One of the reasons WordPress is such a dominant Content Management System has to be the availability and quality of the 3rd party plugins that have been developed for it. Plugins are software add-ons that allow owners and developers to bolt on extra functions to their WordPress website. The best plugins have become near-ubiquitous in their use and increase the utility of WordPress significantly. Here are the six most popular WordPress plugins of all time. All of these plugins have over 10 million downloads.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a ubiquitous WordPress plugin that makes optimizing your site for search engine success easy to do. Yoast allows you to set your main keyword, your meta description, slug, SEO title, and the alt attributes of your images. It is a pretty useful one-stop optimization shop that does the basics right. One thing Yoast can’t do is conduct keyword research or localization for you. For that, you are better off consulting with a professional. ALT Agency website designer Birmingham, is a company able to optimize your website for SEO in the Midlands area of the UK with lots of experience tailoring SEO to localized needs. For general SEO, tweaking Yoast is incredible, For more specialized work, you’ll need to contact the professionals.
Jetpack
Jetpack is a highly versatile plugin that covers a great many bases. It improves security, helps with design, and contains lots of marketing functions. Marketing-wise, the automatic social media posting function is an incredibly useful little feature. If you only plan on downloading one plugin, consider making it Jetpack – the jack of all trades.
Akismet
Askimet is a highly useful plugin designed with the purpose of detecting and deleting spam comments. The sheer scale of the spam problem has certainly contributed to this plugin’s success among WordPress site owners and developers alike.
Wordfence Security
Website security is incredibly important. High-profile hacking operations have held online data to ransom, stolen sensitive information, and compromised customer data. Wordfence Security is a plugin dedicated to plugging the gaps in your defenses. Wordfence has plenty of great features that help you feel secure handling sensitive data – including a firewall and a malware scanner.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 does exactly what you might expect it to allow you to create contact forms on your site. It allows for the implementation of CAPTCHA authenticity checking so that you can prevent bots from spamming your inbox with phony inquiries. Giving your site visitors a way to get in touch is essential, and Contact Form 7 is a simple way of providing a communicative avenue.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the dominant eCommerce plugin for WordPress and has been downloaded over 82 million times. It offers plenty of tools for the online shopkeeper, including streamlined checkout processes, airtight security, and a great customizable User Experience. WooCommerce is an absolute juggernaut. If you have ever bought goods online from a site other than Amazon or eBay, the likelihood is high that you were purchasing from a WooCommerce website.
