I’ll start this article off by admitting that I’m a fanatic… fanatic about WordPress websites. I literally recommend WordPress to anyone who asks me about creating a website for their brand or business.
The fact that 26.4% of the ENTIRE internet hosts their websites on WordPress leads me to believe that you’ve come across a wordpress website at one point or another.
Mega brands like CNN, TED, Time Magazine, and TechCrunch all use WordPress to power their websites and have made WordPress the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world.
We’re big fans of WordPress here at Wishpond and love it for its power and flexibility.
One of the things that makes WordPress so awesome is its selection of plugins.
WordPress is an open-source platform that allows developers around the world to make plugins that extend the functionality of a standard WordPress website.
In other words, using the right plugins can take your website from Charmander to Charizard.
Maybe you’d like your website to be faster?
Maybe you’d like to collect more leads? Or how about more sales?
Maybe you’d like to have more of your content read?
Whatever your goal is, there’s a plugin out there that can help you reach it.
But not all plugins are created equal.
Some of the nastier, poorly-developed plugins can harm or even crash your website if not properly vetted. They can steal your info or charge you without your knowledge. It’s strongly advised you do your research before implementing any new plugins on your website.
Set your reservations aside while I share with you my list of 16 impossibly awesome WordPress plugins that will supercharge your website.
Let’s get into it!
1. WP Super Cache
Every time I open my mouth to talk about WordPress one issue comes up right away: the speed.
Webmasters will often complain that WordPress has some issues when it comes to its page load speeds, which negatively affects user-experience.
Good thing there’s the WP Super Cache plugin.
WP Super Cache is the number two most-downloaded plugin on WordPress for a reason: it makes your WordPress site WAY faster.
I won’t bog you down with the technical details but put simply, WP Super Cache works by creating HTML files from all the pages of your WordPress site and serving those up instead of resource-heavy PHP scripts. These HTML files load quickly and make the experience for your visitors much faster.
What’s the bottom line?
Use WP Super Cache if you want to increase your website’s page load times. It will decrease your bounce rate and improve the user experience of your entire website.
2. Beacon
Here’s a plugin aimed at improving your lead generation tactics.
After you’ve created a healthy stable of blog posts under one subject you’ll be able to use the Beacon plugin to easily turn those posts into a full ebook. Pretty cool right?!
If you’re a small team or a team of one you probably don’t have the time to create comprehensive ebooks to incentivize lead generation. What the Beacon plugin does is take the blog posts of your choice and compiles them into a full ebook that you design yourself.
Have a collection of workouts and nutrition tips on your personal training blog? Turn them into a Summer fit guide ebook and offer it to your website visitors to get more leads for your personal training business.
What’s the bottom line?
The Beacon plugin makes it impossibly easy to create high value ebooks from your blog posts to use as leads magnets for your website. Pick the posts you want to include, the theme, give it your personal touches and boom, a full-on ebook.
3. Wishpond Popups
How are your lead generation initiatives going? Are your visitors signing up in droves or leaving without doing anything?
Would a plugin that increases leads and blog subscribers help you?
The Wishpond Popup plugin allows you to easily add action oriented popups to any page on your WordPress website:
- Is a significant amount of traffic coming to your website and leaving without converting? An exit-intent popup can help capture a portion of that traffic.
- Are you running a promotion on your website that everyone needs to know about? An entry popup will let all your visitors know right when they arrive.
Don’t let your website visitors come and leave without trying to convert them into a lead or customer. Popups take care of the hard stuff by prompting action from your visitors.
What’s the bottom line?
The Wishpond Popups WordPress plugin comes with 50 beautiful templates to start with and makes it easy to get a popup up and running on your WordPress site in minutes.
4. Instagram Feed
Bring a little colour and excitement to your WordPress website with the Instagram Feed plugin.
The Instagram Feed makes it easy to display a customized version of your Instagram gallery.
Add in a tiny shortcode to import your Instagram feed to a page or the sidebar of your website.
Customize your gallery’s width, number of photos displayed, border, background colour, and more, to suite your website’s look and feel.
What’s the bottom line?
