20 Incredibly Popular WordPress Plugins You Need to Know About

Since WordPress is beginner-friendly and flexible, it is the perfect platform for creating any type of website. However, there are certain things this Content Management System (CMS) can’t do by default, so you might struggle to add specific features.

Fortunately, the larger WordPress community has created a solution with plugins. These are add-ons you can install on your WordPress site to include new features and functionality. Out of the thousands of available plugins, there’s likely a version available that can meet your needs.

This article will explain what plugins are and how to find the best ones for your WordPress website. Then, we’ll give you a list of 20 essential options. Let’s get started!

An Introduction to WordPress Plugins

The core WordPress platform includes many useful features that make building and running a website simple — even for complete beginners. However, it can only do so much. You may find you want more options or functionality than WordPress core can provide on its own, which is where plugins come in.

WordPress plugins are pieces of add-on software you can download and install on your site. They provide additional features, which could be slight changes or an entire suite of options:

With the right plugin, you can add nearly anything to your site, including contact forms, an online store, or extra security features. You can even use plugins to boost conversions and generate leads!

There are thousands of plugins to choose from at various price points. Before we dive into where to find them, let’s dig a little deeper into why they’re so important.

Why Plugins Are Useful Additions to Your WordPress Site

As we’ve explained, WordPress is a powerful and flexible solution right out of the box. However, plugins are ideal for creating a truly memorable and unique site. Whether you’re running a blog or a huge e-commerce site, you can find plugins to fit your individual needs.

Here are some ways plugins can benefit your WordPress site:

• Add the targeted features and functionality your site needs
• Make the practical aspects of building a website easier (e.g., page-builder plugins)
• Improve site safety and performance

What’s more, WordPress’ thriving community means there are many excellent free or low-cost plugin options. Therefore, you don’t have to break the bank to improve your site. As long as you select the right plugins, there’s really no reason not to take advantage of all their benefits.

How to Find and Choose the Best WordPress Plugins

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of adding plugins to your WordPress website, it’s time to explain how to do it! With so many options, it’s crucial to make your selections carefully. Poorly designed or older plugins can slow down or even break your site.

When searching for the best plugins to suit your needs, you’ll want to look for the following things:

• Specific features or functionalities that match your goals
• Positive user reviews and ratings (a popular plugin isn’t necessarily better, but it’s a good sign)
• The plugin’s price and plan options
• Recent updates (in general, be wary of anything that’s gone longer than six months without an update)

When searching for plugins, we recommend starting with the official WordPress.org Plugin Directory. It has a myriad of excellent options and displays all the features you need to make an informed choice.

Once you’ve found a plugin you’d like to try out, just install and activate it on your site. Keep in mind that it’s best to only add one plugin at a time. This way, you can identify the cause of any issues that arise.

Related: Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Plugins

20 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Website

Although you can peruse directories, storefronts, and developers’ websites to find plugins, the thousands of available options can be overwhelming. To make your decision easier, we’ve compiled a list of our favorites.

The following plugins are highly recommended for beginners and advanced users alike. Each tool meets the criteria we discussed in the previous section and offers unique features.

In short, if you’re creating a new WordPress website or sprucing up an old site, these are the first plugins you’ll want to check out!

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1. Yoast SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategy that, when followed correctly, can help your site rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. However, it can be challenging to remember its complicated rules and guidelines.

Fortunately, Yoast SEO provides an easy way to hone in on keywords and customize how your posts appear on search engine results pages:

Key Features:

• Optimize your search engine results with titles, URLs, and meta descriptions
• Analyze your pages and posts and find areas for improvement
• Control which of your site pages are displayed in Google search results

The great thing about Yoast SEO is that it uses a simple traffic light system. Your post or page is good to go with a green light, while yellow and red require more adjustments. This is the same process for editing your post’s SEO or readability.

Price: The core WordPress plugin is free, but Yoast SEO Premium costs $99 per year.

Related: How to Improve SEO Rankings

2. Jetpack

Jetpack is an all-in-one plugin created by the developers of WordPress (Automattic). It offers a suite of features activated on a module-by-module basis. These modules include contact forms, site security, user engagement options, site backups, and much more:

Key Features:

• Automatic backups and one-click restorations
• Protection against brute force attacks
• Advanced site analytics and social sharing tools

Using Jetpack, you can access vital security features for practically all site owners. The free plugin provides ‘set and forget’ brute force protection and downtime monitoring to ensure your site performs at its highest level.

While it’s not as comprehensive as Yoast SEO, Jetpack’s offerings are ideal for people dipping their toes into SEO. It lets you customize how your titles, taglines, posts, pages, and archives appear in search engines. You can also write a custom meta description and preview how your content will look on social media.

Price: While Jetpack Professional is normally $299 per year, you can get it free with our DreamPress Plus and DreamPress Pro hosting plans. You’ll have access to both a fully managed hosting system and a comprehensive set of features to secure your site.

