You may be thinking of building your WordPress site in the year 2022 as a beginner, where will you start from or what plugins will I install on your WordPress site. Its not new, it a normal thought that a beginner has to think of.
With over 45,000 plus plugins on your dashboard and thousands of themes, then you need to have that thought.
WpressBeginner will love to help you out with Tools or plugins that you must have on your website or blog as a beginner.
Note; We are not saying that this tools are the best, but we have tested this plugins on our two websites ;GodzGeneral and this particular blog WpressBeginner and it works well. So let start with;
Plugins You must have as a beginner to build a successful WordPress site
Contents
Jetpack
This is the ultimate WordPress plugin for security, backups, malware scan, anti-spam, CDN, site search, CRM, Stripe, Facebook, & Instagram.
In summary, It brings many of the most powerful features available on WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress sites, and thereby contributing greatly to the improvement of WordPress powered blogs and websites.
Jetpack plugins owned by WordPress, which makes it secure and free from bugs and virus, it does most of the things 4 or 5 plugins can do together and makes your website so fast in loading.
MonsterInsight
MonsterInsights is a plugin that allows you to easily add, customize, and manage the Google Analytics website tracking services on your WordPress site. The plugin was originally created by Yoast WordPress SEO plugin, widely regarded as the best WordPress SEO plugin available.
The reason why expert on WordPress use Monsterinsight is because it is more advanced using google analytics and very fast in setting it up. It can also track how searcher or down loaders are downloading on your website because google analytics does not track downloads.
MonsterInsight vs Google Anaytics
Am not saying that google analytics is not good but what monsterInsight does is that it simplify the whole process of setting up your WordPress websites, no use of adding codes on your website, just Install, activate and start using it.
You can read our guide on different ways to install google analytics.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a search engine optimization plug-in for WordPress.
The plugin has five million active installations and has been downloaded more than 202 million times according to Wikipedia.
With research from experts, it is the best SEO tools for WordPress site and very easy to understand.
To rank highly in search engines, you need to beat the competition. You need a better, faster, stronger website than the people who sell or do the same kinds of things as you, you need YOAST. Yoast SEO consist of;
Automated technical SEO improvements.
Advanced XML sitemaps.
Title and meta description template.
Schema.org integration.
Full control over site breadcrumbs.
Faster loading times
And many more
WP Rocket
For fast loading and speed, we recommend wp rocket. WP Rocket is a cache plugin for WordPress. WordPress experts recognize it as the most powerful caching tool, I mean very powerful to speed up your website.
WP Rocket caching ensures websites will load blazing faster than your competitor, which is essential to improve SEO rankings and increase conversions rate.
You can also turn on optional features like lazy loading images, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, minification, and more to further improve page load times.
This is by far the easiest and most beginner friendly caching plugin ever. It also offers Imagify which is a free image optimization service to help you speed up your website even further.
WP Smush
WP Smush is a WordPress plugin that allows you to optimize images without losing quality.
WP Smush is very easy to use, and you can optimize your images on the fly as you upload them to your WordPress site.
Smush is a free image compression and optimization plugin for WordPress.
This plugin is maintained by the good folks over at WPMU DEV and is loaded with nifty features, including compression, bulk smush, incorrect size image detection, and automated optimization.
Using this free plugin and image optimization service, I can guarantee you that all existing and future images that you use on your website will load as fast as possible.
The AddToAny Share Buttons plugin for WordPress increases traffic & engagement by helping people share your posts or contents and even pages to any service.
With over 120 social media website such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Wechat, Pin interest even WhatsApp, mails (Google mail,Yahoo mail) and so on.
Woocommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is designed for small to large-sized online merchants using WordPress.
With over 5 million user activated on their website, it has established itself as the most dominant eCommerce plugin for WordPress. If you want to sell online with the fully customizable, open source then use eCommerce platform to built for WordPress.
WordPress Popular Post
WordPress Popular Posts is a highly customizable widget that displays your most popular posts.
