As of 2019, WordPress is the most popular content management system there is on the market commanding approximately 59.4% market share of the entire web. Yes – more than five in ten currently active websites are likely powered by WordPress.
This massive success is mainly attributed to the unparalleled versatility of WordPress whether you are looking to create a personal blog, small business websites or even a large and heavily commercialized blog. As a result, WordPress everyone is able to build a website – including those with minimal or no development skills.
In this article, we are going to take a deep look at the newest WordPress plugins and how they can help augment your website and overall online presence.
Definition of WordPress Plugins
In simple terms, WordPress plugins are tools used to add and extend the functionality of a WordPress site. This wide variety of handy plugins within the WordPress framework helps do the heavy lifting for almost every function hence reducing a lot of work on your part. According to official estimates, the official number of plugins in the WordPress repository is over 55,000 and counting.
Of this number, there is a good mix of both free and premium plugins although most are built as freemiums which are free but come with an upgrading option.
With that said, downloading many irrelevant plugins doesn’t mean that they will help you boost your website’s performance and conversion. In fact, installing unnecessary plugins has the potential to significantly slow down your website and even threaten its security.
To help avoid this scenario, you can outsource experienced developers to help you to clean up the clutter by choosing the relevant WordPress plugins.
Click here for additional info on how Business Process Outsourcing works.
Here is our List of 10 Newest WordPress Plugins
Everest Forms
Irrespective of the size of your website, you need a “Contact” page through which your audience or customers reach you out for business or suggestions. As such, it is extremely important that this page has a good design.
To create a properly outlined contact forms, ‘Everest Forms‘ is the go-to plugin. Featuring an easy to use drag and drop interface, the plugin allows you to quickly and easily build beautiful contact forms with multiple design layouts. Moreover, ‘Everest Forms‘ allows you to create multifaceted contact forms with advanced fields making it the most versatile plugin in this category.
Although ‘Everest Forms‘ is available for free, it comes with a host of additional features like editable email settings, Google reCaptcha support, and form validation message that make building fully-fledged forms a breeze.
MonsterInsights
By far, MonsterInsights is the top-most branch among the Google Analytics plugin family tree. It allows you to gain insights on how customers find and use your website. Even better, all this information is collaborated and correlated within the WordPress dashboard for easy access.
Armed with such information, you are able to finetune and optimize your website for purposes of increasing traffic, subscribers, and revenue. Although the free version works well, the ultimate prowess of MonsterInsights becomes apparent once you upgrade to the Pro version.
Yoast SEO
Although WordPress as a stand-alone platform is SEO friendly, Yoast SEO helps improve your WordPress blog search ranking. Voted as one of the widely used WordPress plugins, it is the ultimate package with all the tools and features required to improve your on-page SEO.
For starters, it helps you optimize your website for social media platforms and Google Search Console, add meta tags, generate sitemaps, and much more. Additionally, the powerful Redirect feature allows you to easily create 301 redirects, auto-directs and detect URL changes. This helps get rid of broken links which are a major turn-off to customers.
OptinMonster
According to recent research, it’s estimated that an average online customer spends less than 3 minutes on a website before moving to the next. OptinMonster helps in conversion rate optimization allowing you to convert these casual website visitors into customers and email subscribers.
OptinMonster features a manifold of special features like pre-made and high-converting opt-in forms which give you the freedom to personalize your campaigns for different users.
Sucuri
WordPress website security should be a top priority for every site owner. Sucuri is a WordPress security plugin that offers protection for your website. This plugin works by creating multiple security layers to safeguard your website from malware threats, DDoS, XSS attacks, or any other type of attack.
Courtesy of the cloud proxy firewall, Sucuri is capable of bypassing all your website’s traffic before transmitting it to the hosting server. Additionally, the File Integrity Monitoring can automatically detect any changes made to your files and notify you immediately.
CSS Hero
If you are operating a commercial website, it is important to go with a theme that showcases different aspects of your business. You may choose to showcase different products, services, or themes. Thus, the design elements of your website should gravitate more towards increasing the site’s engagement rate.
If you have the time, you can choose to learn CSS if you are looking to inject a more customized visual appearance to your website–which can be time-consuming. Alternatively, you can deploy CSS Hero plugin as it allows you to easily customize your WordPress theme without writing a single line of code.
MemberPress
Having a large online community helps boost your business and build your brand’s reputation. With MemberPress, you are able to create a large online following and membership using WordPress. On top of that, you are able to customize your content basing on the subscription plans of each member of your online community.
For easy subscription and seamless integration, MemberPress can interface with most popular payment solutions and online stores courtesy of WooCommerce.
Shared Counts
Another great and newest WordPress plugin is Shared Counts. This social media plugin allows you to easily incorporate social sharing buttons and social proof on your website.
And although there are multiple paid solutions available, Shared Counts is absolutely free plus it outshines its peers in terms of performance and code quality.
User Switching
As a business owner, it’s extremely important to test your website’s environment. At the same time, you need to step into the site visitor’s shoes by having a feel of the website’s front end. In the course of doing so, you will constantly have to jump from one user account to another.
User Switching allows you to hop between user accounts giving you a different view of the website.
Revive Old Posts
Looking to revive an older yet quality blog posts that have been buried deep in the archives? Revive Old Post is a plugin that helps you revive older post by sharing them to your social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This is particularly important when you are looking to eliminate over-reliance on time in getting favorable responses for your posts. Furthermore, it also helps you populate your social feed with relevant content hence generating more traffic for your website.
You may be asking…how do I update my WordPress website?
Before we answer that, it’s important to mention that the above-mentioned WordPress plugins require constant updating. This typically happens when the developers behind these plugins introduce extra functionality or add security patches to the code.
As a site owner, its always recommended keeping your plugins, themes, & WordPress version updated. This reduces the chances of being hacked due to vulnerable software or insecure passwords.
In a bid to streamline the update experience and promote better security, the current WordPress version 5 automatically update itself. However, these updates manly focus on the core WordPress files. For the themes or plugins, you are required to manually update them by simply placing the mouse’s cursor over the Dashboard menu option. In the fly-out menu, you will see the “Updates link”. Click on it and you are good to go.
Final Thought on Newest WordPress Plugins
As you can see, WordPress plugins help improve your site’s SEO, harden security, optimize speed, and marketing your products in a better way.
Depending on the business you are engaged in, you may not need to install all the above-mentioned WordPress plugins. However, you may end up using at least 5 or 6 solutions that we have outlined.
