WordPress is an all-time star. Whether you want it for a simple or complex website, the functionalities of WordPress make  any site look great.

New tools for adding and extending this functionality are coming up every year. It varies from site to site as to which plugins you should have on yours – however, there are some plugins that every WordPress site needs. Plugins will make your life easier, they are handy and replaces lots of work on your side. With about 47, 000 plugins and counting, WordPress lovers have a lot to choose from!

In this post, we bring forward 5 must-have WordPress plugins for your website in 2017.

1. Jetpack (FREE)

This is a powerful plugin that is a must have for every WordPress website. It provides a superb list of features for your website to be fast and optimized. Jetpack takes care of your site’s security, performance, traffic growth, image optimization, website appearance and a lot more.

It also features strengthened distribution which automatically shares your published content to third party services like search engines which also helps to increase your reach and traffic. Additionally, it creates sitemaps so that search engines can easily index your website. Further, it protects your site’s security from brute force attacks through monitoring and instantly notifies if attention is needed.

2. Google XML Sitemaps (FREE)

For Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, Google XML Sitemaps is a very useful plugin for WordPress. It helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo to better index your site with a special XML sitemap.

Once you activate the plugin, it will automatically create an XML sitemap for your site which enables it to index. A sitemap allows the search engine bots view the complete structure of your website and collect the results more efficiently and with accuracy. It also notifies the major search engines every time you publish something on your website.

3. Social Icons (FREE)

With social media platforms taking over in recent years for being an effective medium of content marketing, it is essential to use this platform in optimized form. With more number of people using social media these days, both news and information is curated through these platforms which needs to be paid attention to. To support and boost your social media marketing, you can use a social media plugin like Social Icons.   

Social Icons is a free WordPress plugin. It provides a convenient way to display popular social icons on your website with options to add social media icons to the pages or the posts through widgets or shortcodes. It offers customization options such as, resizing of the social media icons, icon backgrounds, drag and drop icon sorting, etc. You use use hundreds of popular social media platforms through this plugin given it’s easy-to-use design.

4. BJ Lazy Load (FREE)

Images are tricky – if your website is image dependent then it might take hours to load. This annoys users and might result into higher bouncing rates for your site. BJ Lazy Load solves this quite easily.

With a placeholder, the plugin replaces all your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images and content iframes. It then loads the content as it gets close to entering the browser screen. It displays the content (images) only when a user scrolls the page. Hence, your site loads faster as well as it saves bandwidth. Further, it works with text widgets, embedded videos from YouTube, Vimeo etc. and can also help with website performance optimization and SEO.

5. W3 Total Cache (FREE)

W3 Total Cache improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing download times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration. It is currently the only web host agnostic WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework recommended by countless web developers and web hosts.

W3 helps in improving search engine result page rankings, especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL, browser caching, conversion rates, overall site performance  as well as optimized pages, reduced page loading time, web server performance which helps sustain high traffic periods. It also can provide up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds.

WordPress can open a world of opportunities through incredibly diverse themes and plugins. These not only makes your website content pretty amazing, but accessible and organized. With options for countless free plugins, it will fit right into your budget too.

Dive in today!