Having too many choices is not always a good thing. If you’re planning on making, or have recently made, a WordPress website, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about — WordPress Plugins.
The number of plugins on WordPress seems to have grown by the hundreds every time you visit the website. While it’s great that you have so many options to choose from for your website, it can pretty be confusing pretty fast, especially when every plugin claims to be the “best” and “essential”. So here we’re listing the 4 must-have WordPress plugins that all kinds of websites — from online shopping sites like eBay to casino sites like ChelseaPalace — use.
1. GDPR Cookie Consent
With the GDPR regulation looming over your heads, the best course of action is to comply with the law as soon as possible. If you own a WordPress website you can easily make it happen by using this GDPR Cookie Consent plugin for this purpose.
The plugin comes with a bunch of powerful features that enable you to ensure that your website’s cookie usage is aligned with the rules of the GDPR. The plugin comes with an automatic cookie scan feature that lists all the cookies present on your website to a cookie list. You can display the cookie list on your website using a shortcode.
A fully customizable cookie banner is a great plus of this plugin. With this feature you can choose from pre-built templates and customize its style, color, position, etc., to match your existing website’s style. Third-party cookies are hard to track thus a major hurdle in achieving compliance. But with this plugin you can automatically block the scripts of third-party cookies until the visitor grants consent.
GeoIP based cookie banner exclusion, the option to allow granular control for cookies, storage of consent log details (like cookies consented to, timestamp, anonymized IP of the user), etc., are the rest of the important features offered by the plugin.
2. RafflePress
If you want to instantly get more social media followers and email subscribers and boost your website traffic using viral giveaways and contests, RafflePress is your best bet. This simple giveaway plugin comes with an easy drag-and-drop giveaway builder in addition to proven giveaway templates. You can start with the free version called RafflePress lite if you wish to check it out first.
Another feature of the plugin includes getting the visitors’ email addresses to enter the giveaway. This way, you can get new subscribers for your email newsletter. In addition, RafflePress encourages visitors to follow your social profiles and even share the giveaway with friends. You can use these features to get more entries for the contest and increase social media engagement.
3. Yoast SEO
No matter which type of website you’re planning to start, you’ll need SEO to outrank your competition and get a bigger piece of the pie for yourself, the pie being the massive traffic that comes from the search engines. So meet your new SEO buddy, Yoast SEO. It’s a freemium SEO plugin that guides you all the way to create better content and improve your search result ranking.
The plugin has various features like focus keyword analysis and page analysis. First, Yoast SEO requires you to select a focus keyword and then guides you through using it the appropriate number of times and in the right places. It also checks whether you’ve used your focus keyword in the meta description, headings, alt tags, etc.
4. Wordfence Security
You wouldn’t want a malicious bot on the internet to attack your website and destroy your work within a matter of minutes, would you? If so, you’ll need to take the help powerful security plugins like Wordfence Security to keep the bad guys out.
The plugin includes features like malware scan, firewall protection, blocking, live traffic monitoring, and login security among many others. You can use it to monitor all your traffic in real-time including everything from robots, human, logouts, logins, and even 404 errors. In addition to tracking your website’s security, it also acts as a firewall to keep known attackers and malicious networks away. It used a Two Factor Authentication to keep all your data safe.
5. User Registration
Want your users to be able to sign up to your website to bu the products or services you’re offering? You’ll need a plugin called User Registration. Yes, you can use the built-in feature to let visitors sign up to your website. But it has two caveats: users are required to find the login URL to get the registering option, and you don’t get much information from them through this two-field form.
This straight-forward plugin, much like its name, lets users login, signup, make payments, and more. It’s a free drag and drops user registration that comes with plenty of useful features like unlimited registration forms, multi-column support, ReCaptcha support, email notifications, and many more. Using it, you can create a presentable front-end registration form with a few minutes.