Want to significantly improve and customize your WordPress website? Then you need to make use of the many brilliant plugins coming from its hardworking community. There are tens of thousands of them in the WordPress Plugin Directory, both free and premium, and you can truly benefit from them. However, there is a large number of subpar plugins as well. So how do you know which ones to get? Worry not, in this article, we have selected a number of high-quality and extremely useful plugins for you.

Jetpack

If you are looking for a versatile plugin that includes great features, then Jetpack will certainly do. It significantly improves your website performance, has a variety of tools for content customization, improved security, as well as features that you can make use of to better engage with your audience. Furthermore, there is social sharing, related posts, post by email, and protection from spammy comments. Last, but not least, it has a responsive mobile theme option.

W3 Total Cache

Caching is one of the essential methods of improving your website performance. W3 Total Cache does just that – it boosts how fast your pages are loading in order to improve the UX for your website visitors. Fast page load times mean that your overall website performance will be better, which will, in result, help you boost your ranking in search engines. What is also great about this plugin is that it improves web server performance when the traffic is high, which is very important for big websites.

Google XML Sitemaps

What Google XML Sitemaps does is that it automatically creates an XML sitemap for your website. By having an XML sitemap, you are making sure that your website is better indexed. In other words, search engines have a better view of how your website is built, and get better results from crawling through it. Furthermore, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing will get an instant notification with every new post that you create.

iThemes Security

The task of iThemes Security is to take care of your website’s vulnerabilities, in order to protect it from known attackers. It is a common case among WP website admins that they are unaware of all the vulnerabilities that their websites might have. Luckily, this plugin has got you covered. Quite often, these vulnerabilities come from other plugins that you have installed. iThemes Security scans your website for them and makes sure that it’s safe and sound.

Relevanssi

In case that you are looking for a way to improve search on your website, Relevanssi is a plugin that can help you. The default search option sorts the search results by date. Relevanssi improves this by making it possible to sort the results in order of relevance. The free version of this plugin is made for a single site only, while the premium version can handle multiple sites and includes advanced features. You can customize how the plugin works. For example, you can set up fuzzy matching for partial words. It can search for content based on all the words a user inputs, or just on one term.

Broken Link Checker

Broken links can be a real issue when it comes to both your website’s UX and the way it performs in search engines. Broken Link Checker is a plugin that scans links throughout all your posts, comments, and pages. Every broken link, redirect or a missing image is shown in the plugin. Once you have identified them, it allows you to edit them directly, saving you from having to manually update every post on your website.

TablePress

Do you want to create tables that you can embed into your posts and pages? TablePress can help you do this with the use of shortcodes. You can input any kind of data into it, including formulas. It enables you to input data directly into the spreadsheet interface without the need to do any coding. Additional functionalities of this plugin include sorting, filtering, and pagination. Furthermore, you can import and export tables from and to Excel, HTML, JSON and CSV formats.

Gallery

As the name suggests, Gallery is an image editing plugin for WordPress. It makes it easy to implement and edit images on your website by making them completely responsive. You can add albums and photo galleries to your pages and posts or to a variety of widgets. It enables you to input image descriptions and tags. Furthermore, it’s quite simple to upload, rename, copy and delete images within the plugin.

In summation

WordPress is a good CMS out of the box, but it is necessary for you to improve its features by installing some of the many plugins made for it. In this article, we have gone through some of the essential plugins that you should try out, so make your choice.