3. Akismet

Eradicating spam is crucial for securing your website, so it’s important to find tools that monitor comments and emails. Akismet is another Automattic plugin that filters malicious links and irrelevant content from your site by checking against a global, constantly maintained database:

Key Features:

• Checks all comments on your site automatically and filters out potential spam
• Lets you review what’s been marked as spam so that you can correct the plugin if necessary
• Evaluates contact form submissions to ensure you receive legitimate responses

Although you can manually moderate your comments for spam, this process can be time-consuming. With Akismet, you can have a reliable solution that automatically blocks 99.9% of spam. Therefore, visitors can engage with your content without wading through irrelevant advertisements or repeat messages.

Price: The plugin is free for personal bloggers, but you’ll need a subscription if your site operates as a commercial venture. The good news is you can access this with one of our DreamPress plans.

4. WooCommerce

Something the core WordPress platform doesn’t include by default is the ability to create an e-commerce store. That’s where WooCommerce comes in. This plugin enables you to create an online store and start selling physical and digital products:

Key Features:

• Customize your storefront with themes and product blocks
• Include multiple payment and shipping options
• Access a wide range of features via extensions

Once you launch your online store with WooCommerce, you can monitor its performance using a customizable central dashboard. It even provides a mobile app so that you can manage your sales on the go.

Price: The core plugin is free, but its developers (the folks at Automattic) also offer many premium extensions that can provide additional functionality for your store.

5. Elementor

If you’re just starting your website, you can benefit from using a page builder plugin such as Elementor. This tool has a drag-and-drop editor to design your website’s appearance on the front end. You can also import pre-designed pages, blocks, and templates to speed up the creation process:

Key Features:

• Over 40 free widgets
• Performance improvements with reduced CSS and Javascript files
• Ready-to-go website kits and templates

With Elementor, it’s easy to design your dream website. The drag-and-drop editor is simple for beginners. Still, professionals can also benefit from Elementor’s custom CSS, animations, and motion effects.

Price: Elementor provides a free version, but Elementor Pro starts at $49 per year. It includes over 300 templates, a theme builder, and premium support.

6. Gutenberg Blocks and Template Library by Otter

Gutenberg is WordPress’s built-in editor for designing posts and pages. While it does have some pre-designed block patterns, it might have more limited functionality than you were hoping for.

Fortunately, the Gutenberg Blocks and Template Library extends the features of the Block Editor:

Key Features:

• Many block types, including the Maps Block, Product Review Block, About Author Block, and more
• Over 50 different block templates
• Built-in responsive settings to control color, animation, and typography

This plugin could be the best option if you want to use the Block Editor but need more unique layouts and ready-to-use block sections. Even though you’ll receive more features, the Gutenberg Block and Template Library plugin is lightweight, so it won’t impact page speed.

Price: Gutenberg Blocks and Template Library is completely free to download.

7. UpdraftPlus

Since your website could face crashes, hacks, or poor updates, you’ll want a plugin that can save your data. UpdraftPlus is arguably the most popular free backup solution available, with over three million active installations. Its services can reliably protect your hard-earned investment and prevent frustrating data loss:

Key Features:

• Back up WordPress files and database to remote storage
• Access cloud storage options including Dropbox, Google Drive, UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, Openstack Swift, and email
• Schedule automatic backups

Compared with other backup plugins, UpdraftPlus provides more features. This plugin not only backs up your website but can restore your information with just one click. Due to its many cloud storage options, you also don’t need to worry about backups using server resources.

Price: Although UpdraftPlus is free, UpdraftPlus Premium starts at $42 per year and supports site migration, restoration from other plugin backups, and advanced reporting features.

8. WP Super Cache

As you may have noticed, the folks at Automattic develop many functional yet crucial plugins for WordPress. A lot of the time, they also offer them for free.

WP Super Cache is no exception. This plugin caches your pages as static HTML files, with minimal setup required:

Key Features:

• Three different ways of caching files: Simple, Expert, and WP-Cache caching
• Basic CDN support with an integrated OSSDL CDN off-linker
• Customizable garbage collection settings

WP Super Cache works by compressing heavy WordPress PHP scripts into static HTML files. This process can improve your website speed and allow users to access your content quickly. Plus, it offers three different caching modes to choose from, each increasing the amount of customization you can make.

Price: WP Super Cache is free to use.

9. Proxy Cache Purge

Proxy Cache Purge is a plugin developed by (and used on) DreamHost sites, so its quality is assured. In essence, it acts as an interface with your cache proxy.

After you update your content, Proxy Cache Purge requests your proxy service to delete its cache. This setup can enable those changes to load quickly for front-end users:

Key Features:

• Requests purges for entire cache or specific pages (depending on your modification)
• Can temporarily disable the cache during development
• Enables plugins to hook into the purge actions

You can administer the plugin via WP-CLI or manually purge the entire cache in your WordPress dashboard (which will also happen when you switch themes).

