Plugins in WordPress are essential components that extend and enhance the functionality of a WordPress website. They allow users to customize and add site features without changing the core WordPress codebase. In this article, we will review essential plugins in WordPress, their use, and their different types. WordPress plugins are packages of code written in PHP that can be easily integrated into a WordPress installation. With thousands of plugins in the WordPress plugin directory, users can find solutions for any need.
Using WordPress plugins covers many purposes. Let’s look at some common uses:
1. Increased performance:
Plugins can easily extend the functionality of WordPress by adding a contact form, e-commerce system, or social media sharing buttons. Plugins are easy to activate and configure in minutes.
2. Website performance and optimization:
Plugins focused on performance optimization help users improve their website’s speed, cache, and overall performance. They offer features such as reducing the size of CSS and JavaScript files, loading all images in lazy loading mode, and database optimization. By optimizing various aspects of a site, these plugins ensure a fast and responsive user experience.
3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization):
SEO plugins help optimize websites for search engines and facilitate improved rankings in search results. SEO plugins give users more power to optimize content and improve their website’s visibility in search engine results.
4. Security and maintenance:
Plugins dedicated to security help WordPress websites against attacks and vulnerabilities. They offer features such as firewall protection, malware scanning, login security, and file health monitoring.
Essential plugins for a WordPress website
Now let’s check the types of essential WordPress plugins:
1. Free plugins:
The WordPress plugins folder hosts thousands of free plugins covering a wide range of features. These plugins are provided by the WordPress community and can be downloaded and used for free. They offer users a good starting point for those looking for basic features or who want a variety of features before investing in various premium options.
2. Premium plugins:
Premium plugins are developed by individuals or companies that offer advanced functionality and dedicated customer support. These plugins typically come with additional features, regular updates, and priority support. Users typically purchase premium add-ons as a stand-alone product or as part of a larger package or membership plan.
Yoast SEO plugin
It helps to optimize and SEO the website and allows us to improve our ranking in Google. With this plugin, you can set aside any tool you consider for your website’s SEO and install it on the site very easily, because yoast seo provides you with all the features and tools you need to SEO your website in one place. Yoast SEO has many features such as entering keywords, previewing posts, adding meta tags, and connecting to the Google search console. To add the sitemap feature, it is enough to write the name of the site + sitemap_index.xml, if our sitemap gives an error, it is enough to Create a post to fix the error problem
Wpforms plugin
Using this plugin, we can create any desired form just by dragging and dropping. With this plugin, we can create a survey form, email newsletter, payment form, or even a multi-step form.
MonsterInsights plugin
This allows us to analyze our site to see which part of our site was visited more by users. This plugin helps us to connect to Google Analytics, this can also help us to optimize our website. , in such a way that we can find out, for example, which one of the posts or pages of your website has the least number of visits and we can make a series of changes to them.
Elementor Header & Footer Builder plugin
It is a free plugin that we can use to create beautiful and unique headers and footers for our site.
Woocommerce plugin
WooCommerce plugin is one of the most popular, powerful, and essential store builder plugins for WordPress content management systems. This plugin provides high power and flexibility for building and managing online stores on websites. In the following, we will discuss some of the features and facilities of this plugin.
1. Create and manage products: WooCommerce plugin allows you to create your store products with full details and various features. You can easily manage prices, inventory, images, descriptions, and other product features.
2. Shipping: The WooCommerce plugin provides advanced features to manage the shipping of your orders. You can customize shipping rules, postage prices, shipping methods, and order tracking.
3. Easy payment system: WooCommerce allows you to connect to different payment gateways so that customers can easily use different payment methods such as credit card, PayPal, cash, etc.
4. Manage profitability and discounts: You have the ability to set prices, discounts, and special coupons in WooCommerce. This allows you to customize your pricing and advertising policies.
5. Reporting and statistics: The WooCommerce plugin provides comprehensive reporting and statistical tools to display and analyze sales, inventory, and customer behavior. You can check and improve the performance of your store using this information.
6. Customization feature: WooCommerce plugin offers many features to customize your store. You can customize the template, product grouping, special display, add-ons, and many other details to your taste and needs.
With these, only some of the aforementioned features of the WooCommerce plugin have been mentioned, and in fact, its features and capabilities are unlimited. This plugin helps you build a powerful online store with WordPress and manage it easily.
Beaver Builder plugin
The Beaver Builder plugin is a powerful and easy-to-understand tool for building web pages on WordPress websites. This plugin provides users with a simple yet highly flexible way to create and customize amazing web pages without the need for programming or technical skills. Let’s dive into some of the main features and benefits of the Beaver Builder plugin.
1. Drag and Drop: One of the outstanding features of the Beaver Builder plugin is its drag-and-drop interface. Users can easily add and arrange elements such as text, images, videos, buttons, and more by dragging and dropping them onto the screen. This user-friendly interface is accessible to both beginners and advanced users.
2. Pre-built templates: Beaver Builder comes with a wide selection of pre-designed templates that users can choose from. These templates provide a starting point for creating beautiful pages and save time by eliminating the need to design from scratch. Users can easily customize the templates to suit their needs and branding.
3. Compatibility with Themes: Beaver Builder plugin works great for most WordPress themes. Users can enhance their pages in various formats and add their own custom designs and layouts using this simple tool. Whether for a blog, portfolio, or business website, the plugin is integrated with various templates to allow design flexibility.
updraft plus plugin
This feature can be used to create a backup copy. This plugin allows us to automatically back up our site and store these backup copies in FTP, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc., also for Returning the support version to the site will not cause any problems, although this plugin does not support large databases.
After entering the plugin page, in the first tab, you can back up your database and files, which includes all the information on your site and your posts.
A full backup of all WordPress files, database, plugins, and templates is better than a backup of the database daily
Sucuri plugin
This plugin can be used to prevent intrusion into the site. This plugin helps us to deal with DDoS attacks, XSS, or any other intrusion. It has a cloud proxy firewall that bypasses all your traffic before sending it to the hosting server and blocks all malicious attacks or hacker attempts to infiltrate the website and you will have only real visitors. It also makes your website perform better in terms of efficiency and speed.