The Best WordPress Plugins to Help Grow Your Website in 2020

WordPress and its plugins allow site owners to customise every aspect of their website’s user experience and functionality. But with over 57,000 plugins available, it can be daunting to know where to begin.

If you’ve looked at the vast plugin library, you would know there are numerous plugins for any given function you’re looking for; whether that be implementing SEO mark-up, generating sitemaps, or adding social share buttons to your articles.

Cutting through the fluff can be challenging. But not to worry! We take you through some of the top recommended plugins every site owner should have.

Yoast SEO

Getting yourself regular and engaged traffic from your (potential) audience can be a difficult task, especially when you’re just starting out. You’ll undoubtedly have heard the term ‘search engine optimisation’ (SEO), which is integral to putting your website towards the top of search engine rankings in your niche.

With over 5 million active installations, Yoast SEO is the king of all SEO plugins. Due to its easy-to-understand yet sophisticated interface, the plugin is hugely popular among beginners and experts alike.

Yoast implements essential SEO mark-up to your homepage, pages and posts, allowing you to optimise your performance for search engines. With other features, such as readability analysis, metadata optimisation and plugins for Google News, Google Videos & more, Yoast offers a comprehensive one-stop solution for on-page search engine optimisation.

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OneSignal

OneSignal is a market-leader in push notifications for websites & mobiles, allowing site owners to automate the process of reaching their most valued readers. OneSignal offers a WordPress plugin that allows new visitors to subscribe to web push notifications for your website.

You can access your subscriber list to send your readers customised messages with latest offers or news, or send them automated notifications with a link to your website’s latest articles.

Web push notifications by OneSignal can significantly increase the number of returning visitors to your website, allowing you to build a loyal readership that is highly engaged with your content.

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Hustle

Hustle is an excellent tool for marketers looking to build and grow their website’s audience and interactions.

The plugin offers a range of features, such as mailing list forms, slide-in offers, share bars and highly-targeted marketing popups & widgets, all which lead to improved conversions, greater following and better lead generation.

Hustle has numerous options to customise each option, making it a versatile plugin that can be used across several niches. With a detailed analytics dashboard & conversion rate tracker, you’re in control of making decisions based on real performance data to help you optimise your campaigns.

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Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms allows you to build easy-to-use, powerful custom forms using an intuitive visual form editor and embed them on your website.

With features such as auto-responders, file uploads, calculators, among others, you can create high-performance forms suitable for any need – no matter how advanced.

The plugin integrates with MailChimp, PayPal, Dropbox, Zapier and many others, allowing you to streamline your processes and lead generation.

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AddToAny

With over 500,000 active installations, AddToAny is one of the most popular share buttons plugin available for WordPress. Why do we recommend it over others? Simple: while many plugins offer similar features, AddToAny outperforms them when it comes to site speed and customisation options.

AddToAny buttons help increase your traffic & engagement by helping your readers share your posts & pages to over 100 different social media sites & apps, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Messenger, Reddit and more.

The plugin allows you to customise every element of the multiple share interfaces, including the style, layout and placement. Not only that, but it also integrates with Google Analytics to provide you data of your trending articles and where they were shared.

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Disqus

WordPress has a default comments section it appends to pages on your website. But the functionality is severely limited. As you look to drive engagement, discussion threads can be hugely valuable to build a rapport with your readers.

Enter Disqus. Disqus is the industry leader in comment widgets, and it’s easy to see why. The interface is super slick, and with features such as real-time comments, customisable elements, rich media commenting, in-depth moderation and more, it blows every other commenting system out the water.

While Disqus is easy to embed on WordPress, its plugin is no longer being maintained. We would instead recommend Disqus Conditional Load, which allows extra site performance options such as async loading and load-on-scroll.

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Simple Tags

In order to redirect readers to relevant sections of the site, you would usually have to insert internal links to your blog articles and pages manually. But with Simple Tags & its 'auto-terms' feature, you can save hours on your internal linking efforts.

Have you written plenty of different articles about a particular topic, but haven’t found a way to categorise them? Add a tag for that term, and Simple Tags will automatically scan all your content to attach the tags to previous posts which mention the phrase.

But not only that, Simple Tags can insert a link to the tag page wherever the term is mentioned, helping you boost your crawl budget by better linking of your pages. With custom terms and links and plenty of features, this is a must-have plugin.

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