However, not every change will delete the entire cache. Only certain pages will purge when you edit a post, page, or custom post type.

Price: Proxy Cache Purge is a free plugin available in the WordPress directory.

10. Contact Form by WPForms

You’ll likely want your site’s visitors to contact you, whether to share their thoughts on your content or to sign up for your services. Including a contact form directly on your site is a convenient way to make that possible.

With a plugin such as Contact Form by WPForms, you can add custom forms to your pages so that users can submit precisely the information you need:

Key Features:

• Lets you create and customize contact forms and insert them into your pages and posts
• Makes it easy to add unique fields to your forms
• Enables you to include a reCAPTCHA solution to combat form spam

Contact Form by WPForms is a powerful form-building tool that’s also extremely easy to use.

This plugin features a drag-and-drop interface to quickly create all manner of forms on your site. It also features several pre-built templates to get you up and running in a flash.

Price: This practical plugin comes free with all DreamHost plans.

11. Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress

These days, it’s challenging to build a successful online presence without the strategic use of social media. Fortunately, integrating your social media with WordPress is simple with Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress.

Using this plugin, you can add buttons to your site that encourage visitors to share your content via their social media accounts:

Key Features:

• Add social media sharing buttons to your posts and pages.
• Choose from 55 ready-to-use templates, plus a custom template builder and various button styles and animations.
• Integrates the tool with over 50 different social media networks.

What’s more, this plugin provides a wealth of additional features, such as social sharing, subscribe forms, and advanced analytics. Easy Social Share Buttons can also integrate with Elementor and the WordPress Block Editor to apply social buttons and forms anywhere on your website.

Price: Lifetime licenses for this plugin start at $22.

12. The Events Calendar

Although plenty of plugins can list events on your website, The Events Calendar is one of the best. This easy-to-use tool enables you to fully customize your calendar and continue to update it as your events change:

Key Features:

• Create events and add them to one organized calendar
• Enable users to view your calendar in multiple ways
• Use additional features, such as a search function and maps

With The Events Calendar, you’ll have everything you need to organize and manage your upcoming events. However, you can also access advanced features if required. By browsing the free Extension Library, you can extend the capabilities of the core WordPress plugin.

Price: The Events Calendar is free to download, but The Events Calendar Pro offers more custom fields, widgets, and views. This premium version starts at $99 per year.

13. Slider Revolution

Slider Revolution is another popular plugin included in many premium WordPress themes. It helps you spruce up your site’s design by creating sliders, carousels, etc.

Slider Revolution offers many options to display your images, posts, videos, and other content in a visually appealing and user-friendly manner:

Key Features:

• Includes a visual, drag-and-drop page editor to simplify the design process
• Lets you add sliders, carousels, and hero scenes to your site
• Offers a front-page designer so that you can customize your home page

Price: Slider Revolution plans start at $29 per year for a regular license.

14. EWWW Image Optimizer

Using large or poorly-optimized images can slow down your site, hurt your user experience, and even drive some visitors away.

EWWW Image Optimizer is a powerful, useful tool that optimizes your site’s new and existing images. It does this so that the graphics have as little impact on website performance as possible:

Key Features:

• Automatically optimizes images and converts them into the best file format for performance
• Provides various compression options, such as pixel-perfect and high compression
• Includes security features like SSL encryption and free 30-day image backups

Price: EWWW Image Optimizer is a free WordPress plugin. However, it also offers premium plans starting at $7 per month.

15. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. When you use this tool, you can quickly and easily connect your site to the Google Analytics platform.

You’ll get a Google-specific dashboard right in your WordPress admin panel so that you can make data-driven decisions where they matter most:

Key Features:

• Provides custom reports for data regarding Audience, Behavior, Content, E-commerce, Forms, Search Console, and Custom Dimensions
• Offers easy integration with WooCommerce for product and sales tracking
• Enables use tracking for Google Adsense and affiliate links

MonsterInsights can also help you track your customers across multiple platforms and devices. It includes integration with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Another benefit is that, unlike other link-tracking plugins, MonsterInsights won’t slow your website down. All of these features can help you get a comprehensive picture of your site’s traffic so that you can make improvements.

Price: The core WordPress plugin is free, but MonsterInsights offers Pro, Plus, and Agency versions that start at $99.50 per year.

16. MemberPress

If you want to start selling digital products on your website, offering membership services can be effective. Using a plugin like MemberPress, you can provide exclusive access to certain content.

By creating a subscription site, you can profit from paywalls and subscription fees while building a loyal community:

Key Features:

• Create access rules to set up paywalls for online content
• Integrate the plugin with email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Drip
• Access diverse payment options and automated billing

MemberPress offers an easy way to customize your content and who has access to it. Using its timed content releases and content access expiration settings, you can keep visitors interested in your online courses, tutorials, and advice.

Price: The MemberPress plugin starts at $179 per year for the Basic plan. This can cover unlimited members and courses on one website.

