Unless you are a WordPress prodigy or an outstanding web developer, you’ll need plugins to help your site run smoothly. With the right plugin, you can streamline the functionality of your WordPress site, improve its appearance, and most importantly, make it function efficiently.
Fortunately, there are a good number of plugins to choose from.
In this little guide, you’ll learn about eight plugins that will optimize your site for the best experience.
Table of Contents
1. WP-Optimize
If you want your site to keep performing at its best, you need to clean up your database regularly. You also need to optimize your website to keep your user engagement growing. Thanks to the WP-Optimize plugin, you can do both automatically. The plugin will automatically delete unnecessary files without leaving manual queries that slow down your site. You can configure the plugin to remove pingbacks, trashed spam, and unapproved comments, as well as trackbacks to keep your site lean and loading fast.
2. Atlas – WordPress Knowledge Base
Having a knowledge base on the website helps users to find more information about a company or brand. A properly managed knowledge base should properly display information, have great search functionality, Easily control permalinks from the admin, and above all, a nice user interface – Atlas – WordPress Knowledge Base has them all.
Atlas – WP – Knowledgebase plugin helps you create a self-serve online library of information about a product, service, department, or topic, helping you to reduce your support volume and increase customer satisfaction.
Atlas comes with a modern look and feel and two beautifully designed, mobile-ready themes to match your brand.
3. Updraft WordPress Backup Plugin
As you know, it’s essential to back up all of your WordPress files and databases. Doing this will help you get back up quickly if your site is hacked, crashes, or hit by malware. With a fully backed up site, you would lose very little if anything at all.
While a full WordPress backup can be done manually, a plugin can do it for you automatically. The UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin is an excellent option for this. It’s one of the most popular backup plugins in the WordPress repository.
The plugin is great for making backups of your website and has a scheduling feature, so you don’t have to tinker with any files. The plugin comes with lots of customization options and allows you to back up your site and send it to off-site storage including Google Drive, Amazon, Dropbox, or your local store.
4. Schema Pro
The Schema Pro plugin is one of the best Schema markup plugins for WordPress which automates schema markup easily. The plugin allows you to automatically add markup configurations in minutes on your posts and how they appear in search engines. They display more information about your post or pages to users and help you get higher CTR. You can mark content with articles, recipes, local businesses, business products, reviews, and more and distinguish them in the SERPs. This will attract more visitors, higher CTR, better rankings, and more traffic.
5. BJ Lazy Load Plugin
If your site is image-heavy, it can take more seconds for your site to fully load. This can annoy readers and even affect your rankings. Now that site speed is a ranking factor, a slow site will mitigate against your success in the SERPs. If your site is already fast, you can make it faster by adding lazy loading functionality to your site. The BJ Lazy Load Plugin is the best out there. The plugin lets you control how and when images load on your site, saving your bandwidth and resulting in faster load times.
6. TinyMCE Advanced Plugin
When you are just getting started with a behemoth like WordPress, you need every skill in your skillset to get things done correctly. One of the aspects of WordPress you need to understand is the Visual Editor toolbar, which holds the keys to your editing needs. To fully enjoy it, you may need more than the few options it offers.
That is where the TinyMCE Advanced Plugin comes in. With the plugin installed, you can add, remove, and rearrange buttons on the Visual Editor toolbar. It even allows you to configure up to 4 rows of buttons, from which you can select tables, fonts, sizes, and lots more that are not available with the typical Visual Editor.
7. Broken Link Checker
Even if you are not running an eCommerce site, it’s still great to have a low count of 404 pages on your site as it allows readers to navigate your site easily. Having “Page Not Available” errors on your site is the fastest way to lose readers. Another problem is that it may be difficult to identify the pages that contain the broken link on your site, further compounding the problem.
The good news is that you can monitor all broken links on your site with the Broken Link Checker Plugin. It will check all your content, including comments and images, and alert you when a broken link is found so you can quickly fix it. You can also use the plugin to block search engines from following the links.
8. MobileMonkey
MobileMonkey is a WordPress plugin that enables website owners to add Facebook Messenger to their website. It enables the site to send news and updates automatically to those who have subscribed to it with the help of Facebook Messenger.
9. Redirection
This is similar to the plugin above in that they work closely together. While the Broken Link Checker Plugin allows you to detect a broken link instantaneously, the Redirection plugin lets you direct the broken link to the appropriate location. Imagine what will happen if you change the permalink of a post/page on your site and you forget to direct it to a new URL. You may never figure that out.
When users go to the old URL, they will get an error “Page Not Available,” further annoying potential subscribers. This plugin allows you to monitor all these kinds of errors and do a 301 (permanent) redirect as they come up.