5 Essential WordPress Features You Need to Implement in 2024
Having the right set of WordPress tools and plugins can help you grow your business. But with more than 57k WordPress plugins out there, it can be difficult to decide which ones to choose, especially for new users.
How do you decide which are the best plugins for social media, SEO, speed, etc.? How can you tell whether a certain tool will really make a difference?
In this post, we are sharing a list of 5 essential WordPress plugins that will help you take your business to the next level in 2024.
Essential WordPress Features You Need to Implement
1. Yoast SEO
The most popular WordPress SEO tool, Yoast SEO is a definite must-have for any business looking to improve its SERPs rankings. When it comes to driving traffic to your business site, search engines are your best bet. The latest search engine Google handles more than 9 billion searches every day. So, it is safe to say that organic traffic can make a huge difference when it comes to the success of your business. That is why having a solid SEO strategy is very important.
Yoast SEO helps you improve your SEO by optimizing your pages and posts using meta descriptions and keywords, but it also analyzes your content’s readability. This is very important, as nearly 80% of users tend to scan through web content, so the more readable your posts and pages are, the greater your chances of retaining users’ attention.
The basic version of Yoast is free, and there is also a premium plan with extra features.
2. AddSearch
Site navigation is a crucial part of your online presence. When visitors land on your website, they want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
One of the best ways to help your visitors is a custom search function. A good WordPress search plugin allows visitors to easily find relevant information on your website by simply typing in a few keywords. Moreover, search logs can also offer actionable data to help you create similar content and increase your website traffic.
After a quick and simple installation, you can fine-tune your visitors’ experience and build a more efficient search engine for your website.
When it comes to pricing, you can choose from four different AddSearch plans.
- Essentials, which offers essential features to help you get started with a fast customizable search for $25 a month.
- Professional, which is a great entry point to a professional website search with powerful features for $89 per month.
- Premium is a perfect advanced search solution for larger organizations or more specific needs and comes at $349 a month.
- Enterprise is a fully-tailored solution for any needs with implementation support and costs $1,990 a month.
3. WPForms
This is a great WordPress plugin for building eye-catching forms, offering an ideal blend of ease of use and useful features. WPForms is also mobile responsive and user-friendly.
One of the reasons why more than three million sites are already using WPForms is the fact that it allows you to create contact forms without having to work with code. The plugin offers pre-built form templates that allow you to build modern, customizable contact forms that improve interaction, generate better conversions, get more survey results, and more.
There are two versions of WPForms you can choose from:
- WPForms Lite, which is free and works well for websites that want to use it on their contact page, and
- WPForms Pro, which offers more features, integrations, and form templates for $39.50 a year.
4. Elementor
With more than five million active installs, Elementor is another must-have on our WordPress plugin list. This visual page builder allows you to create original page designs that are somewhat independent of your current theme. That means you won’t have to hire a pro to add fabulous effects such as animations, hover effects, background overlays, etc. You can do it on your own by choosing one of the 150+ templates from the library and a simple drag-and-drop.
The basic version of the plugin is available for free in the WordPress directory. If you need more features, you can choose from the following plans:
- Personal at $49 a year for one website
- Plus at $99 a year for 3 websites
- Expert at $199 a year for 1,000 websites.
5. Optimole
If your images aren’t optimized, they could compromise your page loading times. Loading times are extremely important because, according to research, if your site needs more than 3-4 seconds to load, over 50% of the visitors will get annoyed and leave. Moreover, nearly 80% of online shoppers say they will not return to a site that has loading speed issues.
Even though images are not the only factor that has an impact on the loading speed, optimizing them is crucial for improving your website performance. Optimole is a plugin that optimizes every graphic you upload to your website so that it takes up less space. It automatically compresses your images and resizes them to provide a faster loading. Also, Optimole uses a cloud-based system to speed up your website.
Optimole is free for up to 5k visits a month, after which you can work with the premium plan for $22.52 per month.
Final Thoughts
WordPress is one of the best “out of the box” CRMs, but there is also something else that makes it a top choice: access to tens of thousands of plugins. Once your WordPress website is up and running, consider using these 5 plugins. You probably won’t use every one, but there is a good chance that at least a few of them will help you reach your goals.
