WordPress is used by more than 28 percent of the total number of websites on the internet, which sums up to around 75 million websites. It can thus be very easily declared that WP is the most renowned CMS or Content Management System. This is also open-source and free. In addition, it offers a variety of plugins, both free and paid, which can be used to enhance and improve design and usability.
If you are the owner of a web development company and are planning to pay an external agency for WordPress development services, their developers will have a relatively easy job mastering this technology. This is because it’s characterize by a simple learning curve. Most users of WP are neither web designers, nor programmers.
There is a huge chance that you have already come across some kind of a third-party app or software on the internet and used it to edit your images. This situation can be avoided by making use of the built-in image editor plugin offered by WP. This is just a tiny example of how WP plugins can be put to use.
Even though this CMS is primarily used for creating blogs and websites, by making use of the in-built plugins, themes are an amazing part of the constantly increasing popularity of a particular website.
Since the time WordPress was officially introduced, during the last decade, there has been a plethora of users who have gone online to create portfolios and brand their work, so that they can attract clients. To maintain portfolios like these along with a strong client base, the designers must make use of a number of plugins for WordPress development services.
Before delving deep into the wide variety of plugins, it is important that you are well informed about WP itself, which is why it is important that you get to know about its benefits.
Few Advantages of Using WordPress
Despite being a CMS, with a large number of in-built plugins, WordPress is also characterized by a number of other benefits. Following are just a few of those.
- It is immensely simple to use, as far as adding new images, images and blogs are concerned.
- Management is effortless as well. You have the liberty to log in to and access your account from any computer.
- WP is characterized by pre-defined templates, thus it doesn’t require a developer to have knowledge about coding.
- It is SEO friendly, which means that it is comfortable to rank high in search engines. It also points towards the fact that here, coding is straightforward and immaculate.
- Web designers have full control over the website that they have created, so they have the freedom to maintain it their way.
- The website can be built easily, as per the wishes of the developer, as WordPress offers 100 per cent customization rights.
- As the admin, users have the freedom to add as many users they want to their admin panel.
After talking in brief about a few of the advantages of WP as a whole, it is finally time that some popular plugins that are addressed.
Useful WordPress plugins
- Yoast SEO
This is currently one of the most useful plugins of WordPress. It is also considered as the best plugin for users who want to write content and adhere to all the SEO factors. This plugin was created by Joost de Valk to drastically improve SEO.
This plugin encourages users to focus especially on keywords and as everybody knows, that inclusion of keywords is the most important factor for anybody who writes articles.
By today, Yoast SEO has become one of the most important plugins of WordPress. It has been installed more than 3 million times by now. It stands out because it takes care of the minuscule things that most people tend to forget about and neglect.
With the use of Yoast SEO, you can also control the pages that can be displayed in Google searches. Its features include import-export, RSS optimization, media integration and WordPress multi-sites.
- Monarch
This is regarded by experts as one of the best social media plugins. This can be used to increase traffic on social media websites. Whenever you are creating a website, then adding a social sharing option is undoubtedly one of the most crucial actions
Monarch also provides you with a variety of placement options. This can be used to maximize conversion and the level of social sharing. As far as placement is concerned, Monarch offers the following options:
- Above and Below Content
- On Images & Videos
- Floating Sidebar
- Automatic-Flying
- Automatic Pop-up
As far as the designs of the social sharing options are concerned, you have the option of choosing from a variety of modern designs.
- W3 Total Cache
This plugin is also extremely critical and popular, as it serves the purpose of solving one of the most important issues. This plugin is responsible for improving performance optimization. This plugin is trusted and used by big names like mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, AT&T, makeuseof.com, personified.com and many more.
Active installs, since the inception of this particular plugin, has reached nearly 1 million.
W3 Total cache also performs the function of improving search engine results of different page rankings. It is also considered as an immensely important mobile-friendly tool. It drastically reduces the time taken to lead pages and thus, in turn, reduces visitor time on your website.
This plugin is compatible with dedicated servers and clusters. It is characterized by a transparent content delivery network management. It supports SSL and AMP and can be used to incorporate a number of security measures.
Conclusion
WordPress, along with its set of plugins are at a constant state of evolution, which involves new features and updates. It is updated regularly, and as soon as new updated versions are released, developers all around the world are creating new plugins.
Hopefully, the plugins mentioned above will help you in some manner to arrive at a resolution about what the best plugins are. These plugins contribute to the idea of designers trying to build an optimum website. Even though there are many other plugins available within WordPress, this article informs you about the best three of the lot.
