10 Must Have WordPress Plugins
A good plugins has the power to help you to skyrocket the success of your business online. With the right suite of plugins incorporated into your backend, you can dramatically (and instantaneously) improve the functionality, aesthetics, and efficiency of your site both for yourself and your viewers.
So here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the WordPress plugins that can help take your site from good to great. I’ve included options for everything from caching the image optimization to security and more.
Really Simple SSL (Freemium)
Here are plenty of free SSL certificates available, but moving your entire site to HTTPS to avoid the “Not Secure” warnings Google is adding to all non-secure websites can be tough if you’re not sure what you’re doing. The good news is you can use the best WordPress SSL plugin, Really Simple SSL, for free.
Features:
- Automatic Redirection — This 1-click solution redirects and updates all old URLs to reflect the change to a secure site.
- Easy to Use — Handles everything that comes with migrating your site to HTTPS.
- Won’t Slow You Down — It’s a super lightweight plugin.
Wordfence Security (Freemium)
Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that was built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe. Rounded out by a suite of additional features, Wordfence is the most comprehensive security option available.
Features:
- WordPress core file integrity verification and repair.
- Malware, virus, and backdoor scanning.
- A firewall that includes rate limiting, blocking fake Google crawlers, IP whitelisting and IP blocking.
- Real-time traffic that includes Google Crawlers, RSS feed readers and all other crawlers and bots. (Google Analytics does not include this data.)
- Email alerts of warnings and critical problems.
- Brute force hacking protection.
- And a whole lot more.
Yoast SEO (Freemium)
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugin of all time. Out of all the WordPress SEO plugins, Yoast offers the most comprehensive solution with all the features and tools that you need to improve your on-page SEO.
SEO helps you get more visitors from search engines to your website. While WordPress is SEO friendly out of the box, there is so much more you can do to increase your website traffic using SEO best practices.
With Yoast SEO, you’ll get templates for titles and meta descriptions, so you can learn how to craft this information according to SEO best practices. Yoast SEO also analyzes your content for both readability and keywords, so you can balance high-quality content with SEO.
Features:
- Sitemap Help – Helps you create an automatically updated XML sitemap for your website (like Google XML Sitemaps).
- Previews – Check out your content’s search snippet so you can see what people searching the web will see.
- Visual Help — Gives you a green light when your content is SEO optimized.
- Tons of Helpful Tools — You can add meta tags, set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content and Google penalties, and integrate with Google Search Console so you can see how search engines are indexing your site (and fix any crawl errors that exist).
Akismet (Freemium)
As a preloaded plugin with most WordPress installs, this is one of the first that you should take advantage of.
Akismet filters out your comment spam for you, so you can focus on more important things.
he plugin provides a status history for each comment so that you can learn which comments were found spammy by Akismet or the moderator.
Moderators also can view the number of approved comments for each user, see the URLs in the comment body and remove the suspicious links.
The plugin is free for the personal site and blogs while you have to subscribe to its monthly plans for commercial sites. The premium plans provide advanced security solution besides spam protection.
Features:
- Filtering spam manually is confusing and time-consuming. Time spent dealing with spam is time stolen from the business of your site.
- They have kept 497,579,218,430 pieces of spam off the web, averaging about 7,500,000 per hour. That means we’re stopping almost twice as much spam as there are people in Los Angeles every single hour.
W3 Total Cache (Freemium)
WordPress caching is one of the best ways to improve website performance. The general idea of caching is storing the website data temporarily in the cache so that it loads faster the next time the user opens the same page. Cache is a place to store something temporarily in the computing environment.
To enable caching in WordPress, you can use WordPress caching plugins. Caching plugins will cache your posts and pages as static HTML files which are served to the users. This reduces page loading time drastically and helps to optimize the overall site performance. Additionally, enhanced site-speed will profoundly impact your site SEO.
Features:
- Speeds up Your Site – With this caching solution, (easily the world’s best WordPress minifying plugin alongside WP Super Cache) you can serve compressed and cached files to site visitors, reducing the load time on your server and improving overall site speed.
- Save Bandwidth – W3 Total Cache saves you bandwidth and minifies HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and feeds.
Contact Form 7 (Free)
Known as one of the best contact form plugins, this tool is simple, flexible and able to handle all of your needs.
You can create multiple contact forms and manage through this plugin. No need for extra coding with the Contact Form 7 plugin, as the form and mail contents can be easily customized through the settings.
Contact Form 7 also supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet filtering to help with spam.
Features:
- Create and manage multiple contact forms
- Easily customize form fields
- Use simple markup to alter mail content
- Insert forms into any pages or posts using Shortcode
- Plugin supports Akismet spam filtering, Ajax-powered submitting, and CAPTCHA
- Lots of third-party extensions to add additional functionality
Compress JPEG & PNG images (Freemium)
Make your website faster by optimizing your JPEG and PNG images. This plugin automatically optimizes all your images by integrating with the popular image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG
After you upload an image to your WordPress site, each resized image is uploaded to the TinyJPG or TinyPNG service. Your image is analyzed to apply the best possible optimization. Based on the content of your image an optimal strategy is chosen.
Features:
- Automatically optimize new images on upload.
- Advanced background optimization to speed up your workflow.
- Optimize individual images already in your media library.
- Automatically resize huge image uploads by setting a maximum width and/or height for more reasonable browser display.
UpdraftPlus (Free)
There’s nothing worse than losing all your site’s content to a hacker, server crash, or other website malfunction. That’s why using a free auto-backup solution like UpdraftPlus is so important. And it’s on our list because it’s simply the best WordPress backup plugin around.
Features:
- Automated Backups — Schedule an automatic WordPress backup of your website’s files and WordPress database.
- Cloud Storage — Store your backups in a cloud service such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or Amazon S3.
- Instant Restore — Restore your website instantly using a one-click restore button if something happens.
Gutenberg Blocks – Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg (Freemium)
Shortcodes Ultimate is a comprehensive collection of various visual and functional elements, which you can use in the post editor, text widgets or even in template files. Using Shortcodes Ultimate you can easily create tabs, buttons, boxes, sliders and carousels, responsive videos and much, much more.
FEATURES
- 50+ beautiful shortcodes
- 1-click shortcode insertion with live preview
- Gutenberg-ready
- Works with any theme
- Modern responsive design
- Documentation
- Custom CSS editor
- Custom widget
- Translation-ready
- RTL support
- Developer-friendly
Disqus for WordPress(Freemium)
Disqus is the web’s most popular commenting system trusted by millions of publishers to increase reader engagement, grow audience and traffic, and monetize content. Disqus helps publishers of all sizes engage directly with their audiences to build loyalty, retain readers, and foster thriving communities.
The Disqus for WordPress plugin lets site owners and developers easily add Disqus to their sites, replacing the default WordPress comment system. Disqus installs in minutes and automatically imports your existing comments.
Feature:
- Syncs comments automatically to WordPress for backup and flexibility if you ever decide to switch to a different platform
- Loads asynchronously with advanced caching so that Disqus doesn’t affect your site’s performance
- Monetization options to grow revenue
- Export comments to WordPress-compatible XML to backup or migrate to another system
- Analytics dashboard for measuring overall engagement on your site
- Mobile responsive design
