5 WordPress Plugins to Use in 2022
While not exclusive to this one CMS, plugins are pieces of software that essentially make your SEO and website maintenance journey easier to handle. There are thousands of tools and tricks to build an accessible and easy to use CMS, as well as tools to monitor, track and improve your websites performance.
WordPress plugins include some of the greatest tools and software applied to your website to make it run smoother, provide you with insights and give you a greater understanding of your site’s needs. The best part is that most of these plugins are free, or provide lite versions to see if the plugin is exactly what you’re after.
At Innermedia, as a specialist in WordPress websites, we use a variety of plugins that benefit our clients in website maintenance and general management of site features. Here are our favourites.
1. All In One SEO
This tool is highly recommended for a number of reasons. First is that you can amend meta descriptions, titles and see an overall SEO score for your specific pages. It’s a good way of seeing how your pages look in the search results and how quickly you can amend them. It’s also integrated with SEMrush, meaning you get real-time results on keywords and their search volume.
2. W3 Total Cache
Site speed is a key ranking factor for Google, meaning if your site is slow and hard to handle then you’re going to struggle to rank higher than you’d like. With W3 Cache you can easily cache the site (essentially speeding up a website process) or you can look at your core web vitals and see where improvements can be made to the website and it’s performance.
3. Lazy Load
WP Rocket has a few WordPress plugins and tools you can use, but one of our favourites is the lazy load feature. Having a lazy load option on your site means that you reduce the number of HTTP requests made, which improves overall load times on the site. Being quite a lightweight plugin as well, you won’t see much change in your site’s speed or performance when adding the plugin to your CMS.
4. MonsterInsights
Having a plugin that easily integrates with your Google Analytics dashboard is essential for the running of your site. Keeping a close eye on your visitors, conversions, bounce rate and where your users come from, among other features, is how to keep your website optimised and ready for your customers.
You can easily add the tag required to track your website performance, and then visit your GA account to see the data manually, or you can use a plugin that’ll streamline the entire process. MonsterInsights is highly recommended for this – with a universal tracking system and real-time stat reports that can be accessed at any time.
5. WPForms
Building a contact page? Some websites prefer the standard way of reaching customers, via email or picking up the phone, but others offer a contact form that customers can fill out. WPForms does just that, by allowing you to customise the fields you choose, make your own messages and it includes email integration.
Having a range of plugins for your site can both streamline and maximise the output of your website. With less buttons to click, you have more time to focus on other areas of your business. Try out a few plugins today and see which ones work for your business!
