Nowadays, most of the WordPress users prefer making changes and modifications to their site themselves with the help of tools and plugins available online. Especially, plugins prove productive tools for users, helping them make certain processes as smooth and seamless as possible. Most importantly, the plugins help add new and better functionality in a WordPress site. Whether you want to speed up your WordPress site, or are looking for ways to improve SEO, commenting, – there is a plugin to meet all of your needs.

Let’s have an overview of a list of highly useful plugins that are indispensable to optimize your WordPress site performance.

Plugins to Harden Security of WordPress Site

The security of WordPress site has become the topmost concern of website owners because of the increasing hacking attempts and security infringements. Thankfully, there are brilliant plugins available online that helps in heightening the security of WP install. Two of the most popular security plugins are:

1. Acunetix WP Security Acunetix serves as your comprehensive security tool that provides suggestions to guide you in taking corrective (and necessary) measure in securing your WP installation. It helps implement version hiding, secure the database and file permissions and much more to keep WP site protected against security vulnerabilities.

2. Login LockDown Today, most of the hackers launch brute force attacks in order to login into a WordPress site’s admin panel. You can tackle such an attack by using the Login LockDown plugin. This plugin restricts the number of login attempts made by an IP address after a given period. By default, the plugin blocks an IP, for one hour, after three failed login attempts that a user makes in 5 minutes. However, you can even modify the lockout IP range using the plugin’s options panel.

Plugins For Improving Website Speed

Website loading speed is the most crucial factor that plays a significant role in decreasing the abandonment rate. In fact, based on the Akamai study conducted in 2009 it was concluded that “47 percent of visitors anticipate a page to load in less than 2 seconds while 57 percent of visitors likely abandon a page with over 3 seconds loading time.” Several other case studies have also confirmed that page loading time can have a profound effect on the sales. Below listed are two best plugins to improve the speed of your WP site:

1. Speed Booster Pack This is a new plugin that comes loaded with features options that help in increasing the speed of WordPress site. For instance, it comes with lazy loading images feature that saves bandwidth and speeds up loading time. Also, the Speed Booster Pack lends a helping hand in getting you a high score on various website speed test tools like GooglePageSpeed, Pingdom, GTMetrix, etc.

2. W3 Total Cache Designed specifically for optimizing WordPress website performance, the W3 Total Cache plugin best fit your needs in improving the speed of your site. It’s one of the most in-demand caching plugins that helps increase server performance, and most importantly, cuts down the files downloading time by minifying and compressing JS, HTML, and CSS.

 Plugins to Boost Your SEO

No doubt, WordPress comes with built-in SEO features. However, with ever-increasing competition to make it big in today’s hyper-competitive world, you might need to add advanced features to boost your search engine ranking. This can be done using the plugins listed below:

1. Yoast SEO The plugin helps WordPress users write better content on their site. The Yoast SEO plugin provides snippet preview that enables you to check how your titles appear in search results – whether they look too long or extremely short. Also, it lets you check if your meta description makes sense in SERPs or not. Furthermore, this plugin also analyze the pages to see whether you’ve included things that are critical for SEO but are often overlooked. For instance, it ensures whether you’ve added focus keyword on the site, or incorporate images in the post and so on.

2. WP Social SEO Booster As the name implies, this plugin is built to give a boost to WordPress site search engine rankings. It helps improve search engine visibility of your site by adding rich snippets, Facebook Open Graph, etc. to your website. This plugin is also compatible with other popular SEO plugins All in One SEO, SEO by Yoast, and others.

Plugins For Image Optimization

Images are unarguably the most crucial component of any WordPress site, as they help in making a site look engaging and interactive to users. This eventually helps in increasing user engagement rate, which improves clickthrough and conversion rate. But sadly, large size files can also make a site load slowly. Here are two best plugins that contribute significant time in optimizing the images for better performance of a WordPress site: 

1. WP Smush If you’ve large size image files on your website, then may cause your page to load slowly. This is where the WP Smush plugin comes in handy. It makes use of WPMU DEV’s super servers for compressing each image within your site and removes any unnecessary data that slows down website speed. 

2. EWWW Image Optimizer Another great image optimization plugin is EWWW Image Optimizer that automatically makes the images optimized for WordPress blogs. It basically optimize the already uploaded images and turn them into a file format that generates small size images.

Plugins to Add Comments

Most of the people usually make a purchasing decision after reading the reviews and comments posted by each product and service. In short, they see what others have to say about a product that they may be interested in buying. So, it is imperative that you are having a comments section added to your site. For this purpose, you can make use of the following plugins:

1. CommentLuv With this plugin, you can increase the number of comments you receive on your WP blog, and ultimately improve the traffic. CommentLuv plugin provides opportunity in making your blog go viral on niche social media networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Basically, it encourages users to revisit your and comment again by rewarding them with a link to their last blog right below their comment. Also, the plugin proves useful in reducing the spam comments and much more.

2. Subscribe to CommentsAt times, you may have posts on your blog or your website that leads to heated debates or discussion, something that your users might be interested in staying updated with. In that case, you can use the Subscribe to Comments plugin that lets your commenters receive email notifications of any new comment that is being added to a post of their choice. The best thing about Subscribe to Comments plugin is that it easily enable users to subscribe as well as unsubscribe from your comment feeds.

Plugins For Social Sharing

In today’s age, creating unique and quality content is no longer enough to bring traffic to your site. You also need to make your content reach a broader user base to expand your clientèle list. Well, it’s a known fact that social media is the best source for attracting traffic to a website. Thus, sharing your content on popular social media channels can increase the probability of maximizing your exposure. And, placing nice-looking social share buttons is an excellent way to convince your users in sharing the content. Here are two great social sharing plugins worth exploring:

1. WP Social Share This is a lightweight and fully responsive social sharing plugin that helps add social share buttons of Google+, Pinterest, Facebook and a few other popular social networks. The best part is that the plugin supports add buttons created through CSS3 rather than images, which makes the buttons attractive to viewers’ eyes. With WP Social Share, you can insert the social share buttons to your WordPress posts, pages or custom post types.

2. Social Warfare Social Warfare is an ideal plugin for WordPress users wanting to drive more traffic to their site. It makes the task of adding visually appealing social share buttons to the website posts or pages. Besides this, it even allows controlling the share counts to be displayed on the site and much more.

Conclusion

So, there you have it! Some of the most amazing WordPress plugins that you shouldn’t miss having in your site.

Author Bio :

Sophia is a trained WordPress developer working with WordPrax Ltd., A leading HTML to WordPress conversion services company. If you are planning to convert HTML website to WordPress for a brilliant online presence, she can help you. Some stunning articles related to website markup conversions can be found under her name.