If you’re building your site with WordPress, you will quickly stumble upon the world of seemingly endless plugin options. WordPress plugins are the building blocks of a WordPress site and allow you to add any additional features to your site. Although you can use WordPress plugins to make your site more engaging, secure, and functional, using too many will slow your site down and make it difficult to manage.
What to look for in a plugin
Installing, testing, and uninstalling WordPress plugins is easy, so you can always play around with which ones you want for your site. When vetting plugins, the primary things to look out for are a large user base, customer support, security features, and pricing.
Users
When searching for plugins, the number of installs will be shown to you. Choosing plugins with large user bases is preferred because these plugins likely operate well, stay updated, and have support communities because of their large userbase.
Customer support
When selecting a plugin, make sure to check out the company website for the plugin developers. The developer should be easy to contact and active. Premium plugins tend to have very active customer support systems.
Security
You want to ensure you don’t install any plugins that risk your security. Checking repositories for plugins, selecting plugins with a large user base, and using plugins that are regularly updated all make for a more secure plugin.
Price
While there are plenty of free plugins, the cost has little to do with the plugin’s actual value. Many free plugins have very limited features, making them virtually useless or only usable for a particular thing, requiring you to use more plugins to supplement. Similarly, some paid plugins may offer far too many features than you will utilize. Therefore, assessing each plugin’s value to your site is essential to choosing plugins.
Now that you have some guidelines on selecting plugins for your site, here are some starter plugins that you may find helpful in designing your website.
Popular plugins
WPForms
WPForms is the premiere plugin for adding forms to your site. WPForms offers premium and free versions and has been installed over 5 million times. Forms can be difficult to create without web development skills; WPForms seeks to solve this problem. WPForms allows you to create contact forms, surveys, payment forms, appointment forms, and more.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin on WordPress, featuring a free and premium version that has been installed on over 5 million sites. SEO is a time-consuming and complicated task, often requiring an SEO specialist to make the most of it. Yoast SEO seeks to support you in driving traffic through search engines without taking up all your time. Yoast SEO assists in generating keywords, meta descriptions, and more. It will even check your content and let you know what steps you could take to improve the SEO specific to your site.
Jetpack
Jetpack is an essential WordPress plugin that assists in security, design, and marketing. Jetpack offers tools like spam reduction, login security, site analytics, and automated social media posting. Jetpack has been installed over 5 million times and provides a free and paid version.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin available on WordPress. WooCommerce is the plugin you need if you want to turn your website into an online business. It allows you to sell digital and physical products and accepts several payment methods. WooCommerce has been installed over 5 million times and is used to support many online stores on WordPress.
MonsterInsights
Monster Insights is the most popular plugin for specifically utilizing Google Analytics for your WordPress site. MonsterInsights allows you to track your google analytics directly within WordPress. These stats can help you determine how users find your site, what draws their attention, how they use your site, and more. MonsterInsights has been installed over 3 million times and offers a free and premium version.
