Did you know WordPress is responsible for powering over 34% of the internet? Furthermore, if you were to look at websites built using content-management systems (CMS), over 60% of websites are built on WordPress.
As web design agency based in Cheshire who specialise in WordPress, from social media to security there are over 55,000 free and paid WordPress plugins available to help extend your website experience in every way possible.
With such an extensive collection to choose from, it can quickly become overwhelming to choose which plugins are best suited for your website. With this in mind, our Cheshire web design team have put together our handy guide highlighting 5 free essential WordPress plugins to help your business website grow.
Free Contact Form Plugin Recommendation
There’s nothing worse than creating a shiny new contact form, only to find the form is broken or even worse it doesn’t store any enquires if it hasn’t been configured correctly! Luckily, Flamingo is a message storage plugin designed to capture all enquires.
Although Flamingo is a free WordPress plugin, it was originally created for Contact Form 7 which doesn’t store submitted messages. This is an essential plugin because you will no longer need to worry about losing any website enquires due to mail server issues or misconfiguration in mail setup and miss any potential customers. Once activated, you can easily find Flamingo within the admin dashboard where all messages are listed, searchable and downloadable.
Free SEO Plugin Recommendation
If you have a business website, I’m sure you will have heard of the important of search engine optimisation!! Created in 2008, Yoast SEO is described as the #1 WordPress SEO plugin with over 5 million active installations.
Although Yoast SEO offers both paid and free versions, the free version provides solid foundations to help you understand about keyword optimization and how you can instruct search engines about what your posts and pages are about. With a live search engine result preview and readability checks to provide insights on what you can improve, Yoast SEO offers a great education in how you can get the best SEO performance from your website.
After activating the plugin, you will see Yoast SEO installed on every individual page and post. If you need any assistance or would like to discuss your SEO strategy, please do not hesitate to contact your local Cheshire web design agency.
Free Google Analytics Plugin Recommendation
With over 2 million active installations, MonsterInsights is designed to make it effortless to properly connect your WordPress website with Google Analytics. Configured with a dashboard analytics dashboard within the back end of your website, you can start making data-drive based decisions to help improve your business website.
Although this blog is based on free plugin recommendations, I would certainly consider MonsterInsights Pro where through the simple click of a button, you can start to track how users interact with your website through triggering Analytic goals to make more educated decisions.
Free Security Plugin Recommendation
According to statistics, from 40,000 WordPress websites ranked in the Alexa top 1 million, more than 70% of WordPress websites were vulnerable to hacker attacks. I’m not saying your website will get hacked, but it’s probably a smart decision to install a security plugin and with over 3 million active installations, WordFence is the most popular free security plugins.
Although WordFence offer free and paid versions, the free version is more than powerful enough to manage smaller business websites. Everything from firewall blocks to protection from brute force attacks to a security scanner, this free plugin is very easy to set-up and manage and also provides piece of mind that your website will have good security.
Free Performance Plugin Recommendation
Providing a platform of all-round services in security, performance and site management, Jetpack is certainly a great free plugin with over 5 million active users.
From a Cheshire web design prospective, what’s particularly interesting is the performance tools the free version offers to WordPress websites. With search engines openly favouring mobile-first websites, speed has become an increasingly important factor. Jetpack offers a number of different options to help page load times decrease including optimising images and lazy loading images to enable a faster mobile experience.
Cheshire Web Design Conclusion
Don’t worry, if you have already had your website built by our Cheshire web design agency, you will already have both free and paid versions of these plugins installed on your website.
If you are local business looking for a new business website, or simply want to some advice on how to grow and improve your website, please do not hesitate to contact untitled™. Simply fill out the contact form where a member of our team will be in touch within 24 hours or why not pop into our Knutsford web design studio for chat over a coffee.