Best WordPress Plugins in 2019
WordPress is the most popular CMS nowadays. WordPress plugins offer a set of tools for you to build and optimize your WordPress sites. Due to the popularity of WordPress, over 55,000 plugins are developed and available on the WordPress Plugin Directory. We have handpicked a list of the best WordPress plugins you must have in 2019. Let’s take a closer look to each of the recommended plugins.
As a webmaster, you already know how important SEO is. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins that help you create better content and improve your ranking on search results. It can generate XML sitemaps, add SEO title and meta description to your content, controls site breadcrumbs, etc. You can add focus keywords on each page and get your content analyzed accordingly. It indicates how good or bad your content is regarding SEO and readability. It also gives you suggestions to improve the content for better usability and visibility for search engines.
With snippet preview, you can improve how your page looks on the search results by creating better headlines and catchy meta description. It increases the click-through rates and traffic for your site.
Google XML Sitemaps is a free and useful SEO plugin for WordPress. It automatically creates a special XML sitemap that make crawlers easier to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. All you need to do is to submit the sitemap to search engine webmaster tools. Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo can thus better index your site. It also notifies all major search engines whenever you create new content on your site.
Website loading speed is one of the most important SEO factors. The faster your website is, the higher it is likely to rank on Google. With the use of WordPress caching plugin, your website will load faster, deliver better user experience and improve conversion rate. W3 Total Cache is the best WordPress caching plugin that can serve compressed and cached files to your visitors. It reduces page loading time drastically and helps to optimize overall site performance. W3 Total Cache also supports content delivery network (CDN) integration to reduce page load time. You can choose to minify and HTTP compression of the HTML, JS, and CSS files in order to get up to 80% bandwidth savings.
UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin
UpdraftPlus is the most popular scheduled backup plugin that make backups and restorations simple for your WordPress site. It provides a user friendly interface for you to backup, schedule, and restore your WordPress files and databases. You can choose to backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email. More advanced features like cloning and migration, non-WordPress files backup are available in the paid version.
WPForms is a beginner friendly contact form plugin which allows you to create 100% mobile responsive contact forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and other type of forms for your site easily. It offers a drag and drop online form builder that allows you to add custom form field, rearrange fields in minutes. It also provides pre-built form templates so that you do not need to create a form completely from scratch every time. Even better, the forms are optimized for speed and SEO friendly.
Schema is a fast, light-weight plugin for adding schema.org structured data markup in recommended JSON-LD format automatically to WordPress sites. With Schema markup, you will be able to create rich snippets that show extra pieces of information like star ratings, images, number of reviews etc. for your pages on the search results. It helps the search engines return more informative results for users and improve your click-through rate.
Large image files may be slowing down your site without you even knowing it. WP Smush is an award-winning image optimization plugin for WordPress, which can quickly reduce your image file size without losing quality. JPEG, GIF and PNG image files are supported. You can set a maximum width and height to scale down large images before they are added to your media library. In addition to smushing your media uploads, this plugin also lets you compress any image in any directory so that you can optimize all images on your website.
Keeping your website secure from hackers is crucial. Wordfence Security is one of the most comprehensive security plugins for WordPress. It includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. It also protects your site from brute force attacks by limiting login attempts, enforcing strong passwords and other login security measures. Live traffic monitoring is in place for you to monitor all visits and hack attempts in real-time. When you site is facing security threats, you can be aware of it and take an action against it quickly. Its blocking feature blocks all the known attackers, malicious networks which can be harmful to your site.
All of the above are the best WordPress plugins we think you need in 2019. If you haven’t tried any of those plugins yet, we highly recommend you to do so!