When setting up a WordPress website there’s going to be some essential features and functionality you’ll want your site to have. This is where plugins come in. There are countless WordPress plugins out there so choosing the best or most suitable ones can be tricky, so we’ve put together our list of top 5 essential WordPress plugins for 2018.
Yoast SEO
Making sure your website is search engine friendly is essential to any self respecting website. There are plenty of useful seo plugins available but Yoast SEO is a great all-round plugin that allows you to easily customise meta data, generate xml sitemaps as well as help optimise for social platforms. It also has a handy feature which tells you how well each page is optimised for your chosen keywords/phrases which makes optimising your site a lot easier.
Contact Form 7
Whether you’re selling online, promoting your product or business or perhaps just setting up a personal site you’ll want visitors to your site to have a way to contact you easily. Contact form 7 is a free plugin which allows you to quickly setup contact forms to embed onto your website. If you’re looking for a quick reliable contact form plugin you can’t go far wrong with this one still.
Cookie Notice
With the new GDPR regulations all sites need to inform users of what cookies the site uses and give users the option to accept them. Making sure your site is fully GDPR compliant can be a bit of a headache which is why we’ve included this cookie notice plugin as one of our essential 2018 plugins. It allows you to quickly and easily get everything set up on your site to allow users to accept, decline and review the sites cookie law policy.
W3 Total Cache
Ensuring your website loads and performs quickly is an important factor when it comes to SEO and user experience. W3 Total cache is a a great all in one plugin that helps compress and cache files to help reduce load speed on your server. This all helps to make a better more user friendly website.
Wordfence
Security has always and will always be vital to any website which is why having reliable security on your site is imporatnt. Again there are many to choose from but we’ve found Wordfence to be a great plugin that helps protect against a range of possible security threats. It also notifies you of any threats and can give you regular updates so you can keep a close eye on any activity on you site.