WordPress has thousands of plugins that are designed to help make your site run more smoothly and also to give your site a professional look. There are WordPress plugins to help with the design of your site, white-hat SEO and increasing profits. Here is a list of twelve that can really have a positive impact on your SEO and your profits.

Yoast SEO

Yoast has carved out a reputation for being one of the best at white-hat SEO and this plugin makes handling all aspects of SEO much simpler. There are some features that are charged for, but you can access a lot of the features for free. You can look at Titles & Metas, Social, XML Sitemaps to see how your good your SEO is and it can help you find ways to improve your ranking.

Broken Link Checker

Broken links are something that every site falls victim to at one time or another. When you are linking to exterior content or even when linking to something else on your site, things get moved around or deleted and you end up with broken links littering your site. Broken Link Checker is a great WordPress plugin that scans your site for broken links at an interval you choose and then emails you a list of the broken links so they can be fixed.

Akismet

Spam is one thing that sites are constantly having to deal with – spam comments on blogs and spam messages are something that plague WordPress sites, but there is an answer to this. Akismet. Akismet is a plugin that offers the best spam protection for WordPress sites and catches most of the spam comments before they are even seen by you. You’ll need and Akismet license once the plugin has been installed, but it is well worth it for all the hassle that this plugin saves you.

EWWW Image Optimizer

Images are something that can cause lots of problems on sites. Huge image files can mean that pages take a long time to load or even that they take up far too much room on your server. If you have a lot of image content on your site, then you might want to consider using EWWW image optimizer. This plugin strips away all the unnecessary data in an image file without affecting the quality of the image so that you can reduce the file sizes and still have a professional looking site.

BackupBuddy

Having your site backed-up is an excellent and sensible thing to do, as it is with all digital content. BackupBuddy is a plugin that is designed to back-up your site so that if it falls prey to hackers or you lose some of the site for one reason or another, you can simply reload the site back in the state it was before everything went wrong (assuming of course that you saved it).

OptinMonster

Though not everyone loves pop-ups, they can be a great way to get people to sign up to your newsletter. OptinMonster is one of the cheapest plugins that can be used with wordpress and allows you to create a pop-up on your landing page to encourage new visitors to sign up to your newsletter or advertising different offers and site promotions.

TweetDis

TweetDis is a great plugin for those who are looking to increase the interactive content that is available on their site. What this plugin does is allows your site visitors to tweet sections or content from your site by simply clicking a button.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a social media management platform as social media exposure is key when it comes to increasing traffic to your site. CoSchedule will display all the different forms of social media you have linked to the scheduler and displays all the posts you have scheduled as well as allowing you to schedule more posts. This management method allows you to implement and complex social media strategy over multiple platforms with relative ease.

WooCommerce

One of the most popular plugins when it comes to setting up an eCommerce store, WooCommerce allows you to create listings for items in a straight forward and easy way that display in simple and professional designs on your eCommerce page. You can add in price ranges, descriptions and an awful lot more information as well for physical and digital products. It also allows you to set shipping options so your customers can choose their location and it will calculate shipping based on the settings you are using.

WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart

Having the ability to take PayPal payments on a business site is essential, even if you are a business that rarely takes payments using PayPal, it can be essential to have the ability to take those payments to make sure you are not missing out on revenue. With the WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart you can sell a small number of products without needing a full commerce plugin catalogue.

WP Simple Pay Lite for Stripe

Stripe is one of the major alternative payment processors to PayPal. Having the ability to take Stipe payments on your site as well as PayPal can increases the amount of revenue your site takes in. You can add in “buy” buttons once the plugin is installed with a short code:

[stripe name=“Item name” amount=“1999″ description=“Item description”]

Easy Digital Downloads

For those who are dealing in digital products – course, webinars and e-books, this wordpress plugin is a must have. If you are a first time seller, it is really simple to use. You can accept payments from major online payment processors such as PayPala dn Stripe and the plugin delivers your digital product automatically. You will s a download tab appear in your navigation sidebar rather than products. In this screen you’ll be able to keep track of all your earnings. You reports generated by the plugin as well as the ability to look at your sales history.

How can your WordPress site be improved by these plugins?