The right WordPress plugins can make an outstanding difference to your website. They can dramatically improve the aesthetic, efficiency, and usability of your website, for both you and your visitors.
However, there are so many plugins available, and this can make it difficult to know which ones are right for your website.
It doesn’t take much to transform your well-designed website into something unsightly, with messy themes, troubled usability, and incomprehensible code all drawbacks of the wrong plugins.
But don’t stress, as we have taken the time to test and review a host of WordPress plugins on your behalf.
These are the top 7 WordPress plugins for 2020.
1. Contact Form 7
If you are looking for a plugin that will allow you to use reCaptcha verification, easily create/maintain multiple contact forms, and ensure that all spam submissions are filtered out through Akismet, then Contact Form 7 is your absolute go-to.
This breezy plugin allows you to bypass all the annoying extra coding so that you can easily create and publish stylish contact forms that will have your customers filling up your inbox.
Contact Form 7 is incredibly popular amongst marketers, with over 5 million installations and over 1,000 5-star reviews. It is simply the best contact form plugin available online.
2. Akismet
Akismet Anti-Spam is the only plugin that you require to keep out those annoying spammers as well as maintain the long-term standard of your website.
The plugin reviews and filters every comment that is sent to your website, providing a status history for each comment so that you can decide on which comments are spammy.
You can also see the number of approved comments for each user, check the URLs in the comments section, as well as remove any unwanted links you come across.
What makes Akismet really amazing is the fact it is free to download for personal sites and the premium version is super cheap, allowing you to maintain an awesome, spam-free website without breaking your marketing budget.
3. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is essentially top of the range when it comes to on-page search engine optimization. It is a highly functional plugin that takes you through the process of optimizing your keywords and new content for search engines.
From the optimization of your title and h2 tags to your target keyword’s density, as well as basic readability and metadata, Yoast SEO makes on-page search engine optimization and absolute synch.
4. WooCommerce
For budding marketers who choose to take a slightly less standard route with eCommerce and don’t use Shopify, WooCommerce is the ultimate open source platform for WordPress champions.
With a myriad of extensions, features and customizations build into the platform, WooCommerce makes selling on WordPress the easiest it’s ever been.
From the plethora of themes (all of which are available with unlimited customization) to the ability to sell digital, physical and affiliate products, as well as the endless conversion optimization tools, you simply won’t find a better single plugin that can rival WooCommerce in terms of price and efficiency.
5. Google XML Sitemaps
Another awesome SEO WordPress plugin, Google XML Sitemaps helps search engines like Google, Yahoo! And Bing to better index your website with a special XML sitemap.
Once you install and activate the plugin, it will automatically produce an XML sitemap that makes it simple for search engine bots to crawl, view and index your website so that you can enjoy a helpful rankings boost and a bit of “SEO Juice” for some time to come.
6.WP Fastest Cache
In 2020, your website speed is paramount. With WP Fastest Cache, you can quickly and easily enhance your website’s baseline speed.
This free and simple plugin generates static HTML files from your WordPress site meaning and the webserver will utilize that file instead of processing the heavier, and much slower, PHP scripts.
7. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics
If you are looking to track the real-time traffic data of your website without logging into and attempting to navigate the maze-like Google Analytics website, then Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by Exact Metrics is your go-to.
This fantastic plugin allows you to monitor the acquisition channels and real-time traffic, but also the:
- Organic searches, page views, bounce rate, analytics stats, sessions
- Traffic channels, traffic mediums, search engines analytic stats, social stats
- Pages, referrers, keywords, 404 errors analytics
And much, much more – it is a truly fantastic plugin for analyzing real-time traffic.