We at Gurkha Technology love wordpress – what’s not to love? You can establish web presence, jump-start your web fronts for your business, publish what you and your customers care about, launch a rocket ship to Mars in a matter of hours with WordPress (Okay we might have lied about that).
WordPress is not about making everything from scratch, mind you. It’s about pure productivity, the amount of time leveraged out of having a boilerplate of a framework to easily come up with a content management system that has sheer scalability, modularity and management that helps enterprises and startups alike. And the modularity, in form of plugins, are so rampant, that it make overwhelm even the best of us.
Our mission is simplicity, that “less is more”. Hence, the tech department present: 10 plugin every wordpress developer should have in their arsenal, to boost their productivity. Without further ado, here they are:
1. Yoast SEO – freemium
SEO needs no introduction. The ability to end up in the top of the search results is paramount, because customers don’t bother going beyond the first page in this age of search engine relevancy. Getting search results relevancy is the same as building a brand: an intangible asset.
Image Credit: searchinfluence.com
Also see: how good your website holds up in regards to SEO standing
Yoast helps with all the intricacies of the art of SEO. From analytics, appreciable stats crunching to user-retention forecasts all in a seamless, user-friendly interface – Yoast SEO has everything to minimize hassle, and maximize concrete results. The Gurkhas here at the dev team wholeheartedly endorse Yoast SEO.
2. Contact Form 7 – free
We love Contact Form 7. It’s minimal impact on performance, and lets your customer interact with you on-site without firing up their email client. We mean, who uses emails these days anyway? For the record: We still use it. We’re still cool, we promise 😉
Telltale signs your website might need Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 has an easy to understand interface, integrates in any page you designate it to be on with the help of short-codes, and makes it embarrassingly easy to craft professional looking contact forms that can be as meticulous, or as casual as one deems fit. Configuration of Email Templates is another handy feature – it allows for making beautiful email templates that do not induce a migraine for anyone dealing with customer email queries.
3. Duplicator – freemium
Let’s face it: every one of us has faced migration issues with their websites on one time or the other. OR, someone (We know it’s we, but we deny responsibility here) “magically” messed up the website while upgrading WordPress. Perhaps security vulnerability leading to site defacing?
Why duplicate your site? Even Spiderman has a double!
So how do you mirror an entire site and make sure it’s working when deploying on a different server? Duplicator has joined the chatroom. You’ll realize quickly wordpress has plugins like these having your back, letting you seamlessly package, and download an entire website into one single archive easy to install in a different server; all in a matter of minutes. We at Gurkha Technology don’t always need it (Trust us: we’re professionals… we … think), but when we make use of it. You can be sure even Donald Trump’s not deporting those websites away from us.
4. WooCommerce – freemium
WooCommerce is a domestic name when it comes to turning your blog site into selling your home-made superman action figures. In an era where people look up for stuff in online stores before even grabbing their keys, you can bet if a business would only run half as well when not integrating an online store.
For the LAST time, Karen, we KNOW.
Also Read : How Gurkha Technology helped building brand for Nepal Airlines Corporation
WooCommerce, even the free version, comes with already featured pack interface to quickly build up an inventory portfolio, and push it immediately into the web front for customers to be able to buy stuff from your website. Integrating payment gateways is a breeze, and there are little to no security hazards for both the customers, and the business. We here at Gurkha Technology have nothing but praises for WooCommerce.
5. Akismet – freemium
Ever checked your latest comments on your blog, and 90% of the comments there make no sense? We feel you. Akismet is your one stop solution to comment flooding in your wordpress blogs. If you have product portfolio posts, and the customer interaction needs to show professionalisms, you simply can’t afford to have irrelevant spam, as well as a host of Mr. Bucard Smiths promising free 24-carat Gold bars to your prospective customers. That &^#* don’t fly in my business, dawg.
Our feeling when Nigerian Prince emails
Akismet makes sure your comment section is well policed, and prunes spam at break-neck speed. It’s smug when someone with malicious intent wishes to comment bomb your website, but gets immediately IP-blocked. Well played, hacker sir, well played.
6. RevSlider – premium
So you say you want your pictures moving side to side in a given duration, huh? That oddly sounds like a job for RevSlider. Minimal footprint, insanely portable thanks to short-codes, and customizability that blows its competitors out of the waters – RevSlider is the image slider you definitely should employ for your image slider needs. It is also massively responsive, so devices of all varieties should have similar website experience.
It boasts that even folks from non tech background are able to easily setup and run – And our team here at Gurkha Technology believes them, since we use them too!
7. Borlabs Cache – premium
Ever notice your website getting slower as time goes by? We did too, which led us to search for a plugin that manages it for us. Thus, with certainty, we present – Borlabs. It makes even the most persistently slow website start serving visibly quicker. With optimization, caching, and pre-loading, just about any site gets quick – some even faster than anticipated.
Legend says the page is still loading
Having well optimized wordpress sites might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but optimizing a badly made one in a matter of minutes, is in our eyes, worth every buck spent on acquiring Borlabs Cache plugin. May your sites be swift, and properly loading!
8. Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode – Coming Soon Builder
Although trying to implement experimental changes on a live site is already scary, what if you don’t want potential visitors coming across a particularly nasty change that makes the website look ugly?
Minimal Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode promises you a simple, toggleable coming soon page that the public sees, while you can silently introduce changes and view them instantly without running into too many hitches. It’s a simple plugin that is a life saver when you wish to update your site quietly without the public seeing the ugly picture behind the curtains.
Gurkha Technology is a forerunner in Technology and Digital Marketing. Check us out!
9. WP Switch Clean Updates On – free
Quite simply put, WP Switch Clean allows for seamless transition from an older version of WordPress to new, with no unwanted code changes being introduced by the newer version. It’s minimal impact, small plugin, that makes the life of every site maintainer easier, as the process of updating WordPress can be tedious at times, especially after a security-sensitive upgrade, or perhaps an overhaul in the unforeseeable future.
10. Wordfence Security – freemium
Wordfence Security is a tool that is paramount for every WordPress site. And for a very good reason – there are people with not-so-good intentions, always looking to getting your site defunct. Wordfence Security comes prepackaged with a firewall, and a malware scanner, that periodically informs the administrator of any apparent vulnerabilities, as well as swiftly removes anything that could lead to a compromise. It also protects the site from attacks, DoS(Denial of Service), MitM(Man in the Middle) attacks – to name a few. It also saves the site having its password cracked by brute force attacks, where a hacker purportly tries thousands of password per second from a word dictionary to find out the password, and gain illegitimate access to the website’s admin panel.
This is an accurate description of how we do things here.
Conclusion
We know the number of plugins aren’t getting any lower by the time we’ve finished publishing this blog. All we do know, is that some are popular, whilst others never see the light of the day. The ones we listed however, are tried and tested plugins which will always be faithful. Thus our reasoning for our picks – they’re indispensable, and pop up to mind whenever we think of the feature they provide.
Unsatisfied with the list? Didn’t see your favorite plugin listed in our favorites? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comment section: Gurkha Technology welcomes new suggestions that’ll be included – perhaps in a future blog.
