9 Essential WordPress Plugins
Here’s a list of our favorite WordPress plugins that can help enhance your site performance. If you’d like more information about our custom web development services or if you need further assistance use the form below to contact us.
Best WordPress Plugins For 2021
SEO
Yoast SEO
Take full control over how your site appears within search engines using Yoast SEO. Yoast also offers a ton of free SEO content to better educate you about the SEO process and how you can get your site to rank higher. This tool allows you to create meta titles and descriptions for each of page or your site and helps you craft high quality content by allowing you to set target keyword phrases and tells you how to improve your content.
Redirection
This free app allows you to avoid duplicate content by implementing 301 redirects quickly and easily as well as fixing any 404 errors you may run into. Many SEO applications offer this a premium service in the paid versions of their apps, but Redirection allows you to achieve the same effects at no cost. Who wouldn't love that!
Image Compression
ShortPixel
Images can help your customers visual your products or services. Higher resolution images show up clearer, but tend to be much larger files which slow down your site. Optimizing these images by compressing their file sizes can directly impact the page load speeds and customer experience of your site. ShortPixel offers a number of free image compressions per month as well as very affordable bulk packages.
Caching
Autoptimize
Consistently working to optimize your sites performance should always be on your calendar. Autoptimize increase the performance of your site with minor adjustments including site caching, minifying and aggregating CSS and JavaScript files, and implementing image lazy-load. All key features associated with the Core Web Vitals that Google will be implementing in 2021.
Structed Data (Schema)
WP SEO Schema
Implementing structured data on your site is becoming more important as Google has started using it to determine search rankings. WP SEO Schema does offer the basic schema structure for organizations and local businesses. It does offer a paid version that allows you to inject different schema types depending on your content, but there are other options that give you more bang for your buck... take for example, Schema App.
Schema App
Schema App is a paid application, but it offers you the granularity needed to associate structured data mark up for nearly every element of your website. Whether it's a testimonial, category page, or defining a service area it's got you covered. The enhanced organic rankings should drive enough traffic to your site to easily cover the costs of this application once it's been fully implemented.
Page Builder
Elementor
We aren't all developers, luckily, drag & drop tools like Elementor can make building your own website a breeze. You can create a website using the templates that are included or customize your own with it's user friendly features. We recommend this application so much that we include it on all of our clients sites and we even offer full training.
Forms
Formidable Forms
Create customized forms to help your customers accomplish your intended goal. With this application you can create simple forms with the drag & drop feature or create easily customized, complex multi-step process flows with dynamic fields. Formidable Forms is our favorite application because it's easy to create the custom solutions that our clients require.
Reporting
Google Site Kit
With Google Site Kit you can easily implement basic Google Analytics tagging, Google Tag Manager and associate your Google Search Console with your website. You can also see up to date reporting directly on your dashboard quickly and easily.