One of the best things about WordPress is the possibility of enhancing the website with plugins. The most important plugins are free, and they are available in the WordPress database.
But for extended WordPress functionality and for making more money, we also need some premium plugins as well.
WordPress is designed to be lightweight and minimalist. Plugins are there to extend the functionality of the WordPress site, and therefore everyone can create the website they need.
One rule of thumb in plugins is to install only those that you use. Plugins consume resources and can slow down your website if they are too many.
Now let’s discuss about the most important plugins for niche sites build with WordPress.
Table of Contents
1. Akismet
Akismet is a simple plugin with an important role: keeping your website spam free. Each comment submitted on your website is run through Akismet detector, and only the legitimate ones goes through.
While there may be some false positives or some tricky spammers that manage to leave a comment, this happens very rarely as Akismet detector is very good at picking up spam.
You can straight up delete those comments or send them for moderation.
2. Jetpack
Jetpack is a plugin that has a lot of things in it. It’s like a Swiss Army Knife for WordPress.
Here are the functionalities you can get with the free version: Subscriptions, Gallery and Slideshow Tools, Custom Sidebars, Infinite Scroll, Write posts by Email, Easy Contact Forms, Lazy loading images, Site Stats, Related Posts, Post Sharing Tools, Auto Social Sharing, XML Sitemaps and more.
You can also manage multiple WordPress installs from one platform using Jetpack.
It’s truly amazing in what it can do. There’s no WordPress installation that I have without this awesome plugin.
One of the most popular plugins when it comes to Contact Forms. You can have multiple contact forms, customize them, and also protect them with Akismet or CAPTCHA.
It has over 5 million installations and a very good rating on the Plugins section.
That’s because most of the other Contact Forms plugins don’t work well, they crash all the time and makes things complicated.
4. Amalinks Pro
As the name suggests, this is not a free plugin, but it’s very important for anyone that is looking to make money with Amazon on their niche site.
This amazing WordPress plugin lets you easily create product links, showcase product images, create tables of comparison and more.
The Basic membership costs $67 per year, but it doesn’t include the Table Builder.
If you want to use it on multiple sites, you need to pay at least $197 per year to use the Table Builder as well.
This plugin is amazing for making money with Amazon. You don’t have to leave your WordPress dashboard to find items and link them to your content.
With this plugin, you can easily insert links to products, search for offers on Amazon, and display beautifully made boxes with product features.
Entirely optimized for mobile and for speed, this plugin is a must for those that want to make money promoting Amazon products.
5. TablePress
TablePress is a free plugin that gives the option to insert amazing tables in your WordPress posts with simple shortcodes.
You can create elaborated tables from the plugin interface, with a lot of data on it, and you can even import the data from Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON files.
The tables displayed are beautiful, they can be sorted out by different labels they have, and you can even use the search function.
When it comes to tables, TablePress is the plugin to go.
6. Yoast SEO
SEO is a very important part of any website, but most specifically, the most important part of a niche site. Having the best SEO settings is crucial to getting the organic traffic you need and deserve.
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins that can be downloaded free from the plugin database. It comes out-of-the-box ready with all the settings your website needs for bringing that search engine juice.
The Yoast website also has plenty of tutorials and articles that help you improve your SEO settings even more.
This is the number 1 SEO plugin, with over 5 million installs.
What’s also great about it, is that it provides tools for improving the SEO of your every page and post you publish. This plugin helps you choose the best title, description, and to improve your content’s readability.
Right before you hit publish, you have all the guidance you need to make the best decisions to improve your search engine exposure.
As the developers call it, the best WordPress tracking plugin. This plugin helps you shorten your links using your own domain, and it also helps you track the clicks you get on them.
For example, let’s say that you have the website MyNicheSite.com. Instead of having a long affiliate link for a hosting company, you simply create a short link like mynichesite.com/hosting.
Now you can easily display short links towards your affiliate offers without having to use an external service.
This is a professional way of displaying affiliate offers. It also stops those that intend to use the link and delete your affiliate code at the end of it.
By using these redirecting links, you can be sure that they can only get your offer by using your affiliate link.
8. Thrive Leads
Building a list of prospects is a very important part of any business. Most sales are generated with people that trusted you enough to give you their email address.
