When it comes to creating a website? WordPress is a king for creating websites. Total credit goes to WordPress plugins, This plugins makes our website from trash to treasure. So below I’m going to provide you with a list of Top 10 plugins which will make your website secured, responsive and will increase your Google rankings.
Before beginning with the topic let me explain to you What are WordPress plugins through simple words?
We can term WordPress plugins as a mini robot or an application whose purpose is to do a specific job. The plugins are coded in PHP language and are available for free and paid. Giving you a short example suppose I want to show some Google ads on my post, all I can do is either insert script(ad-code) on the backend of the page every time.
Or, Install a plugin through which I just need to save the ad-code in a place and just insert the short-code of the plugin in my desired location where I want to show my ads. Now the difference between this is that via the first example you need to add the code in the backend of the script multiple times.
But in the 2nd Scenario, I just need a shortcut and rest the plugin will do automatically. Also the features such as do not show ads on Home-page or show ads only to mobile and not Desktop requires a high number of coding knowledge. But with a plugin, all I need to do is whether to enable this feature or disable.
That was a quick explanation of what is a WordPress plugin, Below I’ll share a list of my recommended plugins and will explain its features which helps me to keep my website secured, optimizes my content, Speeds up my website, and will also share disadvantages of using these plugins.
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List of Top 10 best free WordPress plugins you should definitely use
- Ad Inserter
- Autoptimize
- Classic Editor
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- Google XML Sitemaps
- LuckyWP Table of Contents
- Rank Math Seo
- Simple Author Box
- Tablepress
- Web push Web push Notifications
- WP fastest cache
1. AD-Inserter:
It’s just an AD-serving plugin which enables us to choose which advertisement should be displayed and where. The plugins support various options such as tweaking the code with sizes, Showing ads on mobile or Desktop or both, Options for enabling AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) advertisement and much more. The plugin also has a dedicated feature on displaying advertisement positions of a current page. Not only this, but it also has an option to choose by default what are places that an ad must be shown.
Example: Whenever I publish a post my first ad will be shown in Header and second on Footer also.
I’ve used many other advertisement plugins but I found this one perfect.
2. Autoptimize (Highly recommend a plugin for all WordPress users):
Autoptimize minifies the website by removing unwanted cache scripts, Inline CSS and many more files which are generated daily. When the cache increases it decreased the speed of the site, And no one prefers slow site no matter how good or unique your content is. E-commerce giant Amazon says if their website goes slow for 1 second they could face a loss of 1.6 Billion dollars per year.
Autoptimize also has support for lazy load images which makes your website a lot quicker. Also if you’ve performed the speed test of your website on:
- Ping Metrix
- Page insights
You’ll see a major difference after installing and using this plugin.
3. Classic Editor:
Classic editor is Official WordPress plugin used to format your article with your desired way. The plugin has many features that are used widely by everyone such as Heading tags, Bold – Italic fonts, Size indent, Align left-right, clear formatting, support of special characters, Change the text colour, Insert a link on a text and add a full underline as splitting paragraphs apart.
4. EWWW Image Optimizer:
Do you know the size of the images costs more to a server and a user? Suppose you’ve posted an HD image on your website it and has many users active on the current page. Viewing that image fully will take time and will increase the burden on Hosting servers. More the burden, slower your webpage will load. So to avoid this situation WordPress has a beautiful plugin which compresses your image and will load only when the user wants it to load.
Suppose if the user is on the first para and the image on starting of 3rd para, when the user is reading and scrolling slow, the plugin automatically detects and loads properly when the user is on 3rd paragraph.
So this reduces the burden of hosting server, site and also make sure that the resources are only used when a user actually wants to view the image.
This plugin will also increase your page score on ping Metrics and Page insights.
5. Google XML Sitemaps:
Sitemaps are termed as a road between your website and Google servers. Basically, it tells Google that content is available and you need to show it to the users if a similar keyword is typed in the search engine.
Without an XML sitemap, your content won’t appear on google search results. The job of the plugin is to scan all the URLs found on your site – it will be as https://www.yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml.
