WordPress is known as the most used CMS. In fact, more than 35% of the whole Internet is WordPress. The strength of this Content Management System is the massive list of plugins you can install and for most of them, without paying anything.
What are (to me) the 5 must have WordPress Plugins?
Contact Form 7
Your website can be a blog, a forum or even a ecommerce, you might want your user to be able to contact you by implementing a form. Contact Form 7 makes it very easy and allows you to customize your forms with any field type you could think of. You just need to copy paste a shortcode to display your form in the wanted page. This plugin is used by more than 5 million websites and is regularly updated.
Smart Slider 3
Displaying a slider on a website is pretty common for any type of websites. As developing it from scratch can take a pretty long time, using a plugin can be an excellent solution. Smart Slider 3 makes it super easy to create sliders and the free version gives a lot of settings already. You can decide about the size of your slider, the transitions between slides, some animations and of course, the content of your slides. Smart Slider 3 allows you to create fully responsive sliders as well.
The premium version gives you number of additional settings (like using a background video in a slide) and you can create differente types of sliders.
Askimet
Every WordPress Developer knows it: if you don’t do anything about Spams, your mailbox is soon to be useless!
Installed by default on every wordpress website, the free version of Askimet helps to prevent spams in your mails and in the comments. All you need to do is create an account and link your website to it by using an API key.
Yoast SEO
If you want to promote your business online, you’ll need to optimize your website in term of SEO. Google algorithm is based on more than 200 criterias and it’s vital to make your website SEO-friendly before starting to search for external links.
Yoast SEO is the best SEO tool you can get for WordPress. It allows you to customize the meta title and description of every pages, blogs or products or to generate XML Sitemaps. In its free version, this plugin also gives you an analyse of your pages content to help you make the most out of it.
The premium version of the plugin gives you a lot of additional settings and gives you access to number of resources on the Yoast website.
SVG Support
One of the main reason of a slow website is the wrong use of images. Working on optimizing the size of your website is the best way to improve its performances and using SVG can be very useful as they are very light weight. It’s not possible to use this format for any type of images but will be perfect for logos, illustrations or icons.