The 10 Most Essential WordPress Plug-Ins in 2017

WordPress started out as just a small blogging service but has recently grown to a powerhouse for web design and management. In fact, over 24% of the websites online are powered by WordPress. One of the things that makes WordPress so popular is that it’s simple to use and can offer a lot of flexibility. It also has a huge community that offers advice, themes, and plug-ins.

The plug-ins on WordPress make it easier to handle and manage various aspects of a website. They can range from offering SEO analysis to helping contact customers and collect information.

In this article, we will discuss the 10 WordPress plug-ins that every website needs. And the best part, most of the plug-ins on this list are free.

Contact Form 7

No matter what kind of website you have, you most likely will need a way for your visitors to contact you. Contact Form 7 is a free plug-in that lets you create custom forms for your WordPress site.

WooCommerce

Without WooCommerce, there would not be nearly as much e-commerce sites using WordPress. WooCommerce makes it incredibly simple to turn your blog into a store. While some of its advanced features will require some learning, listing a product to sell is very simple and WooCommerce offers many features to manage customers, shipping, and taxes.

Google Analytics by Yoast

Nothing goes hand in hand better than WordPress and Google Analytics. After all, how else are you going to find out how many visitors are coming to your site and what they are doing once they get there? The Google Analytics plug-in by Yoast integrates all the power of Google Analytics into your WordPress admin dashboard. With this plug-in, you will no longer have to open a new window for Google Analytics. You can get all the information you need without leaving WordPress.

Chrome on Android Meta Theme

If you use Chrome on an Android phone, you might have noticed that some websites change the color of the title bar in Chrome. This recent addition by Google adds a nice, unique touch to your websites that helps it stand out more from the crowd. With the Chrome on Android Meta Theme, it has never been easier to change the color of your website’s title bar in Chrome.

Polylang

While not the most advanced language translation plug-in on WordPress, Polylang is surely the best out of the free options. It allows you to automatically to translate your WordPress site and all of its’ contents into different languages. On the front end, when visitors come to your website, Polylang offers a language selector so they can choose what language they want to browse your site in.

All 404 Redirect to Homepage

This plug-in is as simple as its title. It allows you to take all the traffic going to 404’s under your domain and redirect them back to your homepage. This plug-in is extremely handy because it allows you to have less lost visitors and fixes a problem that can take a while to fix.

Jetpack

Jetpack by WordPress.com is one of the most powerful plug-ins on WordPress. It features over 30 modules that let you do anything from adding a picture carousel to monitoring site stats.

Regenerate Thumbnails

One of the most frustrating aspects when doing web design is getting all the images to work together. Whenever you upload an image and it looks terribly blurry, it not only doesn’t look professional, it will also scare off many visitors. Regenerate Thumbnails takes your blurry images and restores them so they look better.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

While WordPress allows you to schedule posts without any plug-ins, their system is not perfect at best. The WordPress Editorial Calendar makes it easier than ever to schedule posts. It has a drag and drop feature so you can plan your content distribution from one screen.

Google XML Sitemaps

Now that you created your site and installed the essential plug-ins, it is a good idea to let Google know you are ready for its’ bots to crawl your website. Google XML Sitemaps plug-in allows you to automatically create a sitemap for your WordPress site and makes it simple to ping it to Google. Without this plug-in, you might have a harder time getting your website indexed by Google.