Looking outstanding and being 100% functional is nothing but the bottom of the “pyramid” that your site needs to “climb” for standing out in the fiercely competitive digital landscape! You still need to "supercharge" it with all the functionality provided by the best WordPress plugins in 2017!
You do agree, don't you?
It might look like you've figured it all out: beautiful imagery, gorgeous graphics, “in trends” design, great functionality. It looks like you've checked everything off your list.
And yet: your website won't be able to stand out once launched “into the wild”!
Your competitors' checklists might just be a little more complex than yours: they might have taken security issues a lot more seriously than you and SEO optimization, as well.
They consider, also, making their websites far more visible and “inviting” for the search engines to “crawl” in. They consider turning the content managing/editing “ordeal” into a matter of just a few clicks and they might also anticipate when their visitors intend to leave their sites and have figured out an effective means to “lure” them back in, to eventually turn them into customers.
Could your “ just” awesome looking WordPress site ever compete with that?
We're ready to help you get it ready for the fiercely competitive digital arena! In this respect, we've put together a list of “website boosters”: 10 best WordPress plugins that will take your website to the next level in 2017!
1. Yoast SEO, One of The Very Best WordPress Plugins
It's by far WordPress's most popular plugin and no wonder why: it's “overloaded” with SEO-boosting features aimed at helping you optimize your website at various levels. The perfect reason for adding it to our list of 10 best WordPress plugins in 2017!
It's WordPress's “Swiss knife” when it comes to supercharging your SEO strategy!
Now let's detail a bit what this plugin can do (or help you do):
- it helps you add meta tags
- it streamlines your tags across all your data analytics platforms
- it encourages adopting the best practices for properly aligning and positioning your keywords across the content on your WordPress site
- it comes with built-in page analysis: you can change the length of your titles, edit your descriptions and do all the needed optimization “hocus pocus” within the web pages. It practically analyzes each page for you and signals to you the existing errors so that you can rush in and take the right measures.
- it incorporates an XML sitemap generator, making your website “inviting” for search engines to easily “crawl” in and parse your content.
- it allows you to import/export plugin settings
Yoast SEO's functionality boils down to two aspects:
- it guides you in optimizing the content on your site
- it makes sure it's visible and that it complies with search engines' guidelines, thus ensuring its high rank in search engines!
2. Google Analytics WD
A website lacking Google Analytics-provided data, as its main “fuel”, is a “stillborn”!
It's like running your digital business blindfolded: you just “guess” who your audience is, where they come from, what pages on your website they visit most frequently, how much time they spend there and so on.
Now, you don't want to take such a risky “guess”, right? Big data-driven business decision making will, no doubt, be one of the most influential trends in 2017!
And still: why should you install and activate this WordPress plugin when you probably already have a GA account?
Because it will streamline your whole data analyzing workflow: you'll get to monitor your GA data right from your WordPress dashboard. No need to switch between windows over and over again anymore! And this is one of the strongest reasons why we do predict it to become one of the best WordPress plugins in 2017!
You'll get to view all the relevant reports and not just the audience-relates ones, but those regarding all the authors and other logged-in users, too. You get to monitor how well each one of the categories on your WordPress site/each blog post each performs, you get to monitor your visitors' behavior in real-time.
Besides, the “more than tempting” feature of displaying all the data right in your WP dashboard, this plugin's ready to “seduce” you with another irresistible functionality: a goal management one! You can track targeted tasks and get notified when they're completed.
Ready for more?
You can easily integrate this WordPress plugin, one of the very best WordPress plugins this year, actually, with your Google Analytics account and it also “spoils” you with a panel where you get to compare stats over a certain period of time.
All the business-generating data right there, nicely displayed and easily accessible on your WordPress dashboard!
3. WP Super Cache
Try visualizing this domino: slowly loading web pages leading to poor user experience, leading to a low conversion rate, leading to low ranking in search engines!
So, you got the point: speed is a crucial SEO factor!
And here is where WordPress comes in, bringing you ones of the best WordPress plugins this year!
It comes with an easy to install, to activate, to configure and to use plugin: WP Super Cache. Its “easy to use” feature is no doubt what makes it so popular among all the other plugins promising to supercharge your website with top speed!
Practically, it's a content management system “crafted” to guarantee you that big “floods” of traffic won't slow down your website!
Confidently “welcome” high traffic!
4. BackupBuddy
This is probably the very first WordPress plugins that you should install and activate on your site!
No matter how sophisticated a security solution might be, it could never “beat” a good backup system!
Take no risks when it comes to putting all your vital business data and your priceless customer data “under a secure vault”. WordPress's Backup Buddy is one of those solid “vaults”.
