Whether you are building your first WordPress website, by following a WordPress Tutorial, or you have experience with website building, there are several things, you’ll always have to take care of. Customize your permalinks, decide if you’ll let people to discuss your content (if they’ll be able to comment), add a contact page, install a WordPress theme, create an About Page, and depending on the type of the website that you are creating a few more things.
Also, whether you are building a personal blog, business card website, an e-commerce shop, or a portfolio, the plugins that we’ve picked are among the necessary ones.
Before we examine the 5 WordPress Plugins that you need to use, let’s make a little disclaimer.
Every one of these plugins has a lot of plugins that can substitute them. The list is more or less subjective about my personal preferences.
Still, the plugins that I’ve chosen to be on the list are here for a reason.
All of them are easy to tune in to. All of them are taking care of a feature that you absolutely must have on your website or something that if you don’t have, you’ll have a hard time achieving the desired goal. In essence, all of them will help you do something faster, easier, and with greater security than if you try to do it all by yourself.
With that said, let’s find out the 6 WordPress plugins, that you need to use.
Limit Attempts by BestWebSoft
Let’s start with the security of your website.
WordPress is one of the most used CMSs in the world. And as I said in my previous article you have to use a strong password because as much as it is unfair and bad, there are people that will try to hack your website and obtain control over it. And exactly because WordPress is so popular it is often a target of hacking attacks.
First, I have to say, that the fact hackers are trying to break into WordPress websites, doesn’t make the CMS more vulnerable to these attacks. Just the opposite. These attacks predispose the CMS to become better and stronger.
Much like every time you get ill, your immune system gets stronger. Still, that doesn’t mean you should pay no attention to your health, right? That’s why I highly recommend you install Limit Attempts by BestWebSoft.
Everybody knows that a WordPress-based website’s admin panel is accessible by adding a ‘wp-admin’ after www.domainname.com/ and while this is so, for yours and my facilitation, it’s an outright sign for hackers. And it says “Attack here”.
Of course, there are ways to move the “entrance” somewhere else or to prevent for it to be accessible from anywhere else than your IP. Yet, doing this could be hard, especially if you are not an experienced user. For now, you can just use the Limit Attempts plugin.
The name of which explains right away what it does. It limits the allowed number of attempts to enter your password. How many times you (or someone else) can try to enter a correct password, depends on you.
But don’t worry, it works like the PIN on your phone. If you make too many unsuccessful attempts to enter a correct PIN, you’ll have to wait too much time to be able to try again.
This is great if hackers are trying to enter your website by using brute force.
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
Continuing the topic of security, a backup is a must, whether you are creating a personal blog or any other type of website. Having a backup is as crucial for your website, as it is for your HDD. You have to have one. Period. UpdraftPlus, allows you to backup, restore, and even to clone or migrate your website.
The plugin gives you the option to choose remote storage. Meaning you can use any of the given options to upload the already created backup. Automatically. The remote storages offered are one of the most famous cloud services – DropBox, RackSpace, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and a lot more.
Whether you decide to use the remote storage options, or not, having a backup of your website is essential. And, of course, there are other ways to create a backup, but why don’t you save yourself some time and just use a plugin?
Contact Form 7
To offer a better user experience, pretty much every type of website has to allow the users to contact the administrators. Let your users and/or customers contact you. Also, that shows openness, and you get one more reliable source of content ideas.
Find out: 5 Reasons You Need a Contact Page
Contact 7 is straightforward, customizable, frequently updated, and nice-looking contact form plugin.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Marketing is all about analysis. And to analyze, you have to have information. As far as I am concerned, there is no better free tool for information gathering on user behavior, website, and content performance, than Google Analytics. The amount of information, you’ll be able to access, once you install Google Analytics on your WordPress website is just outstanding. And Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsight is as easy as it gets when it comes to Google Analytics setup. Again, there are a lot of plugins that will offer you the same result, for the same amount of effort. This one is just the one that I prefer.
Yoast SEO
Ahh, traffic! Everybody wants more of it. Everybody is trying to reach as many people as possible. And for a good reason. If your website is not visited enough, it might as well not exist. It just so happens that the digital marketing trends are going further and further in the direction of search engine optimization. And for a good reason. Mobile technologies are at a peak. People are relying more and more on search engines to find what they need. And why shouldn’t they? You and I are giving our best to feed the web with interesting and useful information. And if you are doing it in the right way, more of your content will pop up in the SERP(search engine result page), which, of course, brings traffic. Let, Yoast SEO help you with that. It’s one of the most used SEO plugins. Yoast has a useful SEO blog. And we have a tutorial on how to use it. What more do you need?
ZigTrap
Have problems with spam comments under your content? In the linked article I’ve mentioned ZigTrap and how good of a job, it did for us. Yet, it deserves to be in the 6 WordPress Plugins that you need to use. No one loves spam. Don’t allow it on your website. Period.
In Conclusion
Like every person, every website is different. You may need a ton of additional features. But I doubt that you won’t need any of the mentioned plugins. You need to be able to find out what kind of features you need on your website, and how you see its future growth and development. Yet, whether you are shooting for the stars, or just want a little personal blog like a hobby, these five plugins are a must.