The Top Three Plugins that Should Be on Your Website
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One aspect that we love about WordPress is the ability to add thousands of different third-party plugins. The options are virtually endless, but that’s not always a good thing. With over 58,000 available plugins – and counting – finding the best and most important plugins for your site can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Today we’re going to share with you our top three plugins.

Depending on the nature of your website, there are a variety of different plugins that will be helpful to you. However, in all of the dozens of sites we’ve created, updated, and done maintenance on, we’ve found three plugins that are essential for almost every site.

1. Yoast SEO

Every site can benefit from SEO, and Yoast SEO is the most efficient, complete plugin solution we’ve found for this. Yoast has tons of features that come in handy for every page and post on your site. Here are a few:

  • Built-in SEO analysis
  • Readability analysis
  • Google search result snippet previews
  • Ability to change SEO title and meta description on each post
  • Focus keyword evaluation
  • RSS footer and header configuration
  • XML Sitemaps that make it easy for Google to understand the structure of your site

All of these features are integrated into the free version of Yoast. If you choose to update to the premium version, you’ll enjoy even more features. However, the free version is effective for many sites. If you do choose to upgrade, here are some more benefits you will get:

  • Ability to use multiple focus keywords
  • Video tutorials for each feature of Yoast
  • One year of support
  • Access to Yoast SEO academy courses

There are many more features that make Yoast SEO valuable for your site. We love Yoast SEO for its ease of use and comprehensive solutions. Yoast uses a simple red-orange-green light system to let you know how you’re doing in each category. If you receive a red or orange light, it will let you know how you can improve, and will even link you to an article to explain further. The system, while thorough, is also simple enough for almost anyone to use.

2. Gravity Forms

Almost every website will need a plugin for forms. Whether you offer contact forms, want to request feedback, provide a newsletter signup, or need to set up a survey, Gravity Forms is an effective plugin solution.

Here are some of the top features of Gravity Forms:

 

  • Form Editor. The drag-and-drop interface allows you to edit basically every aspect of your forms. It’s easy to add new fields, rearrange, select types of fields, and adjust to your specifications as needed.
  • Email forwarding. Gravity Forms allows you to send results to the email address of the applicable person in your company. Just type in the email address of the employee who should receive the form results, and that person will get them right to his or her inbox.
  • Payments. Gravity Forms is integrated with Paypal, which allows you to easily collect payments directly from your forms. You can insert pricing fields pretty much wherever you need.
  • Conditional logic. One of the most popular features is conditional logic. This allows fields to be hidden depending on the answer to a previous field in the form.
  • File uploading. This plugin allows users to upload files, such as images or documents, into their form submissions.
  • Data Export. When you’re collecting a significant amount of data, it’s helpful – and often essential – to be able to download your data into an Excel spreadsheet. Gravity Forms allows you to save form responses and export data as a spreadsheet.

3. Imagify

Imagify is a simple WordPress solution that will optimize and compress your images in one click. Adding visuals to your website is key for enhancing your site’s appearance and creating a user-friendly, attractive space. However, if you bog your website down with unoptimized images, the visitor’s browser has a lot of work to do in order to load your site’s pages. This will slow your site down considerably (not to mention your user’s experience). Optimizing images allows you to add media with compressed file sizes that make loading times faster and give your user a much less frustrating experience.

With Imagify, your images are automatically optimized when you upload them into WordPress, which makes adding visuals simple and quick. You also have the option to restore files to their original version or change to another compression level whenever you want. Some more benefits of Imagify include:

 

  • At-a-glance check of before and after image size
  • 3 compression level options
  • Easy image size selection according to your WordPress media settings
  • Automatic resizing, so you don’t have to edit your images before uploading to your WordPress library
  • Optimization for every device, from mobile to desktop
  • Three different pricing plans depending on the amount of data that you need per month

Be sure to add these top three plugins to your site!

Adding these plugins is a fairly simple and very effective way to make your site simpler to set up, more user-friendly, and easier for your customers to find. If you are creating your own WordPress site or already have a website, we think these top three plugins will considerably improve your experience.

At Lifedge, we’ve seen many businesses struggle because their marketing efforts are not providing the results they want. We offer strategy, planning, and execution of high-quality digital marketing to help you achieve success online. We want you to have the confidence that your marketing really works. Lifedge offers website development and maintenance to help you succeed in your digital marketing. When you work with us for your website, we’ll make sure you have the plugins that are most important for you – which will almost certainly include these top three! Contact us today to start the conversation and find out how we can help you.

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