Marketing skills required to effectively compete across various digital marketing channels is immense. That is why many WordPress site owners struggle to find the right set of tools and plugins that will effectively showcase their offerings. But the good news is that there are plenty of handy plugins present in the WordPress framework that reduce lots of work on your part and make things easier for you.
To date, the official plugin repository has over 56,000 WordPress plugins and counting. So there are plugins available for almost every functionality and feature you need on your WordPress website. From writing tools to search engine optimization, from lead generation to data analysis, WordPress plugins will help you find any solution you seek for your website while saving your time along the way.
However, it’s quite a tricky job to pick the best plugins from such a massive collection that works best for your website. To make things simpler for you, we have compiled a list of the 9 best marketing and SEO plugins that every WordPress site needs to optimize the overall site’s performance.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is an awesome plugin for WordPress websites that guides you to create better content and helps you improve the ranking on search results. It focuses on creating the content that is both useful to the users as well as search engine friendly.
Yoast SEO plugin allows you to choose a focus keyword for each of your blog posts and use the keywords appropriately throughout the content. Its page analysis feature checks whether you have properly used the focus keyword on the page title, meta description, image alternative attributes, headings, etc. It helps you to properly set up the text and images for better visibility on search engines.
In addition, it helps you to improve the way your page or post looks on the search results with its snippet preview. By using this plugin you can create better headlines, catchy page title and meta description for your posts that can greatly increase the click-through rate of your site. Yoast SEO’s content readability feature lets you evaluate and improve your write-up and make it more human-understandable and user-friendly.
2. Broken Link Checker
You might have a great website or blog that has a remarkable number of daily visitors. But if the users land on a broken page, that may not leave a good impression certainly. Eventually, you may lose a lot of prospective customers as well as create a shoddier feeling about your brand.
Broken Link Checker is a handy WordPress plugin that monitors your website for all the broken links. You have to just install this free plugin and it will do the job automatically. The plugin checks all your posts, comments and other content for broken links and instantly notifies you if any broken links are found.
The plugin has options to prevent search engines from following the broken links, display the broken links differently and more useful features.
3. MailChimp for WordPress
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools for webmasters and business owners. It provides services to send emails, manage subscribers, and track results. The integration of MailChimp with a WordPress site is really easy with its plugin, MailChimp for WordPress. This plugin has both a free and premium version that allows you to add subscription forms in your WP blog. You can use the premium version of this plugin for commercial purposes.
MailChimp WP plugin lets you create beautiful and attractive opt-in forms to add more subscribers to your email list. Apart from this, you can easily integrate this plugin with any other form on your sites like comment, contact form, or checkout form. It supports various major form plugins like WooCommerce, Contact form 7, etc.
4. Jetpack
Jetpack is one of the must-have plugins for every WordPress website. As the name suggests, it offers a pack of awesome features for your website to fly up high and make it a great success. Jetpack takes care of your website’s performance, traffic growth, security, image optimization, site appearance, and a lot more.
It features enhanced distribution that indirectly shares your public content to search engines and helps you increase your reach and traffic. It creates sitemaps for your website so that search engines can easily index your content. Besides, it protects your website by preventing it from malware attacks.
5. WP Smush
Images are essential for your posts that easily grab visitors’ attention. Uploading stunning images helps you to convey your message better and make your page look attractive, catchy, and engaging. While images are helpful to make your site more appealing to users, they also take up a lot of storage space and slow down your website.
To resolve that issue, you can compress and optimize the images without reducing the quality of the images using WP Smush plugin. WP Smush optimizes image files in JPEG, PNG and GIF formats using advanced compression techniques and saves a lot of storage space and eventually boosts the site’s loading speed.
6. Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is another very helpful SEO plugin for WordPress sites. By creating a special XML sitemap, it helps search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. to better index your site.
After you install and activate this plugin, it automatically creates an XML sitemap for your site to make content-indexing easier by major search engines. A sitemap lets search bots understand the complete internal link structure of a website and retrieve the results more efficiently. Additionally, it notifies all major search engines each time you publish new content on your website.
7. Akismet Plugin
Akismet is one of the default plugins for WordPress that comes with every new WordPress installation. This plugin is basically an anti-spam plugin that checks all the incoming comments and filters out the spammy ones.
The plugin provides a status history for each comment so that you can check the comments that are found spammy by Akismet. You can also view the number of approved comments for each user, see the URLs in the comment section and remove the suspicious links.
This plugin is free for personal websites or blogs while you have to subscribe to its premium plans for commercial uses. The premium plans provide advanced security solutions besides basic spam protection.
8. Rich Snippet WordPress Plugin
Rich snippets provide brief information about the page by highlighting the main features of the products/services you offer. This makes your site look different from your competitors and helps you get more click-through rates from search engine results page.
To create rich snippets in your WordPress website, you can install a useful plugin called All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets. It provides search engines precise information to be displayed on the search engine result pages and helps your site rank better as well as get higher click-through rates.
9. WP Super Cache
Caching is one of the best ways to improve the performance of your website. The idea of caching is to store your website’s static data temporarily in the cache memory so that the site loads faster when the visitor opens the same page next time.
To enable caching on a WordPress website, you can use the WP Super Cache plugin. This is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress sites. It features database caching, page caching, object caching, browser caching, and a lot more. This plugin will cache your posts and pages as static HTML files that are served to the users while they browse your site.
This caching process drastically cuts the page loading time of your site and helps you optimize the overall site’s performance. With a fast page loading time, you will get better ranking on search results and that will ultimately generate high traffic and more conversions.
Wrapping Up:
The aforesaid WordPress plugins will certainly help you improve your site’s performance whether it’s improving your site’s functionality, reducing your page load time, showing rich snippets, or tracking various metrics. These powerful WP plugins have features that are tailored for individuals and businesses of all sizes and are fairly easy to use. So try out some of these plugins to enhance your day-to-day WordPress experience.
