13 Essential WordPress Plugins (Almost) Everyone Should Be Using in 2015. Although every WordPress website is different, with its own individual needs and requirements, in most cases there is a list of core plugins that can greatly enhance it. In this article we will take a look at some of those genuinely useful plugins that can make your WordPress website that little bit better.
You probably won’t need all of these plugins running on your website. But if you are looking to add some useful features to your site, then the below options are some of the plugins.
Make Your Website Faster with WP Rocket
There are already two very popular free caching plugins available for WordPress in the form of WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. However, the premium WP Rocket gets the nod when it comes to making your website go faster.
With the two aforementioned free plugins, you do get access to a wealth of settings and options in order to configure how caching will work on your website. However, if you want a quick and easy solution for adding caching to your WordPress website in order to make it load faster, WP Rocket comes highly recommended.
It’s often reported that if you don’t configure your caching plugin correctly, it can slow your site down. WP Rocket negates this issue by having limited settings and options, helping to make this a foolproof caching plugin for the busy WordPress user.
WP Rocket
Keep Your Site Backed Up with VaultPress
I used to use and recommend one of the free WordPress backup plugins, but after experience some frustration when trying to roll back to a previous version of my website, I’ve started moving over to the VaultPress backup service.
I’m still using the free BackWPup backup plugin on some websites and in some situations. I’m also experimenting with the premium BackupBuddy plugin from iThemes, but so far VaultPress has been pretty impressive.
If your website is worth backing up, and you can spare $5 per month for daily backups, or $15 for real time backups, then I’d definitely recommend checking out VaultPress.
VaultPress
Secure Your WordPress Site with iThemes Security
After activating this popular WordPress security plugin on your website, you are presented with a list of things you should think about fixing in order to shore up the defences of your website.
As well this checklist being sorted by order of priory, each action point includes a button that takes you to the page where you can perform the necessary actions to resolve the potential issue.
If you like to know what your security plugin is doing to actively protect your site, check out iThemes Security.
iThemes Security
Monitor Your Visitors with Jetpack Stats
As your website grows, so too will the number of external links you publish. To avoid frustrating your visitors and missing out on any affiliate commissions you could’ve otherwise earned, the Broken Link Checker plugin can be a real time saver.
After installation, this free plugin will do a quick check of all the links on your website to ensure they are still pointing to an active web page, image, video, or other type of content. From then on, it will run periodically in the background, and send out notifications each time a broken link is found.
From the Broken Links dashboard, you can edit any of the problem links directly, removing the need to visit the individual posts or pages. You can also unlink them to quickly resolve the issue.
This is one of those useful plugins that runs in the background, without your visitors ever being aware of its existence.
Broken Link Checker
Customize Your Text with Easy Google Fonts
If you can’t, or don’t want to start editing the underlying files of your theme, but you would still like to customize the fonts your website uses, then installing the Easy google Fonts plugin is highly recommended.
Not only does this plugin give you access to the 600+ free typefaces available in the Google Fonts repository, but you can also preview them live on your website, through the WordPress Customizer. Through the theme customizer tool, you can change the fonts used for the different elements of your theme, such as paragraphs, headings, and more. This plugin also gives you the ability to add custom selectors to the customizer, in order to change the fonts for any of text elements on your website.
If you want a live preview tool and access to over 600 fonts, then Easy Google Fonts is the plugin for you.
Increas Social Shares with Floating Social Bar
If you’ve already activated the Jetpack plugin, then you could use the Sharing module to add social share buttons to your posts and pages. For everyone else, the Floating Social Bar plugin is a good choice.
This free plugin has been built to be as lightweight as possible and have the least amount of impact on the page load times of your website. Only the main social networks are covered, and you can either display the sharing buttons on a floating bar, or as a static set of icons at the start or end of each post. You can also insert them into your content by using the included shortcode.
If you want an easy way to display links to your social media profiles in the sidebar of your website, then the Social Stickers plugin and its widget is a good option.
Floating Social Bar
It’s great when someone tweets out one your posts to their followers. But if you really want to make the most of your Twitter shares, you really ought to enableTwitter Cards for your website.
Twitter Cards are those tweets which include custom content. This additional content can range from large images, mini galleries, product information, and even video content. One plugin that makes it relatively straightforward to start using these rich tweets on your WordPress website is JM Twitter Cards.
As well as giving you a quick way to enable Twitter Cards for your website, the plugin also adds a panel to the post editor. Through this panel, you can add a custom image for your card, or just use the featured image.
I’ve yet to find the perfect all-in-one social sharing plugin, but for now, JM Twitter Cards takes care of maximizing the impact of your tweeted content. If you are looking for a premium option that covers all of the main social networks, thenWP Social Sharing Optimization is worth checking out.
JM Twitter Cards
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