Whether you run a business or want to establish your brand, a website is a must for both. But they are not simple things to build, and the designs must be great, along with seamless navigation from one page to another. The color, infographics, copywriting on what you want to get known, and a direct call to action to sell your products or services make a good website look excellent.
But a website runs using three languages: HTML, CSS, and Javascript. To build a robust website, you must have good knowledge and hands-on experience writing codes in the above three languages.
And what if you don’t have any prior knowledge of it? You have to look for alternatives. But here you have got two options for the same:
- hire a professional web designer who will charge you a bomb for codes and getting your website ready.
- Look for a platform that requires no coding (WordPress, Wix, etc.) to build your website, watch tutorials, and learn step by step.
Which option would you like to go to? Option 1 will demand you a good package, and the thing is you will always need a developer to update anything or make some necessary changes, but in the second option, you can do it all by yourself.
And that makes WordPress one of the best CMS platforms to host your website and boost your brand like what you see or experience on other websites. The popularity of WordPress is due to its flexibility, and someone who hardly knows how to code can build a robust website too.
What are WordPress Plugins?
The WordPress Plugins are a minute code to the self-hosted WordPress website that enhances the website functionality and navigation better while making UX/UI fits the best for all types of users and makes them easy going. Plugins do two things for sure, either they add new functionalities or add more to existing ones.
Each plugin has different uses, functionalities and gets used based on the requirements. To install any plugin on WordPress, all you can do is install a plugin on your website. Then, go to the plugin page – click on activate the plugin, follow the instructions and configure if it asks you to do so, and get your required functionality to give your website awesomeness.
Why Does Your WordPress Website Need Plugins?
Plugins are the building blocks of your WordPress website; they add crucial functionality to the website that your theme generally lags. Its actual premium themes give you more security and functionality, but they are costly too. Instead, you can use a free theme and a few plugins to build a contact form, power up your SEO game, social sharing, fast loading, and for multiple purposes and functions you want to have on your website.
There are dedicated plugins for everything on a WordPress website to get you more customization and boost your performance and functionality. That’s the apparent reason why your website needs plugins.
Why Should Your Website Load Fast?
Neither your customers nor readers have much time; they want everything instantly or in the least time. Therefore, having a fast website helps to stay on your website or to complete their purchase. A fast website enhances visitor satisfaction; helps Google to win trust over crawling and providing relevant information.
So when building a website, make sure to optimize in multiple aspects like mobile-optimized, SEO optimized, navigation friendly, responsive, etc. The best loading time for a website is in between 5.5 seconds.
From a recent survey by experts, almost 53% of people worldwide bounce back when a website takes more than three seconds to load; 87% of carts get abandoned for the same. A time-series analysis indicates that 79% of customers who had a negative experience are not likely to buy again in the future.
And, again, it’s true that plugins slow down your PC when you have too many of them on your website. Therefore, have only those plugins that solve your purposes.
How Can You Measure Your Website Speed?
You can use many sites to track your page loading speed, and they even show you what makes your website slow down and what areas you need to consider to revamp it.
Some of the sites to measure your page loading metrics are:
- Google PageSpeed Insight
- Google Mobile Website Speed testing tool
- Google Analytics Site Speed
- Pingdom
- GT Metrix
- Webpage test
- Dare Boost
- Key CDN Website Speed Test
7 (Free) Plugins You Must Install On Your WordPress Website For Seamless and Fast Loading
The best part about WordPress is it comes with pre-built themes and a few plugins to make your website look dynamic and straightforward. And it allows you to add multiple plugins to your website to add more customization, make it more responsive and serve the purposes of business or brand.
Some of the best plugins you can always trust to speed up your website are:
Yoast SEO
Your work doesn’t get over having a website. It starts from there. Once you have a website, the next step is to rank for specific keywords to sell products to customers.
For that, your content has to be SEO friendly, written for your audience, and serves the purpose of writing the article, studded with images to make your blog post more appealing. In other words, you have to do SEO to get your website into ranking for specific keywords.
How to do that? A plugin called Yoast SEO can help you do On-Page SEO, make your content SEO optimized, alternative text image, and a few more guidelines to make your content SEO optimized. It even helps you with focus keywords, slug or URL, title, and meta description. Therefore, boost SEO can take your website to the next level landing more customers on your website.
Akismet Anti-Spam
So what is the next thing that happens when your post goes live over the website? It appears on the website that people start reading your content, and if it touches them, they obviously bookmark it, write a comment, or even do both. But other people will try to spoil your website with insensitive comments or drop some fishing links to breach your data.
Approving such comments will put you in shame, and people will start distrusting you. Being an entrepreneur, your brand and everything matters a lot for you, and this Anti-Spam plugin by Akismet will save you from many blunders keeping you and your brand’s image at very top priority.
WP Super Cache
You built your website; you designed and decorated it and made it impact your audience’s mind. But what if it loads like a snail when I type and hit the enter button from the keyboard. Your following questions will be: is your internet speed down, or is your website damn slow to load all the data stored in the webserver?
The chances are high that the second one will be your condition in the high-speed internet world, but a small plugin can save you from lazy loading. Yes, WP Super Cache, it’s a place that stores your website data temporarily. It creates static pages for your website and reduces the page load time significantly.
Jetpack by WordPress
There are thousands and thousands of plugins available over the internet, but if you load all of them, your website may not open the next time when you reload it. To keep it light, you can genuinely trust the best plugin to solve many purposes for you.
Yes, the best part is WordPress hosts it, and it’s an ultimate tool that helps design your website, track data, enhance your social sharing and protect it from hacks. And the maximum of its functionalities is for free too.
Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Images indeed capture lots of space, making your website load like a snail when you open it. High-resolution images affect any website coming to speed and fast loading. But without pictures, your content looks dry and unappealing. Many times won’t even hook your audience.
You can always compress images manually but remember it every time.
But a simple plugin can solve this problem, compress your images to too small sizes without affecting the clarity of the original photos. Yes, Smush Image Compression and Optimization is a minute handy plugin to resize and optimize your photos automatically.
WP Forms
Your website looks perfect, and you started ranking for various sets of keywords and blog posts and content and appealing images to fit your content; you see visitors flooding worldwide. They keep coming, get engaged and leave. And you feel that doing something to capture them will lead to nurturing them in the future.
looks
Yes, WP Forms are pre-built contact forms to match all kinds of information you want to capture from your visitors. It’s a user-friendly plugin with robust features. Just drag and drop, build your form accordingly and hit the publish item to see it capturing leads for you.
AMP
Okay, you have all the best features installed on your website, you made it simple yet robust, and the response you get in contrast says it’s working fine on PCs and speed is super fast, and the rest is impressive. But again, there are chances it gets slower when you load it on mobile devices. When you recheck on page speed insights, it sucks for mobile devices.
What have you thought about this? Users always won’t have to rely on a PC to experience your website the best; they want the same experience on their mobile devices.
Install AMP: Accelerated Mobile Page configure everything accordingly, and the experience is the same or even faster than you experience on the PC.
Final Words
A lot of time and investment goes for website maintenance and design and optimization, but at last, all that matters is a dynamic website that serves all your purposes. There are multiple reasons why WordPress can solve that instantly for you, even if you lack coding.
Just drag and drop, with full customization, pre-loaded themes, and tons of tutorial videos on Youtube and courses available on Udemy. That makes no wonder why WordPress is the best CMS globally and the go-to solutions to build a robust website with zero coding experience.
Also Read- Time Series Analysis