17. SearchWP

Your WordPress website has a built-in search feature, but it lacks functionality. This can be detrimental to your user experience.

Fortunately, SearchWP offers a solution. While WordPress search ignores custom fields, the SearchWP plugin displays all of your data in relevant searches:

Key Features:

• Makes your website data searchable (including product details, documents, categories, and tags)
• Has an automatic theme integration
• Uses a Metrics Extension that collects information about your website’s search traffic

Ultimately, your online visitors want to find the content they came for. By enabling SearchWP, you can make it easier for users to navigate your website and search for relevant topics.

Price: SearchWP plans start at $99 per year for one license.

18. LiveChat

If you want to nail your customer service, consider making it easy for online visitors to contact you. A simple way to do this is by enabling LiveChat on your website.

After installation, you can answer customer questions while visitors browse your site. Plus, you can create automated messages, which can effectively answer common concerns:

Key Features:

• Creates a chat widget that appears at the bottom of your website
• Includes chat invitations to engage online visitors in real-time
• Integrates with page builders, e-commerce platforms, and third-party email marketing tools

When you provide customer support immediately when users enter your website, you seem more accessible and willing to help. Adding LiveChat to your homepage can encourage customers to complete purchases because you’ve eased any worries they might have had.

Price: Whether you run a small blog or large e-commerce site, LiveChat has a variety of plans for you to choose from. These start at $16 per month, billed annually.

19. Redirection

When making changes to your website, you may accidentally create broken links. However, you can use the Redirection plugin to redirect old content to a new URL.

Redirection makes it easy to manage all your redirects in one place, even if you’re not familiar with Apache or Nginx processes:

Key Features:

• Track 404 errors and implement many redirect types
• Migrate old permalinks to a new structure
• Add HTTP headers to your website

Price: This plugin is free.

20. Site Kit by Google

Often, the key to increasing your organic traffic is knowing more information about how people find your site. With Site Kit, you can access multiple Google products that provide insights into your audience metrics:

Key Features:

• Implements site analytics on your WordPress dashboard
• Provides metrics from Search Console, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, and more
• Integrates Google tools without editing your website’s source code

Google offers many free tools to analyze your website’s success. With Google Site Kit, all of these products are combined in your WordPress dashboard. This way, you can explore page speed, SEO, and audience analytics from one place.

Price: Google Site Kit is a free and open-source WordPress plugin.

The WordPress Plugin Directory Awaits

When extending your WordPress site, plugins should be your go-to option. They are generally easy to install and maintain through your dashboard. Best of all, you can find many of these tools for free in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Of course, the world’s top WordPress plugins won’t make much difference to your website if your host isn’t up to the challenge. Here at DreamHost, our hosting plans are optimized specifically for the WordPress platform. This setup can ensure a safe, secure, and seamless experience for your online visitors!

Power Your Website with DreamHost

We make sure your website is fast, secure and always up so your visitors trust you. Plans start at $1.99/mo.

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source https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/most-popular-wordpress-plugins/

How to Improve SEO Rankings

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of producing great content that ranks well in search engines. And how well search engines position your content is determined by a variety of reasons and algorithmic ranking factors.

Because of the ever-changing nature of those reasons and ranking factors, there will always be new concepts to explore and tactics to apply, but rest assured — many of SEO’s foundations and fundamentals are here to stay.

SEO can be intimidating, but we have great news — you don’t have to be an SEO expert to achieve impressive SEO results. Instead, apply these professional tips and tricks to help you compete online by breaking everything into actionable steps. Doing this will strengthen your strategy, boost your confidence, and help you reach your search result goals with greater success!

The Current State of SEO

The ways in which people use search engines changes constantly. The factors that were once important five years ago have the potential to be eclipsed by trends, new technology, and the different ways we interact with our online environments day-to-day.

Search engines like Google consistently shift their strategies for filtering and positioning the ranking of websites and pages, which means that a good SEO strategy should be adaptable and able to grow over time. In the past, a focus on keyword stuffing and comment backlinks would work very well, but now algorithms prefer to promote websites with strong user experiences and site optimization.

Revitalizing your SEO strategies and taking a more holistic approach can help to navigate the ever-changing search landscape. Here are some time-tested recommendations for doing just that.

Tips for Improving Rankings

When approaching SEO, breaking it down it categories – Experience, Performance, and Content – allows you to focus on specific areas and can provide some much-needed focus and clarity to the complexities that search engine optimization can present.

Below, with the help of our Pro Services team, we’ve put together a list of the most important areas of SEO to focus on and how to tackle them. These tips will strengthen your organic visibility and provide you with powerful search results and loads of organic traffic now and well into the future.

Experience

Core Web Vitals (CWV)

Google’s Core Web Vitals report shows you how your website is doing in several key performance areas. These specific metrics are determined by Google to be valuable for a user’s overall experience when visiting a webpage.

