30 Must Have Plugins in

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1 30 Must Have Plugins in Every business owner know that the right set of tools can make his life a lot easier and help take your business to the next level. If you have a Wordpress theme installed, these plugins can help take it to the next level Establishing a strong online presence can help your business grow, but it can also turn out to be quite expensive. If you re looking to expand your website s functionality here 30 of the must have Wordpress plugins in 2016: NOTE: If you d like to install one of these plugins or test it out for yourself. Just do a simple Google search for the name given or search in your Wordpress plugins search box inside your WP dashboard. 1. OptinMonster

2 OptinMonster is one of the most popular conversion rate optimization softwares, that can help you convert visitors who want to leave your website into subscribers. With over websites using it, it s able to detect user behavior and prompt them with an optin form such as lightbox popups, floating bars, slide-ins, sidebar forms at the precise moment they are about to leave. 2. WP Forms Although there are a lot of Wordpress contact forms you can choose from, WPForms is one of the most easy to use and beginner friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. It comes in four versions, with the Basic one starting at $39/year. One of its most popular features is the drag & drop functionality which allows you to create any type of form from contact forms to online surveys or donation forms. 3. BirchPress

3 Developing an online booking system from scratch can be rather expensive and time consuming. BirchPress is a Wordpress appointment booking plugin that allows visitors to check availability and book appointments by embedding a customizable booking form in a page through a simple shortcode. It can also sync with your other calendar (Google, ical, iphone, Android, or Outlook) and import or export your appointments and availability automatically. 4. Google Analytics Although theoretically it s not a plugin, Google Analytics is an essential tool every wordpress website should have. It allows you to carefully track your website visitors, see where they are coming from and how much time they spend on your website, all of which helps you determine user behavior in order to improve your website. Knowing the number of unique

4 website visitors during a certain period of time and their demographics can help you optimize your future marketing campaigns and increase your earnings. 5. Constant Contact Constant Contact perfectly integrates with lead generation software like OptinMonster to build subscribers lists and send them notification s or newsletters. It comes with easy to choose features that allow you to create professional or personalized s, built in tracking tools and a number of templates you can choose from, or edit to fit your needs. 6. Yoast SEO

5 Search engine optimization is essential if you want your customers to find you. Yoast SEO offers a lot of features that not only help you add meta tags, but they also help you optimize your entire website. Its Page Analysis functionality check your website for any missing meta tags or alt tags and it helps you write better content by using a preview snippet to see how it will look in search engines. 7. Linker Linker is a Wordpress plugin that can prove very useful when you re working on improving your search engine strategy and increasing your ranking as it helps you track your outbound links. It s also a perfect tool to use for affiliate marketing or any other links you want to keep track of. 8. W3 Total Cache

6 Competing with other websites for higher ranking also relates to website speed. The faster, the better. W3 Total Cache increases your website s overall performance and reduces download times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration in order to deliver an improved user experience and higher speed. 9. MaxCDN Another way to improve your website s speed is by installing MaxCDN, a wordpress plugin that puts your static static content like images, videos, downloads, and stylesheets on MaxCDN servers that are situated closer to end users. Cached content will allow your website to load faster on different devices, increasing user engagement and Google rankings. 10. WP Smush

7 On the topic of optimizing your website and improving its speed, you can also do that by optimizing your images using the WP Smush plugin. This plugin reduces your images file size without reducing image quality, helping improve the overall performance of your website and the user experience thanks to faster loading speed. 11. Envira Gallery Although there are many ways to create photo galleries for your Wordpress website, Envira Gallery one of the best plugins that allows you to create responsive photo and video galleries and add them anywhere on your website. It s easy to use thanks to its drag & drop builder, offer multiple gallery templates and social media integration. 12. Soliloquy

8 On the same topic of creating photo galleries, you can also use another Wordpress plugin called Soliloquy, that allows you to create dynamic, responsive sliders in just a few minutes. It also comes with a drag & drop builder, making it fairly easy to use, customizable pre-built templates and a fullscreen lightbox mode designed for a better user experience. 13. TablePress TablePress allows you to embed feature-rich tables into your posts and pages, via a shortcode without having to know HTML or to write any code. Tables can also be interactive and you can add features like sorting, pagination or filtering thanks to an additional JavaScript library that takes care of everything. 14. Max Mega Menu

