Nowadays everybody, including both techie and non-techie users, knows what it’s like to have a well-functioning website showcasing your business. The standard procedure incorporates choosing a popular content management system that excels in popularity as well as simplicity and launch it over the internet. Yes, I am talking about none other than WordPress, or indeed ClassicPress!
But what you might not be knowing is other than offering business owners an easy to build a website, WordPress aids developers in tag-in for more advanced custom needs. And that’s what our today’s post is all about! I will discuss some of the best WordPress plugins for ultimate website design which are suitable for both techie and non techie users alike.
One of the questions that I often get asked is: Why WordPress and not any other platform? Since its inception way back in 2003, the platform has proved its worth again and again. Started as a mere blogging tool, the platform has carved its way to becoming flamboyant enough to make all different types of websites and has massive support from contributors worldwide. This means WordPress offers a huge variety; some live examples built with Wordpress include Time Magazine, Facebook Newsroom, Wall St Journal Law Blog, Techcrunch, Microsoft News, Sony, Quartz, Disney, Harvard Gazette, MTV News, The Rotary Club, Target, BBC America, Variety Magazine, SAP News and many many more. You ask me why I choose Wordpress. I ask you why the heck not?
Now do you know what is the most exceptional aspect of WordPress Development other than being an open-source CMS? It’s a robust library of plugins. You will come across tens of thousands of both free and paid plugins available for WordPress websites. These bunch of tools can help you with everything right from caching your website to help it run faster, enhance SEO techniques, add social media plugins and many others! Also, we can write our own plugin if need a certain special type of functionality! At the same time, it’s easy for anyone to get overwhelmed. But that certainly does not mean it cannot be made easier or should I say less overwhelming. All you require is to know which specifics you should be focusing on. But before that let’s take a detour and go through certain aspects that must be taken into account before choosing a plugin for WordPress development.
#1 Plugins & Page Load Times
Very few of you know that the concept of less is more works while dealing with WordPress plugins. Downloading or activating too many plugins at a time can slow down your website and this can be a major turn off for your end-users. Technically speaking, as soon as a user visits your site, every plugin script sends a request to the server. And all this happens in a span millisecond, so you can expect sites to load in two seconds or less.
#2 Security
Like I said before you might get attracted to many open source or free WordPress plugins because they are available for free! But being open source also means they are vulnerable to hackers. Recently I came upon a shocking news one well-known plugin: WP Total Cache; hackers found a way to use the plugin as a backdoor to breach websites and insert malicious code. Eventually, those who downloaded the plugin were compelled to change passwords on their sites.
Before you choose a plugin just ensure it is safe and secure. I would also recommend working closely with a WordPress developer like Xhostcom, who can offer you tools that can be used to achieve the right functionality and prevent any potential cyberattacks or threats.
#3 Ongoing Support
Last but certainly not the least, choose a plugin that offers continuous ongoing support and not a ticking time bomb at hand. Unfortunately, there are many free ones that offer a year of user support before they eventually stop responding to inquiries or making updates to the code. And you end indulging among problems like compatibility issues with other tools, design errors begin to render, the primary function no longer works, and in some worst-case scenarios or it may entirely end up crashing the website. Thankfully, we have many premium WordPress plugins to choose from.
Top 15 WordPress Plugins for Non Techies
Speed Booster Pack
This one is pretty obvious! Site speed is a major factor for positive Google ranking and good user experience. As soon as a user clicks to a website, and find slow page load time. He or she is more likely to abandon the site and switch to your competitor. Speed Booster Pack is one such WordPress plugin that automates and fixes many issues at a time; of course regarding speed. Right from minimizing clunky scripts to compressing images, optimizing database calls, load CSS asynchronously, and more to make page load time faster.
Get Speed Booster
Elementor
This free plugin with over 2M active installs isn’t a bad pick at all. The WordPress plugin features the most advanced drag & drop editor and is mainly used to create high-end designs in no time, without coding. Moreover, Elementor works at its best with any theme and plugin and will not slow down your existing website. Also, you get to choose from over one hundred pre-designed templates.
Get Elementor
Yoast
Search Engine Optimization is very much in vogue! Yoast SEO is completely out of the box tool when you are looking for SEO- friendly plugin for WordPress. If you are looking for a comprehensive solution with all the features and tools that you need to improve your on-page SEO. You can add Meta tags, generate sitemaps, connect your site to Google Search Console, optimize it for social media, and more, and also its easy to use for non techies.
