WordPress is a fantastic platform to create your website, blog, portfolio, or online store. It comes with a series of very useful tools that help you build a very professional-looking website and monitor its performance. But, in addition, it has the advantage that you can easily add new functions by installing different WordPress plugins, from simple contact forms to much more complex online sales systems.
WordPress plugins can be free (the simplest) or paid (those with more advanced features), and you can find both types in the official WordPress plugin directory that you can access from your website dashboard. In addition, if you want to fully customize your page and add features that you cannot find in any plugin offered by the platform, there is also the option of adding third-party plugins, but only if you are hosting your website on WordPress.org. On the other hand, if your website is hosted on WordPress.com, you will not have this option.
The Plugins for WordPress that you cannot miss in 2023
If you take SEO positioning very seriously -you do it right- and you want to achieve the maximum optimization possible, Yoast SEO is for you. Among all the WordPress plugins designed to improve SEO, this one is the best. Yoast SEO analyzes your page in real time and helps you optimize content, images, titles, meta descriptions and keywords. You can also use the plugin to tell Google not to index a certain page or set of pages. In addition, it also analyzes the readability of your text and checks the length of your sentences and paragraphs, whether or not you use enough subheadings and transition words, if you abuse the use of the passive voice, etc.
muPlugins WordPress
WordPress muPlugins is one of the best blogs to get information about WordPress Plugins. It will provide you a comparison between which plugin is best for your WordPress website.
Google Analytics WordPress
This powerful (and free) WordPress plugin allows you to track your site visitors using the Google Analytics tracking code, and view key stats within your WordPress settings. You can use their dashboard to generate reports on the performance of your website as a whole, as well as that of individual pages and posts. The information you get is fully customizable and you can configure it to select only those areas in which you are interested (for example, your website traffic: how many people visit you, from where, how long they stay, etc.) if the rest of the elements seem too complicated to you and you do not have much marketing knowledge.
Gravity Forms
If you need a contact form for your website, Gravity Forms is perfect for you. This is one of the most used WordPress plugins today, specifically in more than a million websites hosted on the platform. Gravity Forms is a plugin that allows you to create complex contact forms quickly and easily, without the need for any specific technical knowledge. Its easy-to-use and intuitive editor asks you to select the fields you want to include, then configure the options and, voila: you already have a form for your website. In addition, you can also divide the form into several pages and display a progress bar that lets users know the progress of their process.
Woocommerce
WooCommerce is the plugin used by more than 30% of online stores around the world. First released in 2011, it was acquired by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) in 2015, so its future development is clearly in good hands. The standard and free version of WooCommerce can calculate shipping costs and taxes and offers the possibility to accept credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers and cash on delivery. There are also some perfectly designed stock management tools to help you keep track of your inventory. If your business has an online store, do not hesitate: this plugin is designed for you.