrive leads is my next choice. It is an intuitive tool that allows you to create pop ups, Calls-To-Action, banners, multi-step opt-ins, etc, and then sync those leads with your email marketing platform. The price for this tool is a steal and worth every penny. Thrive Leads lets you set where, when Calls-To-Action appear, as well as a priority of ones over others. It does not have the same targeting ability as ConvertFlow, but for the price, it’s a killer option.
Warning: My only reservation in recommending Thrive Leads is that I’ve found it to not always play nice with other themes & plugins. It has caused some conflicts on some sites where I’ve used it in the past a couple times. But their support is very good, and I was able to find resolutions to the issues with the a little tweaking.
c. Elementor Pop Ups
At the time of writing this post, Elementor Pop Ups is in Beta testing. But I must admit that it looks VERY promising. This will be included free in future releases of Elementor Pro and will give Thrive Leads a serious run for its money. Also, I have never had to deal with code glitches from Elementor like I have with Thrive products.
d. HelloBar
HelloBar is another great option. It has a great suit of tools to help visitor become subscribers & buyers. It was really made popular by Neil Patel who uses it one his sites, and has written a number of articles on how it has increased his conversions.
Part 4: Plugins for Speed
1. reSmush.it Image Optimizer
I can’t stress enough how important it is to optimize images on your site to minimize load times. Part of that optimization is making sure your images are properly compressed. That just means reducing the file size as much as possible without damaging the image quality.
There are a lot of methods to do that, but non so easy as a plugin that does it automatically as you upload an image. The other best part is that reSmush.it is free!
2. Autoptimize
Autoptimize is a jewel of a plugin. The purpose of this plugin is to speed up site loading by reducing the number of requests made to your server. It does that by merging CSS files and Javascript files into one each, and then caching that file. It is much faster for a web browser to retrieve & read one long file, then to retrieve and read dozens of separate files. This has real impact on your site speed.
3. W3 Total Cache
What is a Cache plugin? And Why do I need it?
Remember earlier when I said that WordPress is built with PHP? And that by today’s standards, it’s not very efficient? PHP is what we call a server side language. Your server needs to calculate the code in those PHP files every time someone lands on your site, just to show them the page. Your server calculates the code and then converts that into HTML to display.
Imagine I asked you the answer to 4×4… Let’s pretend you needed a calculator to get that answer…
But then 100 people came and asked you the same question. Would you need a calculator every time?
A cache plugin saves in memory the HTML that your server calculated so it doesn’t need to pull out the calculator every time. It can just fire off the answer to the same query over and over without having to whip out the calculator.
Make sense?
S on top of Autoptimize, I recommend W3 Total Cache. It has a lot of advanced options and features making it my preferred choice. But if you’d like a more simple approach, try WP Super Cache instead.
If you just want an all in one solution, and don’t want to deal with the technicalities of configuration, give WP Rocket a try.
4. Async Javascript
Async Javascript makes it so your page isn’t stuck waiting for javascript to load before the rest of the page can display. It speeds up load times by allowing Javascript to load at the same time, or by deferring it to load after the page has loaded. You may need to test which options work best for the way your site is built.
5. WP Offload Media Lite
This is another hidden gem in the world of WordPress development. This awesome little plugin lets you move your entire Media library (images, etc.) to an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket. An AWS S3 bucket is just a storage container for digital media. This plugin is the seamless integration of WordPress, and that bucket for all your media.
Media really is the meat of most of the bandwidth for servers. By taking your media off of your primary server, and letting AWS serve those up instead (hint: through their Cloudfront CDN distribution), you free up massive amounts of bandwidth from your server, allowing it to work leaner, faster, smarter.
6. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is more a service than a plugin, although it also has a plugin. Cloudflare is essentially a conduit you can pass all of your website traffic through. It has an incredible free tier which acts as a Content Delivery Network for your site, it has caching, minification of files and a firewall against malicious attacks. It is a no-brainer for site owners.
7. WP-Sweep
Plugins Affiliate Link Management
1. ThirstyAffiliates
I love this free plugin. They have a premium version as well, but even just the free version is awesome. Many blogs (mine included) rely on affiliate revenue to fund content creation like this. Those links can become a mess to manage over time, especially if they need to be update.
ThirstyAffiliate is a clean and tidy way to make those links pretty, easier to work with, and gives stats on clicks. A must have for any WordPress site using affiliate links.
Plugins for Spam & Security
Security plugins
1. Wordfence
Don’t want Russians to hack your site? Try Wordfence. It’s a great (and free) security plugin for WordPress.
2. Cloudflare
On top of the performance boosting the Cloudflare gives your site, it also has a firewall to prevent a brute force attack on your site.
2. Askimet or Disqus or Thrive Comments or Facebook Comments
3.
Conversion Rate Optimization
1. Headline Optimizer
Headline optimizer. King Sumo. Thrive Headline Optimizer.
2. Page Split Testing
Heat Map
- Hotjar
- Full Story
- VWO
- Crazyegg
Backup & Migration
1. All in One Migration Tool
2.UpdraftPlus
Personalization
1. URL params
2. Elementor
3. RightMessage
Analytics
1. Monster Insights
Other Tools for Marketer
If you are looking for other recommended tools, check out the stack of tools I recommend here
