If you are creating a WordPress website then you should know that it is incomplete without adding the best WordPress plugins into it. The popularity of WordPress is increasing because of many factors like SEO-friendly optimization, accessibility, customization, and plugins which further increases its reach.
Plugins are powerful enough to elevate a WordPress website. There is a wide range of plugins available for different functionalities from which you can choose any plugin you want to use on your website. So, here in this post, we have compiled a list of the best WordPress plugins for developers that would literally help you grow your website to the next level.
10 Best WordPress Plugins for developers
Without any further ado, let’s get into the details of the best WordPress plugins you can use on your website in 2021.
1. Yoast SEO
So the first contender on the list is Yoast SEO. The SEO-optimized websites get approximately 50% more traffic on the internet than the unoptimized ones. Hence, SEO is critical for a WordPress website.
Yoast SEO is one of those SEO plugins that will help your website to reach the highest standards of technical SEO. Even if you are a beginner in SEO, these plugins could work as a guide for you. Yoast SEO is an easily accessible plugin. It also saves your website from getting blacklisted as it helps you with identifying SEO errors. This plugin also keeps the track of your WordPress website’s keyword density.
Though Yoast SEO is easy to use, it does not update your search engine rankings. It cannot understand the keyword or user intent too. Therefore, there are chances that Yoast SEO may measure keyword density wrong and affect your SEO results on the search engines.
Some more plugin options are available so that you can use them as an alternative to Yoast SEO. They are Rankmath, SEO press, All in one SEO pack, SEOPressor, and The SEO Framework.
2. WPForms for developers
Every WordPress website consists of an option of contact through which the visitors can get in touch with you. WPForms is one of those plugins for WordPress that will help you create user-friendly WPForms.
And not only that, WPForms is a drag and drop type of online form builder that allows you to create email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, survey polls, and many more very easily with just a few clicks.
WPForms come with such powerful features that you can build forms in less than five minutes. You can also integrate these forms on every popular payment and marketing platform available on the internet.
Such advantages like form landing pages, conversational forms, user journey tracking, geolocation tracking, GDPR friendly, custom WordPress user registration and login forms, form abandonment, and more aren’t even available in other builders.
WPForms is the product of WPBeginner, they use it on their website and claim that most of the WordPress websites that use their plugins are successfully maintaining a 4.9-star rating out of 5 for over 4 years now. If you are looking for a simple solution then there is a WPForms Lite version too.
However, the pro version comes with a set of more powerful features that could boost your lead generation efforts and will ultimately grow your business. An excellent alternative for WPForms is Formidable Forms that can help WordPress developers to create advanced solution-focused WordPress forms.
3. Hubspot WordPress Plugin
If you are looking for a WordPress plugin that offers a lot of value in one then Hubspot is the perfect pick for you. And the best thing is that it is completely free. This plugin enables you to capture, organize and engage with visitors on the website through various options like live chats, CRM, forms, email marketing, and analytics.
This WordPress plugin is very useful to developers as they can craft forms and pop-ups with the help of a drag and drop builder. You can also provide an elegant experience to your visitors by adjusting colors, stylings, and many more to elevate your brand.
Hubspot also offers analytics that will help you understand which sales and marketing actions of your campaign are successful and which ones need improvisation. This will also help you to decide which pages of your website are performing well and which ones need an upgrade. All of these affect your business growth.
4. MonsterInsight
You can add, customize, and manage website tracking services of Google Analytics on your site with the help of MonsterInsights. This WordPress plugin not only evaluates the performance of your WordPress website but also optimizes your web traffic, subscribers, and revenues as per the stats provided by Google Analytics.
You can easily install and customize the user interface while you can view and analyze the web data on WordPress Dashboard provided by MonsterInsights. It will provide a backup for the analytical web data through data export and import. You can handle all of these using your google account as the MonsterInsights plugin allows you to connect your site to Google Analytics using your Gmail account.
The drawback of this plugin is its most useful and powerful features come with a premium version whereas the capacity of the free version is very limited. The alternatives for this plugin that you can use include Google Analytics, Heap, Smartlook, Looker.
5. Floating Social
Now you can connect your social media profiles to your WordPress website with the help of Floating Social Plugin. It enables you to add a social media floating sidebar on your site. This will help you increase the web traffic not only on your main website but also to your social media business pages. Also, you can change the settings of social media icons in terms of their type, animated effects, shadow, size, etc. to provide an elegant and customized interface.
This WordPress plugin will not only boost your online exposure but will also direct your web visitors to your social media business pages. While this can help you build your followings, it will also keep your site secure by keeping it away from bots.
Some businesses use social locking tools, so that if the web audience wants to access any content then they need to follow the business profiles on social media platforms. Putting a floating social bar will just add more visuals on the website while it will also give your web visitors a preview of what they can expect from your social media profile or page.
Some other social plugins you can use on WordPress include Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress, Novashare, Social Pug, Shareaholic, Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons (Ultimate Sharing).
6. Constant Contact WordPress Plugin
As a business owner, you have to utilize many streams and platforms for marketing. However, email marketing is one of the most reliable tools at your service. With the help of email, you can stay in constant touch with your customers or users even if they aren’t active on your website.
