WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world and is used by a immense percentage of corporate and corporate websites and even regular content websites on the Internet. According to statistics , 42.5% of all existing Internet sites are WordPress sites, and therefore it is necessary to learn to use and adapt it for any business owner or site manager.
Why WordPress of all content systems?
The WordPress system due to its previous popularity has a lot of plugins and external themes that make it customizable to do anything the user might want. In addition to being free and open source, having a strong and gigantic community of developers and users makes it the first stop that anyone who wants to build a website might think of.
That is why WordPress is ranked not as high as other CMSs such as Drupal and Joomla; It is not the same size in plugins and themes, nor in the same size as the developer and user community, and therefore it is a weaker surroundings to launch for those who want to build any type of website on the Internet, or at least require a higher rank of resources and efforts to adapt it in the same way that WordPress can achieve.
A must-have WordPress plugin for every website
In this article, we will talk about a set of WordPress plugins that are essential to be present on any type of WordPress site, regardless of its specialization and purpose. These plugins are general and benefit different sites, and are not limited to a particular classification, for example.
You can install these plugins directly from the WordPress dashboard on your site by typing their name in the search box, then installing and activating them.
Jetpack
Jetpack is an official add-on from Automatic, the owner of WordPress that adds a lot of different features to it, and these features are not limited to one area, but in several areas:
- The extension allows to increase the speed of the site by distributing its files on a network of servers around the world belonging to the company.
- The extension also allows monitoring visitors and knowing which pages they come from, the pages they open and the links they click every day, thus allowing site administrators to know more about their visitors and their activities on their sites.
- The extension also has a firewall that can be activated to protect the site from being hacked through bruteforce attacks.
- The extension has an option to change the default comments box for WordPress to allow visitors to write comments through their social accounts on Facebook, Google, etc., or follow new comments on any article via email.
And to add a lot of other options normally in the areas of: automatic content sharing, performance acceleration, widget management, search engine optimization, and more. Most of the add-on options are free; As we explained, it comes from the parent company of the WordPress system itself, but you can subscribe to the paid plan if you want more features related to ads, payment options, and more.
Akismet
It is also a plugin operated by the automatic company that owns WordPress, and its advantage is simply that it prevents spam comments (annoying comments from random bots) from being published on your site, thus saving you a lot of time and effort in following up, deleting and blocking these comments manually.
It’s also a free add-on, but you’ll need to register on their site to receive an API Key and then add it to your site’s settings for the extension to work.
Fortunately, the plugin is automated; You don’t need your intervention after activation, it will automatically delete all the annoying comments you make and throw them in the trash. The plugin works through an advanced system designed by WordPress developers to distinguish spam comments from others through several advanced methods.
Wordfence
Wordfence is a very popular plugin to protect WordPress sites from various types of hacking attacks and security holes, and it is used by more than a million WordPress sites to date.
The extension works by activating a firewall on the site to inspect each visitor’s request to it, and then, through its advanced programming, captures and blocks all attempts to hack the site and blocks the IP addresses from which those attempts come for a period of time.
The extension also contains a set of Scan Tools to check the site and make sure that it does not currently contain any spy code or malicious files within it, and the extension will show any files that have been suspiciously modified as well.
Finally, it comes with a set of extra security tools, such as enabling 2-factor authentication for user login, live traffic monitoring, manual or country blocking, and more.
GAinWP Google Analytics Integration for WordPress
Whether you use Google Analytics to monitor the flow of visitors on your site, then you will love this plugin, because once you have it installed and linked to your Google account, you will be able to see information about your visitors directly from within your WordPress dashboard.
This add-on works in the form of a widget on the main page of the control panel, through which you can view the flow of visitors during any specific period of time you want, and then classify those visits by device, country, open pages, or other beautiful options.
The extension also allows you from the blogging page to see statistics on particular topics that only you want; By clicking on the add icon next to each published article, you can see the Google Analytics statistics for that article alone in the same way as before, so you will know which articles are good and which ones bring visitors from the poor ones that do not.
The extension is of course free and you only need to connect it with your Google Analytics account to use.
WP-Optmize
There are quite a lot of speed, cache, and compression optimization plugins on WordPress, and they differ in performance from each other.
But the advantage of WP-Optimize is that it gives a nice option for uploaded images, which is to automatically compress them to a sure percentage as soon as they are uploaded to the site without user interplay. For example, you can specify the resolution you want (for example, 95% or 90%) for the uploaded images, and the extension will compress it and use the compressed image directly in the article instead of the original image.
This saves a lot of loading time for visitors. Instead of uploading the original image in its large size, they now have a light image that is set for fast and light loading, which in turn can raise the ranking of your pages in search engines and improve the experience of use on your site.
SEO plugins
Any WordPress site must have an SEO plugin.
This is because search engines are the main source for visitors to visit your site and get to know it, and therefore it is necessary that most of the pages on your site are configured according to the best SEO tips out there, and that they target particular keywords that you want to rank well in.
There are a lot of plugins for this, but the most famous ones are Yoast SEO, All in One SEO and RankMath SEO, and the best of them are the last ones; Because it’s not just an SEO add-on like other add-ons, it also includes a 404 error page monitor and an Immediate Indexing tool, in addition to linking it to Google stats to fetch live data on site performance in search algorithms, image metadata optimization, and a redirect tool. Links, and more…
RankMath SEO is a really gigantic add-on in terms of features, and it’s free (with a paid plan with more features whether you want).
Editing and writing add-ons
Gutenberg is the name of the default WordPress content creation editor, but many users are not comfortable with the default writing experience of this editor and want something else, and here we have a set of solutions to this problem:
- Using the classic editor, which is the old WordPress editor before moving to version 5.X, is still officially supported now and will be supported – at least according to the WordPress developers – until 2022 AD.
- Use the TinyMCE editor with the preceding classic editor; It is a more advanced editor and has a lot of formatting and editing options that it does not have.
- Using some Gutenberg editor plugins that allow adding more blocks (Blocks) to it, such as Ultimate Gutenberg Blocks, Gutentor, and others. (You will find numerous of these plugins by searching for “Gutenberg Blocks” on the plugins page.)
- Use another editor at all, such as the advanced Elementor editor to create and modify pages with direct vision, or a rudimentary text editor such as Markdown editors such as WP Githuber MD or WP Markdown Editor.
All of these options are available to you, and you can try them one by one – depending on your site’s classification, specialization, and needs – until you find the correct editor for you. All of them are free, incidentally, so you don’t need to pay to get them.
Conclusion
WordPress is a really great content management system, all of these plugins that we saw in this article are easy to install with a click of a button from the control panel, and most – whether not all – are free and available to everyone, so users do not struggle to create their websites that they want through this the system.
