The 5 must-have plugins for WordPress.

The right choice of plug­ins is not so easy.

I’ve been crea­ting web­sites for almost 20 years and I can tell you it’s a new chall­enge every time. In the begin­ning, ever­y­thing was crea­ted with sta­tic pages and every chan­ge had to be done in the HTML files them­sel­ves.

With the intro­duc­tion of con­tent manage­ment sys­tems, the pro­cess has sim­pli­fied, becau­se the design was now sepa­ra­ted from the con­tent. Thanks to the ease of use, of cour­se, their popu­la­ri­ty increased ste­adi­ly and so the first deve­lo­pers also began to design exten­si­ons, bet­ter known as plug­ins, for Word­Press.

By now, the­re are alre­a­dy 57,857 plug­ins in the offi­ci­al Word­Press direc­to­ry.

But enough tal­king, let me intro­du­ce you to the must-have Word­Press plug­ins that no site should be wit­hout.

F12-Plugins #

A web­site is con­stant­ly gro­wing. We expe­ri­ence it again and again that com­pa­nies and web­site owners start instal­ling a new plug­in for every litt­le thing.

Espe­ci­al­ly when seve­ral edi­tors are working on one web­site, it is easy to lose track of ever­y­thing, and at some point your web­site will beco­me slower and slower.

F12-Pro­­fi­­ler helps you find out which plug­ins affect your loa­ding times. Using the traf­fic light sys­tem, you can quick­ly see whe­re the bot­t­len­ecks are.

Once acti­va­ted, it shows you cle­ar­ly which plug­in needs how long to load.

Once you have crea­ted your Word­Press web­site, you need to down­load and install this plug­in imme­dia­te­ly. Once acti­va­ted, you don’t have to worry about any­thing.

All in One SEO #

The name says it all. All In One SEO is a Word­Press plug­in that offers you the pos­si­bi­li­ty to opti­mi­ze your web­site for search engi­nes.

Once you acti­va­te the plug­in, you can add meta infor­ma­ti­on to posts and pages that will help you rank bet­ter with search engi­nes.

All in One SEO also auto­ma­ti­cal­ly crea­tes a site­map for your site. A site­map is a table of con­tents that lists all posts, pages, cate­go­ries and topics on your web­site. Search engi­nes pro­cess this list and then add the links to the queue to be craw­led by the bot next time. Of cour­se, you can speed up the pro­cess manu­al­ly by sub­mit­ting the site­map direct­ly to Goog­le and Bing.

The most popu­lar fea­tures of the plug­in include the fol­lo­wing:

• XML-Site­­map
• Exten­ded cano­ni­cal URLs
• Auto­ma­tic crea­ti­on of meta tags
• Com­pa­ti­bi­li­ty with other plug­ins
• Available in over 50 lan­guages.

Important note: With the intro­duc­tion of the GDPR, it was pre­scri­bed that coo­kies may only be set with the expli­cit con­sent of the visi­tor. You should the­r­e­fo­re not use the Goog­le Ana­ly­tics opti­on that comes from All in One SEO, becau­se Goog­le auto­ma­ti­cal­ly sets coo­kies when inte­gra­ting.

Install the plug­in direct­ly after you have crea­ted your web­site with Word­Press. Once con­fi­gu­red, you don’t have to worry about any­thing.

WP Rocket #

If your web­site loads too slow­ly, you should take a look at WP Rocket. WP Rocket is a caching tool that helps you opti­mi­ze your web­site’s loa­ding times by per­forming four fun­da­men­tal tasks:

1. It com­bi­nes CSS and Java­Script files, so fewer requests are sent to the ser­ver.
2. It shrinks CSS and Java­Script files, redu­cing the size of the page.
3. Fur­ther­mo­re, it delays the loa­ding of Java­Script files, which makes the page load fas­ter.
4. It defi­nes how long indi­vi­du­al data from the visi­tor should be stored in the cache until they are reques­ted again by the ser­ver.

For eva­lua­ti­on, you can use GTMe­trix. This way, you can easi­ly see if your chan­ges have had a posi­ti­ve effect.

With WP Rocket, we could increase our Page­Speed Score to 99%. With YSlow Score, we only score 82%, but this is due to the fact that we have alre­a­dy acti­va­ted HTTP/2 for our ser­ver.

You should wait until you are done with your site befo­re acti­vat­ing WP Rocket. This will save you from having to clear the cache when you chan­ge con­tent.

Redirection #

When­ever you dele­te a page or post on Word­Press, you crea­te a dead link. This means that the next time a bot tri­es to crawl the page, you will be kicked out of the index becau­se the page no lon­ger exists. To avo­id losing all your SEO work, you can work with so-cal­­led redi­rects.

The Pugin Redi­rec­tion offers you the pos­si­bi­li­ty to crea­te the­se redi­rec­tions com­for­ta­b­ly via the backend.

It also reli­e­ves you of the work of crea­ting redi­rects when you rena­me or move pages. The plug­in detects this auto­ma­ti­cal­ly and crea­tes the redi­rects for you direct­ly.

And if you do for­get a link, you can sim­ply check the log. The­re you can see all links that have gene­ra­ted a 404 error.

Espe­ci­al­ly when crea­ting the web­site, titles and per­ma­links are often chan­ged. So that you do not get bog­ged down here, you should acti­va­te the plug­in only after com­ple­ti­on of your page.

Important: If you are relaun­ching for your web­site, you should redi­rect your old pages to your new pages.

Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP #

One of the latest chan­ges in SEO is the so-cal­­led “sche­ma mark­up”. Through the “sche­ma mark­up” you can impro­ve the posi­ti­on of your web­site in the search results (SERPs).

What does the “sche­ma mark­up” do? Nor­mal­ly, of cour­se, search engi­nes can’t know what you mean by the data you publish on your web­site. To sol­ve this pro­blem, the “sche­ma mark­up” has been added. The­re, you can spe­ci­fy with a code what your data means.

So now, to tell Goog­le what your indi­vi­du­al pie­ces of con­tent mean, you can use the Sche­ma & Struc­tu­red Data for WP & AMP plug­in.

This allows you to use the “sche­ma mark­up” even if you are not so fami­li­ar with the code.

You should try to always use “sche­ma mar­kups” for your page to get an advan­ta­ge in ran­king.

Summary #

With the plug­ins, you can impro­ve your ran­kings in the search engi­nes if you use them cor­rect­ly. Of cour­se, a web­site is not finis­hed after it is crea­ted. It needs to be updated and adjus­ted regu­lar­ly.

The best approach is to have a solid stra­tegy that you imple­ment con­sis­t­ent­ly over a long peri­od of time.

Do you use one of our plug­ins from the list or want to try one out? Tell me about it in the comm­ents sec­tion.