The Core Web Vitals Assessment is broken up into three specific website performance and user experience measurements:

• Page Load (First and Largest Contentful Paint or FCP/LCP)
• Time to Interactivity (First Input Delay or FID)
• Visual Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS)

Source: PageSpeed Insights

Once you run the report you can see how your website forms in these specific areas. These results are critically important to your organic presence, as poor scoring in one or more of these categories can negatively impact your search engine rankings.

It is important to note that while having a strong CWV Score is an important aspect of your SEO strategy, it will not necessarily send all of your web pages skyrocketing onto page 1. With over 200 ranking factors that can affect position in Search, it is just a piece (albeit an important one) of the overall SEO pie. Yum.

Other Important Experience Metrics

In addition to Core Web Vitals, Google is taking into consideration other key experience metrics that can influence a site’s ranking, including:

• Mobile-Friendliness
• Lack of obtrusive popups

Mobile-Friendliness

If you aren’t considering how your website runs on a mobile device, you can consider yourself a few steps behind and need to update your website and SEO strategy for mobile pronto. Today it is not optional but necessary to optimize your site for mobile as well as desktop browsing. This is called making your website responsive and includes factoring in both speed and usability since the goal is for your site to run optimally on any size screen or device.

When designing your website for desktop, consider if the links and popups will translate effectively to a mobile screen, will the site function seamlessly and still be intuitive to use? Thankfully, with site builders like WordPress, themes and plugins are created with a responsive design in mind. The key to minimizing errors in the process is to check your site consistently on several different devices to ensure everything is user-friendly and working how you intend it to.

Remove Obtrusive Popups

Building trust with your site visitors is a highly important aspect of implementing a smart SEO strategy. While popups are a common marketing tool that leads to some favorable results when used correctly, a site that features obtrusive popups in a poorly designed manner can quickly diminish the trust of your visitors in potentially detrimental ways that affect your website rankings and reputation.

Because nobody wants to visit a site with dozens of popups preventing them from engaging with content or slowing down their ability to go through a transaction process, eliminating any unnecessary popups is key. The best way to avoid this is to use page experience best practices. Optimize your site for usability, and speed, ensure overlays do not block content.

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Performance

Improve Your Technical SEO

Improving technical SEO refers to the process of ensuring that your website is compatible with technical and accessibility standards set by search engines. There are three main aspects of technical SEO to consider; page speed, mobile-friendliness, and security.

Both mobile friendliness and page speed are aspects of your technical SEO that factor into the experience of your website visitors and will usually be addressed when looking into your Core Web Vitals. When looking at your site’s security, one of the main factors to consider is HTTPS. Search engines and users alike very much prefer web experiences to be fully encrypted and secured with an SSL Certificate, especially when collecting sensitive personal information from its users.

It is important to scan for broken links when considering your website’s page experience, but it is also important to crawl for 404 errors in relation to the technical side of SEO. The best way to address this is to ask Google to recrawl your URL’s anytime you make a change or adjustment to your site. It generally takes a few days for Google to conduct the inspection, but be patient and monitor the progress using Index Status Report or URL Inspection Tool.

Utilize third-party tools to review your page experience to help guide you and your technical SEO strategy. Online tools such as PageSpeed Insights, GT Metrix, Pingdom, and Lighthouse can all be helpful in providing these actionable insights.

As you continue to further apply your technical SEO, be sure to take into consideration optimizing your website images by resizing and compressing them before adding to your site, or use a WordPress plugin to automatically optimize the images for you. Pages will load faster and more efficiently when correctly optimized, you can also enable lazy-loading to strategically identify resources as non-blocking (non-critical) and load these only when needed.

Optimize Your Site for Speed

Overall performance and site speed go hand in hand. So much of technical SEO optimization is focused on ensuring every aspect of your site works properly to keep up with speed expectations. The importance of maintaining fast page load times bears repeating. As a site is not solely viewed on a desktop computer with a stable wifi connection, it needs to be optimized to load quickly on every device and browser and consider certain factors that could diminish site performance and speed.

We have written extensively around the importance of this broad SEO factor and encourage you to explore more comprehensive ways to speed up your site in general, including taking a look at our full series of tutorials on performance optimization.

Related: Boost SEO on Your WordPress Website

Use Schema to Enhance Search Results

Schema is structured data that can help web browsers and search engines gain a deeper understanding of your page’s content. By adding this markup, you can improve how your website displays (and ultimately ranks) in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

It is recommended that Schema be used to enhance content such as creative works, events, recipes, organizations, people, and products. For example, a search result using Schema will display richer information than one without.

As you can see in the example, one of the results displays ratings, images, and more. You can manually add this kind of markup to your posts, or you can use one of the many tools available to test and improve your structured data. Fortunately, if you’re not prepared to tinker with the HTML of your posts, you can employ a dedicated plugin to help you take advantage of this SEO functionality.

