5 Essential WordPress Plugins For Your New Website

In my last couple of articles, I’ve covered a lot about WordPress. Right from it being an open-source Content Management System (CMS) powering several websites all over the globe to niche themes and plugins. Starting your new website is a milestone and setting up a WordPress website is easy. Also, choosing the right WordPress hosting, themes and plugins at the onset helps build a robust website.

In this article, I’ll be covering some of the essential WordPress plugins that will help you set up your new website with ease.

Importance of WordPress Plugins on a New Website
Plugins are mini codes written in any programming language by either an individual or a firm. All a website admin needs to do is ‘install’ or ‘plug-in’ them onto their website and they’re good to go.

Let us look at two reasons why WordPress plugins are essential:

1. Plugins help you manage your website efficiently by adding greater functionality and reducing your task of coding to help keep your site well maintained and secure. This way you can concentrate on setting up your business whereas the plugins take care of the rest.
2. As a website owner, to install a plugin you need not have high-level technical skills or hire an external developer to make customised pages for you. Example: A ‘Contact Us’ page can easily be available in the form of a plugin.

Having seen how plugins can prove to be useful let us now move on to checking some of the essential WordPress plugins that you as a user can install on your new WordPress site.

1. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin
   Taking a backup of your data is very crucial as it helps you be at ease in case of data loss as recovery is hassle-free.UpdraftPlus is a popular, easy-to-use, comprehensive backup and restore plugin. It has over 1+ million active installations and is available in both free and premium versions. It backups your data over the cloud with a single click. Some of the big entities it is trusted by are Microsoft, MIT, P&G, NBA etc.
   Features:
   1. UpdraftPlus backups data to applications like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, UpdraftVault, FTP, email etc. The premium version also backups to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, SFTP etc.
   2. It allows the user to set up both manual and automatic backup schedules depending on their convenience.
   3. It even allows users to backup and migrate their data remotely from a single central location using UpdraftCentral.
2. Login Lockdown
   Limiting the number of login attempts on your WordPress site is important, as hackers might try the brute-force attack to gain entry to your site and compromise it.Login Lockdown is an open-source plugin with over 2,00,000 + active installations. It is free in nature, easy-to-use and a must have plugin.
   Features:
   1. Login Lockdown monitors brute-force attacks by noting the IP address and Timestamp of every failed login attempt and stores in its database.
   2. It disables the login attempt for a particular IP address if there are repeated attempts within a certain timespan.
   3. The default time set up by the plugin to lockdown the site for the user is 1 hour after three failed attempts. However, the admin can change this as well as manually release the lockdown.
3. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
   If you’re a business website, tracking the source from where your traffic has come is of utmost importance.The Google Analytics plugin by MonsterInsights for WordPress helps you see where your visitors are coming from to help you plan your business strategy better. The plugin is popular and has over 1+ million active installations.
   Features:
   1. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is easy to set up and gives real-time statistics.
   2. It uses universal tracking that helps track your visitors across various platforms and devices and gives you report based on which pages of your websites are popular.
   3. If you’ve setup Adsense on your website, it enables you to track it. It also enables you to track any outbound links if clicked.
4. Contact Form 7
   Contact forms help you design interactive forms for your visitors to get in touch with you.Contact Form 7 is a sought after plugin with over 5+ million active installations. It is an open-source software including CAPTCHA, Akismet Spam filter support etc.
   Features:
   1. Contact Form 7 is easily integrated within your WordPress dashboard and doesn’t write any messages to the database or tracks users.
   2. The plugin helps you customize forms and mail content in a flexible way using simple markup.
   3. You can place the contact form in the form of a text widget as well as into your post content.
5. Quick and Easy FAQs
   When you launch a new website, visitors may have several questions. To make sure your support isn’t overburdened you can add an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page to your site.FAQs page helps your visitors seeks any answer they wish this, in turn, helps in the conversion rate. Quick and Easy FAQs is a free and open source plugin with over 10,000+ active installations.
   Features:
   1. Quick and Easy FAQs plugin helps adds FAQs easily to the custom post type.
   2. The plugin displays FAQs in three ways viz. A simple list, Toggle and Filterable toggle based on groups.
   3. It even allows the user to change the default styles using custom CSS and supports changing toggle style text, background and border colours.

Conclusion:
Selecting plugins for a new website is a crucial task and depends on what you as a user need as opposed to the popular plugins in the market today. It is best to have fewer plugins as most are heavy in nature and can potentially make the site slow. My recommendation would be to have five essential WordPress plugins that help your website function smoothly.

We at ResellerClub help small and medium-sized business setup their website smoothly by offering essentials like domains, hosting, themes, plugins, logos, etc. Moreover, if you have a WordPress website, it is recommended that you opt for WordPress Hosting. We offer Managed WordPress Hosting to keep your mind off of maintaining and managing WordPress so that you can concentrate on marketing and growing your business.

Once your business grows, you will surely have an idea which plugin is best suited for your website. Until then keep experimenting and good luck with the success of your new WordPress website. If you have any queries, comments or suggestions please feel free to drop us a comment below!