WordPress is the best known content management system (CMS in English). A CMS is a tool that helps in the creation, configuration and maintenance of a website.
With more than 37% of websites created using WordPress (more than one in four), it dominates all competition, by far. The software owes its success to the fact that it is very accessible, open-source and free but also to its technical accessibility. Indeed, you do not need to know how to code to use it. Its dashboard is very intuitive and allows even beginners to manage a website easily.
WordPress works with plugins (extensions in French) that allow you to add functionality to your website, as needed and without the need to code.
Some of these extensions are paid and others are free. But then, what justifies this difference?
It's simple, paying customers get assistance, support helps you in case of problems. In addition, regular updates will automatically come with paid extensions so that they are adapted to new versions of WordPress and finally, some plugins are free and you have to pay to access a version of the plugin allowing more features.
Currently (June 18, 2020), there are over 56,000 listed on the official WordPress site. This is an impressive number and can quickly destabilize when you start with CMS.
Fortunately, 8P has put together a small detailed list of our opinion on 10 WordPress plugins.
This plugin, as the name suggests, is a web page builder. That is to say, it allows you to configure, prioritize and design the pages of your site without having to know the code.
The advantage of this extension is that it directly applies the changes in real time to the web page. Just add the items by dragging and dropping, without having to press the "Update" button or access the preview.
Benefits :
Its interface is very UX-friendly and allows to take the tool in hand quickly and easily
The rendering is directly visible on the site thanks to the drag and drop which updates automatically
The free version already has many features
Limits :
Documentation only in English in the text and English-speaking after-sales service.
Yoast SEO is also an essential WordPress plugin. Its main functionality is to optimize the natural referencing (SEO) of your site.
When creating a website, the question of SEO is not to be avoided. The benefits are numerous: visibility in search results, improved user experience, targeted traffic, etc.
In general, Yoast SEO adds interfaces to WordPress to easily manage the parties related to SEO. Indeed, this plugin takes your site point by point (permalinks, title, images, description) and you to manage all its parts to best optimize your SEO easily.
Benefits :
Automatically inserts meta-tags and other descriptive elements which are then used directly by Google.
Allows a point by point optimization of SEO, it is almost sure not to forget anything.
Limits :
This plugin does not allow the automatic optimization of a website, it only detects bad practices and it is up to you to correct them. If you know absolutely nothing about natural referencing, we advise you to contact an SEO agency who will take care of the optimization of your website.
JetPack is a free plugin founded by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress itself. Nicknamed by users “The WordPress toolbox”, it contains more than 50 modules within the same extension. Indeed, this plugin alone has around thirty features, such as those to optimize the design, manage marketing or even ensure the security of your website.
Benefits :
Very useful when you start on WordPress and you do not know which plugin to install, it brings together a lot of useful features that will allow you to advance just with this plugin.
Limits :
The quantity of functionalities affects the quality of these, many functionalities are not really useful and those which are sometimes deserves to be improved.
Very heavy plugin, it has a longer installation and navigation than other WordPress plugins. It is therefore very important to select the features you want to use and to deactivate the others.
When you create a WordPress site, Askimet is an extension that will be installed directly. A real shield against unwanted comments, its functionality is essential to a website: it is anti-spam. Askimet allows you to filter these unwanted comments and to validate some or not, it will be your choice.
Benefits :
Installed by default when using WordPress
Very effective antispam, which is updated regularly to be at the forefront of security.
Limits :
Each time the plugin acts to counter spam, it writes a report to your website's database. This action can add considerably to your database unnecessarily over time.
The extension can be a victim of its success, indeed, spammers know very well that it is the default anti-spam extension of WordPress. They therefore build their spam by taking into account its existence, and by trying to circumvent it.
WP-Rocket is a plugin that will increase the performance of your website. It takes care of caching your pages for faster browsing, compressing your files to speed up their loading, loading only the images displayed at a time t ... and much more.
In short, this extension allows you to speed up the loading and therefore the navigation of your website and all this, without writing a piece of code!
Benefits :
Very simple to use, functional and very efficient (according to WordPress: the most efficient cache plugin).
Limits :
It is a premium extension and without trial version: the price starts at 44 € and can go up to 222 €.
Broken links: bad for the user experience, they affect your SEO positioning and can even make you lose visitors because they get lost on your site.
Fortunately for you, WordPress has a very useful extension to locate them and therefore remedy this problem: it is Broken Link Checker. This extension reviews each of your links at the frequency you want and indicates the obsolete links that need to be corrected.
After the broken links, it seems logical to talk about redirection. Here again, the task is made easier by the WordPress plugin “Redirection” which manages, as its name suggests, redirects. This extension allows you to manage redirects without having to code, in a simple, intuitive and efficient way.
Among the main features of this extension, there is the possibility of performing different redirects, managing 404 errors, importing or exporting already existing redirects and even creating groups to organize these redirects of different types.
Benefits :
Free and easy to use plugin
Save significant time when managing large-scale sites
Woocommerce is a free WordPress extension that allows you to transform your website into a real high-performance e-commerce site. Its main role is to add e-commerce functionalities to your site in order to optimize the sale of your products.
Woocommerce allows in particular to integrate a payment system on your site (CB or Paypal for example) and to manage your sales in general.
Benefits :
It is possible to add extensions to the extension in order to customize it more in line with your end goal, it is very useful!
Limits :
Some criticize this plugin for a lack of assistance and its complexity of use.
Cookie notice is THE WordPress plugin you need to be in compliance with the RGPD and more specifically the aspect concerning cookies of a website. This legislation specifies that each website must warn its user that it uses cookies and ask for its authorization, the user then has the choice of accepting them or not.
To comply with this law, you must:
Inform the user that the site uses cookies
Request user consent
Propose a version of the site without cookies if the user refuses them
The Cookie notice extension allows you to do all of this easily and intuitively, it has ergonomic banners that advertise cookies. You can customize them to your liking by modifying the message, the design and many other things.
The plugin we were missing to perfect your website. As we explain in our Blog article "Why optimize your website images", it is essential to take care of compressing and optimizing your website images. The loading time is immediately reduced and navigation is smoother.
This is therefore the main role of this "Smush" plugin, to speed up the loading of your pages, to resize and compress your images and to activate "lazy loading" (deferred loading of images not displayed on the screen).
Benefits :
This plugin does not affect the quality of the images, in fact, the image will be compressed by removing hidden information but without affecting its appearance.
Compress any type of image.
Limits :
The free version may be a little light depending on what you plan to do and may not be suitable for a large site.
In conclusion,
And There you go ! You are now better informed about our vision of these plugins.
If you have specific needs that WordPress and these plugins do not seem to meet, do not hesitate to call on us! Even better than plugins, we take care of the SEO of your entire website, we develop in Drupal or WordPress and we even do web marketing.
While waiting for your website to rank number 1 in the search results, here are other articles that may interest you: How to improve the conversion rate of your e-commerce, Plan your Web marketing campaign, Should you update update its WordPress site, The main differences between Drupal and Wordpress.
