How to Increase Web traffic Using the Best WordPress Plugins 

If you have a WordPress website, you probably already know how valuable plugins are. 

With just a bit of research, you can find a plugin for almost anything you want to do. Well, they still don’t have a plugin that makes a decent cup of coffee!

What are some of the best WordPress plugins?

With so many plugins available, picking a list of the best plugins is nearly impossible. People, especially bloggers, have their own opinions and preferences. Then there is the matter of using themes and assorted plugins. 

The themes may disagree with a plugin; two plugins may not work well together. 

So any list of plugins is only a list of personal preferences. However, here are some must-have WordPress plugins that you should be using on your website.

Akismet:

The Akismet plugin comes standard with your WordPress installation. You will need to create an account at WordPress.com to get an API key to make it work. 

This plugin does an excellent job of keeping spam comments away. Akismet is intelligent, and it learns from you over time. A very useful plugin.

All in One SEO Pack:

Optimizing your site with this plugin is essential for achieving high search engine rankings. It is simple to set up and a popular plugin. 

Even for complete novices, the All In One SEO pack makes the search engine optimization of your blog a cinch. For each page and post, it allows you to create a title, description, and keywords. You can also use tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs to increase your online visibility. Here is a detailed comparison – Semruh vs. Ahrefs

W3 Total Cache:

W3 Total Cache provides the most options of any caching plugin that I have ever used. If you don’t know what caching is, let me explain that briefly first. 

Caching on a WordPress blog or any blog can be very important due to limited server resources or days of higher than regular traffic. 

Caching plugins will create static versions of your dynamic pages on your site so they can be served much quicker to visitors with less load on the server than dynamic pages.

W3 Total Cache also provides more functionality than just caching your content. I want to talk more about the CDN or (Content Delivery Network). This feature allows you to use an already in place CDN like Amazon or create your own. 

You can create a self-hosted CDN network within your own server or on another server that you own via FTP. 

Why would you want to create a CDN on your site? Because it will dramatically improve load time on the site or appear when your users visit. A CDN allows a browser to load more objects and images in parallel than without.

WordPress Database Backup:

This plugin should be number one because it’s the most important. I remember back about 8 years ago; I had a blog that I was building. 

And then, one day, the hosting company server crashed, and they didn’t have a backup of my stuff. Well, I lost about a year’s worth of blogging in one day. Use a web hosting provider such as HostGator to host your WordPress website. Activate the HostGator coupon code and get some amazing deals.

Not anymore because I back up everything. This plugin will backup your blog each day. I do a backup and then have the plugin send me an email. This email will be in my archive. 

If anything happened to my blog, I could just go into my archive and upload my backup. Never miss a beat, and the readers wouldn’t know the difference.

Facebook Social Plugin:

Every blog needs some social proof, and this plugin will give you that. This plugin will add a widget to your sidebar if you have a fan page with lots of fans. You can set it up to show the pictures of all your fans. This indicates to your blog readers that others like your page. 

Since others like your fan page, then people will feel OK about staying around and reading more. It also gives the readers the ability to like your fan page without actually having to click over to Facebook.

Google XML Sitemaps:

This plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap which helps the search engines to better index your blog. 

Sitemaps make it much easier for search engine spiders to follow the structure of a website and therefore index it more thoroughly. 

Every time you add a new page or post to your blog, it can automatically notify the major search engines.

Revision Diet:

How often do you write a post, publish it and then never look at it again? Do you save various drafts, publish them and make more amendments? Is your database clogging up with revisions? 

This plugin helps you, thereby clearing out all but the most recent revisions. It keeps the database space down and should help keep your page response time up. You choose how many recent versions you keep.

WP Captcha Free:

Akismet does a good job, but it is not perfect. It misses some spam and falsely marks good comments. This means that you have to trawl through your spam folder and check all spam is spam. Well, this simple plugin stops a lot of spam at the source without affecting users. It encodes into the comment form a timestamp and checks that. 

The first time a spammer uses it, they will get through, but after that, they will keep using the same timestamp, and the comment will be deleted. Real visitors get a new timestamp every time they see the comment form, and their comments get through.

Hubspot Calls to Action:

This is more for the business blogger, but anyone who wants to direct readers to a particular action will benefit from Hubspot’s Calls to Action plugin. It integrates beautifully in the toolbar of your post editor so that you can insert calls to action anywhere. 

The settings page allows you to create numerous calls to action that you can insert with shortcodes whenever and wherever you choose. Plus, it comes with an analysis feature, so you can see how many people have viewed your CTAs, how many have clicked through, and what that click-through percentage is.

NewStatPress:

Google Analytics is still the gold standard in analysis, but for an internal stat plugin, I am in love with NewStatPress. The real-time stats are a great help. You can track visits, page views, spiders, and RSS feed. 

I rely on this heavily and probably check it too often. It’ll show you more details than you can even handle, including your top pages, top referrers, which spiders are crawling your site, which days at the most visitors, etc. Once you set it up, I promise you’ll be hooked.

Conclusion:

With the help of plugins, there’s no limit to what you can do with your WordPress blog. 

If you want to see just how big a selection of choices you have, check out the WordPress plugins section and start exploring for yourself. Just be sure that you are not using plugins excessively.

I would advise anyone who wants to start using them to carefully consider what their particular blog needs and would benefit from. 

Using WordPress plugins to enhance the functionality and convenience of your blog, you create a much better user experience for your visitors. And this should keep them coming back on a consistent basis.