Additionally, you can review Google’s own structured data guidelines, as well as numerous reports offered in their webmaster tools. Ultimately, Schema is a vital addition to your website if you want search engines to read your products’ details rather than view your content as non-descript text.

Content

Using Video to Enhance Your SEO Strategy

An important thing to acknowledge in regards to SEO is that it is not all about text. YouTube ranks as the second largest search engine, and if you aren’t taking that into consideration, you are leaving out a huge chunk of SEO and content opportunities.

The easiest way to start incorporating video into your SEO strategy is to simply include videos on your website. Search engines consider the quality of your content and the length of time users stick around as ranking factors. By using video, you can improve both metrics.

 

Look To Your Competitors for Ranking Opportunities

Your competitors can help provide comparative insight that could help you prioritize different SEO strategies and pick up on any emerging areas you might have missed. One way to utilize your competitors for your SEO benefit is to run a Content Gap Analysis.

Using tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, and SpyFu, you can quickly understand what topics your competitors are writing about and what keywords they are attempting to rank for. You can then easily compare where there are areas of opportunity, or “gaps” in your own content strategy.

Related: 20 Ways to Come Up With New Content Ideas

Ramp Up Your investment in High-Quality Content

While tips, tricks, and tools can all be incredibly helpful towards building a strong SEO strategy, prioritizing and investing in high-quality content is the number one most important thing you can do. Some of the base foundational content that this investment should include are:

• Structured plans to produce more blog content
• Continuously looking for opportunities to expand your core page count (especially the products and services pages)
• Create more videos to feed into your YouTube presence
• Send more content via your email lists as a way to leverage your owned media and pull in more website traffic.

The quality of your content matters in your marketing strategy, because it will increase your trust and reputation amongst your visitors. Being a trusted source for content, delivering information that people want to engage with increases the chances of content being shared across social media platforms. While volume is important, quality is going to be the defining factor in how the content impacts your SEO.

Rankings Within Reach

As SEO professionals, we understand better than anyone that grasping an expert level knowledge of SEO strategy is a lofty goal, but by breaking your strategy down into manageable bites, and utilizing every online toolkit, resource, and tip available to you, laying out a highly effective SEO strategy is available at even the most beginner level.

And should you need additional help, there are always seasoned experts available on our Pro Services team.

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The post How to Improve SEO Rankings appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

source https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/how-to-rank-higher-seo-trends/

WordPress 6.0: Making Gutenberg “Guten-Better”

Just because something is already pretty great doesn’t mean that there isn’t ever room for further improvements and refinements. Take WordPress 5.9 for example. It was released on January 25, 2022, with a whole fleet of new features and refinements.

Dubbed “Joséphine,” the WordPress 5.9 release bounded forward with a number of updates intended to make the website creation and design experience much more friendly for end-users than any previous release. The hallmark features of Joséphine include:

• Full site editing controls when using a supported block-based theme
• Sitewide blocks that allow for additional customization
• Navigation blocks that allow for further flexibility with site menus
• The new, full site editing ready Twenty Twenty-Two theme
• Enhanced lazy loading performance for images
• Performance improvements to the Inserter, Block Themes, List View, and more

And yet, WordPress developers are already looking ahead to 6.0, and figuring out what new features it might boast.

The Future of WordPress

Early reports on WordPress 6.0 hint at even bigger advances and refinements. In a January 26, 2022, blog post, Matías Ventura, an engineer and designer who was the lead architect of the Gutenberg block editor for WordPress and co-designer of the Twenty Eleven default theme, laid out a preliminary, high-level roadmap for the next steps and general scope for the new release.

“The overall aim is to consolidate and expand the set of customization tools introduced in 5.9 for creating themes with blocks, with a special focus towards usability and refinement,” Ventura said. “This new release could be considered a conceptual wrap for Gutenberg: Phase 2. This doesn’t mean the customization phase would be concluded with it, but that its main features would have been established.”

For those of you who aren’t aware, Gutenberg is the name given to the controversial yet revolutionary block editor that was introduced alongside the release of WordPress 5.0 in December 2018. The Gutenberg project’s goal is to help even the most novice, non-developer users easily create and manipulate content in a way that WordPress’ previous editor could not. Gutenberg allows for building and editing impressive, media-rich pages using movable block elements such as paragraphs, images, lists, galleries, videos, audio, and more.

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The Gutenberg editor has three main components:

• Content: The content takes up most of the screen. You’ll see a visual preview of what everything should look like when a visitor is browsing your site. It’s not always 100% accurate, but the editor provides you with a rather good idea of the final layout.
• Top toolbar: The toolbar at the top helps you insert new blocks, undo or redo any edits you have made, and access other vital settings
• Sidebar: The sidebar contains two tabs. The Post tab lets you configure post-level settings such as categories, tags, the featured image, etc. The Block tab shows the settings for whatever block that you have selected.

Expanding upon the existing tools that were introduced with the Gutenberg release — and revisiting some previously considered and shelved features — are, as Ventura said in his blog post, ultimately the goal of developers as they look ahead to WordPress 6.0.

