WordPress is a great platform, but it can be frustrating to maintain. There are so many plugins out there that claim to make your WordPress site run more smoothly and offer new features and functionality. How do you know which ones will give you the best value?
In this article we offer you a list of the 7 plugins that you should use in your site. The a Ticksites team has used every single one of the ones mentioned in some capacity or another.
At Ticksites, we help website owners, agency partners, and freelancer partners install, integrate, and optimize their sites. Whether you’re managing SEO for WordPress website or a 1,000, we’ve got your back!
Elementor is a leading website builder for the WordPress CMS – it allows you to place various elements on your page with a simple drag-and-drop interface. This way, creating your dream site becomes as simple as clicking and dragging the desired elements into Elementor’s creation area.
One of the advantages of this plugin is its simplicity , and its ease of use offers an attractive and friendly interface for beginners. Its compatibility with many themes makes it highly recommended and is a great option for those who feel less familiar with WordPress code. It can get complicated, however, if you choose to mess around with Elementor extensions built by third parties. Extending elementor with different addons can bloat your site with sometimes unnecessary scripts so if you’re not fluent in this, it’s best to consult WordPress experts.
WooCommerce is truly one of the best and most popular WordPress plugins to power your online store. This plugin has powered over 3 million e-commerce stores, which makes it a great reference for online store development.
With the additional extensions and plugins already included in WooCommerce and its partner sites (such as product ratings or product addons), managing an online store has never been easier. All you have to do is classify your products into categories and then set the product information settings you prefer before uploading product images.
The most important feature of this plugin is its extension library, which makes it very versatile. You can add a currency converter to your checkout page, include live chat features and automate sales tax for instance. Aditionally, it also offers various payment options, analytics tools, multiple product management methods with various options. Adding to all this, it is compatible with many other WordPress themes and plugins, so you’ll never feel as if WooCommerce won’t work for you.
Ticksites actually manages Ecommerce stores grossing over 1+ million USD, all on the back of WordPress and WooCommerce.
The SEO by Yoast plugin is designed to help you publish higher quality, search engine optimized content and helps ensure your pages and posts are optimized not only for Google, but for all search engines. It does this by ensuring that your headlines are descriptive and make sense for SEO, as well as making sure the reading experience is more smooth with its readability-oriented approach.
This plugin works with a system of indicators similar to a “traffic light” that serves to show how your content will fare in search engines. Yellow shows that it needs more optimization; red is negative for the website, as it means that the content is poorly optimized and will not be found by those all important “search engine bots” and therefore will not rank well; Green means good to go.
This plugin mainly focuses on the keywords you select for your site and so it will have a big impact on the what queries bring users to your site. Yoast SEO is an excellent tool to help optimize this process, as it provides deep insight into the types of metadata that should be implemented and how they can improve search engine rankings.
Wordfence Security is a wonderful plugin that protects your website from malware, malicious files, spam and other online threats. With over 100 million downloads worldwide, it has become the most popular WordPress security tool.
Wordfence uses a web firewall-like application (WAF) known as (Threat Defense Feed), which serves as a shield, identifying and blocking malicious traffic to your website. The WAF also protects your website from brute force attacks by limiting login attempts and forcing the use of strong passwords, among other methods.
Wordfence is free, but if you want to make your website security one of your top priorities, the Premium Plan is a great choice. The Premium Plan includes other features such as real-time IP blacklists and a country blocking option.
WP Rocket is a premium plugin designed to improve the loading speed of your WordPress website. Once activated, WP Rocket plugin accelerates the site speed, immediately after activation and a small bit of configuration . One of the great features that this plugin has is the caching option, which essentially, makes websites load faster. It has a great impact on SEO rankings and increased conversion rate. It also features GZIP compression which effectively decreases the file size, so that the content is visible to users faster. In addition, it is compatible with many themes and plugins and works correctly with the most WordPress hosting environments including managed hosting packages like WPENGINE and KINSTA.
Thanks to its robustness, WP Rocket will drastically reduce the loading time of your website to leave all your visitors satisfied with the experience. It is also worth noting that WP Rocket is e-commerce friendly and gives you the ability to not cache any cart or shopping cart related pages. This means that your online store will run fast and without any hiccups.
Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create forms on your website. It’s popular, well-respected and has universal support from users because it provides an intuitive user interface for quickly building forms while also being very easy to use as it doesn’t require coding knowledge or skill.
Gravity Forms makes it possible to easily create forms that will allow people to submit any type of information or post directly to your WordPress site, albeit under certain circumstances. The simplicity and benefits of this form plugin go far beyond just a basic contact form. You can register users, add/edit posts in the database, take payments and more. Because of this, Gravity Forms has been the go-to solution for WordPress users. The various customizable features and benefits make it an ideal choice for any WordPress site owner.
We use gravity forms on our site!
Toolset is a plugin that allows you to create custom WordPress websites visually. Its simplicity lies in the fact that there is no need to create complex child themes or edit PHP, or mess with the functions.php files. It includes everything you need to create custom web apps, without code. Toolset uses the WordPress Block Editor. Its presentation comes with a rich block library and is compatible with other plugins. It replaces the needs for Advanced Custom Fields, CPT UI, and more. You can create custom input types, fields and taxonomies.
