If you have one or more websites that are using WordPress as a CMS, there must be a good reason behind it. And have no doubt in your mind, with more than 35% of websites around the globe using WordPress, you are on the right path. One of the things you can not go around are plugins that help you with almost every aspect of your website. But why are plugins that important?
You can not expect to have a successful website without an increasing number of visitors. There are a lot of ways to increase website traffic, with plugins being one of them. Plugins can cover and help you with most of the tasks – from the simplest to the more complex ones. Before digging into our choice of plugins, there are basics we need to cover.
Good and fast websites need to be lightweight. Do not burden your website with add-ons and plugins that are not essential. Everything that loads with your website can be a potential bottleneck, so you need to play it smart. Choose plugins and add-ons that are crucial for your work, and ditch everything else, your visitors will be grateful, and your website will have more breathing room.
Smart choices are the key, and before everything, you need to play it smart and pick a good hosting partner for your WordPress website. Try to find the provider that can grow with you and upgrade your plan if there is a need for it, and we all hope that will be the case. Look for a secure hosting plan, with regular backup, good server neighborhood, and quality support. Take your time and pick a good hosting company now, so that you can avoid spending more time later on. It is much easier if you make a list, and try to check all the boxes, within a reasonable price range.
When it comes to plugins, there are essential ones that can and will increase traffic to your website, so take a look at our picks.
1. Yoast SEO
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Sometimes the simplest things can make the biggest difference. Yoast SEO is the plugin that checks the level of optimization of your content before publishing. It’s simple and user-friendly interface helps you see how your content will look in Google Search, and what you need to do to improve it. SEO and Readability analyses are there to help you improve the parts of your content that are not optimized. Numeric values help you improve different areas, and make the keywords stand out so that your search results have a better ranking.
Features like cornerstone content and internal linking are very important, and Yoast will help you link the right keywords with the right pages.
To learn how to use this plugin, you can refer to this series.
2. Smush – Compress, Optimize and Lazy Load Images
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The fast website depends heavily on the content. With big and bulky images that are not intentionally published as a part of the post, your website speed can suffer. Smush can help you optimize every image on your website by offering to resize and compression options, without affecting image quality. Features like “Bulk image optimization” can be really helpful, especially because the optimization can cover your entire media library and every other image folder. This way you can finish a great deal of work with a couple of clicks.
With lazy load option built-in, Smush can further speed up your page by serving only the images being viewed and loading others when they are being needed.
3. All in One SEO Pack
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Good SEO means that your content will have a better position in Search Engines, and your website will appear as a relevant result to a specific query on Search Engines. All in One SEO Pack does automatic optimization of your content by generating meta tags. This plugin is the ideal solution for users that do not have time to deal with proper WordPress content optimization and learn SEO algorithms. If you just want to focus on your blog and write quality content, All in One SEO is something you don’t want to miss.
4. W3 Total Cache
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The server load can play an important role in your website performance. W3 Total Cache will cache the website’s data, so it can load faster next time the user opens the same page or set of pages. This cache plugin offers page cache, database caching, HTTP compression of the HTML, JS, and CSS files, and lets you integrate CDN services. With W3 Total Cache, page rankings are improved especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL.
5. WP Health
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Nothing can bring down your visitors count like downtime. WP Health is one of the plugins that monitor your site so that you don’t have to do it 24/7. WP Health will send you notifications if your website is down, another site has blacklisted you, or you have
plugin vulnerabilities and broken images on your site… With this plugin you can keep track of your loading times and look for a room to improve: is there a user with name “Admin”, are your all plugins up to date and active, are you using the latest version of WordPress, SQL database or theme…
Play it on speed
It might not look like a great factor, but website speed is one of the key elements that search engines use in their ranking algorithm. This means that your website speed can directly affect your income. For example, if the speed of your website decreases for half a second, you will see more than 20% traffic loss on Google. This impact is quite significant, even if you are not a large company, so take advantage of plugins that can have a great impact on your performance, and consequently on your traffic.
By optimizing your content, plugins and choosing the hosting provider which will take care of most of the possible issues on your website, you are halfway to a successful online business. And remember – online business is an ongoing process that requires constant improvement in order to be one of the few best-ranked websites with high visitor count. Always be on alert and look for a new way to improve your website and keep one step ahead of the competition.
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