WordPress plugins are a very convenient way to extend the functionality of your website. You can download them directly from your admin screen. You can also develop custom plugins, important and install them on your website.
While the plugins would be very use-case specific, there are few hygiene based plugins that would be applicable to mostly every website. These can help you gain insights, optimize the website for performance and help with search engine optimization.
Top WordPress Plugins
Site Kit
Google develops Site Kit. Site Kit provides insights into multiple Google features
- Analytics
- Speed
- Search Console
- Adsense
The integration is so smooth that it takes seconds to integrate with all services. A definite must-have. You can get it from here
Yoast SEO
Yoast is 1 of the top downloaded SEO tools. It generates an SEO score and gives recommendations for each post and page. It also provides nifty tools such as Sitemap generation that must be submitted to the “Google” search console for better indexing.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache again significantly helps with the speed of the website. It helps with caching, CDN for content delivery, and modification of scripts to boost the website loading.
Smush
Website speed is a critical factor in SEO performance. Website speed can depend a lot on the images. Smush helps compress all images that are uploaded to the website. It also helps in the lazy loading of images and hence makes the website performance much better.
Conclusion
WordPress is very flexible in terms of the way you can customize your website. A few of the plugins however would be useful across most use cases. The above list should at least be part of your consideration list whenever you are developing a WordPress plugin for any of your use cases.
