WordPress offers over 50,000 plugins to improve your own website management. Plugins are small applications that are added to the CMS to add new functionality to the site. Having too many plugins on a site can be counterproductive or dangerous: slowdowns, bugs, incompatibilities between plugins, potential security breaches and therefore the risks of piracy.
Here are 5 tested plugins you need to install on your site to get started.
1. All in One Security
All in One Security is a free plugin for website security. Its advantage lies in protecting all aspects of the site: its code from duplication or finding errors, protecting comments from robots and entering the system using captcha, blocking the “copy” function, spam filters.
With All In One Security, it is possible to hide the site administrator login page. Why? It’s simple: it is quite easy for a hacker to find usernames and passwords. On the other hand, without the address of the login page, it cannot connect: it has the keys, but no door! Therefore, it is important to make this address invisible.
Additional security: the number of connection attempts is limited to 5, after which the IP address of the unwanted visitor will be “blocked” and they will no longer be able to try to establish a new connection. Another cool feature: the plugin informs about the flaws of the site and recommends changes that should be accepted.
2. Automatic optimization
Automatic optimization – allows you to optimize the website loading speed by reducing it. Here are its advantages:
- Independently combine your CSS, JS or HTML files into one.
- Remove unnecessary comments, line breaks or spaces from your code.
- Compress images.
- Postpone loading images.
3. Google Site Kit
Google Site Kit is a universal plugin for free Google analysis tools. Once installed, you can access the panel of its various tools directly in the site administration.
Google Analytics allows you to measure and analyze traffic in real time:
- who visited the site (number of Internet users,
- origin, age, conversions performed),
- when visited (time spent on a page, pages viewed, bounce rate, terminals are used: computer or mobile phone, etc.),
- where (traffic sources).
This data is important for understanding user behavior and implementing marketing / trade activities.
- Search Console lets you know if a site is located on the correct keywords. It shows the queries for which the site appeared, its position in Google search results and the traffic generated. This data is used to determine your content strategy and keywords for which you need to rank.
- Google’s PageSpeed Insight penalizes sites that are slow and not optimized for mobile devices. Analyzes the content of website pages and provides a report with recommendations to use to optimize page load times. Provides one report for your site on smartphones and another on computers with a score of 100.
- AdSense allows you to monetize your website by “renting” ad space on it.
- Tag Manager is a tag management tool. It allows you to embed tracking apps on your site to collect data about the actions your visitors take: CTA clicks, article clicks /, video watch times, file downloads.
4. Yoast is a free SEO
Yoast is a free SEO optimization plugin. According to checkwebsite.pro, this is the best SEO plugin. It analyzes texts and gives recommendations on the choice of keywords, syntax of sentences or their length. It is one of the most commonly used plugins for managing various aspects of natural links on pages: titles, URLs, meta descriptions. In addition, Yoast conveys a title, image, and description that will appear on social media when someone shares a page on your site.
5. Smush
Smush – compresses and optimizes the weight of images, which allows the site to load faster, reducing the load on the servers. Compression is performed without loss of quality:
- automatically when importing new images;
- manually for those who are already on your site.
The tool also allows you to resize images and detect those that slow down your site.
It is recommended that you carefully consider your needs and do some checks before installing a new plugin: is it updated regularly? Is it compatible with the version of WordPress you are using? Having the right analysis tools is essential to ensure optimal site management and transformation into a service provider for the business.