An average person spends only 54 seconds on a website. Unfortunately, in this short period, they decide whether to visit your site or move on to the next one.
That means you must capture their attention quickly if you want them to try your product or service.
The good news is you can quicken the load time of your website with the right caching plugin. Not only that, you can also use different plugins to drive sales and convert regular customers into loyal, repeat buyers.
If these benefits sound good to you, read on. This post will discuss what plugins can do, things to consider when choosing one, and some top options to check out.
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Understanding Plugins and Their Importance
WordPress plugins act as assistants, extending your website's capabilities beyond the basic setup.
From optimizing performance to bolstering security and integrating with social media, plugins offer endless possibilities.
They empower you to tailor your site's appearance, ensuring it stands out with unique visual appeal. With a vast array of plugins, you can effortlessly add functionalities that align perfectly with your requirements.
Plugins elevate your search engine rankings by fine-tuning content, metadata, and URLs, driving organic traffic to your site.
Moreover, plugins elevate the user experience by introducing interactive elements such as sliders, galleries, and contact forms.
This enhanced functionality streamlines navigation and engagement, fostering a seamless interaction with your content.
With the right plugins, you can pave the way for increased conversions and sustained success.
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What To Look for in a Website Plugin
A crappy plugin can cause all sorts of problems. It can make navigating your site way more complicated and slow everything down for your visitors.
Even worse, some plugins leave security holes that hackers can slip through.
Check out any plugin before installing it to avoid those issues and protect your site. With that in mind, here are factors to look out for when picking free WordPress plugins:
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Average user rating
When evaluating plugins, it is customary to observe user-assigned star ratings ranging from 1 to 5. It is advisable to gravitate towards plugins boasting an average rating of at least four stars.
Ratings falling below this threshold may signify potential risks, as you cannot disregard safety concerns.
However, it is worth noting that user ratings may be skewed due to users' tendency to assign either a maximum or minimum rating based on personal preferences.
Consequently, slightly below four stars may still indicate a good plugin.
Users often exhibit polarized opinions, expressing wholehearted endorsement or outright disdain, thereby minimizing the possibility of average ratings.
It is particularly common in free plugins, where users anticipate flawless functionality.
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User reviews
User reviews provide invaluable context to the star ratings associated with plugins. However, the sheer volume of reviews can sometimes be overwhelming.
Choosing the most recent highest-rated and lowest-rated reviews is best to streamline the evaluation process.
You can access these reviews conveniently via the reviews tab below the download button. While checking the reviews, pay attention to recurring criticisms.
These reviews often highlight the plugin's weakest aspects. For instance, if multiple users report a significant decrease in site speed post-installation, it’s best to exercise caution regarding that plugin.
An imbalance between positive and negative comments is also a noteworthy red flag.
Should negative feedback outnumber positive endorsements, it may indicate underlying issues warranting further consideration before proceeding with the installation.
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Number of active users
In general, the level of activity surrounding a plugin correlates with its reliability. Many active users indicate widespread trust and suggest that the plugin functions effectively across various websites.
WordPress conveniently provides insight into a plugin's popularity by displaying the number of installations on its directory page.
It's advisable to exercise caution with free plugins that have yet to surpass 1,000 users. However, approach this guideline with flexibility.
Every successful plugin started from zero downloads at some point, and emerging plugins, albeit less recognized, may still offer valuable features.
Low installation numbers alone do not necessarily denote poor quality, so it's essential not to dismiss a plugin solely based on its initial popularity.
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Fits your niche
It's best to pick plugins that fit your site's specific industry. For example, a fitness blog would benefit from plugins for workout tracking, nutrition analysis, or exercise demos.
An eCommerce site selling handmade crafts will likely need plugins for inventory management, order tracking, and payment processing.
Meanwhile, a financial website should include plugins that allow seamless investing and planning. A classic example is SoFi’s plugin for integrating your IRA online account.
By including that plugin on their site, financial companies can give people a smooth experience when managing their retirement savings.
