What plugins should I use for WordPress?
We have reviewed the few plugins we examined with due care. They were all pre-installed on the open source, free blog system WordPress, which is currently ruling in the world.
One of the most unique qualities about WordPress is that it’s both free and open-source. What does this mean? Anyone can easily access WordPress’ underlying code, meaning any user of the software can customize their own version.
Users who are skilled in Web development can leverage this feature to benefit their own projects and content publishing initiatives, if they so choose!
In order to make your WordPress blog page more special, I wanted to share with you the features of the 7 most used and most popular WordPress plugins.
1. Rank Math
Rank Math is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. It is a very powerful plugin with many features to guide your SEO efforts.
Rank Math SEO 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.
2 – Contact Form 7
As the name suggests, it is a contact form plugin that is most preferred on sites built with WordPress. It is a plugin for creating a contact form designed to contact you with the visitor entering your site. It is a very useful, easy to manage, user friendly plugin.
Contact Form 7, an Ajax-based contact form plugin with CAPTCHA support, also allows you to create as many contact forms as you want on the same site.
3 – Google XML Sitemaps
The plugin allows Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com search engines to easily scan pages, articles, and categorized links on your site by creating a special XML sitemap to help search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com for better indexing of your website.
It helps. With the Sitemaps XML sitemap, it’s much easier for their crawlers to see the full structure of your site and retrieve data more efficiently. When the sitemap location is written as your field/sitemaps.xml, you will see all the links listed in the XML on your site.
4 – Akismet
The Akismet plugin, developed for WordPress, is a very powerful plugin that protects your blog against spam comments made by bots and member registrations.
It comes with WordPress installation, but in order to use the related plugin, you must open a free account on the wordpress.com site and get your private API key.
Some WordPress users prefer to skim through SPAM comments every now and then, as Akismet occasionally marks non-SPAM comments as SPAM, although this is rare.
5. Hummingbird
Hummingbird is another powerful caching plugin for WordPress. It was developed by WPMU DEV, the same people who created the Smush image optimization plugin.
After installing the plugin, it scans your website, finds what slows it down and provides one-click fixes to improve your site performance. This increases your scores in performance testing tools like Google PageSpeed, GTmetrix and Pingdom.
With Hummingbird you have access to top-notch caching features including full page, browser, and Gravatar caching. It offers you a complete set of tools that help you reduce your page load time and provide visitors with a faster browsing experience.
Apart from that, the plugin gives you file compression, minification and lazy loading options for CSS and JS.
Important points:
- Gzip file compression
- Performance report dashboard
- Built-in Cloudflare integration
- Image optimization with the Smush plugin
6 – JetPack
JetPack plugin, which contains many different features, is an extremely useful plugin that can be used to strengthen your WordPress site. It is not possible to include all its features in this article, so it may be useful to take a look at the plugin page.
One of its prominent features is to prevent comments coming as spam on your posts, by turning on the Comments feature and allowing comments to be made by obliging commenters to log in from their social media accounts.
The other most important feature is that it shows the visitors coming to your site graphically and makes a list of which words you get hits on your site.
7 – Really Simple CAPTCHA
By using Really Simple CAPTCHA, a security verification (CAPTCHA) add-on developed especially for Contact Form 7, with different add-ons that need verification, you can get rid of spam and bots with security verification.
