With WordPress powering 35% of the web, there’s a high chance that you’re considering using WordPress for your website if you aren’t already using the content management platform. The greatest benefit of using WordPress is the variety of responsive themes as well as the flexibility of creating a customised website.
Arguably, as the best publishing platform for web design, WordPress has multiple features that make publishing content extremely easy. With the addition of plugins and add-ons, a simple static website can be made responsive.
If you’re looking for ways to enhance your website or blog, you should first do some research on the plugins and add-ons available to contribute towards your user experience and add special elements that would otherwise be more complicated to add. In this guide, we explain the best WordPress plugins and add-ons that you can add to your WordPress website to enhance your website’s performance.
JetPack
Most useful for International SEO, JetPack aims to load pages faster and improve your overall site speed by serving images and static files from their global network of servers. As shorter page load times can lead to happier readers and therefore increased page views, it provides great opportunities for your website to resonate with your audience.
JetPack also features lazy loading for images, infinite scrolling, auto-updates, downtime monitoring and also with the functional ability to display images in a carousel. The plugin also optimises your images for faster loading times.
When security shouldn’t be an afterthought, JetPack features brute force attack protection to block unwanted login attempts and distributed attacks.
Akismet Anti-Spam
According to Akismet, the number of spam comments found on WordPress websites is around 6,208 times higher than the number of legitimate comments, with around 487 billion spam comments left on all WordPress sites each month.
The Akismet Anti-Spam plugin is used by millions worldwide and is quite possibly the best way to protect your site from unwanted spam. The plugin filters out spam comments which would otherwise be annoying and time-consuming to remove. Akismet checks comments against their global spam database to remove malicious or repetitive comments before it has the chance to damage the credibility of your site.
WP Rocket
One of our favourite performance plugins has to be WP Rocket – an essential plugin for improving SEO. It does this by improving the loading speed of WordPress websites, compressing images, clearing cache and much more. This then helps improve user experience, organic rankings and can therefore increase conversions.
After installing WP Rocket in as little as three minutes, the plugin can instantly provide static cache for desktop and mobile, browser caching, cross-origin support for web fonts, WooCommerce refresh cart fragments cache, a combination inline and third party scripts, as well as detection and support of plugins, themes and hosting.
Your website can benefit from the above features without any action needed after installing, meaning that the plugin automatically takes care of this to improve the speed of your site.
WordFence
The WordFence plugin is designed to make a WordPress website up to 50 times faster and more secure. With an endpoint firewall and a malware scanner included, the plugin protects websites with the best security available.
As the most comprehensive security plugin available, WordFence also provides some useful additional features, such as:
- Two-factor authentication (2FA)
- Login page CAPTCHA to stop bots and hackers from attempting to log in at the backend
- Leaked password protection -block logins for administrators using known compromised passwords
- Live traffic to monitor visits and hack attempts
- Country blocking – block countries engaging in malicious activity
- Hack recovery – see changes made during hack with the option to repair them
Redirection
Redirects are used when informing a user that a page they are visiting has moved, with a redirect pointing the user to the correct page they are looking for, or a temporary one. One of the most recommended plugins for redirecting pages is Redirection, a free WordPress plugin which not only allows you to set up redirects on your site, but it also helps you locate 404 errors on the site for pages that couldn’t be found.
Redirection is the simplest way to redirect, with it making redirects easy to manage, and therefore helping reduce errors on your website and improving your site ranking on Google.
Smush Image Compression
Image compression is an important part of WordPress website optimisation, and if images aren’t optimised properly, you’ll most likely find that your website is slow and isn’t as high in Google rankings as you would like.
If you are looking for ways to improve your site speed, start at image optimisation! Smush Image Compression is one of the best plugins for optimising site images. Smush makes it quick and easy to compress images, without a visible drop in quality.
As a free plugin, Smush Image Compression allows you to optimise your website images by up to 5MB in size, with no daily, monthly or annual limits.
Engage Your Users With an Innovative Website
From initial concept through to execution, we will visually communicate your brand’s message to get maximum impact, convey why your service or product is unique and give your customers what they are looking for from your website.
At Digital Ethos, we can build you a new site which is easy for both you to edit and manage as well as easy for customers to use.
If you think we could help you with your web development, or ongoing website support, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!