WordPress is the most common platform to build websites on. Its popularity is due to its simplicity in building websites and the thousands of plugins to choose from to enhance your website. Plugins are both free and paid and can drastically improve the user experience on your website. Everything from optimizing your speed, adding reviews, and creating new landing pages is available via WordPress plugins. In this blog post, we will go over how to install WordPress with the best plugins.
First, let’s go over how to install WordPress. It is a relatively easy process and Canadian Web Hosting allows an easy 1-click install of WordPress on all shared hosting accounts. To do this follow the steps below.
How to Install WordPress
- Navigate to your cPanel. Here you have the default “Site Software” cPanel option and the additional “WordPress Manager by Softaculous” option. Both work great, but we do recommend Softaculous for the additional options provided to manage the installations later on.
- So go ahead and Click on the Softaculous option for WordPress
- This opens up a wizard, where you click “Install”
- The next page, would have you enter the required information, like what domain name and folder/sub-folder you want WordPress installed on. You have options to customize the admin user name too. Also, select a list of plugins you’d like to get installed automatically.
- Once everything is filled, click on the “install” button at the bottom of the page
- Once WordPress is installed just make sure it works by entering the domain you entered in step 4.
Keep in mind that VPS customers may not have Softaculous as it is an added option. However, in such a case you can use Site Software which is still an easy way to install WordPress. Now that you have WordPress installed here are some great plugins to use to take your website to the next level.
WPForms
If your website requires users to fill out forms use the plugin called WPForms. It is a popular plugin and is very easy to use even for beginners. Adding a form is easy due to the drag and drop system. Another benefit is that the plugin offers both a free version and a premium version. In the free version, you get features such as form fields, CAPTCHA, email notifications, and more. In the premium version, you get all the previously mentioned features and the ability to add multi-page forms.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is another popular plugin used on my many WordPress sites. It has over 5 million installations for good reasons. The plugin is free and is an easy way to enhance the SEO for your blog posts. It will check if your blog post is optimized for SEO as well as readability. A beginner to SEO can understand the basics of SEO by using this plugin.
Jetpack
Jetpack is a great plugin that improves your website in multiple ways. You can secure and speed up your website with this one plugin. If you look to install the premium version you can also get advanced features such as creating backups, spam protection, and malware scanning. Jetpack also allows you to add features such as comment likes and contact forms that also improve the user experience of your website. The Jetpack plugin covers a wide array of areas and is worth checking out.
Elementor
If you want to completely avoid any backend coding on WordPress you can use Elementor. Elementor allows you to create website pages with an easy drag and drop system. Though WordPress is fairly simple to use and create new pages, Elementor gives you the flexibility to create unique pages. This would be perfect for creating unique landing pages for campaigns where the homepage does not resonate with the user.
W3 Total Cache
Caching is when a website is stored in your browser after visiting it for the first time. As a result, users are able to load the site extremely faster the next time they visit a website. W3 Total Cache is the most popular cache plugin with over 1 million active installations. By utilizing W3 Total Cache, the SEO of your website will certainly improve as load times will be decreased significantly.
Smush
Smush is perfect for those of you who have lots of images on your site. Images can slow down your site especially if they have big file sizes. Smush is an image optimization tool that optimizes the files as you upload them. This not only helps the user experience but can also improve your workflow as your own site will take less time to load when working on it.
Weglot
If your customer base is all over the world then having Weglot will certainly help you get a further reach. Weglot translates your website giving you access to untapped markets. The plugin also uses machine learning to translate websites which means you will have high-quality translations.
Monarch
If you want to add social sharing buttons to your website, then use the Monarch plugin. It offers up-to-date social icons, and you can choose where to put them on your website. You can experiment with different locations to place the sharing buttons and determine the most effective spot. The best part is Monarch has 20 different social media platforms to choose from.
Contact Form 7
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that can help grow your client list. Contact forms can also use reCAPTCHA and Akismet which helps filter through spam. The plugin is straightforward to use. It has over 5 million active installations with an average of 4 stars.
WP Notification Bar Pro
Notifications are a great way to share any announcements and help drive conversions on your website. With the WP Notification Bar Pro plugin, you can use links, countdowns, and buttons to drive users to specific pages whether that be a product page or a page related to a promotional campaign.
Broken Link Checker
The Broken Link Checker plugin will improve your SEO. As you add content to your website it is easy to forget about the old posts that may be outdated or include broken links. These broken links can negatively impact your SEO. With such importance placed on SEO and user experience, removing any broken links will improve your website experience.
Bonus Plugin – Wordfence
Rated 4.7 stars and with more than 4 million installations, Wordfence is a popular security plugin. The goal of this plugin is to block malicious traffic. Wordfence equips you with a firewall and a malware scanner specifically designed to protect WordPress websites. It even provides you with a dashboard to monitor your blocked traffic.
Overview
The installation of WordPress gives you the ability to create a beautiful website that has much more potential because of plugins. Plugins can take the website to the next level and improve the website performance drastically.
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