There are a wide number of ideas currently on the table, and Ventura laid many of them out in his roadmap.

On top of the WordPress 6.0 roadmap, the Gutenberg project itself has its own development roadmap, broken down into four phases. They are:

1. Easier Editing: Block-based content editing.
2. Customization: FSE, block patterns, block directory, block themes, and global styles.
3. Collaboration: Co-authoring content.
4. Multilingual: Implementation of multilingual sites.

As it stands, the Gutenberg project is currently working through Phase 2, Customization. And while work on Phase 2 won’t be over anytime soon, after WordPress 6.0 ships the talk is that the team may start work on Phase 3, Collaboration.

More Customization On the Way

The future looks bright and is full of possibilities when it comes to what these and further updates will offer WordPress users, according to Jason Cosper, the WordPress Product Advocate on the DreamPress team here at DreamHost.

“With Full Site Editing officially being released in WordPress 5.9, WordPress 6.0 looks to offer further refinements and improvements to the core site editing experience,” Cosper said. “6.0 means that WordPress users will move ever closer to not even needing one of the popular page building plugins like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Divi.”

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Website Builders

WordPress 6.0 Release Schedule

Have a look at the timeline below for the planned schedule for the development and eventual rollout of WordPress 6.0. Even more detail can be found on the WordPress core development blog.

• April 5, 2022: Live-streamed walkthrough
• April 12, 2022: Beta 1
• April 19, 2022: Beta 2
• April 26, 2022: Beta 3
• May 3, 2022: Release candidate 1
• May 10, 2022: Release candidate 2
• May 17, 2022: Release candidate 3
• May 23, 2022: Dry run for release of WordPress 6.0 and 24-hour code freeze
• May 24, 2022: WordPress 6.0 is released

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The post WordPress 6.0: Making Gutenberg “Guten-Better” appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

source https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/wordpress-6-0/

Decoding WordPress: An Introduction to Global Styles

WordPress blocks and Full-Site Editing (FSE) features make building and styling a successful website quick and easy.

Global Styles can help you unify the appearance of your WordPress site without having to edit single blocks or pages. So whether you want to change your background color or adjust the heading typography, you’ll be able to make your modifications in a single place, resulting in a more cohesive and all-around better User Experience (UX).

In this post, we’ll walk you through Global Styles. We’ll explain what they are, their benefits, and how the new features work. Then we’ll discuss how to use them to style your WordPress website. Let’s get started!

An Overview of WordPress Global Styles

Before working with Global Styles, it’s important to understand what they are and how they operate. This feature works in conjunction with theme.json, a new theme settings file. Developers can use theme.json to define defaults for a site as well as individual blocks. Gutenberg automatically applies this JSON when you place the file in the root directory of a block-based theme.

This file is one of the most useful tools of the new full site editor in WordPress 5.9. The file lets theme authors share Global Styles as well as Global Settings. WordPress reformats the data taken from these JSON objects and turns it into CSS. Then users can further customize the styles in the WordPress editor.

In previous iterations of the Gutenberg plugin, you had to register support for the style properties of a block before you were able to work with them in theme.json. Also, in classic themes and older versions, you had to use PHP to define things such as your color choices and fonts. Then you needed to add styles for the front and back end sides of your theme.

However, with the latest release, when you use a theme with the theme.json file in place, WordPress automatically adds the styles defined there to your stylesheet. You can use this system to add entirely new color palettes, change the typography of themes, and more.

Why Use WordPress Global Styles

No matter your skill level, you’ll likely find using Global Styles an intuitive and accessible experience. Overall, it can streamline the web design process by making it easier to change the look and feel of your site. If you’re a WordPress beginner, taking advantage of these Global Styles may mean that you won’t need to hire a developer in order to design your website. Sorry, developers.

On the flip side though, this new feature might be particularly useful for theme developers. That’s because Global Styles helps WordPress developers style blocks within the Block Editor. This can be highly advantageous, especially for new theme authors. It offers a variety of controls that minimize the need to create custom solutions for styling a site.

In other words, Global Styles simplifies theme development to a great degree. As a result, it can help developers avoid damaging design mistakes.

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Creating the theme.json File

The theme.json file contains two important parts: settings and styles. Settings refer to a list of global or contextual configuration values that determine how the editor and blocks behave. For example, it influences which controls are enabled by default, which controls are hidden from the User Interface (UI), the available color palette, typography settings, etc.

Styles handles the theme’s design language and enables theme authors to define elements such as:

• Font size
• Line height
• Background colors
• Link colors

If you want to create a theme.json file, you can make a new file of that name and then place it inside the root folder of your theme. All the contents of your file should be inserted inside two curly brackets: { }.