9 Organizing your content in easy to find and comprehensive menus can sometimes be a challenge, especially if you have a lot of content. The Max Mega Menu plugin for Wordpress allows you to create a mega menu with a custom layout where you can add multiple different elements, including images. 15. Quick and Easy FAQ Most websites selling a product or a service need an FAQ section, and that s why Quick and Easy FAQ was created. It allows you to create FAQs using custom post type and later on displaying those FAQs using shortcodes. 16. Buffer

10 Buffer is a Wordpress plugin being used by over 3 million people, specially created to help you manage all your social media accounts and analyze all posts in one place. It allows you to schedule and publish posts to all your social media accounts at the same time, or to customize messages depending on the social platform. 17. Broken Link Checker This is another plugin that can be very useful if you re trying to improve your Google ranking. As you probably know, Google is not a big fan of broken links and might penalize your website if he finds any. The Broken Link Checker scans your posts, pages and even comments for any broken links and helps you remove them. 18. Simple 301 Redirects

11 Broken links can be a real deal breaker for visitors coming to your website, making your bounce rate skyrocket and bringing you a bad reputation in Google search results. You can fix all of that with the Simple 301 Redirects plugin that allows you to easily redirect users to other pages of your website, instead of showing them a 404 Error Page. 19. Insert Headers and Footers In order to insert code snippets to your website s header or footer you generally need to edit the theme of your Wordpress website. If you want to get away from this messy job, you can install this simple Wordpress plugin which will take care of this for you and add scripts like Google Analytics to your WordPress site without writing any code. 20. CSS Hero

12 CSS Hero is another Wordpress plugin that replace the need of writing code when you want to style your Wordpress theme and the overall visual appearance of your website. It comes with an easy and intuitive point and click interface that allows you to customize font styles, colors or special effects. 21. Beaver Builder Beaver Builder is a Wordpress plugin that can help you increase conversion rates on your website by creating your own page layouts for landing pages using a simple user interface. It comes with easy to use drag and drop functionality that allows you to position images and text with precision, or to create column based layouts in just a few minutes.

13 22. Disqus Comments System Even though Wordpress comes with a default commenting system, you can also install the Disqus Comments System plugin for a better user experience and overall improved appearance. It comes with a lot of features including aggregated comments and social mentions, as well as full spam filtering, blacklists and whitelists. 23. Testimonials Widget Every business needs good recommendations, and Testimonials Widget for Wordpress is an easy to use plugin that allows you to slide or list selected portfolios, quotes, reviews, or text with images or videos on your website. It s widget and shortcode ready, offering random display in responsive image slideshows. 24. Freshbooks

14 Freshbooks is a Wordpress plugin that takes care of another essential issue when running a business: sending invoices to clients, receiving payments and managing your finances. It s a simple and intuitive accounting system that allows small businesses to get more organized, keep track of finances and helps them grow. 25. SEMRush SEMRush is a great tool you can use for your competitive analysis and see what are the most important keywords your main competitors are ranking for. It also provides information on

15 your competitor s strategies in paid keywords and organic traffic, as well as link building, helping you create better marketing strategies. 26. Slack Although it s not a plugin, Slack is a team management, productivity and communication tool every business owner should take advantage of. It allows you to gather your team s communication, files and projects in one place by creating private groups and keeping track of what everyone is doing. It also integrates with other online management tools through their API in order to improve communication and effectiveness. 27. BackupBuddy

16 A hardware failure or a cybernetic attack on your servers can put you out of business if you lose valuable information or your customer database. That s why it s important to regularly backup your website using a reliable backup system. BackupBuddy allows you to safely backup your Wordpress website and then restore it using just a few clicks. 28. WP-Sweep Maintaining a messy database can sometimes be challenging, especially if you re a business owner focused on growing your company, not just maintaining it. WP-Sweep plugin allows you to optimize your database tables, but also clean up any duplicate entries, unused or orphaned data you might be storing in your database. 29. Wordfence Security Keeping your website secure is no easy job, but the Wordfence Security plugin offers complete protection against any malware or hacking attempts. It s a free and open source plugin that offers firewall, malware scan, blocking, live traffic and login security and it quickly alerts you in case your website is compromised. 30. P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

17 If you want to have a feature rich website and you re using a lot of plugins for different things, you might want to check that everything is working the way it s supposed to every once in awhile. The P3 Plugin performance Profiler plugin scans all your plugins in order to determine which one is slowing down your website and creates a performance report.