On WordPress, whatever your skills in design, development or any other field, there are some things you inevitably need to secure, accelerate, and even analyze the behavior of your visitors: these are plugins.
The tricky thing is that, there are over 57,000+ WordPress plugins that you have to choose from. Making the right choice of plugins become extremely overwhelming for new users.
That's why today, I have selected for you the 10 most powerful and useful plugins every WordPress website owner needs to improve the functionality, aesthetics, and efficiency of his site.
It may come as a surprise to you that I put an extension that analyze website traffic at the top of this list. But believe me, there is a reason for this.
When you take a lot of time to design your website, you expect to receive tons of visitors on your new site, to know where they come from, to understand their behavior on your site in order to convert them into customers for your products.
To make all this possible, you need a powerful tool that allows you to connect your website with Google Analytics. That's where MonsterInsights comes in.
With over 2,000,000+ active installs, MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. With this powerful and useful plugin, you can optimize your website to increase your traffic, subscribers and revenue.
MonsterInsights has both free and premium version. But to unlock all the power of this tool, I highly recommend you to buy the premium version.
The best argument I have for choosing Elementor Pro from this list is that my blog is entirely designed with this beautiful and powerful plugin.
If I'm full of praise for this plugin, it's because it really deserves it. I'm a fan of it, and I'm not the only one.
With over 5,000,000 active installations, Elementor is one of the most widely used plugins on WordPress.
This visual page generator gives you the ability to create unique designs for your website. With Elementor, you don't have to be a web developer to create the website of your dreams.
Its premium version, Elementor Pro, gives you even more flexibility, customization and total control over your site. It comes with an absolutely awesome theme builder.
Elementor Pro's theme builder allows me to create a unique design that applies to all my blog posts. See for yourself the design of this blog post you are reading. Isn't it absolutely beautiful?
Enough talk. I'm ordering you to get Elementor Pro if you're on WordPress. Don't come and thank me afterwards.
The design of my website made with Elementor Pro pleases me enormously. That's why I'm not going to let it be hacked by competitors or malicious people.
WordPress is currently used by more than 25% of websites, so it has become an easy target for hackers.
Since I am not a security expert, I need a plugin that allows me to easily secure and protect my WordPress website.
Searching on the internet, I found iThemes Security Pro. A plugin designed for beginners to ensure their security while they take care of making their WordPress site profitable.
This plugin offers dozens of protections against WordPress security problems you may not know about.
iThemes Security Pro limits the number of unsuccessful login attempts with WordPress brute-force protection.
It does so much to secure your website that I can spend all day quoting without finishing.
For a secure website, you need iThemes Security Pro. The free version is interesting but when it comes to security, I advise you not to take unnecessary risks.
These days, people are always in a hurry. They don't have enough time. Waiting a few seconds for a site to load frustrates a lot of people. A slow site doesn't make visitors want to stay or return to your site after a bad experience.
For all types of websites, speed of page loading is therefore very essential. Optimizing images can sometimes help to speed up the loading of a page but nothing beats caching plugins.
For example, the W3 Total Cache plugin can reduce your load times by more than 43% on average.
WP Rocket does even better: according to a test conducted by ThemeIsle.com, it reduced page loading times by 63%. This result can be observed with this powerful plugin, but it is not free. But the results and the positive impact on your site are well worth it, especially if there are online conversions.
WP Rocket is a very powerful caching plugin. It helps you speed up the loading time of your sites by creating cached copies of each dynamically generated page on your site, so your servers have less work to do.
WP Rocket is a high-end tool whose price starts at $49 for a one-year license for a single site. With my link, you get a small discount.
When we finish creating a nice website, we all want to have tons of traffic and preferences without paying a penny.
To do this, your content needs to be optimized in order to be at the top of the results of search engines such as Bing and Google.
When it comes to search engine optimization on pages, the best plugin of all time is called Yoast SEO.
Few plugins can help you improve your SEO and analyze the readability of your content like Yoast SEO does.
The good news is that the free version of Yoast SEO is already almost perfect. It has almost all the features you need to optimize your content, get you to the top of the search results and generate thousands of organic traffic.
You have designed a beautiful website, which loads quickly, is well secured and receives tons of visits.
Guess what you need now to make this traffic profitable? You need to collect email addresses of course.
The tool you need to accomplish this task is OptinMonster.
On many websites, when you want to leave, a message pops up and offers you to subscribe to the newsletter, offers to download an ebook or even a special offer on one of their products. OptinMonster does that too.
OptinMonster is the most popular plugin when it comes to optimizing conversion rates.
It allows you to get more email subscribers, and convert visitors from abandoned websites into email subscribers and clients.
In addition to having a powerful targeting feature, OptinMonster is also very esthetic. It comes with pre-designed, high-conversion membership forms that you can easily customize with their drag-and-drop generator.
If you want to make more money from your website traffic, then you need OptinMonster.
It helps you recover sales from abandoned shopping carts, convert visitors to your website and expand your email list for your email marketing campaigns.
Now that you have a plugin that pops up when your visitors try to leave and collects hundreds of emails, you need another super powerful plugin to do your email marketing campaigns without emptying your bank account.
With email marketing platforms such as Getresponse, Sendinblue or InfusionSoft, your invoices grow as your email list grows.
Recommended Post: Getresponse review
But I have a solution to help you avoid these expenses. Let me introduce you to Mailster, the most complete and unlimited email marketing plugin.
For only $59, Mailster allows you to have an unlimited subscriber list, send unlimited emails, track and analyze your campaigns and subscribers with ease.
On top of that, you have an auto-responder that sends automatic welcome messages, replies to your subscribers and sends emails scheduled for the whole year.
To give you more flexibility, Mailster allows you to integrate your other favorite WordPress plugins.
Among all the plugins we've listed so far, I think there's one particular plugin missing, capable of bringing you the data from your Google search console account and even your Google Adsense earnings.
That Plugin is Site Kit, the official Google WordPress plugin designed to help you understand how people find and use your site.
Site Kit includes powerful features that make the use of these Google products transparent and flexible. It supports Search Console, Analytics, Adsense, Tag Manager and Optimize.
Of all the precautions you can take to protect your website, backup is probably the most important.
With a backup plugin, you will be able to back up, clone or restore your site without any problems.
You can also schedule automatic backups to make things easier or you can simply do it manually.
The backup plugin I recommend is UpdraftPlus. It is a popular option for site backup and restore. It is fast, powerful, easy to use and has over 3 million active users.
10. Really Simple SSL
Last but not definetly not the least, we have Really Simple SSL;
It is a plugin whose importance is not to be demonstrated any more.
It's used on over 5 millions WordPress websites.
It is the one that informs Google and your visitors that your site is reliable and deserves to be ranked or visited.
The Really Simple SSL protocol automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run on https.
The entire site will switch to SSL.
It is completely free. I use it on all my websites and those of my customers.
Conclusion
We have come to the end of our list. Together we have listed 10 of the most powerful and useful WordPress plugins that any WordPress website should have installed.
Let's summarize this list
On this list, I gathered what seems to me to be the most powerful and useful plugins to have on a WordPress site. Of course this list is not exhaustive.
I invite you to suggest your favorite plugins. Tell me in the comments below, if there is a plugin that I should add to this list.
Thank you for reading all the way through. Cheers.
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