Do you want to extend your functionality in WordPress? Plugins have been on the rise for years and there are so many at your fingertips that provide features to enhance your pages and operations within WordPress. We want to provide you with what we believe are the top 5 WordPress plugins in 2020 that can help improve your sites functionality all around. Even if you have a very niche-specific website, there are plugins for ALL sites and “must-haves”.
So, we will look at just that, the “must-have” plugins. They have been carefully handpicked by some of the industries leading experts and highly recommended for a variety of different websites. Let’s dive in!
What are the Best Plugins to Choose for Your WordPress Site?
Many useful plugins can be found within the WordPress framework that reduces your work on your part. In he official plugin reservoir, you can find over 50,000 free WordPress plugins. Depending on the functions or features on your website, there are plugins for nearly all of them! This is awesome news for WordPress yuppies!
Equivalent featured plugins can be found everywhere also. You just need to settle on the simplest one for yourself that suits your project and install the plugin. There are both free and premium plugins for WordPress. Most of the plugins are developed as freemiums. A freemium plugin could be a free plugin with the capability to upgrade to the premium version for advanced features.
Let’s take a look at the selected plugins we have searched that are very functional for most WordPress sites and will not cost you anything.
1. Best For Forms: Everest Forms (Free)
A ‘contact’ page is one of the fundamental building blocks on a website. Whether a site is big or small, complex or simple, you want those visiting your site to be able to reach you. A contact page hold many purposes: feedback on your content, reach out to you for business purposes or suggestions, requests for products and services and so forth.
‘Everest Forms‘ is a simple yet stylish plugin from WordPress with a drag and drop interface allowing you to build great visual contact forms fairly quickly and easily. It’s set of general fields along with advanced fields allows you to easily drag and drop to create forms.
Not only can you choose from 2 design layouts, default and classic, but you can also create unlimited WordPress forms on them.
2. Best For Security: Wordfence Security (Freemium)
Hackers are constantly trying to get into sites and as a website owner, one of your top priorities should be to keep these criminals from destroying your site. No one can afford to put their site at risk. Of the thousands of malicious bots that are our there, you should do everything in your power to prevent spammers and hackers and keep your website secure.
Of the many security plugins our there, Wordfence Security is the one you can rely on. The plugin features malware scan, Firewall protection, blocking, live traffic monitoring, login security, and more. You will have the capability to monitor your traffic in real-time which includes 404 errors, robots, humans, logins, logouts, and more.
It also features a firewall application that can prevent hacks. It also has Two Factor Authentication along with monitoring the strength of user and admin passwords. Overall, Wordfence is great for preventing attacks.
3. Best For SEO: Yoast SEO (Freemium)
So many factors come into play when you are wanting to rank on the first page of Google. The more traffic you get to your site the higher your rankings go and how do you get this traffic? A huge part of the system is on-page SEO and Yoast provides a clear structure to follow.
You start by setting a keyword you want to rank for and follow the red light, orange and green lights Yoast measures at the core of the plugin. Once your green, you’re on your way to ranking excellent against competitors. Not only will you have inbound and outbound links, clear and regular key phrases, images, alt text, and metal, you’ll have a great looking page to attract your readers.
4. Best For Analytics: Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
To better understand website traffic, Google Analytics is free and provides the statistics you need to understand who your audience is and how to better cater to them. You have the capability to monitor various real-time stats in regards to your website. With the capabilities of tracking user views from multiple platforms and devices, this plugin offers universal tracking along with various demographic and interest reports.
The functionality of this plugin also enables you to integrate Google Adsense for tracking performance and with commerce ready features you can track product popularity, order values and conversion rates.
5. Best For Redirection: Redirection
Simple as that! This will redirect any pages that have been stuffing up your website or if you happen to have lots of broken links, page errors or registration spams, this plugin will benefit you and allow you to keep your site clean and void from 404’s or other errors. If you need to change permalinks from pages or posts and you somehow forget to, you can set up Redirection to do this automatically and also keep a record of the ones you have already done.
Redirection is very useful when migrating pages from an old site to the new one and you need clean direction to the pages. This plugin is hands down the best for redirecting.