3 Widgets Every WordPress Website Needs
Out of the thousands of available plug-ins that exist for WordPress, which ones make the most sense for everybody?
Which widgets will actually help every single website?
To top it off, we wanted this to fit all budgets. So this means each plugin is FREE.
There is no definitive answer to this.
Today, we present 3 widgets we believe every WordPress website needs.
1. Contact Form 7
Without a contact form, it is going to be difficult to connect or engage with any traffic or audience that may land on your website. Although there are many contact form plugins available, with a wide variety of features and customization abilities, Contact Form 7 is simple and effective, even if you are just starting out with your first website. It does not matter what industry or market you are in, it does not matter if you sell clothes or graphic design services, the Contact Form 7 will help you to get in touch with your clients and customers with a simple, easy-to-use form that can be embedded with a short-code. If a majority of websites are a platform or medium of communication, Contact Form 7 fills the gap in order to connect the site owner to the site user.
2. Wordfence
One of the main issues every website owner faces is security. With constant updates, changes to technology, and things like viruses and hackers online, you must always be looking at site security to protect your work and your business. Thankfully, there is a WordPress plugin that helps with that called Wordfence. The Wordfence plug-in will prevent attacks and can perform scans to keep malicious content out of your website. Being able to keep your site safe from hackers and bugs is not something anyone should overlook. The beautiful thing about it is, these scans will happen automatically in the background so you don’t have to monitor it 24/7.
3. Updraft Plus
In addition to security, there is one thing website owners must be aware of. In case of a server or hosting failure, or any other activity that may take your website down, do you have a backup available? The Updraft Plus plug-in will help to maintain active copies and backups of your website so you can sleep at night knowing that if something were to happen, at least you can get back up and running without having to start all over from scratch. Updraft Plus will integrate your website to your Google Drive or Dropbox account, so you can save backups to the cloud where, you can access it from your accounts anywhere. You can also perform simple exports and imports of your website.
Big Contenders:
Yoast SEO
Not necessarily a top-three, but certainly a close recommendation would be the Yoast SEO plugin. S.E.O. stands for Search Engine Optimization and it basically means this is how you get discovered by the search engines online. The Yoast SEO plugin will help you to set your proper keywords and metadata tags to maximize your reach and potential for gaining incoming search engine traffic. This can be powerful for bootstrapped startups or new business owners on a budget that would like to get customers from the web without hiring an SEO firm. You can use the Yoast SEO plugin to maximize your reach on places like Google.
WooCommerce
Another top, powerful, contender is the WooCommerce plugin. Not every website needs to sell things, but for those that do, this WordPress plugin gives you the ability to create your own online e-commerce store. If you ever dreamed about selling your products or services online, WooCommerce will allow you to create a shopping cart, checkout pages, and integrate with your payments processors like Stripe or PayPal, so you can get paid from selling things on your website. I highly recommend WooCommerce to anybody on WordPress that would like to set up an online store.