If you’re actively marketing on Instagram this plugin will not only make your website more exciting but will increase your follower count by having your feed shown to desktop users.
5. Page Builder
The Page Builder plugin is a godsend for users who want a little more customization for their WordPress page layouts.
Page Builder features a simple drag and drop editor that works with every type of theme.
You’ll be able to quickly and easily build responsive, column-based pages on your WordPress website with Page Builder. It supports live-editing and support for the widgets you love to incorporate.
What’s the bottom line?
If you have a specific image in your head about how you want your pages to look Page Builder will get you there — no coding required.
6. Google XML Sitemaps
The Google XML Sitemaps plugin does exactly what you think it does: it creates XML sitemaps in an instant for your WordPress website.
A XML sitemap is a map of the entire link structure of your website. Having one in your website’s directory is an instant SEO-booster that makes it easier for search engines like Google to index your website.
What’s the bottom line?
There isn’t that much more to it honestly. Simply install the Google XML Sitemap plugin and give your WordPress website a quick little SEO boost.
7. BackUpWordPress
The BackUpWordPress plugin is one of those plugins that fits into the “I should have installed it” category.
BackUpWordPress will backup your entire WordPress website and files according to an automatic schedule that you set. This means that if your website crashes or you mess up on a piece of code you’ll be able to go back and restore your website to all its glory.
What’s the bottom line?
It’s really a no-brainer, every website owner should backup their data periodically to avoid any sort of epic disaster in the future. Come back and thank me when everything hits the fan…
8. Rename wp-login.php
This is a plugin for you security-fiends out there. Rename wp-login.php is a tiny plugin that allows you to easily and safely change the login address of your WordPress website.
Typically all WordPress users login to their websites at [domainname].com/wp-login.php. The Rename plugin redirects that address to one of your choosing so that no one else can find it — unless you want them to.
What’s the bottom line?
The Rename plugin is an interesting little plugin for those looking to add a bit more security and customization to their WordPress website… just make sure you don’t forget what you changed the address to.
9. P3 Plugin Performance Profiler
Since we’re talking about the best plugins, how about a plugin that helps you manage all your plugins (so meta!).
The P3 Plugin Performance Profiler monitors the performance of your plugins by measuring the effect they have on your website’s load times.
If you have any plugins, new or old, that may be affecting your page’s load times you’ll be able to see which one is the culprit.
What’s the bottom line?
Want to try a new plugin but not sure how it will affect your website?
Use the P3 plugin to test new plugins on your website and see if it slows down the experience for your visitors.
10. Wishpond Landing Pages Builder
The Wishpond landing pages builder plugin transfers all the great stuff about the Wishpond landing page builder to WordPress. It allows users to easily build, publish, and A/B test beautiful landing pages for their WordPress website.
At Wishpond we talk a lot about the importance of using dedicated landing pages for all your marketing and promotion for a good reason: they get results.
Landing pages have become a basic necessity for marketers looking to get the maximum return on investment for their marketing and advertising efforts. Landing pages are proven to increase conversion rates because they’re built with only one conversion goal in mind.
What’s the bottom line?
The Wishpond Landing Pages Builder plugin will have you building awesome pages in minutes AND allow you to A/B test multiple versions to see which ones perform best. It is the complete landing page building tool for WordPress users, give it a try today.
11. Google Analytics
This is another “must-have” tool for all WordPress users in my opinion.
Instead of heading to the Google Analytics website and logging in to see all of your data you can use the Google Analytics WordPress plugin to import all that important stuff right to your WordPress dashboard.
It gets better, the Google Analytics plugin makes it easy to set up and place all of your javascript tracking codes on all of your pages. No more manually placing your tracking code on all of your webpages.
What’s the bottom line?
Simplify your tracking and spend your time making sense of all your data with the Google Analytics plugin.
12. Relevanssi
One part of the standard WordPress platform that desperately needs some supercharging is its search function. That’s where the Relevanssi plugin comes in.
The Relevanssi plugin replaces the standard WordPress search with a powerful search engine that has plenty of features and configurations. It provides search results that are organized in a format and style similar to the Google search results page but for the content on your own website.
