Every year thousands of plugins are developed that can improve your WordPress site. You’ve probably already got Akismet and Jetpack installed and activated, but with so many additional options in the directory, you can be forgiven for not knowing where to go next. Here are 16 plugins that will make your site faster, safer, easier to use, and more profitable in 2018.
Wordable
As intuitive as WordPress is, many bloggers still find themselves drafting posts elsewhere and then pasting the finished product into the WordPress content editor. Wordable saves you a step here, enabling you to export from Google Docs directly to WordPress in a click. The plugin supports formatting such as headers and bold, and even embedded images.
Optinmonster
Everyone has experienced this: you’re about to leave a website, and suddenly you get a pop-up saying “Hey buddy, sorry to see you go, but don’t you want to subscribe before you leave? You can even have a free e-book if you do!” Well those things actually work! Optinmonster is a top-of-the-range plugin to help you set up forms of this kind and others, to turn visitors into subscribers.
W3 Total Cache
This plugin makes your website faster — in some cases up to 10 times faster. It does this through a variety of methods, such as “minifying” your website’s code so that browsers can read it more quickly, and through better use of content delivery networks (for example, if your site if in the US and a visitor from the UK tries to load one of your pages, W3 Total Cache can allow them to access a cached version stored in the UK).
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder enables you to develop your own WordPress theme with a simple drag-and-drop interface. You can customize almost all aspects of the site, and you can even make custom templates that you can use for different sections of your site. You could make all posts in a certain category to have a unique design, or even make a unique design for every single post.
Contact Form 7
If you want your readers to be able to contact you, but you don’t want to display your email address on the site, you need to use a form. Contact Form 7 lets you do this quickly and easily. You can set up multiple contact forms delivering to multiple addresses (in case you want different forms for sales, support, enquiries, bug reports, etc.), and you can easily integrate CAPTCHA and the Akismet spam filter.
Wufoo Shortcode Plugin
Wufoo also enables you to set up forms on your site, but these aren’t your traditional contact form. These are for survey data, such as that gleaned from the “Did you find this post useful?” type questions you often see on sites. With this plugin you can collect crucial feedback on the content of your posts with very little up-front effort on your part.
Soliloquy
Image sliders: you either love ’em or hate ’em. If you’re in the “hate” camp, give Soliloquy a try. Its sliders can be static or dynamic, and they can easily be customized to match the style of your site. They are also responsive and mobile-friendly straight out of the box, a must in websites of today.
Quick and Easy FAQs
Most sites have a page called “FAQ” (or something equally creative), with the questions and answers written in the page content. But if you have a large, complex site covering multiple topic areas, you might want a better way of organizing your FAQs. That’s where Quick and Easy FAQs comes in. You can create categories, customize designs, and reorder questions far more easily than with a static page.
Freshbooks
If you’re a business owner, check out Freshbooks. This plugin enables you to create invoices and receive payments through your WordPress interface. If you’re presently using a separate program to this end, or if you’re sending invoices manually, this could save you a lot of time.
Optimizely
Another plugin most useful for business sites, Optimizely makes A/B testing super easy. For example, if you have a pitch page for a certain product you’re promoting, with Optimizely you can write two different pitches, maybe focusing on different product features, and see which gets you the most conversions. Then you adjust your pitch again and re-test. By continually testing and evolving based on real results, you’ll quickly optimize your copy for sales.
Give
If you run a nonprofit, or otherwise support your site through donations from your visitors, Give will be of particular interest to you. It enables visitors to make donations without leaving your site. Because you don’t need to send your visitors off to a third-party platform to receive donations, your site is more self-contained and professional.
WP-CLI
This one isn’t for beginners, and it’s not a plugin in the traditional sense. WP-CLI is a command line interface tool for WordPress, enabling you to carry out a range of procedures like updating plugins and WordPress itself from the shell. If that means nothing to you, then either skip to the next plugin or develop some shell skills before installing. If you already have some shell experience, however, you’ll love this.
Revive Old Post – Auto Post to Social Media
As a serious blogger, you have (or will create) a large number of high-quality posts. The problem is that new readers might not have the time or inclination to go through your archives to review your past glories. This plugin solves that problem, automatically posting old content to your social media accounts at a frequency you specify.
Linkify Text
This plugin will automatically turn a given text string into a link, wherever it appears on your blog, without you needing to go through posts one-by-one and manually add the links. For example, if you review PlayStation games, you could turn every instance of “Street Fighter V” into an affiliate link pointing to the game’s product page on Amazon. You can limit the links to just one per post if you don’t want to over-saturate your pages with links.
Rename wp-login.php
Sadly, WordPress sites are frequent targets for hacking attempts. Automated programs will locate your login page (usually yoursite.com/wp-login.php) and try to guess your username and password. This simple but ingenious plugin moves your login page to a different URL, thwarting many of these automated attacks. Just be sure not to forget the new URL!
Snapshot
You should have a security plugin running, such as WordFence or Defender, as well as the aforementioned Rename wp-login.php. But no online security system is perfect, and even the best-defended sites get hacked. Snapshot creates regular, cloud-based backups of your entire site. If your WordPress site gets hacked, broken, deleted, or otherwise compromised, you can simply restore your backup and take your site back to the way it was before.
Of course, different sites have different needs, and it’s unlikely that you’ll want to install all of these plugins. However, you have plenty of options here to help you improve the functionality, security, and profitability of your blog. Install a few today and see how they work out for you.