Looking for the best WordPress plugins to take your website to the next level in 2022?
There are over 58,000 WordPress plugins to choose from. This makes it extremely difficult for new users to find the right plugin for their website.
Readers often ask about SEO, social media, backups, speed, etc. It asks for the best WordPress plugin recommendations.
As the largest WordPress resource site, our experts test thousands of the best paid and free WordPress plugins every year, making it easy for our users (you) to find the best solutions.
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world .
It is so popular that users publish 17 posts every second on WordPress sites around the world.
Having the right WordPress plugins and tools can help you grow your online business. In this article, we’ve shared our expert pick of must-have WordPress plugins for business websites in 2021.
1. Rank Math
Rank Math is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress and was the preferred choice before AIOSEO came onto the scene. It is a very powerful plugin with many features to guide your SEO efforts.
Rank MathSEO has everything you need for both technical and on-page SEO. For blog posts, after you enter your keyword, it analyzes the content to make sure it’s ready to rank on Google.
You will then receive a checklist so you can make changes to the content as needed.
Technically speaking, you can use Rank Math for:
- Setup Wizard (Easy to follow)
- Optimize Unlimited Keywords
- XML sitemaps
- Canonical URLs (to avoid duplicate content)
- OpenGraph tags
- Schema.org structured data
- And more
The downside to Rank Mathis that you can train yourself to keep your eyes on the prize.
In other words, while the 2 may not always agree, it can be easy to start writing to make Rank Math happy rather than Google happy.
So when you use a plugin like Rank Math, you should have a strong grasp of how search engines like Google rank. That way, you can take or leave Rank Math’s suggestions more effectively.
Alternative: All In One SEO Pack is a great alternative to Rank Math SEO.
1. Forminator
Forminator offers integration for Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Trello, Slack, and many other resources. It also supports settlements and payments through Stripe and PayPal.
Plus, preliminary forms for sending messages, surveys, and questionnaires – all the functions for which you will have to pay a lot to install premium form plugins.
Feature list
No matter that the Forminator is a free plugin its features list is the same as he is a premium plugin.
Forminator provides a visual drag and drops builder to create your own forms. His only drawback is that he doesn’t have a visual preview.
The plugin creates 5 types of forms:
- Standard forms.
- Polls.
- Quizzes
- Calculations
- Payments
For standard forms, Forminator is more flexible than other available plugins. For example, you can create:
- Forms of payment through Stripe or PayPal.
- External forms of sending messages that add content to any type of message.
- Email Subscription Forms Through Multiple Email Marketing Integrations.
When it comes for integration, the Forminator comes with a long list of third-party integrations like email services, CRM, storage, and project managers:
- HubSpot
- Campaign Monitor
- ActiveCampaign
- Google Sheets
- Zapier (connects you to +1000 apps)
- Trello
- MailChimp
- AWeber
- Slack
Other useful features:
- Manage form input / submit in the toolbar, including the ability to disable or restrict it to match GDPR.
- Conditional logic.
- Custom email notification forms.
- Spam protection with reCAPTCHA or honeypot fields or only authorized users can submit the form.
3 – WP Super Cache
A slow site can frustrate visitors and therefore hurt conversions.
That’s why you need the WP Super Cache plugin.
An online cache is a place that temporarily stores data.
It takes time to load an entire webpage from scratch. Therefore, your browser stores files from previously visited web pages in its cache.
This means it doesn’t have to get a lot of “fresh” information from the site, resulting in a faster load time.
WP Super Cache creates static pages of your site. These pages are then served instead of processing full PHP scripts.
This will shorten the page presentation time.
Without caching your page, your load times will increase significantly.
WP Super Cache also provides caching for visitors using a mobile device.
Here you can see that the plugin is quite simple to use.
While there are many features and controls you can configure, simply turning on caching will speed up your site’s load times.
Make sure to install this plugin to optimize your site and avoid frustrating your visitors.
4 – Google XML Sitemaps
You need search engines to index your site.
To do this effectively, search engines need a sitemap.
A sitemap file helps search engines crawl and index your site properly.
Without one, your ranking will drop and the information search engines display may be out of date.
This is why submitting a sitemap to search engines is crucial to your SEO efforts.
But doing this by hand sucks .
That’s why you need to install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
This plugin creates a dynamic sitemap of your WordPress website compatible with Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Google XML Sitemaps allows you to notify search engines of changes in your sitemap.
The plugin will automatically notify search engines when you update your website or publish new blog posts.
Pretty cool, right?
Seriously, this plugin is a huge time saver and a must-have for every WordPress website.
Be sure to upload it to increase your site’s ranking in search engines.
5. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Images are vital.
Without them, the content can become dry and inconsistent.