What’s the bottom line?
Your users will thank you for the advanced search results Relevanssi provides and you may even find that more of your content is being discovered and read. Head to the Relevanssi plugin page here for a full list of its many features.
13. Click To Tweet
Forget the days of manually creating specific click to tweets and embedding them throughout your content. Easily highlight the shareable content you create with the Click To Tweet WordPress plugin.
What’s the bottom line?
The Click To Tweet plugin skips all the grunt work and creates beautiful Click To Tweet boxes right in your blog posts. Create, highlight, and post in an instant and have more of your content shared on Twitter — it’s really that easy with the Click To Tweet plugin.
14. Disqus
The Disqus comment system is one of the most widely used comment systems on the internet and the Disqus plugin makes it available to all WordPress users.
The Disqus plugin works by adding the powerful Disqus comment system to all of the blog posts you create. While the standard WordPress comment system does its job fine, Disqus takes it to the next level by having features like user profiles and a more advanced comment-spam blocker (death to comment spam!).
One indicator of shareable and engaging blog content is the number of comments a blog post has. The more discussion, the better the chance for virality. Where Disqus truly shines is its ability to make the experience of leaving comments quick and easy for your visitors.
What’s the bottom line?
Use the Disqus plugin to build your community and start engaging in meaningful conversations with your audience.
15. Yoast SEO
How well are you monitoring your website’s search engine optimization (SEO)?
If your answer was “not very well” or “what is SEO?” then this plugin is for you.
Search engine optimization is a requirement for any website on the internet no if, ands, or buts.
If you’d like your website to be in the good graces of the internet’s all-knowing overlord, Google, then you need to make sure your website is as SEO friendly as possible.
The Yoast SEO plugin will make your life easier by showing you whether or not each piece of content you create on your website is SEO friendly.
It will comb over each blog post and page and give you a checklist of what you can improve so that Google can discover it.
Some of the killer features Yoast SEO has are:
- Content analysis
- Page analysis
- Meta and link elements
- RSS optimization
What’s the bottom line?
The Yoast SEO plugin takes all the guesswork out of SEO and lays everything out in an easy to understand format thus helping you improve your website’s visibility.
16. Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP)
One way to decrease your bounce rate — the amount of people who visit your website and leave after viewing only one page — is to persuade your visitors to continue reading more of your content.
A low bounce rate tells Google that people are finding what they’re looking for on your website and sticking around for more.
So how can you lower your bounce rate you ask?
The answer is as simple as suggesting related content. Sure you could manually plug in related content at the bottom every time you write a new post but you’re a busy person. Who has time for that??
The YARPP algorithm suggests content to your readers based on whatever you choose — post titles, tags, categories, or custom taxonomies. Once a reader is finished they can move on to another post suggested by YARPP based on what they’ve just read.
What’s the bottom line?
The Yet Another Related Post Plugin or YARPP was created to make the life of content writers easier by automatically suggesting related content to readers.
Bonus: The pro version of YARPP allows users to make money by allowing native ads from third-party publishers to be placed in the recommended suggestions. This could be an additional source of income for owners of high-traffic websites. Every click a sponsored ad receives on your page is money in the bank.
Plugging In The Pieces
If you’re just starting your online journey with a WordPress website definitely consider playing around with a few plugins to see what they’re capable of.
These plugins are meant to improve the performance of your website and create a better experience for your visitors. The better their experience is, the better off you are.
The WordPress plugins that I recommended were:
- WP Super Cache
- Beacon
- Wishpond Popups
- Instagram Feed
- Page Builder
- Google XML
- BackUpWordPress
- Rename wp-login.php
- P3 Plugin Performance Profiler
- Wishpond Landing Pages Builder
- Google Analytics
- Relevanssi
- Click To Tweet
- Disqus
- Yoast SEO
- Yet Another Related Post Plugin
WordPress is the undisputed champion of content management systems and the right plugins only make WordPress better. Try a few of these 16 impossibly awesome WordPress plugins and supercharge your website today.
Do you have a WordPress website?
What are the plugins you can’t live without?
Leave a comment below and let me know your favourites!
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