5 MUST HAVE WORDPRESS PLUGINS

If you have a WordPress website or blog or are thinking of starting one. Here are five must-have plugins that every website should have. All of these plugins are completely free and can help you get your website more traffic, more customers and more security from hackers and accidental crashes. If you're on the fence about starting a WordPress website. This is the best place to see how powerful the WordPress platform can be stay tuned. How to make website claim the number one online resource for helping you create your first website both easily affordable. Today I'll be sharing five must-have plugins for every WordPress website or blog. I love each and every one of these plugins and as a professional web developer, they're the first things I download on every new WordPress install. They're that great and the best part of all they're completely free to download and start using for those unfamiliar with plugins. These are basically packages of code that you can add to your WordPress website to add functionality such as a contact form, email signups etc. Think of plugins like extensions to your website taking WordPress from a simple blog to an actual traditional website to install a new plugin. Simply go to plugins on your left sidebar then click add new from here you can search up the name of the plug-in in the search bar and finally click install. They're completely free so you can pick and choose whichever ones you want and immediately start using them. So without further ado let's jump into the first plug-in the first plug-in is a security plug-in called 

5. iTheme Security 

I think that security should be the first priority for every website or blog. No matter how big or small this plugin is going to make your WordPress site much more secure preventing hackers from breaking into your account and stealing confidential information or even worse deleting your website entirely. While iTheme Security does is add multiple layers of security such as blocking the IP addresses of any brute force hackers trying to log in to your admin account for example if someone tries to log into your account five times without success. It will block their IP address from accessing the website as great as the WordPress platform is it can be quite vulnerable in stock form. Once you add a plug-in like iTheme Security. However, then you add some much-needed protection through multiple layers of security protocols. Tying in with the theme of security our second plugin allows you to backup your website and files. So in case anything happens to your servers or if your website crashes you can restore it at the click of a button. My preferred backup plug-in of choice is called 

4. Updraft plus 

Another potential vulnerability of WordPress is that it's mostly an online platform what this means is that all the work and content and customization that you do is stored exclusively on a web server. Now the issue is and I've learned this the hard way is that sometimes servers crash and you can lose everything you work for. Don't learn the hard way download updraft plus and schedule regular backups every week you can even link a free Dropbox account so that your backups automatically get sent to your Dropbox account. Our 3rd plugin is a simple yet effective.

3. Contact Us plugin 

Our 3rd plugin is a simple yet effective Contact Us plugin and the most popular one is contact form 7. Now I know it seems like common sense but everyone should have a contact us form or page on their website so viewers or potential customers can reach you via email. You can customize the form fields to ask for certain info such as name, email, phone numbers, subject etc/ Then you can implement this contact form on any page by copying and pasting the shortcode onto a pages text box. It's that easy. Now, these last two plugins are going to focus on the marketing side of things so you can get more customers and more traffic. Our fourth plugin allows you to collect the email signups through various methods and it is my favorite plugin on this list. The plugin I'm referring to is called sumo me. 

2. Sumo Me 

Sumo Me is actually a bundle of plugins by one company. sumo me is unique because it actually contains a suite of plugins you can activate on your website. The main goal of my plugins is to collect visitor emails through various opt-in forms such as list builder and welcoming that list builder is your typical pop-up email collector that creates a dialog box asking your visitor to sign up for updates. the welcome is more unique in that it adds a full-screen pop-up that really captures your visitor's attention. Building your email list is one of the most powerful marketing tools for capturing your customers and audience email gives you a direct line to your customers so you can promote your products or services. Sumo me also integrates with all the top email marketing software such as MailChimp Aweber and much more there's no better way to start collecting emails from day one than Sumo me. Our fifth and final plugin is for SEO or search engine optimization.

1. Yoast SEO

The best SEO plugin for WordPress is made by the company Yoast. For those who are unfamiliar with SEO, the basic concept is that you can rank higher on the google search rankings by focusing on certain keywords and incorporating these keywords into your pages, title description, and content if you rank high enough you can receive massive amounts of organic traffic from people searching for that keyword.Y aost allows you to edit any pages meta title and description so you can focus on your keyword of choice. Yoast also analyzes your entire page and provides very helpful suggestions on how to improve SEO readability. Well, that wraps up our five must-have WordPress plugins I really hope you found this article useful and if you did please thumbs up and comment letting me know it really means a lot and helps the blog to grow. Also, make sure to follow to get all the latest news.