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Just as with all aspects of business, there are tools that every website should have for optimal performance, and security, as well as to provide an optimum user experience. With the advent of simplified content management systems (CMS), building websites have become easier, though a bit complicated if you don’t know what you are doing.
Having a website is one thing, but having it work optimally and be secure is another thing altogether. In this article, I will explain the tools every website should have in order for it to function optimally.
These features provide you the ability to increase the functionality of your website, and they are a big part of the reason why WordPress has become the most widely used content management system worldwide.
WordPress which powers over 30% of the websites in the world is the most popular CMS, hence this article will be focusing mostly on WordPress as the basis. Aside from custom-made functionalities, WordPress uses mostly plugins to extend website features. With over 55,000 plugins for WP, you will most likely get one that suits your requirements.
1. SEO Plugin Tool
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of boosting both the quantity and quality of visitors to every website through unpaid search engine results. The main objective of SEO for businesses is to produce organic traffic, or visitors who arrive at your website directly from search engine results (SERP).
All the third-party SEO tools and plugins that enable further optimization are what actually make WordPress sites stand out in search engines. Because of this, I believe an SEO plugin should be present on every website.
Yoast SEO plugin is the SEO tool I advise our clients to use. It is unquestionably the most complete option for keeping your site’s on-page SEO efforts up to date. With more than 5 million active installations, so I’m not the only one who thinks that. Yoast has both free and paid versions.
Other SEO tools that are also very good are:
- Rank Math SEO
- All In One SEO
2. A Forms Plugin Tool
Connecting with your consumers or audience is one of the main purposes of having a website. One of the Directly posting your email address on your website will just invite spammers into your inbox. All of your time and effort is saved by using a contact form.
A contact form is a page element that includes a collection of questions asking for information such as the visitor’s name and contact information as well as a message box for the website. Its primary objective is to drive leads to your website. It serves as a conduit for communication between you and a visitor who is looking for a certain good or service.
There are a lot of excellent options available, as we discovered in our search to find the form plugin that would work best for the majority of WordPress users. Even though we personally adore premium plugins and frequently suggest them to our clients, we were pleasantly surprised by a lot of the affordable and free alternatives, including WPForms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms.
The best form plugin will ultimately depend on your individual requirements and financial constraints, therefore before deciding, we advise reviewing the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative.
3. An External Site Backups Plugin Tool
The main assurance that your website may be fully restored after any issues and crashes is a backup. A site backup is useful if you accidentally delete some crucial components, your website is hacked, or a theme, plugin, or module causes trouble.
Every website must have scheduled external site backups that are managed independently of the hosting company because backing up internally has a number of drawbacks.
Updraft Plus is the best backup plugin for most WordPress site owners, according to our analysis of some of the most popular backup plugins, including BlogVault and VaultPress.
4. Page Speed Optimizing Plugin Tools
The success of every website is greatly influenced by page speed because it has an effect on your website’s conversion rate, client satisfaction, and search engine rankings. User experience, web accessibility, and SEO all depend on how quickly your website loads.
If it takes your website more than a few seconds to load, you may risk losing visitors before they even get a chance to see it, especially if they are using mobile devices. Additionally, as Google strives to deliver the best possible results to its consumers, the speed of your page can have a significant impact on how well you rank for a difficult-to-rank keyword.
For these reasons, we believe it’s imperative to install at least a plugin that enhances the speed and functionality of your WordPress website.
Factors that affect site speed include:
- Heavy CSS and JavaScript Use.
- Bad Server/Hosting.
- Poor Coding Standards.
- Too Many Widgets and Plugins.
- Hotlinking.
- WebPageTest.
- Google PageSpeed Insights.
- CDN
Luckily, there are plugins that can take care of almost all these problems and have your website up to speed.
While the Imagify plugin automatically minimizes the file weight of any photos without compromising the quality, WP Rocket caches your pages to speed up your site. It is one of the most well-liked speed improvement plugins on the market. This plugin comes with a ton of great features that all work together to speed up your site and cache your pages. We suggest this plugin to all of our customers.
