Whether you are looking to build your own blog, portfolio, or e-commerce website, WordPress is one of the best platforms to choose from. It has hundreds of different tools that are designed to help you create a site that looks and performs well. There are also various WordPress plugins that you can install to add even more features to your site. Some of the available plugins are free, while others come at a premium price. WordPress’s Plugin Directory is available from your dashboard and you can easily use this to search for both free and paid plugins. If you’re looking to improve your WordPress site with plugins, here are our top choices for 2021.

Yoast SEO:

If you are serious about improving your site’s search engine optimisation, Yoast SEO is a plugin that will help you get to the next level. This plugin offers real-time page analysis and tools that help you optimise page content, titles, images, keywords, meta descriptions and more. You can even ask the plugin to tell Google not to index a certain page of set of pages and it can be used to analyse the readability of your website content. There are both free and premium versions available.

Gravity Forms:

If you want to provide your site visitors with an easy way of getting in touch with you, Gravity Forms is an ideal plugin to choose from. Currently used by over a million site owners, this plugin allows you to easily build complex contact forms without any technical knowledge needed. It comes with a very user-friendly editor where you simply choose the fields that you’d like to include and then embed them on your WordPress site.

WooCommerce:

This free WordPress plugin is the most popular option in the world for e-commerce, currently powering over 30% of online stores. The free version of WooCommerce has several features, including calculating the cost of taxes and shipping. It offers the ability to accept a wide range of popular payment methods including all major debit and credit cards, PayPal, cash on delivery, and bank transfers. In addition, it includes some excellent stock management tools that will help you keep track of your inventory. There is also a premium version that comes with more advanced features, including cart abandonment emails and one-page checkout.

WP-Rocket:

If you want your website to perform as fast as possible, WP-Rocket could be the best plugin option for you. Although it costs more than some of the other caching plugins available, at $49, it’s definitely worth paying the extra for. The tool is easy to set up and can be fully installed and configured in minutes. Page caching will be activated immediately, and your site will experience an instant speed boost. The plugin’s crawler will simulate a visit to preload the cache, instantly improving the indexing of your website by search engines.

Whether you’re looking to start a WordPress site to show off your work, sell goods, or start a blog, these are some of the best plugins to consider using this year.