When it comes to WordPress, the right plugin can make a night and day difference for what you are trying to accomplish. However, the opposite can be said when installing the wrong plugin. Knowing what will work with your theme and deliver the results you are looking for can oftentimes be overwhelming. And sometimes this can cause a week-long headache when trying to figure out what crashed your site and trying to recover everything from backups (always a best practice to test in staging mode before installing a plugin). But don’t worry: We went through these headaches multiple times already so you don’t have to. Here are the 10 favorite WordPress plugins that we use:
1. ZPortals
When it comes to client portals and Zoho, one reigns supreme – ZPortals. This WordPress plugin is easy to configure and integrates with all the main core Zoho applications. If you are looking for a client portal and want to see how ZPortals works, check out the free product tutorial we recently did on ZPortals here.
Pricing: $49 a month
Website: https://zportals.com/
Notable Features:
-Industries that could be useful include – Professional Services, eCommerce, Manufacturing / Products, SAAS, Sales Teams & Third Parties, Construction / Trade, Vendor Management, HOA’s / Memberships, and more.
2. Imagify
Many of the top issues affecting your website’s performance can be attributed to images being too large, whether the dimensions of the image or the file size. Prior to the existence of tools like Imagify, you would have to compress each of your images manually using Photoshop. Now with Imagify, you install the plugin and then can bulk-optimize all of the images in your WordPress media library. And when your library is as large as ours, with thousands of images, having Imagify do the heavy lifting is so helpful.
Pricing: Free (Unlimited plan is $9.99/month)
Website: https://imagify.io/
Notable Features:
–Bulk Optimization
–WebP Conversion
–Auto-Optimize images on upload
3. WP Rocket
Have you checked your site’s performance score recently or ever? Running your GTMetrix report can give you some free insight into how your site is performing and most of us could use some improvement. This app does just that. Without having to deep dive into your site and figure out what elements need to be fixed, WP Rocket handles the cleanup for you. So far we haven’t run into any issues with any themes it can’t handle, but as we said before, it is always good to test something like this in a staging site first.
Pricing: $49 for 1 site per year
Website: https://wp-rocket.me/
Notable Features:
–Quick setup – 80% of web-performance best practices are automatically applied, no need to touch the code.
–The most powerful features for web performance – Caching, LazyLoad, Preload, Delay JS, Remove Unused CSS, just to name a few.
–eCommerce compatibility – No matter what eCommerce plugin for WordPress you’re using, they’ve got your back.
4. Elementor
When it comes to customizing pages for WordPress, Elementor hands down is our favorite tool. This plugin simplifies customization, while still having a TON of advanced features for each customized element you want to add. Even if you are a website developer by trade with advanced HTML and CSS skills, this plugin can save a ton of time and yet still deliver a professional-looking and functioning site. If you are thinking about using Elementor for a new site we found the Zakra Theme to work excellent with it!
Pricing: FREE
Website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/elementor/
Notable Features:
-The leading website & page builder
-Faster. Much faster.
-Professional features right out of the box
-Responsive live editing
5. Yoast SEO Premium
There are many SEO courses, tools, guides, and plugins out there. We find Yoast to be our favorite to work with. Though it helps to have some underlying knowledge of the rules on how your site ranks, Yoast does an excellent job to help you keep your site under those guidelines. Another reason we recommend the premium over the free version is that it includes Yoast Academy. Staying up to date monthly on the latest rules and training videos on best practices for SEO is a must and Yoast delivers.
The automated tools included with premium are also worth the money. It will crawl your site and list out any errors that need to be fixed. Linking and the right keywords are another major component in today’s SEO world. Yoast Premium can help make suggestions that you are picking the right key phrases for your industry and linking to the best pages internally.
Pricing: Premium – $89 for 1 site per year
Website: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
Notable Features:
–Optimize for related keywords
–Full access to all Yoast SEO academy courses
–Internal linking suggestions
–Prevent your visitors from ending up on a dead link with the redirect manager
6. Enable Media Replace
This came in handy for us when Zoho changed all their logos with more modern “logoism” designs recently. Rather than having to find every article that used certain images and replace them this plugin manages all of them for you in just a few clicks. Whatever the use case, this can save a lot of time for bulk image changes along with links that are associated with them.
Pricing: FREE
Website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-media-replace/
Notable Features:
–Bulk file management
–Update properties or replace images with just a few clicks
7. Image Attributes Pro
Have you been updating your Alt Descriptions for every image on your site? If you haven’t you should be. Believe it or not, a big ranking factor for SEO when it comes to Google crawling your site is Alt Descriptions on images. If you fall in this category and have a WordPress site this WordPress plugin is a lifesaver. It will go through all images on your site and handle all of this for you once configured!
Pricing: FREE or $49 per year for Premium for 1 site
Website: https://imageattributespro.com/
Notable Features:
–Auto Image Attributes
–Fast Bulk Updater
–Filename v/s Post Title for alt name
8. Advanced Ads Pro
Do you run a content-heavy site? If so, one great way to attract your users back to your main service offerings is through ads. With the Advanced Ads plugin, you can inject ads into your blog content and get specific with which pages certain ads appear on, how long an ad will run, and create ad sets so that a different ad will be displayed every time the page is loaded.
Pricing: €49 per year
Website: https://wpadvancedads.com/
Notable Features:
–Create Ad groups to have a constant rotation of ad content
–Set start and end dates to showcase event-specific ads
– Set which pages an ad appears on
9. Zoho SalesIQ
If you are a Zoho user, having this WordPress plugin on your site is a must. Getting analytics on who is visiting your site is a powerful tool and Zoho SalesIQ delivers that. Not to mention their built-in chatbot has come a long way and is more intuitive than ever with the recent launch of SalesIQ 2.0. Program these chatbots with the right help article responses and give your website an edge over your competitors while taking customer satisfaction to the next level.
Pricing: FREE
Website: https://zoho.com/salesiq/
Notable Features:
-Website visitor insights
-Codeless bots
-Lead Scoring
-Live Chat & Remote Access
10. Page & Post Clone
The title says it all. This plugin can save a lot of time when creating multiple pages with similar formatting structures. By being able to rapidly clone pages or posts, just edit the content and you’re ready for the next page.
Pricing: FREE
Website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/page-or-post-clone/
Notable Features:
-Create a page clone preserving all the content and title
-Create a post clone preserving all the content and title
Ready to take your site to the next level?
If you are intrigued by any of the WordPress plugins mentioned above and want help taking your site to the next level with them, we are here to help. Feel free to visit our Web Services page and schedule a free consultation. Or if you just want to stay in the loop with other great news and applications, subscribe to our free newsletter with weekly updates!