We also recommend that you use a CDN that serves every website files from servers closer to your visitors, making it load faster. For this, check out Cloudflare (freemium) or Beluga CDN (paid).
5. Anti-spam Plugin Tool
Are your blog’s comments and contact forms clogged with spam? Spam can harm the credibility of your website and put you and your site’s users at risk for phishing and other frauds, in addition to being bothersome to remove.
Once opened, many of the unwelcome emails may reveal themselves to be dangerous dangers to the system. Finding any unwanted emails that flood your mailbox is made much easier with the usage of the anti-spam plugin utility.
Fortunately, one of the simplest and most efficient ways to stop dangerous content from being published on your WordPress site is to install an anti-spam plugin.
Akismet Anti-Spam, created by Automattic, is our go-to anti-spam plugin. By putting all comments and contributions from contact forms through their global spam database and filtering out anything that appears to be spam, Akismet stops spammers from spreading dangerous content.
For personal, non-commercial use, Akismet is “pay what you can,” and it costs only $100 per month for commercial websites.
6. Analytics Tracking Plugin Tools
Insights and data from website analytics can be used to improve the user experience for every website visitors. In order to optimize a website for important conversion metrics, it is also essential to understand client behavior.
You may generate tailored content and improve your exposure on search engines by learning your visitors’ demographics, device type, search terms, and interests. This will all increase your business’s profitability.
We advise implementing Google Analytics as soon as a website is launched because it is essential for measuring and monitoring your digital marketing efforts.
7. Lead Generation Plugin Tool
Businesses can launch campaigns to find potential clients for their goods or services, develop email lists, or collect leads via paid advertising through the lead generation process. These campaigns can be used by businesses to automatically collect data from fresh leads and guide them through the purchasing process.
We wouldn’t describe this kind of plugin as “critical” to the operation of your WordPress site, but as lead creation is a topic we frequently get asked about by clients, we thought we’d include it in this list.
You’ll probably want a lead generation plugin that is specially made for those efforts if you’re looking for something more complex than just a straightforward email collection form, allowing you to construct unique landing pages, pop-ups, floating bars, and more.
There are a ton of WordPress lead generation plugins available, but at imArena, Active Campaign is our top pick. However, Email Octopus, Get Response, and Sendex are as good and recommended.
8. Customer Relationship Management Plugin Tools
CRM or Customer Relationship Management enables businesses to understand more about their consumers, including who they are, why they buy your products, and trends in their buying patterns. This makes it possible for organizations to more accurately predict and meet the demands of their customers.
For managing the relationship with your acquired customers and prospects, we recommend any of the following tools:
9. Website Security Plugin Tools
Web security is crucial for preventing hackers and cyber theft from gaining access to confidential data. Businesses run the danger of malware infection, network attacks, and other IT infrastructure attacks without a proactive security policy.
We highly recommend Astro Web Security and/or Sucuri for effectively securing your site.
CDN protects you from serious security breaches like DDoS. For this, check out Cloudflare (freemium) or Beluga CDN (paid).
Also as a rule of thumb, your site should have an SSL certificate, which is the first sign that your website is secure, and you can get one from SSL Store.
Visit this page to read our in-depth information about website security.
10. WordPress Customization Plugin Tools
When we discuss plugins for WordPress customization, we’re referring to plugins that provide you more power over how your material is displayed on your website. We now believe that two plugins are absolutely necessary. The plugins we suggest for these are listed below:
With the help of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, which makes it easier to create custom fields in WordPress, you can quickly establish WordPress development solutions that are specifically tailored for presenting content.
Those who are still getting used to Gutenberg can continue controlling the content in the same manner with the help of the Classic Editor plugin and Classic Widgets plugin.
For graphics design, which every website ultimately needs, we recommend Canva.
Did I miss any tools?
I hope you enjoyed reading this and I hope it helps you to optimize your website. However, do let us know in the comments section if you feel there is any website optimization tool that is quite essential that we may have missed.
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