There are a variety of plugins available to help customise and add additional features and functionality to your website that are specifically useful to you and your business. Tela has picked out a few that we would recommend installing, to get the most from your WordPress site.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimise your content for search engines. It is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress sites and is used by over 5 million websites all over the world.
As a website owner, ensuring your website is visible to search engines and ranking well in results pages is crucial. Yoast SEO gives you pointers on where you can optimise your page’s content and Google listing information, to help you understand the key factors search engines are looking for. Using these pointers to optimise your site will increase your chances of ranking higher in searches, leading to more traffic visiting your website.
Another benefit of using Yoast SEO is that it can really help fine-tune your website’s content and in turn, make sure your content is optimised for both search engines and users. This can help lead to higher quality traffic and lower bounce back rates.
Yoast SEO can be a powerful tool that can really help improve your website’s visibility and performance.
Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet is one of the most reliable anti-spam plugins which automatically checks all comments and forms to filter out any messages that look like spam. This is an important tool to help protect your site and also prevent any malicious content.
Enabling both comments and contact form messages on your website is a great way to improve your visitor engagement, but are unfortunately prone to spam messages, random advertisements and suspicious links that direct you to irrelevant websites. These comments can harm your sites reputation, credibility and security and if left, can harm your sites SEO efforts and user experience.
Web crawlers see spam as red flags and will therefore remove this content from its search results. Installing an anti-spam plugin like Akismet, is vital when blocking spammers from your site. It can quickly scan hundreds of comments, messages and forms and eliminate the ones that include spam.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a premium WordPress plugin that allows owners to create custom web forms, with lots of different functionality to collect data. It is one of the most popular form builder plugins for WordPress sites and allows you to create anything; from a simple contact form, to a longer more complicated form, or surveys and quizzes. It is very straightforward to use and utilises a simple drag and drop editor.
It is popular for its features like conditional formatting, which automatically shows or hides certain questions based on a user’s answers to previous questions. It also has an email forwarding function, where it automatically sends an email to specified team members, depending on the content filled out on the form.
You can highly customise each form, from what the user sees and what the user can submit, to who receives the responses. Whether you need a simple contact form, email sign up, or sales forms, Gravity Forms can help you do all of this and even more for your WordPress site.
Smush
One of the best ways to improve site performance and speed is to optimise all the images on your site.
Smush is the most popular image optimisation plugin for WordPress sites and is an excellent option for users looking to compress images, without affecting the quality.
Smush will scan every image loaded onto your site, remove any unnecessary data and scale it for you before adding it to your image library. It will pinpoint the images that are slowing down your site and optimise them. Not only will this free up some of your site’s storage space, but pages will load faster without impacting quality.
It can also help page performance by using built in features like lazy loading, where only the pictures being viewed will load, helping pages load faster and improving user experience. This increases the number of engaged viewers and conversions, and really helps your SEO.
In summary Smush is an easy to use, reliable tool that will compress any bulky images without impacting on visual quality. Faster page load will not only greatly improve user experience but is also great for your SEO efforts.
MailChimp
Despite the rising popularity of social media marketing, email marketing is still a really successful way to promote your business, target new customers and retain old ones.
Mailchimp is a popular automated email marketing platform that can help you reach your target audience. It is an all in one tool, where you create custom email templates, manage your mailing lists and automate your email marketing campaigns.
Mailchimp’s features are easy to use and allow you to develop your campaigns from the front end, without needing any coding knowledge. You can choose from a list of features, themes and basic layouts for different email campaigns
Its automation features are really useful for larger organisations with bigger contact lists as it allows you to send relevant emails to target groups without writing and sending each email individually
MailChimp is a great tool to help you send multiple emails and manage subscribers. It offers great tracking facilities, allows you to target subscribers, set up autoresponders and create beautiful email templates all through a great user interface.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free website tracking tool that collects data and creates detailed reports that can provide great insight into your business. It is a really useful tool to help understand how users interact with your website and what is driving customers to, or away from, your website.
Depending on your requirements, it allows you to achieve a basic level of analysis on your site performance, or offers the opportunity for more advanced analysis. Not only can you gather information on which marketing channels drive traffic to your site, but you can also see; what sites users come from at different times of the day, which landing pages they arrived at, and how long the page took to load etc.
Other features allow you to see the age, gender, location, and interests of your potential customers, what device they are using and what pages they are visiting on your site.
It allows you to keep track of the content that receives the highest amount of views and shares, therefore helping you to rank higher in the search engines and increase potential traffic and visitors through to your website.
One of the most important metrics Google Analytics can give you is bounce rate. This measures the percentage of people who leave your site before interacting with anything and can help you determine if a page is attractive enough to your client base.
Overall, Google Analytics is an excellent tool allowing you to gather great visitor data, to track and understand your customers behaviour and user experience. It helps you access the information you need to shape the success of your digital business strategy.
Final Thoughts
There are a range of really helpful, reliable plugins that bring important functions to your website. Whether it’s improving your SEO, increasing your site speed, adding a contact form or helping to eliminate spam, plugins are a powerful tool to help extend your sites features and functionalities.