Using plugins tailored to your niche improves functionality and creates a better overall user experience. It also allows you to effectively address specific challenges or needs within your niche.
It leads to higher user engagement, conversions, and success for your site.
Additionally, niche-specific plugins are often optimized for your target audience, further boosting your site's relevance and appeal to people in that niche market.
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Compatibility and plugin updates
When developers stop updating their plugins regularly, they become less secure. To keep everything working together, it's best if plugins are updated simultaneously with WordPress.
How often a plugin gets updated also shows how involved the developer is.
The WordPress plugin directory shows the last update date on the description page. It also lists all the previous updates on the changelog. That lets you see what the developer has been up to since launching the plugin.
It's essential to check that a plugin works with your WordPress version before installing it. The description page will say which WordPress versions it's compatible with.
Pay attention to that—plugins that don't match your WordPress could interfere with other plugins or even crash your whole site.
To double-check your WordPress version, go to the dashboard when logged in. Scroll to the bottom right, and it will say which one you're using.
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Support offered
When you're looking at installing a new WordPress plugin, one thing to check out is the support and documentation available for that plugin.
All plugins in the WordPress repository have a support forum, which you can find in the Support tab.
If you see people regularly asking questions and the developer actively answering them, that's a good sign they're on top of any user issues. But if the forum seems abandoned, you should be wary.
The developer may provide support elsewhere besides the WordPress forum since not all developers like using the WordPress system. So, it's worth checking their website to see other options.
You'll also want to check out the documentation. The FAQ tab is an excellent place to start, as it outlines the kind of help they provide.
If the support forums are inactive and need more documentation on using the plugin, you should proceed carefully.
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The Best WordPress Plugin for Your Website
WordPress powers over 43% of all websites on the Internet. It's one of the most popular platforms for starting a site.
A big reason for its popularity is all the WordPress plugins you can get to expand its features.
With a plugin, you can create marketing campaigns and display them on your site in minutes, with no coding needed.
Plugins also optimize your site for search engines to improve SEO strategies and drive more organic traffic.
Plus, some plugins make sharing content on social media easy, growing your followers and attracting new people.
Here are some of the best WordPress plugins for getting more traffic.
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PushEngage
PushEngage is an innovative web push notification tool designed to enhance website engagement. It empowers you to deliver tailored messages to individuals who have previously visited your site.
This functionality fosters ongoing engagement with your brand and drives additional traffic to your website.
PushEngage offers extensive personalization capabilities for notifications.
You can break down your audience based on their interactions with your site or other relevant information.
Additionally, the platform allows users to conduct A/B testing on various notification elements, such as titles, messages, images, or button text.
It allows you to optimize your notifications effectively and drive users to take desired actions.
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POWR
This plugin can help your business thrive online by helping you gather more online contacts and boost conversion. Whether you’re selling or blogging, POWR’s 60+ WordPress plugins can help your business stand out online.
Its free trial version includes an image and video slider, photo gallery, countdown timer, social media feed, popup, contact form, and form builder.
Since you don’t have to do any coding, you can easily install these plugins on your website yourself.
It also offers scalable solutions that allow you to upgrade each plugin individually and customize items like sizing, styles, colors, and fonts. With this functionality, it will be easier to match your brand.
You won’t have to worry about integrations, too. POWR is compatible with WooCommerce, Elementor themes and WordPress themes.
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MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is a fantastic tool for tracking website analytics without any coding hassles. Simply install it, and you can start accessing valuable reports directly from your WordPress dashboard.
With MonsterInsights, you can monitor various aspects of your website, including traffic patterns and user behavior, providing insights to enhance your business growth strategies.
Easily discover where your visitors are located, identify popular content, track clicked links, and monitor file downloads.
With this wealth of data, you can refine your marketing efforts effectively.
Focus your promotional activities on channels driving the most traffic and create content formats that resonate with your audience to attract new visitors.
MonsterInsights also allows you to annotate reports with your notes. It facilitates easy correlation between actions such as publishing blog posts, sending emails, or making site changes and their impact on traffic.
