WordPress is renowned for its seemingly endless range of plugins. With over 50,000 plugins available, site owners are often overwhelmed with choice. The amount of choice available is great, however, it can sometimes be too big to find the best ones. We’ve put together this list of our favourite 5 plugins, to make sure you don’t have to search through all 50,000 before finding the best one.
WooCommerce – Free
WooCommerce is one of the most customisable WordPress eCommerce plugins available. It enables your business to sell goods to customers all over the world from your WordPress website. WooCommerce is expandable and has endless add-ons, free and paid, that do anything from integrating with PayPal to bill customers for monthly subscriptions. If you can think of an idea for your eCommerce store, then it’s likely the WooCommerce plugin can do it.
It should be noted that, unlike Shopify, WooCommerce is open-source software, so requires slightly more coding knowledge to unlock its full potential. It might be worth consulting a web developer if you are unsure about how best to proceed. At Optimus Design, we offer WooCommerce setup and maintenance for our customers, as well as training at no extra cost so you can use your eCommerce store to its full potential.
WP Bakery Page Builder (previously Visual Composer) – $45
With the WP Bakery Page Builder plugin, you can create pages on your WordPress site by dragging and dropping text and images into position. Previously known as Visual Composer, this plugin is an alternative to styling everything with CSS. Instead, it uses a visual interface that lets you style your pages without the need to code. The possibilities are endless, and your imagination is the limit, leaving you with the potential to create extremely professional looking pages without the need for a degree in web design!
iThemes Security (previously Better WP Security) – Free (Pro version from $52/year)
The iThemes security plugin is great to protect your site against some of the most common WordPress vulnerabilities. A recent survey of WordPress websites showed that 70% of the 40,000 websites surveyed were vulnerable to being hacked. Around the globe, there are over 75 million WordPress installations, meaning WordPress sites will always be a target for hackers. iThemes Security reduces that risk by offering brute force protection, 404 abuse detection and file change alerts, amongst other useful features, to give you peace of mind that your site is secure 24/7. If you aren’t quite sure about which settings to enable, then Optimus Design is here to help. We can install iThemes Security on your site with the settings personalised from just £45 per hour.
Slider Revolution – from $29
Sliders are great ways of promoting your brand message or a specific product on the front page of your site. The Slider Revolution WordPress plugin lets you create beautiful full-page sliders to advertise your pages and products. You can choose from a range of pre-made designs or make your unique design. Slider Revolution also has built-in mobile responsiveness, which allows you to edit or hide elements for users on specific screen sizes. Use Slider Revolution to get customers to into your sales funnel as soon as they reach your site. This can transform the number of sales you make.
WP Fastest Cache – Free (Premium from $49.99/license)
WP Fastest Cache is a great way to optimise your website speed. Website load speed is massively important for your site. It’s no exaggeration to say it can make or break your business. A Pingdom test showed that after 2 seconds of loading, the bounce rate for some websites were less than 10%. However, when the load times exceeded 5 seconds, the bounce rate quadruples to around 40%. That’s a huge chunk of potential customers that your site could be missing out on.
Get rid of useless clutter! From resources in different places to files with pointless space in. WP Fastest Cache eliminates this clutter by caching page data and minifying CSS and JavaScript resources. This means your visitors will load your site quicker, providing they have a reliable internet connection. This will hopefully reduce your bounce rate and increase the time visitors spend on your site. Use Google Analytics to track bounce rates and see how much time it takes your users to load your site.