Get Yoast
Pexels Images
Many site owners and writers in the past have spent hours searching for images to place in their articles, now those days are well and truly gone with the introduction of plugins for fetching free Royalty free images from designated image hosts. This one is for Pexels, where you can get a free account, and make use of the millions of Royalty free images available there. This is a major time saver when writing articles and helps gather relevant images for them with minimum fuss, saving many wasted hours over time.
Get Pexels Images
Smush Pro
Smush Pro by WPMUDEV is a premium (with a free version) plugin which offers fantastaic compression and optimization facilities for your site. With “Auto Smushing” Compression, WEBP, Lazy Load, Image Resizing, Metadata and much more, all automated, it makes life a lot easier for admins, and helps speed up your site, making it a must have for many sites online. It also works well with other plugins listed here, so is very well tested.
Get Smush Pro
Bulk Image Title
Bulk Image Title by Pageup, is an automated image titler which will optimize your Pexels (or other) images for SEO purposes and save you the trouble of having to do it manually. It uses page/article titles or image names and/or site name, separately or combined depending on your settings, and is a must have for busy site owners.
Get Bulk Image Title
Auto Image Alt
Auto Image Alt, again from pageup, optimizes all the images as above but this time for the Alt tags. It automatically optimizes all image alt texts on the website (and Woocommerce online store), per page & product, from Yoast SEO optimization settings (keywords), so works well with the Yoast SEO plugin listed here. Its a set and forget plugin like the Bulk Image Title plugin above.
Get Auto Image Alt
Video SEO
Video SEO, again by Pageup, is a video optimization plugin for site owners with video content. Given that the trend is for web users to watch video in preference to other media, that’s likely to increase in future, hence this plugin will become essential. It provides transcripts of your video content, among other features, and can be the perfect starting place for creating derivative works to sprinkle around and grow your SEO!
Get Video SEO
Google Site Kit
Googles Sitekit plugin for Wordpress is a tool for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free!
Get Google Site Kit
WP Optimize
WP Optimize is a Database cleaner and optimizer, with many other features built in. It does it in three clever ways, it allows you to clean and optimise your database, it gives you the option to compress your images an it allows you cache your pages, for super fast load times. This is by far the best Database tool for Wordpress, and I have tested quite a lot of them.
Get WP Optimize
Google Analytics Daboard
Google Analytics Dashboard from ExactMetrics, is a real time analytics display of your sites activity, giving valuable insights in to visitors and site performance at a glance. It connects to the Google Analytics account for the site, and displays the data in the back end admin. A very useful tool to have in your armoury!
Get Google Analytics Dashboard
Constant Contact
One of the most effective and most reliable marketing tools at your disposal is email marketing. The WordPress plugin allows you to stay in touch with your users even after they leave your website. All you have to do is build an email list and send beautiful email newsletters to your subscribers.
Get Constant Contact
WP Rocket
Are you looking for a plugin that allows you to instantly improve your WordPress website speed and performance with no technical skills required. Featuring WordPress Catching settings like gzip compression, page cache, and cache pre-loading, WP rocket has secured a place in the top ten plugins which even offers optional features such as lazy loading images, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, minification, and more to further improve page load times.
Get WP Rocket
Beaver Builder
Another WordPress plugin featuring one of the best drag and drop page builder which allows you to easily customize your website design and create custom page layouts without writing any code. Business owners simply love it as it allows them to create completely custom landing pages within minutes without having to hire a developer.
Get Beaver Builder
SEMRush
Last but certainly not the least, SEMRush is a highly recommendable marketing toolkit for digital marketing professionals and business owners. Constant improvement in SEO, paid traffic strategy, social media, and content & PR strategy is the outcome. Some of its other perks include do keyword research, backlink audit, track brand mentions, spy on competitors, and discover best-performing posts on social media, ad strategy analysis, and more.
Get SEMRush Free Trial
So, that’s a look at the most used (probably) Wordpress plugins for non techies, and in fact the vast majority of these are free, with just a couple of paid examples. If you enjoyed this post, why not check out this article on the Best SEO Plugins for Wordpress newbies!
Post by Xhostcom Wordpress & Digital Services, subscribe to newsletter for more!
No comment yet, add your voice below!