Once you visit this address it will show all the links that are located inside the sitemap.xml. It’s necessary to submit this URL to Google search console or Bing webmaster tools because both are among the most used search engine worldwide.
So never ever try to skip this step, Get this plugin and submit it so that your URLs will be visible in Google Search Engines.
6. LuckyWP table of contents:
A user when visits your article which is actually consisting of 2000 words is actually hard for him and time-consuming. Suppose the user has searched for how to make blog posts SEO friendly and visit your website. Suppose he wants information on “Alt txt images”, Your article consists of 2000 words and it will be very difficult for him to read each paragraph and then access the information.
Here the plugin eases the job for the user, LuckyWp table of contents picks your desired heading tags and makes a list of it on your desired location. So if you have this plugin in the above scenario the user will read the table of contents and will directly click on “Alt txt images” which will take him to the exact location.
Want to see how this plugin works? Check the link it will show you how does the table of content works and will also give you some of the best short films on youtube made in India.
7. Rank Math Seo Plugin (One of the important WordPress plugins you should never skip):
Rank-math Seo is an SEO plugin which shows how nicely your article must be written, Overlimit usage of keywords, Multiple H1 heading tags, no alt text on images and many such errors are displayed when you make a mistake.
The plugin actually rates your content in colors as well as marks. Higher the marks, more chances your content will rank on Google if it’s unique. I’ve made a dedicated blog on how to make SEO friendly content article and have briefly explained Rank math plugin with its features you can read it below
How to make blog posts SEO friendly for ranking in Google
8.Simple Author Box:
Every author wants a simple image posted with a quick description of the author. Simple Author Box is a lightweight plugin that does the job fantastically. Shows a proper image with your desired description. Once you read the full article you’ll see the authors image with a description at the end.
Default WordPress only supports gravatar so I prefer this over default WordPress author details.
Make sure you give a try to this plugin it’s worthy.
9.TablePress for WordPress:
The name says itself everything, The plugin is used for displaying a table and it’s contents via row and column format. If you want to show a table with Four rows Three columns you can do it.
Also, the content is stored in the table itself and not directly in the post. So when you add a shortcut id of table press same as of AD-Inserter all the contents of the table will be displayed.
Check the image below to get a proper idea of how does it work.
10. Webpushr Web push notification:
Webpushr is a free web push notifications that send notifications to subscribed users once a new article is posted or a previous article is updated. According to my information, Webpushr supports almost 60,000 subscribers on free Subscription, and then they per year with some amount.
Do note: To install this plugin do read the proper guidance provided by Webpushr team. Because you need to access your public domain folder that will store some specific files of Webpushr plugin which will allow users to subscribe properly and receive notifications in time.
11. Wp Fastest Cache:
A proper WordPress plugin that removes unnecessary files such as cache, javascript and various other logs that make your website slow. Enabling this plugin would always clear your cache with a single click and will make your website 10 times faster for your viewers. This caching plugin also improves my overall page score which is required to rank on Google.
The free version is limited for caching purpose whereas the pro version does a better job. However, for a new blogger with fewer viewers is good to start with free. Once your subs increase you can opt for the pro version.
Check my settings for Wp Fastest Cache – I hope this will help you
If you found some better settings you can let me know in the comment section below.
Do you know this plugin has every social media forward link which will help users to send your articles to various platforms? AddToAny Share button is very easy to setup plugin. You can choose important social media services as I’ve done.
That was the full list of 12 highly recommended WordPress plugins you should definitely install for your blog. But as I mentioned above everything has some types of disadvantages. Same does WordPress plugins have, Installing many plugins that are of no use shouldn’t be activated in your WordPress Dashboard plugin folder. Installing more plugin creates en-number of cache files and then you’ve to clear cache all the time to make your website super speedy. So it’s better to avoid extra plugins and work with only necessary plugins.
That was all for the topic, I’ll make sure to update the blog regularly if I get a new plugin with extra features.
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