Do Plugins Slow Down WordPress?
Nowadays, the most popular type of website to promote your business is running blogs. You can easily interact with your visitors. Therefore, you need to make your blog as effective as possible. For this reason, there are many WordPress plugins for blogs. Plugins do not slow down your WordPress blog, and on the contrary, they can improve the appearance and user experience for your visitors.
What Are the Most Popular WordPress Plugins and Their Functions?
We have said that a blog plugin for a website is a useful and helpful way to increase the functionality of your website. But if you are a newcomer blogger, it can be difficult to choose what plugins and tools should be used and what should be skipped.
Nowadays, there are approximately 60,000 WordPress plugins and around 1000 tools. Below, we have gathered 20 of the most useful and interesting, in our opinion, WordPress plugins, and online tools that every blogger needs to have.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a useful e-commerce plugin. With the help of this plugin, you can convert any WordPress blog into an online store. You will be able to sell not only digital files but also physical products. You can set desirable currencies, view and display reviews and ratings, provide your visitors sorting and filtering functions, and many others.
HubSpot
Marketing is an essential part of any business. The HubSpot plugin enables you to follow leads in your WordPress, control contacts, create email newsletters, communicate with visitors of your WordPress with the help of forms and chats, and many others.
NetGuard VPN
If you are a newcomer to blogging, the question what is NetGuard can appear in your mind. VeePN NetGuard is an important element that can raise your security and privacy to a new level. If you upload a trial, you can be sure that it will prevent suspicious activity. No cyber threats can influence your device. Moreover, NetGuard Adblock will prevent any pop-up ads from appearing. It means that you can easily manage your WordPress blog free of annoying advertisements. You can simply download it on Windows, macOS, and iOS (OpenVPN only).
Jetpack Plugin
Jetpack plugin is a useful plugin as it contains a set of various instruments and peculiar properties. With its help, you are able to supercharge your WordPress with helpful functionalities. Simply speaking, it proposes the capabilities of other plugins. You need to have just one Jetpack instead of numerous plugins. You can improve your site security, optimize user engagement, add contact forms, social share buttons, email subscription forms, etc.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a must-have WordPress plugin if you are going to do any SEO. It can simplify the optimization process and help you to become higher on various search engines. Yoast SEO offers to use its templates both for WordPress titles and meta descriptions. With their help, you will understand the process of building your titles and meta descriptions by using examples of SEO practices.
Elementor
Elementor is one of the blogger plugins for WordPress. It operates as a builder of your WordPress leading page. With its assistance, you can place page elements. It works on the basis of a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG interface. Construct a website from your imagination by simply choosing the needed elements and dragging them into the concrete builder area. Elementor is advised for beginner WordPress owners.
Smush
Do you want your website to load quickly for visitors? For this purpose, you can use Smush. It operates as a plugin for image optimization. Smush will compress images automatically across your site. With the help of optimization, the speed of your site will be improved.
Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet Spam Protection is, as the name implies anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It makes your blog free of spam by checking contact form submissions. Moreover, it monitors suspicious comments under your articles. This plugin operates automatically. So just install and activate it. Also, you can later look at what comments were cleaned by Akismet, and after that, you are able both to block and unblock commentaries by yourself.
Contact Form 7 Plugin
Despite Contact Form 7 being a free WordPress plugin, it is still one of the most popular and demanded. If you install Contact Form 7, your visitors will be able to reach you with the help of streamlined contact forms. Contact Form 7 has reCAPTCHA and previously mentioned Akismet Spam Protection.
UpdraftPlus
It can be a painful experience when there is an accident or a glitch with your WordPress. You can lose all your data, and you will have to start everything from the very beginning. Therefore, keep in mind that you have to create regular backups. UpdraftPlus is a suitable blogger plugin for this case. With the help of UpdraftPlus, you are able to restore lost data and turn back the previous version of WordPress.
iThemes Security
Your WordPress should be secured. Therefore, we recommend using the iThemes Security plugin. It positions itself as the most effective WordPress blog plugin for a website. You can choose from 30 methods of protecting your WordPress and visitors. Some of the ways are two-factor authentication, reCAPTCHA, password expiration, etc.
WP-Optimize
If you have an extensive WordPress database, WP-Optimize is exactly what you need. WP-Optimize is considered to be one of the most significant and useful among blogger plugins. It will clean every unnecessary element that does not have any significance to your WordPress. These elements are auto drafts, spam comments, and others. Moreover, this plugin can compress images.
Bloom
If you look for an email list plugin for your WordPress, Bloom will fit you. It has many design settings and parameters, and templates (over 100). Each of these templates you can customize to match your brand.
Google Analytics
If you want your WordPress to be successful and your audience to grow, you need to understand how to follow your site analytics. Google Analytics is a free and well-known tool offered by Google company. With the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to know the number of people who click on your website, the type of devices via which your visitors use to read your articles, from what social websites your visitors go on your WordPress. Sometimes, it is difficult to use Google Analytics, but if you learn how to utilize this tool completely, you will bring your site to perfection.
LeadPages
LeadPages is a useful tool to design your landing pages. You can both start designing from scratch or use templates. You will get full freedom in designing your landing pages. Moreover, the LeadPages tool proposes advanced features. Some of them are timed popups, Lead Boxes, and others.
OneSignal
Email marketing is valuable, but we can offer other ways to collect and interact with visitors. We mean browser push notifications. They enable you to collect visitors and send notifications via web browsers of these visitors. OneSignal operates for this purpose. This tool is free of charge for up to 30,000 subscribers.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a useful tool not only for students but also for bloggers. It checks your grammar and spelling. Moreover, it offers extra features such as improving your style, setting individual goals for your content. If you write articles for your WordPress with a proper writing style, you will attract a bigger audience. The number of people who would like to share your content will arise.
Disqus
Spam can be everywhere, even in your WordPress comments. But what to do in this situation. You can come to terms and get a bunch of spam comments. Also, you can restrict comments on your blog. The best solution is to use the Disqus tool. It has advanced features that enable you to handle spam comments easily. Just create your account for free.
Gumroad
If you are intended to sell digital products, you should use Gumroad to make this process easier. Sell digital products with the help of a direct link to the Gumroad site. Also, you can integrate digital products on your site with the help of their WordPress plugin.
Easy Affiliate Links
Affiliate links will be useful for you if you decide to monetize your blog. Though the process of placing and managing your affiliate links can be complicated, we can propose using Easy Affiliate Links. It enables you to mask your affiliate links and manage them easily.
A Little Conclusion
In this article, we have gathered, in our opinion, useful plugins and online tools for your WordPress. We consider that they are needed for every blogger. We hope with them, and you will increase the functionality and recognizability of your WordPress blog.
