When developing a WordPress site plugins are an essential part of the process. I will be going over the top plugins that I think are a MUST have for any website. Some of these are free while some have a small cost related to them.
Rank Math
SEO might be the best and most consistent source of traffic for one’s website, but it’s not without its quirks. The constant process of optimizing your posts can sometimes take more time than actually writing the content. If you always feel that you can do more on the SEO front for your website but don’t have the time, *then Rank Math is what you’re looking for.
Its host of intelligent features brings SEO capabilities in your hands that were previously out of reach. The smart automation features give you the power of an entire SEO team with just a few clicks. A well thought out design, powerful features, and years of development by the MyThemeShop squad make Rank Math a game-changing SEO plugin that will level the SEO playing field in your favor.
I recently discovered this plugin and I do say I am very impressed! I have been using All in One SEO and Yoast SEO for years and although they are great choices I think rank math has developed a great alternative that is easier to use and feature-packed. As of right now, everything about the plugin is free but they do have a premium version in the works.
The best thing is you can easily switch to RankMath if you use other popular SEO plugins already, during the setup process rank math will import all your previous settings from other plugins. The built-in SEO Analyzer will perform in-depth SEO Analysis of your website show if your pages are optimized and suggest further ways to optimize them for better results.
RankMath makes it easy to write SEO friendly content right in the WordPress dashboard. As you’re writing it gives you suggestions on how to improve your SEO efforts. I also found the Schema Markup feature that you normally have to pay a premium for in other SEO plugins was free with rank math and provided complete control. RankMath is a solid SEO plugin that will only get better! I can’t even imagine how awesome the premium version of the plugin will be because right now the free version has so much to offer! I highly suggest you give it a try!
Autoptomize
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. You can optimize and lazy-load images, optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more. As such it can improve your site’s performance even when already on HTTP/2! There is extensive API available to enable you to tailor Autoptimize to each and every site’s specific needs.
Monarch & Bloom
I put these two together because they are offered in a package subscription deal from Elegant Themes.
Monarch is the best social media sharing plugin I have found yet for WordPress. The only downside to this plugin is its not a free plugin. It allows you to easily add sharing buttons in 5 different locations of your site without having to worry about complicated coding, or complicated configuration of settings.
It lets you control every aspect of how your social sharing options are displayed and what triggers them to pop up for visitors. Best of all its mobile friendly out of the box so you don’t have to worry about if its going to break your website when people visit on mobile devices.
Bloom is the best eMail Opt-IN and lead generation plugin for WordPress I’ve found for similar reasons that monarch is so great. It works with top email marketing systems. Makes it easy to show well designed opt in forms that look like they actually belong on your website and not some annoying thing you instantly want to click off of.
UpdraftPlus
This is another essential plugin for every site I’ve developed with WordPress. It makes it easy to manage the tedious task of backing up your website and restoring it in the event of a problem.
You may not realize how important a plugin like this is unless you’ve ran into a problem with hacking, crashes, updates gone wrong, or even a simple user error. Any of those things can easily bring your website down and you could loose all your hard work.
It allows you to keep local backups on your server as well as popular cloud backup options off server. It’s recommended that you backup your data in three different places in the even that something happens to one of your backups.
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