Incorporating the right plugins on your WordPress site is one of the key recipes for creating a functional, efficient and aesthetic space for yourself and the visitors. But with so many plugins in the market right now, it can be quite a daunting task to spot the best options that match your site needs. In fact, it is not uncommon to find and fall for plugins that have bad coding, bugs, and other negative aspects, which end up ruining the user experience.
So to help you make the right decision in 2019, we’ve compiled a list of most lightweight and super functional plugins that you need to check out:
1. Contact Form 7
If you’ve been scouting for a plugin that simplifies the process of creating and managing multiple contact forms, then Contact Form 7 is the right pick. The plugin also uses reCaptcha verification, making filtering of spammy submissions with Askimet both quicker and more seamless.
In addition, Contact Form 7 doesn’t come with extra codings like most plugins in the similar category do. That allows you to create and publish amazing contact forms, through which readers or visitors can effortlessly contact you. Making it your top choice in 2019 can definitely pay off in improving contact for users’ experience.
2. Broken Link Checker
Just as its name suggests, Broken Link Checker is designed to help you scan through your blog or website for any broken links. Upon identifying one, you’ll receive a notification prompting you to fix the dead link. Broken Link Checker typically starts parsing all the posts, bookmarks, and other content, immediately it’s installed.
Getting this plugin should be one of your top priorities as a site owner, because, with broken links, the interface can become complicated. And when the search engine notices that, your SEO rankings might drop while affecting readers’ experience too.
The Broken Link Checker plugin basically performs the functions highlighted below:
- Monitoring links in your pages, posts, comments and blogroll
- Detecting dead links plus missing images and re-directs
- Notifying you about these issues via the Dashboard or through email
- Helping you search and filer links by anchor text, URL and more
- Allowing you to directly edit broken links from the plugin’s page, without having to update each post
3. Smuch Image Compression & Optimization
What this plugin does is simple. It scans your website for previously uploaded and soon-to-be-added images and optimizes them by decreasing the file size, adjusting the format or resizing the image. With Smush, the optimization process is automated, something that makes work easier for you.
Large image sizes are the number one culprit for a slow website. With slow load times, potential readers are obviously going to be frustrated. And it will affect your search engine rankings too. So if you want clean and lightweight images on your site this year, Smush can do just the trick.
4. Cryptocurrency Price Ticker Widget
This plugin is for websites that deal in or share content about cryptocurrencies and/or trading online. Cryptocurrency Price Ticker widget basically employs the CoinMarketCap API in displaying different cryptocurrency prices either as a widget on the sidebar or in the site’s content, with a shortcode.
The plugin supports up to 50 of the top cryptocurrencies while still offering the option of displaying up to 32 different fiat currencies. The premium version of the plugin offers more functionality in the form of more styles, more currencies, historical prices, and real-time price updates.
5. WordFence Security
With the countless cyber attacks and website hacks witnessed in 2018, it is without question that website security should be a top priority in 2019. And WordFence offers convenient plugin options, both free and paid, which you can work with. The plugin ideally proffers a number of tools that can do the following:
- Verify the integrity and repair WordPress core file
- Perform backdoor, malware and virus scanning
- Form a firewall that can block fake Google Crawlers, whistle list IPs, and block IPs and more
- Generate email alerts of warnings as well as critical problems
- Protect against brute force hacking
- Ensure real-time traffic with Google crawlers, RSS feed readers and more.
6. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a plugin that deserves a place on your website for many reasons. It not only allows you to plan, promote and execute your marketing strategy with ease, but it also makes it easier to organize everything, including scheduled projects, in one place.
With its thoughtful editorial calendar, you can plan and assign an article to writers, all while seamlessly collaborating on blog posts and promoting them after publication. If you are a multi-author blog owner, then this tool might really come in handy for you in 2019.
7. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup
Making a faulty update or a coding fluke as a webmaster of the site may mean losing all the data and content achieve through hard work. Now, that can be downright frustrating. But with UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup plugin, you can enjoy scheduled backup that ensures everything runs smoothly when working on the backend. All backed up data basically goes into the cloud.
8. Revive Old Posts
This plugin allows you to chare older blog posts on all the social networks you’re connected to. For instance, if there’s a quality post you shared a while ago and can no longer be seen by readers, the plugin can revive it from the archives and share it with new people on such social media sites as Facebook, Twitter and more. This is something that can excite new readers and even generate more traffic to your website.
These are by far the best plugins for WordPress sites for 2019 and they are as lightweight and functional as they come. Just give any of them a try and experience the results for yourself.
9. Responsive Menu
Responsive Menu Plugin provides your website with a responsive mobile-friendly version of the main menu. It is a highly customizable plugin allowing you to make the most use of your website’s surface area and make it attractive and easy to navigate to the visitors.
Some of the Responsive Menu Plugin’s feature are :
- Desktop and Mega Menu Support
- Add custom Header Bar to your website
- Seamless control with Touch Gestures and Keyboard Commands for navigation within the Menu
- Comes with 20+ Awesome Button Animations to choose from
- Supports Multilingual Sites as it comes with WPML and Polylang integration.
- 600+ Font Icons Supported from FontAwesome and Glyphlcon.
And that’s not it, you can also install pre-made themes from the Responsive Menu to enhance the overall look of your websites. We would highly recommend trying its 7-day free trial and you can get it cancelled anytime within the said period.
