The five best WordPress plugins in 2021 to optimise your website

Dasith Narngoda
8 min readJul 14, 2021

In 2021 and in the years to come, it is all about building a fantastic website to boost your business online and leverage your digital brand. WordPress has been one of the most phenomenal content management systems in building websites. However, navigating the WordPress journey it’s not simple without the best of tools. This is why I want to make your life easier by painting the highlights of the five best WordPress plugins in 2021 out there, I believe. I have covered some of the most important areas when it comes to building a website online; e-commerce, SEO, security, social media, and lead generation with email. Read and decide for yourself!

  1. Woocommerce

Woocommerce is the ultimate tool to leverage an online store. There are endless possibilities with this plugin. Why do we need an e-commerce plugin? Running a website without having the option to purchase the product on the spot is like a display store with the entrance door closed. We don’t want potential customers just staring at our products on the screen without any pathway or convenience for them to purchase what they like. We just don’t want them watching and leaving, we want them to complete their buyer intent journey. So, a business that wants to market products and services online is always incomplete without an e-commerce plugin.

Woocommerce is easy to install and configure to your WordPress website. If you are a seller that is worried about tracking and monitoring the stock, this will save 1000s of worries. Woocommerce allows you to systematically track the activity of the stock while notifying you of a warning if it’s running out. Even if there are 1000s of product variations, the Woocommerce technology can get the job done with stock monitoring. You can create your own shipping rules within the integration.

It has limitless possibilities with selling all kinds of physical and digital products. The plugin allows the seller to shape how the online store looks to give an appealing look for the customers’ purchasing experience.

Caesars Ice Cream’s online store has beautifully crafted an e-commerce site using Woocommerce. The business offers high-quality ice cream flavors where it is directly imported from Peru. The website makes it very convenient for users across the world to learn about Caeser Ice Cream about the company and to purchase its products. Here’s how it looks: https://www.heladitos.com/en/

Here’s a blog of how 12 great examples of how Woocommece is powering ecommerce businesses: https://woocommerce.com/posts/12-great-examples-woocommerce-stores/

2. Yoast SEO

Writing content with the best ideas and style is just the tip of the iceberg on your WordPress site, the real treasure can be found in search engine optimization. Most professional content writers use SEO best practices on their content to generate a lot of traffic and to rank strongly in the search results pages. This is where a content writer should strive for. We want SEO to help us reach our goal. It is a must to reach out to our target audience in the best possible means. To achieve this we require the best SEO keywords on our pieces of content. But the road is not that simple to SEO practices. You have to compete with millions of SEO keywords from all over the world. Conducting extensive SEO keywords research can be time-consuming for a content writer. Even so, reaching out to a digital marketing agency or SEO specialist can become quite a hassle when the clock is ticking. This roadblock can be cleared quickly by having an SEO plugin tool integrated into your WordPress. Where should you begin?

YOAST SEO is a great choice if you want to strengthen your SEO practices with WordPress. It will help a WordPress site developer to optimise the pages and post to rank higher on search engines. There are ready-made templates for meta titles and meta descriptions. It not only focuses on the technical side of SEO for a site but also a great focus is given to the content part of SEO. YOAST will analyse your content for both readability and keywords. Hence, you don’t have to worry too much about if your copy is convincing enough or SEO worthy, this tool has both areas covered.

The SEO plugin to WordPress, YOAST SEO is already very popular among users and many companies around the world, hence, explains the important reasons stated above. One brilliant example of a company that uses YOAST SEO is Maple Lodge Farms. Click here to visit their website: https://maplelodgefarms.com/

3. Ithemes security

The iThemes Security plugin is the brainchild of Cory Mill operator, the former writer turned business person. He established iThemes to create instruments to assist web originators to make exquisite WordPress topics and to prepare unused engineers. The company at that point extended into facilitating, reinforcements, security, and other devices outlined to assist the millions of individuals who utilize WordPress. WordPress may be an exceptionally finished Content Administration Framework that powers around a third of the internet. It does numerous things exceptionally well and is moving forward all the time. It is additionally a gigantic undertaking and contains numerous facets. One thing WordPress doesn’t do well is security. Facilitating a website utilizing WordPress is simple but unless you take steps to secure that site, it is additionally simple to hack. It’s not that it is intrinsically not secure, it’s that the sheer tremendousness of the industry makes it profitable for simple pickings. That’s where plugins like iThemes Security come in. They jolt onto WordPress to include additional assurance highlights. In

iThemes Security provides a fundamental security check to evaluate existing vulnerabilities. Blacklists for prohibited clients and IP addresses to halt hacking bots. Backups and database syncing instruments in case the most exceedingly bad happens. Brute constrain discovery to halt lexicon hacks. File alter the location in case something gets through. 404 and abuse location to halt programmers filtering your location for powerless pages. Password arrangement and salting to form passwords more secure. SSL and framework tweaking to move forward location execution and constrain secure associations to the WordPress dashboard. iThemes Security Professional incorporates the above and adds Malware filtering to form beyond any doubt no malevolent code gets through. Two-factor verification for truly great security. Version administration so you’ll check records have not been replaced. Import and trade instruments to duplicate security settings from one site to another. reCAPTCHA integration to halt bots emailing you or logging in.

