10 Best Plugins to rock your WordPress Website 

Whether you are considering starting a blog, building a portfolio for your business, or setting up an eCommerce store, WordPress is a great way to go. A significant number of tools and features come bundled with every installation of WordPress, you’ve essentially got a web design powerhouse right at your fingertips.

One of the features that enhance every WordPress website is with the use of plugins. Plugins are there to add additional functionality to your existing website and can be added at any time, and generally speaking, they can have fantastic results on the look, feel, and performance of your site.

Although there are a lot of premium plugins available, there are also some genuinely great plugins out there that’ll improve your website without costing you a penny.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s get on with the best plugins to rock your WordPress website in 2020.

1. Elementor

Just starting out with web design? This drag and drop page builder makes it a little easier.
If the concept of building a website is a little daunting, there are various page builders out there, but the Elementor plugin is one of the easiest to use. The plugin is free and works with several themes.

There are plenty of free tutorials made by the creators of the plugin to help you get started. When we say drag and drop, we mean being able to add a section, drag a heading element and text editor, type text and choose a font/colour then hit publish. It’s as simple as that.

2. WP-Rocket

Looking to speed up your site in a matter of clicks, take Wp-Rocket for a spin.
Although this plugin fits into the premium category at a fee of £37 per year, its worth its weight in gold.

One of the great aspects of WP Rocket is that you can set it up in a matter of minutes and forget it even exists. You’ll normally see an instant boost to your site’s load time thanks to page caching occurring right away, and you’ll also see an improvement to your google ranking using cache preloads, in addition to speeding up image load times.

3. Yoast SEO

If search optimization made easy is what you’re looking for, Yoast SEO ticks every box.
Yoast SEO free provides tools to help improve your SEO for images, content and titles using a traffic light system. The plugin adds functionality for every page advising whether your SEO for that page is bad (red), ok(orange) or excellent (green) and breaks points down into the most important improvements first.

Yoast SEO also indexes your post’s readability; if it’s hard to read, it’ll let you know. Yoast can set up a robots.txt file for your site and XML sitemap, and also connect your site to Google Search Console, which is all vital to ensure the best indexing of your website. If you’re new to the concept of SEO, why not check out this SEO for WordPress newbies guide.

4. WooCommerce

Need to build an online store? Look no further than Woocommerce.
woocommerce is one of the most straightforward eCommerce plugins to convert a website from a magazine to an online store. The free version of the plugin lets users accept credit card, Paypal and bank transfer payments, calculate taxes and shipping and also includes useful stock management features.

Expert tools are included with the premium version such as add-ons to track abandoned carts and one-page checkout functionality, but the standard version has the tools most users will require. If you’re considering taking a deeper dive into creating an eCommerce store click here for a list of some of the best WordPress eCommerce plugins available right now.

5. TablePress

Import, manage and create tables on your WordPress site with TablePress.
Whether you have large amounts of data to display or a short pricing table, this free plugin makes it easy. No HTML knowledge is required; it offers styling options and allows importing in various file formats.

6. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup

Mistakes happen, so it’s essential to have a way to get your site back up and running.
This free plugin takes backups of your entire website and stores them on your hosting server for easy access. If something does go wrong, you can keep peace of mind knowing your site backup is readily available thanks to UpdraftPlus.

7. All in One WordPress security

Keep those nasty attackers out and ensure website safety with a security plugin.
This entry-level security plugin is completely free and packs some excellent features to keep your website running securely. The plugin enforces the latest security techniques and patches, detecting vulnerabilities found in plugins, themes and files that could compromise the safety of your website.

8. Akismet

Got lots of users commenting on your content, separate the legit comments from SPAM
This free plugin often comes bundled or pre-installed with WordPress, and once activated it will monitor your pages and posts for any comments that come in. Akismet sorts the trash comments from the legit users and allows you to sort through at your convenience to ensure comments marked as SPAM are correct, saving you heaps of time.

9. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

See the traffic coming to your site, and the content that’s being viewed the most.
Yet another free plugin, but this one allows you to see who is coming to your website. Check out the posts they’re reading, and which ones they’re avoiding. See where your traffic is coming from i.e. Google, Social Media etc. and get a good picture of how you are performing in search.

10. Insert headers and footers

Steer clear of touching your theme code, insert your code in a safer way.

Adding Google Analytics, Adsense or other tags requires the insertion of code into your theme files. This free plugin allows you to place code in the header and footer without editing your WordPress theme directly. Check out how to install analytics on your WordPress website if you need a helping hand.

We hope our list of WordPress plugins has helped you to enhance your website, but if we’ve missed any that could do with a mention, drop us a line!