Plugins play a crucial role in helping you build a high-performing WordPress website.They add essential functions to your website, such as creating an online store, improving SEO, live chat, social media integration, image optimizations, and more.
The right plugins can help you improve speed, organic growth traffic, user experience, conversions, and security. They can give you a competitive edge, simplify online business expansion, and level up your platform.
- WP Rocket
- WooCommerce
- Yoast SEO
- Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
- TinyPNG
- POWR Instagram Feed
- Challan
- Form Builder
- Bonus Tool: WPLoyalty
Over 50,000 free and premium plugins are in the WordPress directory, and thousands more are available on third-party sites.
50,000+ WordPress Plugins to Choose From (Image source)
Choosing the right ones is a somewhat challenging experience. To help you get started, here are seven must have WordPress plugins you should consider installing for a robust WordPress website.
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin. It’s perhaps the most powerful caching tool out there for WordPress and the only one allowed on WP Engine, one of the most popular hosting platforms for WordPress sites.
It intelligently manages website caching — or data storage — to help you achieve outstanding page-load speeds and site performance.
It, in turn, helps user experience, conversions, and your SEO rankings.
One of the best parts about WP Rocket is that it’s very user-friendly; you don’t need to be a WordPress developer to use it.
It automatically targets a range of performance optimizations, including static caching on mobile and desktop, browser caching on Apache, detection of third-party plugins and themes, and more.
Suppose you prefer to customize the plugin to get more out of it. In that case, you have many advanced options, including lazy image loading, Google Fonts optimization, deferred JS file loading, and preloading XML sitemaps.
WP Rocket is easy to install with no configuration required. Simply choose your preferred plan and add it to your website.
2. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is arguably the world’s most popular open-source eCommerce solution. It can quickly transform any WordPress blog into a fully-fledged online store.
It’s used by a little under 30 million e-commerce stores worldwide.
You can use WooCommerce to sell physical and digital products and services. It offers hundreds of extensions, giving you a range of functions and features you can implement.
You can handle everything from invoicing to payments, currency management, inventory, shipping, taxation, and more.
While it’s a plug-and-play solution, its list of customizations is virtually endless.
For instance, while WooCommerce offers excellent support for mobile devices, you can pair it with a lightweight WooCommerce-compatible theme to further improve performance.
WooCommerce is a freemium plugin with excellent features under its basic, free-to-use tier. It’s available for download on the WordPress plugin library.
3. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most widely used WordPress SEO plugin. SEO experts built it to help make SEO accessible to everyone. Over 13 million stores use this plugin.
Yoast SEO is well-known for its state-of-the-art SEO and content analysis.
It helps you create high-performing, SEO-friendly content that helps increase your search ranking and on-site conversion.
It offers powerful previews to see your content's appearance when it’s syndicated or featured on different platforms, such as social media sites and search engines.
It also provides various automated technical improvements, such as canonical URLs, meta tags, page load speed, and more.
Yoast SEO Free offers you everything you need to manage your SEO.
Depending on your situation, its paid tier may be just as valuable an investment as professional WordPress SEO services from an agency.
Read more on SEO audit
4. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
ACF converts a basic WordPress website into a fully functional content management system (CMS).
You typically use it to create custom blocks and fields for WordPress screens.
Custom fields are a handy feature that makes adding, storing, and displaying information on your site easy.
For instance, you can use them to update an event calendar to make it easy to add new entries to an event calendar or to add product information, such as price, weight, and color.
ACF makes it easy to add these fields with the click of a few buttons. What’s more, you can add them practically anywhere you like, including pages, posts, media, user profiles, comments, and more.
5. TinyPNG
TinyPNG is an image optimization plugin for PNG, JPEG, and WebP images. It uses intelligent lossy compression to reduce the size of your image files.
It helps you build a lightweight website that loads quickly, even if you have an extensive portfolio of images you’d like to showcase.
TinyPNG is popular because it achieves large file compressions with almost no visible difference.
The plugin is widely supported across devices and browsers. It helps optimize animated PNGs and is the only tool to partially store transparent images.
TinyPNG is available in the WordPress plugin directory. It’s free to use with a paid tier that unlocks bulk file compression with unlimited file sizes.
6. POWR Instagram Feed
As the name suggests, this plugin helps integrate an Instagram feed into your website. In fact, with it, you can display photos from multiple Instagram accounts in the same feed if you need to.
POWR Instagram Feed is highly responsive and optimized for devices with all screen sizes.
It’s entirely customizable in that you can personalize the height and width of the feed window, image sizes, number of columns, background, spacing, and more.
You can also add JavaScript and custom CSS code for more complex customizations.
This plugin lets you automate image upload on your website and is quite simple to install and set up. There’s a free version, a Starter version, as well as Pro and Business versions you can purchase.
7. Challan – PDF Invoice & Packing Slip for WooCommerce
Challan is a freemium plugin that helps generate invoices and packing slips for WooCommerce stores.
As a matter of fact, you can attach the PDF invoices and packing slips automatically with the order confirmation emails with this plugin. It has an easy-to-use interface and you can quickly set up information like shipping, billing, tax, VAT, shipping labels, etc.
Challan also lets you customize the logo, invoice numbers, order numbers, product title, etc. You get the opportunity to select from multiple templates and download the invoices in bulk too.
The pro version of this plugin allows the display of the product’s image, description, and category. It also supports multi-language and multi-currency options for global use.
Challan comes with flexible pricing plans including a free version and three premium options, on either an annual or lifetime basis.
8. POWR Form Builder
POWR Form Builder helps you build custom forms to capture data and broaden your reach.
With it, you can create any form on Wordpress with all the related features you could want, including drop-downs, checkboxes, radio buttons, taxonomies, and more.
You can even create content with POWR Form Builder. It allows you to create posts from form submissions.
The default setting is to create standard WordPress posts; however, you can implement customizations to change the post type.
If you want advanced functions, such as app integration or quickly displaying form data on your front end, consider upgrading your POWR Form Builder.
The POWR Builder Form plugin is a turnkey solution with practically no coding required. Simply download and install it on your site.
Bonus Tool: WPLoyalty
WPLoyalty is a WooCommerce points and rewards plugin that enables you to create an effective loyalty program for your eCommerce store.
It allows you to reward customers for a variety of actions, such as making purchases, signing up for an account, writing product reviews, referring friends, sharing on social media, and more.
The best part is that you can reward your customers with different types of rewards like loyalty points, percentage discount, fixed discount, free product and free shipping.
‘WPLoyalty excels in fostering customer retention, as evidenced by its success with over 3000 satisfied customers.”
With stand-out features like customizable rewards pages, conditional campaigns, campaign scheduling, and customer management, WPLoyalty empowers you to foster a long-lasting relationship with your customers and boost your store's retention rate.
How to Use WPLoyalty?
Setup Campaigns: Easily create loyalty campaigns for various customer activities.
Reward Redemption: Offer a mix of loyalty rewards based on your business strategies.
Customization: Tailor your loyalty program with WPLoyalty’s extensive customization options. Adjust point values, set up expiry dates for points, and more.
Monitor & Manage: Utilize WPLoyalty’s dashboard to track customer engagement, manage points and rewards.
Conclusion
Plugins are the building blocks of your WordPress website.
The primary functions and features your theme offers are often insufficient to provide superior user experiences, and adding new capabilities typically requires developer assistance.
With low-code or no-code plugins, you can customize your website to grow your business how you want.
Author Bio
Jordan Brannon is the President / COO of Coalition Technologies: a top-ranked marketing and web development agency with 700+ case studies and 300 team members worldwide.
