One of the most beautiful things about working on WordPress is that everyone else also uses it too. Because WordPress has such a big piece of the CMS pie, there are thousands upon thousands of great plugins, both created by Automattic and by the million-strong WordPress user community.
What’s a benefit also becomes a challenge- as sometimes it can be difficult to choose the best WordPress plugins with so much choice out there.
Lucky for you, I’ve done the work for you, and I’ve got the best WordPress plugins for 2019:
1
Omnisend’s WooCommerce Plugin
Our first WordPress/WooCommerce plugin comes in strong: Omnisend is a one-stop-shop for everything involved in omnichannel marketing automation. Integrating seamlessly with WooCommerce, WordPress’s ecommerce platform extension, Omnisend allows you to replace many of the smaller marketing plugins you’re probably already using.
With email marketing at the foundation of Omnisend, you can automate many of the marketing channels where your customers are. Unlike many marketing automation platforms, you can add several channels to the same automation workflow, like email, sms, and push notifications, and messenger apps like Viber, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.
Omnisend doesn’t stop there: it’s also possible to connect your contact lists to Google and Facebook for customer retargeting.
If the convenience of bringing all of the channels you use under one roof isn’t enough to tempt you, perhaps knowing that Omnisend’s paid plans start out at just $16 per month might.
For those features, that price is a steal. They also offer a 14-day free trial so you can test it all out before making a decision.
2
Yoast SEO for Content Optimization
Yoast is a personal favorite of mine, as someone who is always writing content on WordPress. While many might think that Yoast is all you have to do for SEO, it’s important to remember that Yoast is a tool that helps you optimize content that’s already SEO-friendly.
It definitely helps give you a full checklist of the ways you can make your content better for Google, and scores your content based on that checklist. This way, you can start following that checklist until these SEO practices just become second nature.
Yoast has both a free and a premium version, but the free is still great for anyone who just needs to get some content optimized quickly.
3
WPForms to Be More Reachable
Want to put one of those nifty contact forms on your WordPress site, but you don’t know how to code? WPForms comes to the rescue.
Offering tons of templates and different settings, you can customize your forms from the plugin in your WordPress backoffice to make sure it functions the way you need it to.
Have you ever seen a site that looked like its contact form was from another planet entirely? You won’t get that with WPForms. They use a visual composer, so you can make sure your form looks like it really belongs on your site.
Finally, you get full control over how your form appears on your site. It doesn’t have to be a full page somewhere on your site. You can set it up to be in the footer of your site, in the sidebar of a blog post, appear in-text of your content, wherever you like. WPForms is simple without limiting you.
4
Revive Old Post
One of the worst feelings is having content that you’ve worked really hard on gather dust on the shelf. Especially when creating evergreen content, every post, no matter how great it is, ebbs and flows in terms of popularity.
While updating the date yourself and adding fresh content is always a good idea, Revive Old Post can achieve this for you.
This WordPress plugin automatically shares your older evergreen content on your social accounts, including inventory. So if you run a WooCommerce WordPress site, you can keep your best legacy products where your customers can see them.
You can also set up Revive Old Post so that it will skip certain posts, inventory, or content based on what you do or don’t want. It’s a must-have for those who just don’t have time to pull older content to the front lines.
5
Google XML Sitemaps
Remember what I mentioned about Yoast being great for content? Google XML Sitemaps helps optimize the parts of your site that aren’t about content. Google XML Sitemaps is the Yoast for your site’s structure.
A huge part of SEO is making sure that your site is structured in such a way that Google can crawl and index it properly. This plugin helps by organizing your site, and reporting that structure to Google and other search engines (but let’s be real, Google), so that it can properly analyze your site’s content for their search results.
SEO is a complicated, tricky thing, but it doesn’t have to be impossible. I highly recommend using both Google XML Sitemaps combined with Yoast for that one-two SEO knockout punch.
Conclude
These 5 WordPress plugins are a great way to get started on the right foot- but I’ve only barely scratched the surface of the amazing plugins the WordPress community has to offer. Test out a few on your own, read the reviews, and see how they work for your site.
In conclusion, with a bit of trial and error, you’ll have a pro-status WordPress site in no time.