Author: Oyedele Tioluwani

Every business website owner wishes to have a flourishing website with good performance. And what better way to achieve this than to have the necessary Strapi plugins that can improve the performance of your website?

If you already have a business website or are considering creating one and need components to enhance it, Strapi has you covered. In this article, I'll share the must-have plugins for your business website developed by the Strapi community.

What is Strapi?

Strapi is the leading open-source, customizable, headless CMS used to create websites, mobile apps, APIs, etc. It can be used as a backend system to manage your content and can also be combined with various front-end technologies such as React, Vue, and others.

It is an open-source system with features that allow you to create or customize your API even if you have no prior knowledge of backend development. You can customize your API to your satisfaction with Strapi.

Strapi Installation

You must have the following items before you can begin installing Strapi:

Node.js v14 or 16
NPM/Yarn

If you already have these installed on your system, you can proceed by running the following command:

For Npm:

npx create-strapi-app@latest my-project --quickstart

For Yarn:

yarn create-strapi-app my-project --quickstart

The Strapi app will launch instantly in your browser when the process has been completed.

What are Plugins?

Plugins are software components that developers add to an existing computer program. They are programs that enable your software/website to meet your specific needs. They are also known as add-ons or extensions.

Plugins are beneficial because:

They increase the power of your software/website.
They enable your websites to do things that they would not usually be able to do, i.e., they expand their functionalities without requiring you to compose or modify any code.

The Strapi Marketplace

The official marketplace for Strapi plugins is the Strapi Market. These plugins were developed by the Strapi team, technology/solution partners, and even individual community members. It is a place where users can access all plugins. Every member is free to submit a plugin for review. After that, the approved plugins are listed on the marketplace.

You can visit the plugin resource page here if you want to create a plugin. You can also read the blog posts listed below, which provide thorough instructions on how to make your Strapi plugins:

8 Must-Have Strapi Plugins for Your Corporate Website

Let's explore some Strapi plugins essential for your business website.

1. Awesome SEO

Awesome SEO allows you to view the results of your website's SEO analysis. As we all know, SEO analysis shows your website's strengths and weaknesses, and with this plugin, you can directly access that.

It can also configure your website's URL link in Strapi. The structure of your URL link can affect the security of your website, and you can easily set up yours in Strapi with this plugin.

As a website owner, reviewing your page and checking for SEO errors is critical; the Awesome SEO plugin can help with this. You can view errors in your content types and SEO on your website and gain direct access to Strapi content to fix these errors.

As the name suggests, it is an awesome plugin you should have for your business website.

To learn more about this plugin, you can check out the marketplace page.

2. Measurement Protocol

Measurement Protocol allows your website to send data to Google Analytics, allowing you to learn more about your company's website visitors and how they use it.

The Google Analytics service is essential for your website because analyzing the data can help you improve your website performance. However, it can only function if you connect it to your website.

With this plugin, you can send data and connect to Google Analytics servers. This enables users to track how users engage with their business's website from any HTTP-enabled environment. Remarkably, this makes it simple to track server-to-server interactions.

A website that cannot connect to Google Analytics servers is limited. An ability like this is required to improve the performance of your website, and this plugin provides it.

3. Internationalization (i18n)

Internationalization is the process of developing software adaptable to various languages and regions. It is designing your website to be easily adapted to meet users' needs from different countries.

Internationalization (i18n) enables Strapi users to manage, generate, and distribute localized content in multiple languages known as 'locales.'

An adequately localized website can bring better SEO results, allowing you to reach a larger audience.

Admin panel users can create multiple localized versions of their content, and developers can build localized developments by getting and consuming the appropriate content based on the audience's country/language.

4. GoogleAuth

Google Auth lets you quickly enable Google Authentication for your website's visitors. It validates your visitors' identities before granting them access to your website, ensuring the security of your website.

This plugin uses the official Google Auth library, which provides numerous methods for enabling Google Authentication, and this plugin works directly with it.

As a result, you can quickly provide a vital service such as authentication, and even JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication is possible. It also allows you to blend with Google APIs, which means you can integrate your website with Google services.

5. EZ Forms

EZ Forms enables you to easily customize forms from the front-end, reject spam, send notifications, and store data in your database.

We're all aware that allowing visitors to contact you is essential for any business website. Still, this information can also make your website vulnerable to spam emails and messages, which is where this plugin can help.

EZ forms provide a straightforward and quick method for combining forms with notifications without requiring a stressful setup.

Web forms serve as a means of communication between the website's owner and its visitors because they allow you to know details about your visitors (name, email address, etc.), serve as a means for your visitors to contact you, and provide feedback, to name a few.

You can easily embed web forms to capture information, promote communication, and store necessary information about your website in your database.

6. Rest Cache

Rest Cache allows you to cache HTTP requests, saving the response associated with a request and reusing it for successive bids.

HTTP caching is an essential aspect of website optimization. It improves the speed of your website, and a website's speed is a significant factor contributing to its performance.

No one wants to visit a website that takes a long time to load, and because previous requests are saved, it returns to get it when the request is made. That is the function of HTTP caching on your website, and the Rest Cache plugin performs it. It is also inspired by varnish cache (a powerful web application accelerator that speeds up a website). It speeds up and improves the performance of your website.

According to the plugin's structure, the cached content is stored by a provider, such as an in-memory provider, a file system, or any other custom provider. You can specify what to cache and how long responses should be cached. When the related Content-Type is updated, the cache is nullified, so you never have to worry about old data.

7. Import Export Entries

As the name suggests, Import Export Entries facilitates importing and exporting data from and to your database with a few clicks. We are in an era where data is required to stay competitive, even in the business world. As a result, the need for frequent use of data, importing and exporting data, increases, making a plugin like Import Export Entries valuable.

Databases, as we all know, are a group of data or information structured for storage, adjustment, or retrieval. Having them on your website means you're dealing with data, and this plugin makes working with data easier by allowing you to store or retrieve data from your database.

Here are things this plugin does as regards working with data:

Import and export data directly from the Content Manager.
Import and export data from CSV and JSON files, as well as by typing raw text, depending on user permissions.
Import contents into your content type, i.e., the structure of the page your website would display, which could be either single or multiple.
Download files or copy exported data to the clipboard.
Use Content Manager filters and sorting to filter and sort data.

All of these are possible with the Import Export Entries plugin. A plugin that helps you deal with data for your website is essential.

8. CKEditor 5

Are you looking for a plugin to help you customize your website? Do you want to add specific designs to your website to make it more visually appealing? The CKEditor 5 plugin does all these.

CKEditor 5 is a plugin that allows you to replace the default Strapi WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. The WYSIWYG editor is an interface for editing and modifying the contents of a page on your website.

It has several helpful default plugins for styling texts, images, tables, and other elements. Because it's a website editor, you can select a color for font styling that isn't identified in the preset palette.

In the configuration, you can specify the language of choice for the user interface or the content; by default, it will use the language designated in the user profile if that language is supported.

The structure of your website and how it appears to your users is one of the keys to having many visitors to boost your website's performance. Nobody would stay on a boring website for long or visit it frequently. Everyone values quality, so the ability to customize your website is advantageous to all website owners.

Conclusion

This article highlighted eight must-have plugins to improve the quality of your business website and its performance. I hope this article was helpful; if you require additional information, such as the installation of these plugins and other information regarding them or other plugins, please visit the Strapi marketplace.