What Is WordPress?
WordPress is an excellent website platform for a variety of websites. From blogging to e-commerce to business and portfolio websites, WordPress is a versatile CMS. Designed with usability and flexibility in mind, WordPress is a great solution for both large and small websites.
What is WordPress? At its core, WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog.
Yes – more than one in four websites that you visit are likely powered by WordPress.
On a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open-source content management system licensed under GPLv2, which means that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free. A content management system is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website – like content – without needing to know anything about programming.
The end result is that WordPress makes building a website accessible to anyone – even people who aren’t developers.
Why are plugins important?
Plugins are the building blocks of your WordPress site. They bring in important functions to your website, whether you need to add contact forms, improve SEO, increase site speed, create an online store, or offer email opt-ins. Whatever you need your website to do can be done with a plugin.
There are thousands of free and premium WordPress plugins to download and add — here are the best plugins for WordPress, no matter what type of website you’re building.
All in One SEO
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is a popular WordPress plugin for managing comprehensive on-site SEO and making optimizations to make a site rank highly in search results.
With AIOSEO, you are able to conduct site-wide audits to see the health of your current site and better understand where to make updates. On each page, you’re given the ability to change things like meta descriptions, title tags, and more.
Plus, if you’re looking to get up and running quickly, AIOSEO includes a setup wizard to quickly adjust settings based on a unique industry’s needs.
Why we recommend: Learning how to optimize your website for search can be intimidating. However, All in One SEO provides a user-friendly, comprehensive solution to monitor and improve your on-page SEO. The dashboard and tools are intuitive, helping new and experienced site owners rank higher.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress, making it easy to optimize your pages and posts to rank higher on search engines.
With Yoast SEO, you’ll get templates for titles and meta descriptions, so you can learn how to craft this information according to SEO best practices. Yoast SEO also analyzes your content for both readability and keywords, so you can balance high-quality content with SEO.
Why we recommend: Yoast is another leading SEO plugin for WordPress, full of features to optimize your website for organic search. Plus, on top of its automatic SEO improvements, the plugin provides tactical help to make your content shine in the SERPs.
WPForms
WPForms is one of the most popular WordPress form builders in the market. It’s a beginner-friendly tool that makes it easy to add forms to your WordPress website. Create forms with the code-free drag-and-drop builder, which lets you add just about any form field you would want in any order you wish.
The free version of the plugin comes with basic contact form features such as form fields, CAPTCHA, email notifications, and more. With the premium version of WPForms, you get even more functionality such as integrations and the ability to create multi-page forms and add survey functionality.
Why we recommend: WPForms is one of the easiest ways to create customized, flexible forms for a WordPress website. Use it to capture whatever user information you need, from contact information to in-depth surveys.
Jetpack
Jetpack is a collection of awesome tools and features that supercharge your site with many useful functionalities. Jetpack offers the capabilities of many plugins in one. It’s also developed by Automattic, the team behind WordPress, so you’ll be getting exceptional developers behind the tool.
From improving site security to optimizing user engagement, Jetpack provides several features to keep your site running smoothly. With Jetpack, you can add social share buttons, contact forms, CDN services, email subscription forms, improve security, and many other services to your website.
Why we recommend: Jetpack acts like a one-stop shop for your website’s needs. It handles lead generation, backups, security, and speed all in one tool, making it great for users afraid of plugin overload. Plus, Jetpack is modular, so you can purchase and install only the tools you need to grow your site.
Elementor
Elementor is a leading page builder for the WordPress CMS — it allows you to place a variety of page elements with a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG interface. This way, constructing your ideal website is as easy as clicking and dragging your desired elements into the builder area — no coding necessary.
For its ease-of-use, simplicity, and compatibility with many WordPress themes, Elementor is a highly recommended plugin for beginner website owners and those less comfortable touching the back-end WordPress code.
Why we recommend: With Elementor, you can add expertly-crafted pages to your site without writing a line of code. This plugin provides a wealth of page elements that you can easily add to any page and craft a highly effective site. Elementor is the kind of plugin that makes you wonder how you ever lived without it.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. Caching is the method of storing website content in the user’s browser, in order to provide that data even faster the next time they access your website.
Essentially, W3 Total Cache reduces your website’s loading times. Because of the increased site speed, you’ll see a boost in your site’s search engine rankings, user experience, and perhaps even in conversion rates.
Why we recommend: Website performance should be one of your highest priorities as a website owner. If your pages are slow to load, visitors will simply leave for a competitor’s site. W3 Total Cache helps ensure your pages stay fast and reliable, with minimal configuration needed from you.
Akismet Spam Protection
Another Automattic-backed plugin, Akismet is the most popular anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It checks your contact form submissions and comments for suspicious submissions, keeping your blog clean, your forms spam-free, and your site professional-looking.
Using Akismet is as easy as installing and activating — the plugin will automatically handle the rest of the work. It also lets you review which comments are stopped or cleared by the plugin, so you can block or unblock comments yourself.
Why we recommend: Akismet is a quintessential “run-in-the-background” plugin. Simply install it and watch it work its magic, limiting spam and saving you heaps of time and busy work.
iThemes Security
WordPress websites can be easy targets for hackers, unless you take the steps to protect yours. The security of your WordPress site shouldn’t be taken lightly, which is why we recommend iThemes Security, one of the most effective plugins for securing your WordPress website.
iThemes Security gives you more than 30 ways to protect your site and users, including password expiration, two-factor authentication, reCAPTCHA, and malware scanning. The plugin also provides security templates to work for your specific kind of site, whether it’s an online store, a blog, or an online portfolio.
Why we recommend: Don’t wait until you’re hacked to install a security plugin. iThemes is one of the best options available, with dozens of ways to harden your WordPress site against cyberattacks.
Monarch
The Monarch plugin from ElegantThemes is one of the best social sharing plugins for WordPress. This plugin has modern social sharing buttons, which you can strategically place on your web pages, to encourage users to quickly click and share your content on their social media feeds.
Monarch integrates with over 20 social media platforms to help you reach new audiences on valuable channels. There are also advanced pop-up triggers to place CTAs at just the right time.
Why we recommend: Social media is a key marketing channel for scaling businesses, and the Monarch plugin helps channel website visitors toward your social media accounts, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or beyond.
There are over 59,000+ WordPress plugins that you can choose from. This makes it extremely overwhelming for new users to find the right plugin for their website.
We are often asked by readers for the best WordPress plugin suggestions for SEO, social media, backups, speed, etc.
Being the largest WordPress resource site, our experts test over a thousand best paid and free WordPress plugins every year, so we can make it easy for our users (you) to find the best solutions.
Having the right set of WordPress plugins and tools can help you grow your online business. In this article, we have shared our expert pick of the must-have WordPress plugins for business websites in 2022. A good plugin has the power to help you skyrocket the success of your business online.
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