When it comes to developing a WordPress website, one can get confused over numerous plugins but too many plugins can actually increase the load time of your web design in Brampton. So how can you use plugins in your favor without overwhelming your site? Many times you must have heard about “must-have” plugins, to be honest, nothing like this exists but there are some essential plugins to know about.
In this blog, we will discuss how each plugin can help you and we will also provide alternatives for these too.
1. Sucuri (Website Security, Protection & Monitoring)
For any online business owner, security must be a top priority. Sucuri is one such plugin that can help with this, it monitors as well as protect your site from malware threats, XSS attacks, or basically any type of attack. When it comes to WordPress website development in Brampton, ensuring robust security measures is crucial for safeguarding your online presence and protecting your customers’ data.
Sucuri offers a bunch of features that can help in securing your website, these includes:
- Virtual patching against security issues
- Blacklist monitoring
- Mitigation against DDoS attacks
- Malware scanning and removal
One of the best features of Sucuri is to not log in to anyone on your site unless you have whitelisted the IP address.
Sucuri can save you a lot of time and money but if you are in a pinch or just starting out, there are some free plugins you can use to improve the security of your website.
The free version of Sucuri provides malware scanning and auditing. You can also use Wordfence, although it is free it can hog up your resource. Another thing we will suggest is to use a Login No Captcha reCAPTCHA plugin, which will add a captcha box on your login page.
2. W3 Total Cache (Web Performance Optimization)
W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress sites. This improves the user experience of your site by increasing the website performance and reducing the load time by content delivery network (CDN) integration. One of the most popular web host agnostic frameworks, these have many benefits:
- Improved search engine ranking
- Better conversion rates and site performance
- Optimized rendering
- Reduced Load time
Some of the Key Features of W3 Total Cache: - Compatible with shared hosting
- Mobile Support
- Transparent CDN
- AMP support
- SSL support
- Caching of pages, CSS, JS, database objects, and much more on disk or CDN
- Reverse Proxy
Although W3 Total Cache has a free and a pro version, if you want to try something new, there are alternatives like WP Fastest Cache and WP Super Cache.
3. Yoast SEO
Creating a website is not enough, SEO is important too. While WordPress is inherently SEO-friendly, there are still numerous strategies to boost your website traffic by implementing SEO best practices. Yoast SEO offers the most extensive solution with all the features and tools that help in improving your on-page SEO. This helps in adding meta tags, connecting the site to Google Search Console, generating sitemaps, and much more. Another feature of Yoast is its Redirect feature that creates 301 redirects.
Other than Yoast, you can also try All In One SEO too. It has similar features like page-level control, XML Sitemap, Image attachment page redirects, and so on.
4. Social Snap (Social Media Sharing Plugin)
Today, social media app has gained popularity and this has the potential to drive traffic to your site. So, making content that is eye-catchy for the same does make sense. Social Snap is one such plugin for WordPress which can help you here. It can:
- Add social sharing buttons on the inline buttons, stick bars, widgets, or on images.
- Customize button’s look to make it stand out
- Choose from more than 30 social networks
- Choose the title/description of the articles to share on the social platforms
Social Snap has an extensive feature set, if you are new, you may not need all of it. Social Warfare Plugin is an alternative with a few features you can use if you are just starting.
5. Constant Contact ( Marketing Plugin)
One of the most effective and reliable marketing tools is Email. For many, this may come as a surprise as many deem social media the best for this purpose. However, email can help you stay in touch with your users, and thus it is strongly recommended that every business owner start to build their email list right away.
Constant Contact is one of the most popular email marketing service tools. It helps in building email lists and sending an extraordinary email newsletter.
One alternative to Constant Contact is MailChimp. You can get up to 2000 contacts and around 10,000 emails for free per month and has a customized email template with detailed analysis.
If you are still in confusion about what plugin is right for your website, contact Enterprise Web Cloud. We develop WordPress sites all according to your business needs.