It's an ingenious method for optimizing your strategies based on real-time performance metrics.
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Revive Old Posts
It helps keep your older blog posts alive by regularly sharing them with platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Most of the time, new bloggers will write a post and share it once, and then that's it - it just sits there, not doing much.
But this plugin will automatically re-share your older posts. That should help drive more traffic to your site over time while getting you more followers on social media.
Keeping your existing content in front of people engages them with your page.
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All in One SEO
All in One SEO is the best SEO plugin for WordPress. It has all the tools you need to optimize your site without hiring a specialist.
You can add metadata, sitemaps, breadcrumbs navigation, robots.txt files, track and fix broken links, and more.
By optimizing your site, you can improve how it shows up in searches and help search engines find what you have that is more accessible.
As a result, you'll get more visitors from places like Google and Bing.
AIOSEO also has an add-on for author profiles that lets you showcase your experience, knowledge, trustworthiness, and other qualities.
This can help you meet Google's E-E-A-T guidelines and boost your rankings.
On top of that, AIOSEO helps optimize for social media like Facebook and Twitter. You can add thumbnails, Twitter cards, and more.
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Uncanny Automator
This plugin allows you to connect all your different WordPress plugins to work with each other automatically.
It helps you handle repetitive tasks without having to do them repeatedly.
That means you don't have to write code to accomplish tasks in the backend. For example, whenever you make a new blog post, you can automatically post it to your social media profiles using Uncanny Automator.
And it's not just that - you can integrate applications like Slack with your WordPress site or tie your Google Sheets in with WooCommerce. There are tons of options there.
Uncanny Automator supports over 150 different WordPress plugins and apps. It has over 1000 triggers and actions to set up your automated workflows.
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Subscribe to Comments Reloaded
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded lets readers subscribe to comments on articles on your site. It will email anyone subscribed whenever a new comment is posted on that article.
Getting people to engage with your content and return to your site is essential for traffic.
Comment sections are significant for that kind of interaction between readers.
With this plugin, people can choose to receive updates on discussions around pieces they care about. This gets people involved and keeps them coming back to your site.
You can also pair it with other plugins to make your comment system better and increase user involvement and traffic at the same time.
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RafflePress
This plugin is best if you want to hold a contest or giveaway on your WordPress site. Its primary purpose is to help you create these online giveaways and increase your website's traffic.
Setting these contests up with RafflePress is simple, too.
They have a drag-and-drop builder to customize everything for the giveaway, or you can choose from some pre-made templates to start from.
Where RafflePress adds value is its viral sharing features. By giving users extra entries to refer friends or post about the giveaway on social media, more people will participate.
This means you'll also drive more traffic to your site through all these additional visitors checking out the contest.
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W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache helps make your website faster and perform better. It can speed up the time it takes your pages to load.
If people wait a long time for items on your site to show up, they'll probably get annoyed and leave.
But W3 Total Cache ensures your pages show up quickly, which can also help boost your appearance in search results.
Google now considers site speed when deciding on an order. So, a faster site means higher rankings.
With rankings up and users not getting frustrated with slow loading, more people will visit your page.
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Optimizing Your Website Is the Way To Go
Optimizing your business website to be more palatable for search engines is essential to driving sales. Implementing SEO strategies on your website has many benefits.
It can increase the number of people who visit your site when they search online. It also helps build trust with customers, improves the quality of your content, and even increases the number of people who buy your products.
With countless websites competing for user attention, you want yours to appear as high as possible when people search—adding the right plugins to your website is one of the best ways.
So why put in the effort? Ultimately, it's all about getting results, and these WordPress plugins can help simplify SEO optimization.
About the author
Hey, it's Mick and I'm the Head of Growth and Partnerships at POWR. My career spans two decades, primarily marketing in the healthcare space, with stints in broadcast television, advertising and copy editing.
I went to the College of Journalism at the University of Louisiana - Monroe and a storyteller at my core. My wife Elizabeth, son Gavin, and pup Jolene currently call Lafayette, Louisiana home.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
