By April Hodge | Littlebigbox
WordPress is the platform behind so many of our web design and management projects, so we thought we’d share some of the best plugins that you can add to your website. Each of these are tried and tested by our creative teams, and even better, they’re all FREE!
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is essential for every website, but can be a pain to maintain unless you have the right features. This plugin allows you to easily add metadata to your posts, pages and even products. It also has a guide in place to let you know how well your page is ranking and what its current score is. It also provides advice on things you could do to improve each page's SEO score.
You can download the plugin here.
2. Akisimet
Akismet is excellent if you have a blog, which allows replies and commenting. The plugin protects your blog from the majority of automated software, and only a few sneaky spambots ever get through. You do have to have a wordpress.com account to receive a code to activate Akismet, but that is free and easy to do.
You can download the plugin here.
3. Jetpack
Jetpack offers a number of different features, which help to keep track of your websites rankings; as well as one, which allows you to add social media icons. It also has a widget that sits on the dashboard of your admin panel and shows you how well pages rank, how many visits
you have had, which pages have been viewed, and where they have been viewed from. This is such useful data when designing content for your potential customers and clients - you need to know who they are and how they behave!
You can download the plugin here.
4. Smush
Smush is a great little plugin, which compresses images without reducing quality. If you have too many large-sized images on your site, that can start to affect your websites speed and performance. Regularly checking your websites speed is essential because if the loading time is too long, people so often ‘bounce’ away from your site. Smush keeps everything under control
- with both a free version where you manually click to ‘Smush’ your images, or a paid version where it does it automatically every time you upload an image to your site.
You can download the plugin here.
5. GADWP (Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress)
This is a simplified version of Google Analytics, helping you to monitor your websites speed and visitors. This plugin sits on the dashboard of your WordPress admin page and can tell you how users found your website, and which pages they visited most often. Used together with Jetpack, this is very helpful for building up a picture of how well your website is working for you.
You can download the plugin here.
We hope you find our top 5 plugins as useful as we do! Have fun experimenting with them, and if you have any further questions or need any help, either check out our blog or get in touch with April and the team.
About the Author:
April is the creative director of Littlebigbox Website Design. Littlebigbox is a professional website design company based in the heart of Southampton, Hampshire. Whatever industry you’re in and whatever budget you’re working with, you can rely on them for a unique, affordable and SEO-friendly web presence which will make money for your business.
Comments