How are you holding on?
Blink once if you’ve come up all the way here :)!
I’ve got good news: this is our last chapter before the wrap up!
Now, let’s get going.
As mentioned in previous chapters, plugins are used to add new functionalities to a WordPress website. Let’s look a bit at some of the most popular plugins out there and their use cases.
SEO WordPress plugins
These plugins allow you to make minimal website changes that can help it rank organically. With them you can set your main keyword, the meta description, slug, SEO title, the alt attributes of your images. Recommendations can be offered on inbound links and more.
I’ve already mentioned Yoast SEO and RankMath as the most popular WordPress SEO plugins out there.
Forms WordPress plugins
Forms are not supported out-of-the-box by WordPress. This is why plugins come in handy. Forms are used to capture valuable user data (with their consent, of course). Whether someone buys something on your site, or just downloads a resource, a form is needed. Here are the most popular forms plugins in the WordPress ecosystem:
Email marketing WordPress plugins
If you want to develop marketing campaigns to stay in touch with your subscribers, leads, and clients, you will need to use a WordPress plugin. Such plugins can also incorporate forms.
Now, most of the popular email providers out there have developed their own WordPress plugins, such as: Sendinblue, ConvertKit, etc. In other cases, other plugin developers have developed such integrations (eg: for Mailchimp).
On the other hand, for the most popular email providers out there, integrations can be provided via Zapier (eg: they have an integration with Mailchimp).
So, there are 2 questions here:
- Which email provider do you use?
- How can it communicate with WordPress? Is there a plugin available, or is there a Zapier integration available? If the answer here is “no”, you might want to consider another vendor.
Security WordPress plugins
Keeping your website safe from malicious activities is no longer optional. So, in order to keep your site in check, you can use some of these successful WordPress plugins:
Jetpack – cleans up malware and protects from unauthorized logins. Jetpack also provides auto real-time backups and easy restores, malware scanning, spam protection, brute force protection and downtime / uptime monitoring.
Wordfence – puts a firewall on your site to keep away malicious traffic
E-commerce WordPress plugins
If you want to create an online store on top of WordPress, this can be done using the WooCommerce plugin. It’s totally free, and helps you easily start an online shop. If you want extra functionalities, you can always install Woocommerce extensions.
Now, the WordPress.org plugin repository contains 50.000+ plugins that do tons of stuff: from protecting your site from spam, designing amazing photo and video galleries, to connecting Google Analytics to WordPress. For anything that might cross your mind, there’s a plugin available, I kid you not!