Next, you’ll use property names and values within double quotes and separated with a colon, for example:

{

"property-name": "value"

}

The property name can either be a setting or a block name. Below is an example of a very basic theme.json file:

{

    "version": 1,

    "settings": {},

    "styles": {},

    "customTemplates": {},

    "templateParts": {}

}

Version 1 of the theme.json format is the earliest, most stable version. However, version 2 is used starting with WordPress 5.9. While the version section must be the first to follow the opening curly bracket, the subsequent sections can be placed in any order.

As we mentioned, the two main sections of the file are Settings and Styles. So let’s have a closer look at the presets for each.

Settings Presets

Presets refer to the default controls as well as any custom CSS properties and are generated by the values in theme.json. Some of the main preset categories include:

• Color
• Typography
• Layout
• Spacing

Categories can also have subcategories. For example, a subcategory of Color could be Color Palette:

{

"version": 2,

"settings": {

"color": {

"palette": [

{

Each preset also creates a custom CSS property using the “–wp–preset–{preset-category}–{preset-slug}” naming convention.

There are a ton of presets and examples that you can use to create your theme.json file, so we won’t go over all of them here. However, you can refer to the WordPress Handbook for more detailed guidance.

Styles Presets

Styles presets control the styles of objects within blocks. For example, the following would be a way to use the hex value for a background and a Global Styles preset for the text color:

{

        "version": 2,

"settings": { ... },

"styles": {

"color": {

"background": "#FBF",

"text": "var(--wp--preset--color--purple)"

}

}

}

If we wanted to change the heading color of a block, it would look similar to this:

{

        "version": 2,

"settings": {...},

"styles": {

...,

               "blocks": {

             "core/heading": {

     "color": {

      "text": "var(--wp--preset--color--blue)"

     }

Again, there are nearly infinite examples and ways to use presets for block styles. You can refer to WordPress documentation for a full breakdown.

There are also Template and Template parts sections. These include the base files of your theme, such as index.html, as well as sections to organize and structure your theme.

How to Style Your WordPress Site Using Global Styles

If you’re looking for a beginner-friendly way to use Global Styles to style your website, you can use the Global Styles interface with a WordPress block theme. Note that you will only have access to the Styles interface with WordPress 5.9 or higher.

Related: How to Create a Brand Style Guide for Your Website

Choosing a Block-Based Theme

First, you’ll need a block-based theme. To find one, you can navigate to the WordPress Theme Directory from your admin dashboard by browsing to Appearance > Themes > Add New. Next, you can click on the Feature Filter and select Full Site Editing, followed by Apply:

Once you find a WordPress theme you like, you can hover your mouse over it, then select Install followed by Activate. We’ll be using Twenty Twenty-Two, which may already be installed if you are using WordPress 5.9 or later.

Accessing the Styles Interface

Next, head over to your Theme Editor (Appearance > Editor). In the top right-hand corner of the screen, you’ll see a half-shaded circle, which represents the Styles panel:

When you first click on it, it will present a Styles Welcome Guide. If you need access to this in the future, you can find it by clicking on the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner and selecting Welcome Guide.

The preview window shows you how the current style of your theme looks. Under the Styles panel, you’ll find settings for:

• Typography
• Colors
• Layout
• Blocks

Let’s take a closer look at each.

Typography

Under Typography, you can manage the typography settings for two elements: Text and Links.

You can change the font family and size:

You can also adjust the line height and select a font-weight. You’ll have these same options for your links. When you’re done, remember to save your changes.

Colors

Under Colors, you’ll find the default color presets that come with your theme. To create your own color palettes, you can enter the HEX value numbers or use the drag-and-drop color picker to generate your preferred colors:

You can also rename the colors to something more identifiable or descriptive than the standard hexadecimal alphanumeric values. You can add custom gradients, apply duo-tone filters to images, and more.

Next, you can modify the colors for three main elements: Background, Text, and Links. You can also select any of these elements to customize the styling. The changes will be applied instantly as you are editing.

Layout

Under Layout, you can adjust padding and other elements. This is straightforward and can be very useful when you need to make a minor adjustment (for example, for the sake of page symmetry).

Blocks

Finally, you can change the appearance of individual blocks. After you select Blocks from the Styles panel, you’ll find a list of blocks on your site.

Let’s say you wanted to change the style of your Heading block. You can select Heading from the list, then adjust its Colors and Typography settings:

When you’re done, you can click on Save. If you ever want to revert back to the theme styles you had before making changes, you can navigate to the Styles panel, click on the three vertical dots, and then select Reset to defaults.

A Better Way to Use and Style WordPress

WordPress is continuously working to improve the editing experience for its users. Now, thanks to Global Styles, theme development has just become that much easier for both beginners and seasoned professionals.

As discussed in this post, you can create a theme.json file to apply Global Styles configurations to your theme. You can also use the Styles editor with a block-based theme to customize the appearance of your site. All this makes designing a successful website a breeze.

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The post Decoding WordPress: An Introduction to Global Styles appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

source https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/wordpress-global-styles/