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6 Must Have Plugins For WordPress Your Business Needs

Must Have Plugins for WordPress

Does your new WordPress website seem a little barren and featureless?

Here are five must have plugins for WordPress that fill the most commonly-demanded needs.

They will get your business website off to the right start. What’s more, these plugins are not bloated and full of useless features. They are sleek, they are professional, and they are very secure. Keep reading to learn more.

1. Yoast SEO For WordPress

Do not be fooled by Yoast’s marketing or that of any other SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugin. It doesn’t have the power to rank you up the search engine results. However, you can use Yoast as a reminder to complete your SEO to the fullest.

Besides enabling you to pick a focus keyword and things of that nature, it also has a small checklist at the bottom of each WordPress post. It reminds you of things like how your image doesn’t have Alt text, or how your keyword doesn’t appear in your text.

2. MailChimp Email Marketing

The MailChimp system is a paid service (with a free tier) that allows people to subscribe to your newsletters or sales letters and then opt-in as per legal requirements. Unlike many other services, its servers are very rarely blacklisted because they have such stringent compliance rules. If you are running an eCommerce website, this tool may help you convert a few followers.

3. Add to Any Social Sharing

There are many social media plugins and most of them are bloated, overstuffed, and even a little suspect in terms of data collection.

Add to Any has kept it as simple as possible.

There are numerous social media buttons and you may pick the ones you wish to add to your website. You can have them sitting at the top or bottom of posts, floating on your sidebar, or wherever best fits your website design.

4. Ads.txt Manager Plugin

If you want to add the Ads.txt page to your website, most will suggest a large and weighty app that has 20 or 30 extra functionalities that you will never use.

This app cuts right to the core of the matter by creating the page for you and that is it. There is no need for extra tools, no updating every week, and no security issues.

5. Smush is One of the Must Have Plugins for WordPress

We all know that WordPress will adjust the size of our images to fit whatever device is being used, but if you upload a 2000px by 2000px image, it still needs to be loaded in full before WordPress can resize it. That takes time.

Smush removes the need for loading and resizing by doing the resizing beforehand.

The Smush plugin has a more famous sister plugin that helps you improve loading times, but it uses caching and other methods that require advanced user agreements. Smush simply takes your images and makes them more suitable for your website.

If you only upload .jpeg images, then you can speed up your website using this app, and it does all the compressing and shrinking automatically. It can also go back through your old images and compress them, too.

6. Black Crow WordPress Plugin

#ShamelessPlug

WordPress Plugins You Must Have

Of course if you have a wildlife website or a site with a Gothic or mystical theme, then our Black Crow WordPress Plugin is just for you. It’s a simple way to add some interest and movement to otherwise static pages. By overlaying a flying bird to your WordPress installation, that draws the visitor’s eye across the screen.

Keep It Simple Where Possible

5 Plugins for WordPress

As you can see, some of the must have plugins for WordPress are also the simplest and least bloated. The problem with the WordPress plugin library is that most plugins are very self-serving with their own built in ads to sell you more stuff. They are extraneous tools that are tacked on, making the plugin seem more valuable than it is.

Stick to plugins that do their job in the most efficient manner, and you save yourself the heartache of constant updates, site breaking plugins, capacity issues and extra security risks.

Are you looking for more help with your WordPress website? Check out our web services page for info on design, SEO, and more!