You need proper tools to collect emails and Thrive Leads is one of the best. This premium plugin helps you create a pop-up lightbox, ribbon, 2-step opt-in form, exit-intent lightbox, widgets and more.
You have templates that you can choose from and a drag and drop editor. The cheapest license costs $67 for an entire year, but you can also get this plugin by buying a Thrive Membership for $19 per month. This membership gives you access to Thrive premium themes as well.
MailChimp and OptinMonster are also good alternatives that can be used to build your subscriber list. They both have free plugins that you can access from the WordPress database.
9. Page Builder
If you want to take designing into your own hands without learning to code, Page Builders are the best choice for you. These advanced plugins help you build stunning websites with ease, simply by dragging and dropping things.
The most popular and professional Page Builders are Elementor, Thrive Architect and Beaver Builder.
They are all good in their own terms, and they all come packed with a lot of templates that you can start from. Elementor costs $49 per year for 1 website, Thrive Architect costs $67 for one website, and Beaver Builder costs $99 for unlimited websites.
Choosing the right Page Builder is more a matter of taste, as all three offer similar functionalities and they come packed with amazing features.
Since you can try all of them with a demo, it’s easy to find out which builder is suitable for you. The Elementor even has a free version that is more limited but helps you get a taste of how to use it.
10. Sucuri Security
When it comes to WordPress security, it’s absolutely necessary to install a plugin that enhances it. Sucuri Security is one of the most popular security plugins out there.
It helps you keep your WordPress website safe with malware scanning, brute-force blocking, firewall, security notifications and more.
It also helps you adjust your overall settings to make your website more secure. This is a must plugin for anyone that wants to keep their work away from hackers.
11. W3 Total Cache
Caching is a necessary feature that every WordPress website needs it. Without it, every time a visitor loads your page, the content from your page gets downloaded all over again.
This takes a toll on their loading speed and the resources of your hosting. But caching allows saving static files to people’s computers, so they load important things, like images and design elements, from their computer.
W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins from WordPress. It has over 1 million installs and a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars.
This plugin is useful for those that want to set a fixed widget that stays visible as people will scroll down the page.
Normal widgets in the sidebar have a smaller chance at capturing the attention of people that visit your website. This plugin helps you get better visibility for your ads, promotions or lead generating box.
13. BackupBuddy
Nothing hurts more your business than losing the data from your website. From server crashes to malware attacks and user errors, our online business is at risk of getting lost into thin air.
BackupBuddy is a premium plugin that helps us back up all WordPress files at ease. You get complete WordPress site backup, scheduled and automatic backups, store WordPress backup off-site and restore your WordPress site in a single plugin.
The lowest price is $80 for 1 year and 1 website.
14. Social Sharing
Social sharing is one of the most important parts of a website nowadays. If you don’t allow visitors to share your content, you’re living under a rock.
While you can use Jetpack to activate social sharing buttons in your content, that feature is limited in options. Using a standalone plugin for social sharing is the go-to solution for many webmasters.
The most popular free plugin for it is Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons plugin. It has over 200,000 installs, and it comes with a lot of options that allow you to customize your sharing buttons any way you want.
16 different designs, animations on social media buttons, making them floating or sticky and using popups for promoting sharing are some of the things you can do with this plugin.
15. Social Locker
Social Locker plugins are a great way to make your audience “pay” with a share for accessing the information you display.
While the Social Locker doesn’t stop search engines from “seeing” your content, you can block access for visitors to different parts of your website and ask for a share or like for unlocking.
This can work well when you have a free eBook or product that you want to share, or maybe a discount code, and you ask your visitors to “pay” with a share.
They get something free and you get the exposure you want to your niche website.
The most popular plugin for this is OnePress Social Locker with over 10,000 installs.
Conclusion
You need to enhance your WordPress experience with plugins to create the best niche website possible. In this article, I’ve shared a great list of free and premium plugins that you can use.
They are very popular, they are secure and regularly updated so that you get something safe and usable.
Just keep in mind to install plugins that you actually need. Otherwise, you’ll have wasted resources. And always install plugins from reputable sources that keep them updated and secure.
A plugin that hasn’t been updated in the last months can expose your website to risks for attacks.
Comment below which plugin do you use for your niche site that I haven’t mentioned here?
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