Nearly 37% of marketers said that visual marketing is the most important form of content for businesses, second only to blogging at 38%.
However, high-quality images tend to be large files that are slow to load.
So now you have a dilemma. If you overlook the images, your visitors will be more likely to leave the slow site. You frustrate your visitors with slow-loading pages.
You can always manually compress every image before uploading it to your website, but who has time for that?
That’s why you need the Smush plugin.
This plugin automatically compresses and optimizes your images.
That said, you can use plenty of images on your pages and posts while keeping your load times fast.
It’s a win-win.
Here you can see what the plugin looks like when running “Bulk Compress”.
After installing the plugin, follow the prompt to batch compress all your images.
Next, make sure that “Automatic compression is enabled” in the upper right corner of the window.
Smush also shows you how many megabytes you have saved on the right side of the window.
You also have the option to upgrade to the WP Smush Pro plugin.
Pro version provides better compression and removes batch compression limits.
Install the Smush plugin to continue publishing visual content while maintaining your page load times.
6. Sucuri
Security should be the top priority for all online business owners. Sucuri offers a WordPress security plugin and web application firewall, which is probably one of the best protections you can get for your site.
They monitor and protect your site from DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks and basically every other type of attack. If you don’t have a firewall on your website, you should add one today.
To learn more about how to strengthen your website’s security and protect your business, check out our ultimate WordPress security guide for beginners with step-by-step instructions.
Sucuri helps us block hundreds of thousands of attacks every month on WPBeginner.
7 – Elementor Page Builder
The WordPress page editor is pretty simple.
So if you don’t know how to code (and aren’t happy with spending the extra time doing it), you’ll need a page builder so you can quickly create the designs you want.
What is a page builder?
It is a plugin that allows you to build your pages with sections, modules and widgets.
There are hundreds of them available, but most are either expensive or lack the features you need.
There are also two types of page builders: backend and frontend.
You are using a backend editor in the WordPress editor. Every time you make a change, you have to click “Preview” and refresh the live page to see how your changes look.
This is so annoying.
But live edit editors let you see the changes made live and edit the page so you can see what you are doing.
Enter Elementor.
Elementor is a simple and intuitive front-end editor packed with features.
This plugin gives you granular control over every element on your page. And the best part – it’s free.
Creating a page from scratch can waste valuable time, but Elementor comes with a number of ready-to-use templates.
Or, you can save your custom created layouts for reuse on other pages.
In the example below, I’m using the editor to start creating a new page.
On your web page, you can click to add a new section or template.
Then you can add and edit all kinds of widgets using the left hand editor.
It may take some getting used to, as Elementor gives you a lot of design control for each module.
Although Elementor has a Pro version with some extra features, you can easily dress up your pages with any design you want with all the features available in the free version.
It has some great options for responsive settings and they recently released mobile editing as well.
Install the Elementor page builder plugin to create stunning, user-friendly designs on your WordPress website.
8 – MonsterInsights
Data monitoring is essential for the continued growth and improvement of your website.
Without the facts, you are left in the dark to guess.
A tool like Google Analytics can help you improve your website, content and user experience.
It allows you to find out which online campaigns are giving you the most traffic and conversions and how each web page is performing.
With the MonsterInsights plugin, you can easily add, customize and manage Google Analytics website tracking services. You can do all this from your WordPress dashboard.
It makes it much easier to track your website with Google Analytics.
Formerly called Google Analytics for WordPress , MonsterInsights was originally developed by Yoast.
The plugin allows you to view all the basic statistics like sessions and bounce rate.
Additionally, you can use it to set up monitoring for outbound links, internal links, and downloads.
If you choose to pay for the premium version, you get extra features like e-commerce tracking through the apps. This includes WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
After installing the app, you need to link it to your Google account to start using the features.
Click “Authenticate with your Google account” and follow the instructions.
Once connected, click the “Monitoring” tab to see a list of all the features you can configure.
Install MonsterInsights to start collecting vital data on how you can improve your website .
Conclusion
There’s a lot going for website design and maintenance.
Whether you need to optimize your site for search engines or improve the user experience, WordPress plugins are vital.
Then make sure your SEO is in the same spot as Rank Math. And don’t forget the Google XML Sitemaps to help you rank.
Use WP Super Cache and Smush Image Compression and Optimization to make sure your pages load quickly.
Then take things to the next level and create beautiful pages with Elementor Page Builder.
Finally, track all your hard work with MonsterInsights directly from your WordPress dashboard.
If you had to do all the necessary tasks manually, it would take too much time. And if you hire a web developer to do them for you, it will cost you a large amount of money.
Plugins handle these complex tasks so you don’t have to.
And by installing these essential plugins, you will be on your way to a better performing website for your personal or business.
