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Top 10 Starter WordPress Plugins

WordPress SEO by Yoast – FREE

This plugin is one of the most important plugins to any company that has a WordPress website. It should almost be added into the design stage! This plugin is a very powerful tool to help guide you’re on page SEO efforts. It makes tedious tasks much simpler for example setting up Google Analytics and doing the verification stage in seconds without going into the code. We recommend this plugin to all of our readers and after a few simple clicks it’s installed and ready to go transforming you’re on page SEO and making you a SEO Wizard!

Jetpack – FREE

Jetpack created by WordPress.com, totally transforms your website giving you a lot more functionality all compact into one plugin. It allows you to monitor, protect and connect your blog to the internet! Our favourite part of this plugin is the Publicize feature which allows you to share your content with all of your social media accounts including google+. Combined with SEO Yoast you can set up the pictures that will go on the social media. If you scroll to the bottom of your post you should see the WordPress SEO by Yoast box which has a social tab to modify the information posted onto various social media including hashtags!

Contact Form 7 – FREE

Contact forms are one of the most popular plugins for WordPress and Contact Form 7 will make your life much easier! This simple contact form is easy to work with and modify and we personally use it on all of our website’s creating it easier for the developer to create the website without having to write PHP files to handle sending mail, No technical skills required! Just simple BBcodes.

SumoMe – FREE/PRO

When your website is producing good content you will want to convert these visitors into leads and this is where SumoMe comes into play helping you to build email lists to get more subscribers for your website with support for multiple external mail list building software such as MailChimp. SumoMe takes a little longer to setup but is very simple to use and is one of the best free mailing list builder plugins.

Jetpack – FREE

TinyMCE is a simple plugin that converts the original WordPress editor and gives you more options on the editor for example file, edit and insert. The similar options you would see in Microsoft Word. This plugin is very simple to plug and go with no issues. You can also add more functions than what is shown in the screenshot below.

WooCommerce – FREE

WooCommerce allows you to transform your WordPress website into an online store selling products with ease. Woo Commerce is highly adaptable with many more add-ons and plugins for additional services that you may require, Caution these additional add-ons for this plugin can cost money but if you want specialized requirements then it is well worth it. WooCommerce is very simple to use and anyone who has sold online before will find this plugin perfect for running an eCommerce business.

Akismet – FREE

Akismet adds protection to your site in the form of spam blog comments, now if you have ever had a WordPress blog before you will know about the spam blog comments that want to sell you SEO and place a backlink to their random site. Akismet checks the users IP address against their database to discover if the comment is a genuine comment or not. If you don’t want loads of notifications or spam install this plugin.

W3 Total Cache – FREE

W3 Total Cache speeds up your website for your visitors but also helps you gain ranking in search engines. As soon as we installed W3 Total Cache on Plan a Link we gained two rankings on a speed ranking checker. The next day we went up 7 ranks in google searches for our keywords. Overall this plugin is super! It can save you a lot of time trying to do some of the more tedious on page SEO and optimisation.

Tidio Chat – Free/Paid

Tidio Live Chat is a simple plugin which allows you to communicate with your visitors, this means you can convert visitors into customers just by simply offering advice and helping the user with your product or service. To get the full effect with Tidio Live Chat (Mobile Users) you have to pay for the premium which is a small subscription per month but it is totally worth it.

BuddyPress – FREE

If you want a social media style website where users can communicate with each other in a Facebook timeline way then Buddy Press is the plugin you need for your Word Press website. This plugin is very sophisticated and robust, Users can enjoy the full experience that should be provided by any social media such as registration, profile creation, private conversations and create groups & communities.

All Plugins found in this guide can currently be found on the WordPress Plugin store.