21 Nov Must-Have WordPress Plugins For Any Website ( Part 2)

In the first part of our post, we recommended must-have apps for your WordPress site. For this post, we will continue listing essential plugins so that your site will enjoy the functionality you need not only to reach out to customers but also to give them a good user experience.

Here are some good WordPress plugin choices.

W3 Total Cache

Incrase your website’s speed and performance with features like CDN integration. W3 Total Cache is one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins with benefits including:

• Improved search rankings especially for responsive and SSL-enabled websites.
• 10 times improvement upon installation.
• Faster loading pages.
• 80% savings in bandwidth.

Some features of W3 Total Cache are:

• Caching posts and pages on disk memory or CDN.
• Disk or memory object caching.
• Disk or memory data base object caching.
• CDN, memory or disk memory feed caching
• Page, feed or post minification.
• Integration reverse proxy through Varnish and Nginx.

Disqus

Increase engagement and build audience loyalty through Disqus. This is very important especially if you’re running a blog. To increase visibility of your blog in search results and social media, you need to boost engagement and the best way to do this is through discussion.

Disqus is a popular discussion platform used by many WordPress users because it helps website owners to engage audience through comments left by guests as they leave questions or feedback.

Features include:

• Automatic synch with WordPress for backup.
• Synchronous loading without affecting site performance.
• Monetization options as revenue grows.
• Export comments to WordPress-compatible XML backup.
• Detailed dashboard to measure engagement.
• Responsive design.

Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker can scan and monitor your website for broken links. This is important because broken link can impact SERPs negatively. Broken links happen when a website or web page no longer exists. It can be due to a webpage being moved without a redirect.

When the plugin detects a broken link, the plugin notifies you through an email or dashboard. Other features of Broken Link Checker include:

• Monitor and detect links that don’t work.
• Filter links by URL.
• Edit links from plugin page.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).

WP Smush

Website performance is very important if you want your site to rank high in search pages. This is also important if you want to drive more traffic to your posts. A faster loading website has better conversion rates and better revenue capacity.

WP Smush is an image compression plugin that automatically compresses images in your website. Smaller images makes websites load faster improving website performance.

Other features include:

• Advanced image lossless compression.
• Control of max width and max height.
• Process JPEG, GIF, and PNG files.
• Optimize image in directory.
• Smushes images to 1 MB or smaller.

BJ Lazy Load

As stated above, website performance is important. Another way to load website faster is by delaying the load of images so your site loads the text first. You can do this by installing BJ Lazy Load.

The plugin works by replacing post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images, and content iframes with a placeholder. This results in the text being loaded first while images load as the user scrolls down, improving load time.

Other benefits include:

• Covers embedded videos from Youtube, Vimeo, etc.
• Lazy load other images and iframes in your theme through filters.
• Non-Javascript visitors get the original element in noscript.
• Compatible with RICG Responsive Images plugin.
• Translations of Hebrew, Russian, Polish and Norwegian.

WordPress plugins are an easy way to expand the functionality of your website. They are easy to use and many of them are free.

Here is the first part of our recommendations.