What plugins your WordPress site could benefit from?

As one of the most popular CMS platforms on the market, it’s said that 25% of the web is powered by WordPress. That’s a lot of websites. With WordPress being a popular choice among many clients for its easy to use interface making it simple to update web content on a regular basis. Here at Spindogs no matter the choice of CMS from .Net to PHP, we always build functionality directly into our client’s to meet individual needs to maximise their websites potential.

So, we thought as your digital expert that we would pull a list together of 5 plugins you should be using on your WordPress site. Really useful and simple to use check out our top recommendations, plus another added bonus is… you don’t need any coding background to use any of these and they all work straight out of the box.

1. Yoast SEO

A particular favourite amongst the Spindogs team when it comes to using plugins, Yoast is more or less considered the SEO God of WordPress. It allows you to control pretty much everything – title tags, meta description, keywords, sitemaps. It’s an absolute must, especially if you are in charge of your website’s SEO.

To quote WordPress’ own description of Yoast, ‘Using the snippet preview, you can see a rendering of what your post or page will look like in the search results, whether your title is too long or too short, and whether your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result’ Source: https://themegrill.com/blog/best-wordpress-plugins/

2. Smush

Another helpful plugin we’ve used is Smush – it compresses images without losing their quality and it does so automatically when you upload an image to your site. This is great for SEO as it means your website is loading as quickly as possible and you don’t have unnecessarily large files sitting on your site.

What’s more, the plugin allows you to ‘smush’ data in bulk – you can compress up to 50 attachments at a time.

3. Akismet

A plugin developed by the creators of WordPress, Akismet is one of the default plugins that every core WordPress installation comes equipped with. It is essentially an anti-spam add-on which filters our spam comments from your site. Site moderators can access user URLs and filter out any suspicious links.

Overall it is a useful plugin that helps protect your WordPress site security, and you can have it for free for a personal blog or for a monthly fee for commercial sites.

4. Redirection

Redirection is a great plugin to use if you are migrating pages from an old website or changing your WordPress installation directory. As the name aptly suggests, the plugin manages 301 redirections and tracks 404 errors, helping you tidy up all of your site’s loose ends. Redirection also allows you to keep a full log of all the URLs you have redirected.

5. Duplicator

Duplicator is a useful plugin that enables you to copy, move, clone or migrate a WordPress site from one location to another, while at the same time serving as an easy to use backup utility. The plugin creates a simple zip file, or a ‘package’, which bundles all your website’s content, database, WordPress files, plugins and themes. You can then use the package to move your information to any location where a WordPress site can be hosted, be it on the same server or across servers.

One thing we would advise you to take note of is the fact that there have been cases in the past when a plug-in that hasn’t been updated for a few months gets hacked, allowing hackers direct access to the site.

If you want to find out how the Spindogs team can help your site deliver great results for your business, contact one of our digital experts today and learn about our website development services.