By Choosing WordPress as your website content management system of choice you have joined the largest growing online community. According to ManageWP.com “The most recent stats are showing that since March 2016, WordPress is actually powering 26.4% of the Web, and it’s on the rise. It is still by far the most used CMS, with 59.4% market share. Also interestingly on a daily basis there are over 500 sites being created on WordPress.” – Thats over a quarter of all websites on the world wide web being powered by this efficient no nonsense easy to use system.
WordPress works best with some nifty plugins, boosting performance and adding functionality. There are thousands of these available, but not all of them are up to scratch. To help you get off to the right start here are my Three Top WordPress Plugins You Should Use on your Site.
1. Better WordPress Minify
The amount of time a site uses to load important CSS and Javascript files can really slow down your load time. If you are using a lot of plugins on your site it will greatly increase the time it takes to load all those important files. The Better WordPress Minify Plugin “Allows you to minify your CSS and JS files for faster page loading for visitors. This plugin uses the PHP library Minify and relies on WordPress’s enqueueing system rather than the output buffer (will not break your website in most cases). This plugin is very customizable and easy to use.
2. SMUSH Image Compression and Optimization
WP Smush meticulously scans every image you upload – or have already added to your site – cuts all the unnecessary data and scales it for you before adding it to your media library.” – Need I say more?
Ok for those of you who don’t know what that means, here is a brief synopsis. Websites look much better if you use really nice high quality images, the problem with a lot of images that get uploaded to the web is that the file size is too big, if an image is too large then it takes slower to download, once again affecting your page speed load time.
Smush Image Compression and Optimisation does an amazing job of striping out all the unnecessary information contained within your image file, reducing its size and improving you page load time.
3. YOAST SEO
Having a website is one thing, however if you don’t optimise it for search engines then you might as well not have a website at all, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) really is that important.
YOAST SEO Plugins THE essential WordPress SEO plugin and I use it on all of my clients sites to help them begin their SEO journey. It is exceptionally easy to use and its simple traffic light system gives you plenty of ways to improve your content.
Here is what the developers of the Plugin have to say about it in their own words “Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet editor and real time page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.”