This is why it is crucial for every business that they start building its email list right away. The long your email list, the larger your reach most importantly, this marketing platform is in your total control. If you want some help with email marketing services then Constant Contact is the right choice for you.
This WordPress plugin will not only help you build your email list but can also help you send newsletters via email to your subscribers. Its setup is so easy that even a non-techy user can get started very quickly. Constant Contact also works very well with popular lead generation plugins for WordPress like WPForms and OptinMonster.
If you are looking for some advanced email marketing plugins then SendinBlue and ConvertKit are the best alternate options. But they are a little too costly.
7. W3 Total Cache
Ever heard that you can optimize your web performance with the help of caching technology? Well, companies like AT&T, mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, makeuseof.com, pearsonified.com, johnchow.com, ilovetypography.com, webdesignerdepot.com, css-tricks.com, and many more practice it to improve their web performance.
And do you know which plugin they trust above all to execute this function? It’s W3 Total Cache. The number of active installations for this WordPress plugin has already crossed 1 million.
W3 Total Cache excels at improving the search engine rankings for your web pages. This is achieved by decreasing the web page-loading time which increases the visitor’s time on your website. And the best thing about this plugin is that it is a great mobile-friendly tool too.
W3 Total Cache plugin is compatible with dedicated servers as well as virtual private clusters. It has a fully transparent content delivery network management. And as it is a mobile-friendly tool, it can support AMP and SSL which are used to integrate a wide range of security features into your website.
8. Sucuri or Login Lockdown plugin for web security
If you are really concerned about the security of your website then Login Lockdown or Sucuri plugin is the must-have WordPress plugin. This WordPress plugin records the IP address and timestamps of each failed login attempt on your web page.
It will allow you to limit the number of attempts while logging in per every IP address. Sucuri plugin will inform the user of the IP addresses about the retries they have left and the lockout time on the login page. But if they run out of all the tries then the administrators have to release the locked-out IP addresses manually from the admin panel.
The other functions performed by the Login Lockdown plugin include protecting the website, locking all the threats and attacks, monitoring website integrity, auditing the website logs, scanning server-side, and services the malware cleaner. So basically, this WordPress plugin is responsible for the security of your website therefore it is the most essential WordPress plugin of all.
However, if you are looking for some alternate options of this plugin then Imperva Cloud Application Security, Amazon CloudFront, SiteLock, Cloudflare, and StackPath CDN are to name some.
9. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a well-known conversion rate optimization software. Its key features enable you to transform your visitors into email subscribers and customers. The plugin for this software is available in WordPress and can help you to boost your sales as well as build your email list very quickly.
This plugin offers a file with hundreds of templates that you can use to build various types of full-screen welcome mats to gain the visitor’s attention, slide-ins, announcements bars, WordPress pop-ups, and gamified spin a wheel. The drag and drop builder feature of OptinMonster allows you to customize opt-in forms and all kinds of marketing campaign templates very easily.
If you want to then you can personalize these campaigns for each user with the help of OptinMosnter’s powerful display targeting feature. With its help, you can show the right message at the right time.
The OptinMonster plugin for WordPress is a great solution for bloggers, eCommerce websites, business websites, and basically for all who want to increase traffic on their site. If you want to earn money through web traffic then you would definitely need OptinMonster. The pros of this plugin include functions like recovering abandoned cart sales, growing your email list, and converting website visitors. There is a free version of OptinMonster available if you want to sign up through the WordPress plugin.
10. SEMRush
Do you need an all-in-one marketing toolkit for your website? WordPress offers a plugin for SEMRush which comes with a set of powerful tools that can improve your SEO, paid traffic, content, PR strategy, and social media. And I don’t need to tell you that though it is last on our list, it is one of the best WordPress plugins you can use.
You can use SEMRush to dominate your industry by gathering the competitive intelligence of your competitors and outranking them. It can help you with many functions like keyword research, backlink audit, track brand mentions, spy on competitors, discover best-performing posts and pages on social media, ad strategy analysis, and much more.
It can solve all your problems from SEO to business intelligence-related requirements. You can also perform keyword research using it. SEMRush helps you offer the right kind of services to the people as it provides detailed demographics of your visitors such as age, gender, location, and more.
The prices of all the plans by SEMRush are relatively reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses except for its PRO plan. Through SEMRush sends out warnings to keep their subscribers hooked, users complain that it sometimes does the opposite. And many times the data sent by the software is found to be inaccurate.
Some major alternatives which you can use in WordPress instead of SEMRush include Monitor Backlink, Searchmetrics, Advanced Web ranking, Serpstat, and Google Keyword Planner.
Conclusion
So, these were the top 10 WordPress plugins for developers that can assist you to grow your website and your business in any way you want. The efficient use of these plugins can help your website thrive and turn it into a brand. You can do all of these with or without any help from professional developers because these plugins are pretty easy to learn and implement.
I hope that this article has been helpful to you. However, if you have any queries or suggestions, share them with us in the comments section below.