Here's how it will guarantee you your good night sleep:
- you'll get to schedule your backups (you can back up on a daily, weekly or monthly basis)
- you'll get to store your backups in Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, Stash, Dropbox or even your own personal email inbox
- you'll get to restore your thus saved WordPress website with just a few clicks
- moreover, it will streamline all your future migration and site duplication projects
Ready for more good news? WordPress's Backup Buddy's not monthly subscription-based!
5. OptinMonster
And it's no doubt a “supercharged monster plugin”! One that goes far beyond “just” empowering you to easily create and to customize opt-in forms aimed at enticing your website visitors to subscribe or to convert.
But first, let's get into details regarding its opt-in form crafting feature:
- you get to select from a multitude of opt-in web forms (attention-grabbing pop-ups here included)
- you have a whole collection of visually-appealing design layouts at your disposal, so personalizing your form is nothing but a matter of drag-and-drop
What type of opt-in form would best serve your “website visitors converting” strategy? A full-page pop-up or rather a sidebar pop-up, somewhere at the bottom or maybe one showing up from the left side? Your options are almost limitless!
Get ready to turn your visitors into subscribers with this cool features-supercharged opt-in form!
And since we've mentioned that it's not just the whole opt-in forms building and customizing features that makes it a “must add” to your future “arsenal” of WordPress plugins, here are some of its other “luring” features:
- A/B testing
- page-level targeting
- relevant analytics
- pre-included exit intent technology: one of its “highlights”, enabling you to trigger a pop-up form the moment a user plans to leave your website
6. Form Maker, Among the Best WordPress Plugins in 2017
“Forms” are part of a website's “DNA”: it can't function without them! Or at least it can, but without supporting any interaction whatsoever, without generating any business, after all!
From surveys to registration forms, to contact forms or questionnaires, WordPress's Form Maker turns the building of a web form into a matter of a few simple clicks.
Not only that it streamlines your workflow, but it also invests you with freedom of customization! Forms become are entirely customizable!
You have no more than 41 editable themes to choose from! You have form fields for numbers, text input, custom select, checkbox for multiple-choice questions and... more!
Collect the information you need from your website's users, through the effective forms that you'll put together nice and easy and then feel free to use Form Maker for monitoring the statistical data (based on the answers you'll collect) that it will provide you with
That's right, this plugin “lures” you with such a feature, too!
7. Soliloquy
Get ready to dazzle away your website's visitors with visually-arresting, highly engaging sliders!
Crafting them has never been any easier than with Soliloquy's drag-and-drop builder!
The plugin enables you to drag and drop not just your stunning images, but video content, written content, testimonials and so on.
Presenting your products/services in the form of some interactive, visually-appealing sliders will become just a matter of a few clicks!
With a whole array of templates to choose from, with its feature enabling you to pull images directly from your social media sites, this WordPress plugin will boost all your efforts of putting together irresistible, highly effective WordPress landing pages!
8. Sucuri
2017 will witness an increased number of cyber-attacks! You don't need to be a visionary to predict that!
So, what do you do as a business owner or as a web developer in this context? You seek the best protection opting for one the best WordPress plugins this year!
You look to keep your WordPress website protected “under” the most powerful firewall: you put together your first line defense! And Sucuri is the security toolset you need!
It will be your web app firewall that will constantly monitor and keep your site/your business protected from all types of cyber-attacks: malware threats, DdoS, XSS attacks.
Here's how Sucuri Scanner, “battle plan” is structured:
- It performs file integrity monitoring
- It performs blacklist monitoring, as well
- It runs file audits on your website
- It performs malware scanning
In one word: it PROACTIVELY protects your WordPress website, seeking to track down malware and detect imminent attacks before they even occur.
9. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
It's no news for any web developer in Toronto or business owner operating in the digital landscape: rich snippets are SEO boosters!
And WordPress, through its All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets, comes in to boost your own SEO efforts!
How? It practically generates and adds the Schema.org markup to your content, thus “better describing it” for search engines!
With a user-friendly interface and all the most popular types of rich snippets to choose from, you'll be adding rich snippets to your content in no time!
10. Google XML Sitemaps
No SEO strategy, no matter how solid and complex, cold be sustainable if your WordPress website doesn't get indexed first!
All your SEO-oriented initiatives will then be nothing but “sandcastles”!
Now, what this WordPress plugin does is that it generates precisely the type of maps, XML maps, that search engines could use for “crawling” into your site to discover and index all your web pages, all your URLs!
It will make your website far more “inviting” for them!
Moreover, this plugin, one of the very best WordPress plugins this year, will keep search engines “notified” whenever you've added a new web page to your website!
In a nutshell: it's the easiest and surest way of “steering Google's spotlights” onto you website and thus granting it a higher ranking!
What WordPress plugins do you consider “crucial” for your own business this year? Which ones will be, in your opinion, the very best WordPress plugins this year? Maybe you'll go for some “niche” ones, that would better respond to your company's specific needs? We're looking forward to discovering what other WP plugins you'd “vote” for this year!