The positives around iThemes Security include ease of utilising — Once introduced, the default settings give a great level of security without having to spend hours arranging settings. Freeform is full of highlights — It makes a decent alter to see a free plugin provide comprehensive features. Defense in abundance — It offers a run of measures at distinctive levels of WordPress to ensure it from threats. Protects from inside as well as from without — Numerous WordPress security plugins do great work ensuring you from web dangers. This plugin offers numerous shields from logged-in clients as well which could be a significant benefit. Salting — Watchword salting may be a minor security work but a really valuable one. Nearby least secret word quality authorization, salting goes a long way to ensure logged-in clients.

Apart from the technical features I mentioned above, I have to say it’s more interesting to first see it in action. To see this plugin in action and to learn more about it, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CVAz03pQY0

4. Monarch

Who is not on social media nowadays? Social Media is the backbone that keeps the web shining, and Social Sharing lets you saddle that action and utilize it as a positive constraint for your commerce. We need a constructed plugin that engages WordPress clients to cultivate a dynamic community; to urge more offers, more adherents. Monarch presents new social sharing strategies that are certain to make strides in the social sharing movement on your site. This isn’t a simple floating social sidebar plugin, it’s typically a plugin with 7 diverse integration ranges that can be blended, coordinated, customized, and followed. It is built with popups and fly-in boxes that can be triggered based on particular client intelligence and customized to urge you to offer the best offers, shortcodes that can be produced on the fly and put completely anywhere, and plan choices that give you control over each little detail.

Without a question, drifting social sidebars are one of the foremost well-known and viable strategies of social sharing, and Monarch makes it less demanding than ever to put one on any of your website’s pages. The coasting sidebar is ever-present, giving your guests a fast way to share no matter where they are on the page. The sidebar was moreover built with versatility in intellect, and the responsive variety works perfectly on smartphones and tablets alike. Typically an includes that nearly every site can utilize.

Inside post content, Monarch gives your guests the capacity to share pictures with the tap of a button. The media sharing choice will auto-detect pictures inside your posts and consequently include social sharing buttons on the float. Or, on the off chance that you’d lean toward targeting individual pictures, you’ll empower media sharing on a per-image premise utilizing the media sharing shortcode. This can be particularly successful for photo-centric systems such as Pinterest and Tumblr, and photo-centric websites such as craftsmanship, nature, or photography distributions. In case you’ve got wonderful, shareable pictures on your site, why not make it less demanding than ever for sharing action to prosper? To find out more benefits of and features of Monarch, visit: https://wpmarmalade.com/monarch-wordpress-plugin-review/

5. Bloom

Despite the controversies that suggest email marketing is dead, it is still one of the strongest methods to generate leads and to create brand loyalty online. Bloom is an email opt-in plugin that was built to assist you to develop your email list. Bloom works by including mail opt-in shapes to your site, each of which can interface to your mail promoting or e-mail pamphlet program. When somebody signs up utilizing the Bloom opt-in frame, they get included in your email list. Blossom works with tons of diverse e-mail showcasing software and permitting you to form diverse sorts of opt-in shapes that appear on distinctive zones of your site and in numerous shapes (such as pop-ups, fly-ins, or typical inline shapes).

Pop-Up The pop-up opt-in makes a lightbox pop-up on your page that contains your opt-in shape. These pop-ups can be activated utilizing distinctive Blossom triggers, giving you extra control over when clients are displayed with the pop-up.

The fly-in is comparative to the pop-up but could be a bit littler and more unpretentious. Rather than making a full-screen lightbox pop-up, the fly-in makes a littler form that slides up from the foot corner of the page. Similar to the pop-up, these fly-ins can be activated based on distinctive client intuition utilizing the Blossom triggers.

Locked content could be an awesome way to construct your email list by requiring guests to sign up some time recently to get access to substance on your site. You’ll be able to lock content inside a post, such as an interface to download free assets. Once the guest subscribes, they are allowed to view the content hidden behind the frame. Locked content opt-ins naturally produce a shortcode that you just can put inside your posts, wrapped around the substance merely like “lock.”

To find out more about how bloom works, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ6IKMcMcVw

To conclude I believe I have covered some of the most important areas when it comes to choosing plugins for your WordPress experience. I hope ‘the five best WordPress plugins in 2021’ read gives you great foresight into the plugins.

Here’s an upcoming strong WordPress plugin that might interest you; https://kepler.app/?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=blogcontent&utm_campaign=articleone&utm_term=wordpressplugin&utm_content=download

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