It support custom post types and has the ability to add the widget multiple times which allows you create different set of popular views, e.g. Popular Posts, Popular Reviews and so on.
Advanced Ads
Advanced Ads is a free WordPress plugin that’s available at WordPress.org, as well as a variety of premium extensions that add additional functionality. It works with all the major ad networks, including AdSense, Amazon, Media Net etc.
You can also use it to manage your own ads (either affiliate offers or direct ad sales) on your website. The plugin is activated for over 70000 user or websites.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is WordPress add-on that enhances your site with extra features. Use a plugin to install a simple Mailchimp sign up form on your site.
The newsletter service that allows you to send out email campaigns to a list of email subscribers. This plugin allows you to tightly integrate your WordPress site with your Mailchimp account.
Simple Author Box
Simple Author Box adds a responsive author box at the end of your posts, showing the author name, author gravatar and author description – author bio.
It also adds over 30 social profile fields on WordPress user profile screen, allowing to display the author social icons in the author box. This plugins is very easy to set.
One Signal Notification
OneSignal is the best web push notification plugin for WordPress. It allows you to send targeted messages and announcements to your website visitors using the browser push notification technology.
It has more than 1 million user all over the continents, very easy to use.OneSignal comes with all the powerful features like drip campaigns, a/b testing, dynamic user segmentation, opt-in reminders, powerful analytics, goal tracking, and more.
Elementor
Elementor is a page builder plugin that replaces the basic WordPress editor with a live frontend editor, so you can create complex layouts visually, and design your website live, without having to switch between the editor and the preview mode. Elementor plugin works;
Very fast.
As page builder for website.
Live design.
Responsive live editing.
40+ widget and design.
Translate.
Other Alternative WordPress Plugins
Rank Math: Rank Math WordPress SEO plugin will help you rank higher in search engines, you can use it rather than Yoast SEO.
Google Analytics: If you are use to Google analytics, their are plugins for it, instead of using Monsterinsight..
W3 Total Cache: (W3TC) improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices. It is an alternative to Jetpack.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer: This is an easy to use, lightweight, install-and-forget-about-it image optimization plugin that can compress all your past images and PDF documents with a single click.
New images are automatically resized/rescaled and optimized on the fly, in the background. It is an alternative to Smush plugin.
Insert Headers and Footers: This is a simple plugin that lets you insert code like Google Analytics, custom CSS, Facebook Pixel, and more to your WordPress site header and footer. No need to edit your theme files. This is an alternative to Advanced ads plugins for advert.
Constant Contact: Email is the most effective and most reliable marketing tool at your disposal as a business owner. It allows you to stay in touch with your users even after they leave your website. It is an alternative to mailchimp plugin.
Frequently Questions Beginners asked about Plugins
I can’t access some of this features on this plugins
Yes, you won’t because this plugins has free and premium paid version. To have access to this you need to upgrade to premium version of it.
Can I have other plugins install on my site?
Yes, you can that is why we have for you step by step on how to install plugins on your WordPress website.
If you have any issue on this, You can use our comment session or join our delegate on Facebook to solve any issues related to WordPress and subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials.
Please I don’t know what’s wrong. From my website menu, for example if i click on Biography, all the contents on the front page will appear instead of the contents under the biography. Please how do i set it so that all the contents that is related to a particular post will appear.
Please help out. Thanks
I will advice you to use author box info plugin to set it up…some times it happens on biography..so you need a plugin for it
https://wpressbeginner.com/add-an-author-info-box-on-wordpress-site/
This is the right blog for anyone who wants to find out about this topic. You realize so much its almost hard to argue with you (not that I actually would want…HaHa). You definitely put a new spin on a topic thats been written about for years. Great stuff, just great!
Hi, I just came upon all your excellent articles. Thanks for them
However, one problem is that I do not know when they were written… are they many years old or this year?
It would be good to have a time stamp of date etc on them
Thanks
Thanks for the request…we will do as you said