Hi, in this article I want to show you some of the most useful plugins that are worth considering for any WordPress site.
Quick reminder what is a WordPress plugin :
In simple terms, a plugin is a little piece of software that adds or improves functionalities of your site. As the name suggests, it plugs into your site and adds all kinds of features and functions. With selection of plugins, you can very easily create any type of website you want – without writing any code yourself (we like this part). Basically whatever you need your website to do can be done with a plugin. Examples of features added by plugins, to give some of the most popular, would be to add a content list, comments section, contact forms, improve site speed&security, add e-commerce functions etc.
One thing that might be confusing with plugins, is the huge number, thousands literally available in the WordPress plugin directory to pick from. It can be a frustrating, time consuming task for beginner site owners to find just the right plugins to improve their WordPress websites. Obviously, some plugins are better than others, some are in fact very poor and will not do any good for the website. Choosing the right plugins is really important for the speed, security, and user-friendliness of the website. Luckily, there are numerous online reviews listing the best plugins, with cool benefits for any type of WordPress site. After spending some time to find most recommended and highest evaluated free plugins, I have listed below some options to consider, sorted into few categories.
Site appearance / functionalities
WooCommerce
If you want to sell products or services on your website, this might be the best option to go. WooCommerce is the leading e-commerce plugin for WordPress. What it does is it simply converts your WordPress blog into a fully functional online store. It has endless customization options that enable you to sell basically everything, either digital files (online courses in pdf format for example) or physical products, with support for product variations, custom configurations, subscriptions, memberships etc. You can create beautiful storefronts with multiple themes suited to different categories of goods. There is a very well designed shopping cart experience, helping to increase the revenue. WooCommerce is also a scalable platform – if you will manage to really grow your commerce, it can easily handle high-volume stores. Finally, what is important, it comes for free. WooCommerce is practically synonymous with WordPress e-commerce.
SeedProd
SeedProd is a drag & drop page builder plugin, worth to consider as it specializes in very specific area – landing pages. What are landing pages? A landing page is a standalone web page that a visitor “lands” on after clicking through link or a Google ad. Usually these landing pages have different design from the rest of the site and do not show the website’s standard header and footer. With SeedProd it is super easy to create great looking and high-converting landing pages for any purpose, which are entirely separate from the rest of website’s design. SeedProd offers specific page elements to create good first impression and to convert visitors. In addition to landing pages, there are other useful page template options, like thank-yous, 404 pages, “Coming Soon” and “Maintenance Mode” pages. The two last options allow you to build a page that will hide your site from visitors and search engines like Google. You can work on your website in private or let Google know your site is down for maintenance. Both of these modes can be handy.
Elementor
Elementor is a leading page builder for WordPress websites. With this plugin you are able to place a variety of page elements easily, using an intuitive drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) interface. This way, constructing an amazing website is as easy as clicking and dragging your desired elements into the builder area — without writing a single line of code. Yyou can create your website while seeing exactly how it will look. Elementor also comes with dozens of out-of-the-box widgets and features. You can adjust every element’s spacing, positioning, padding, and margins exactly as you want it. Ease-of-use and compatibility with many WordPress themes make Elementor highly recommended plugin for beginner website owners.
LuckyWP Table of Contents
This plugin lets you create table of contents for your posts and pages. These feature is super useful, especially if the content on a page is lengthy, helping readers to navigate quickly to what is most interesting to them. Great feature of LuckyWP is an automatical insertion of table of contents, it takes literally seconds to add it the website. It is also SEO-friendly, as the table of contents code is ready to use by Google for snippets on result page. It is also possible to customize the appearance: width, float, title font size and weight, items font size, colors, plus color schemes (dark, light, white, transparent, inherit from theme). I am using this plugin myself, fantastic one.
Site SEO
This kind of plugins are designed to improve the website’s SEO rankings, meaning they will appear higher in Google (or other search engine) search results. Every website owner’s dream is to appear on Page 1 of search results for a given keyword and thanks to SEO plugins their websites can rank higher in search engines. For me, just the notion of website optimization for SEO is quite intimidating, sounds like a domain restricted to professional web developers. However, dedicated SEO plugins provide a really user-friendly solution to monitor and improve your on-page SEO, so even beginners are able to rank their website higher.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a very popular plugin for WordPress that makes optimization of pages and posts to rank higher on search engines easy. It is on the marker since 2008 and as it’s creators highlight, Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone. Users range from the small businesses to some of the most popular sites on the planet. As many other plugins, Yoast SEO is available as a free version, offering basic functionalities, and premium, paid version with extended options available. Here even the free version has tons of great features : SEO analysis: an invaluable tool while writing SEO-friendly content with the right (focus) keyphrases in mind. Readability analysis: ensures that humans and search engines can read and understand your content. A Google preview, which shows what your listings will look like in the search results. Even on mobile devices! Innovative Schema blocks for the WordPress block editor, so that your FAQ and HowTo content can be shown directly in the search results. Plus a breadcrumbs block to guide your users. Templates for titles and meta descriptions, so you can learn how to craft this information according to SEO best practices
All in One SEO
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is another great plugin for managing on-site SEO and making optimizations. It has been on the market since 2007. Using it you are able to conduct audits to see the health of your current site and better understand where to make updates. On every page you have the possibility to change things like meta descriptions, title tags, and more. Great point about this plugin / toolkit is that you don’t need to hire an SEO expert or developer to properly setup WordPress SEO. It is very comprehensive, so you can improve your website’s SEO rankings and uncover many new SEO growth opportunities.
Site speed / maintenance / security
Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker is a plugin that tests all internal & external links on your site looking for broken links. A “broken link” is simply a link leading to a missing website. When clicked it returns 404 error, which is is not cool at all for the visitor experience. Apart from that, every broken link will negatively impact your site ranking on search engines, as it is treated as untrustworthy. Broken Link Checker let’s you scan for broken links across your website and will alert you when they appear (via the Dashboard or by email), so you can fix them on the spot. Both SEO and user experience will improve.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is highly-rated and very popular backup plugin that greatly simplifies backups and restoration. Why you should consider using a backup plugin? Nobody wants things to go wrong on their website, but accidents are always possible with WordPress. There are many things that can go wrong – your website gets hacked, something goes wrong with a theme update, your server crashes or your hosting company goes bust. All of these events are rare, but remain possible. And when they do happen, without good backups, you lose everything. Ouch 🙁 So your backups are basically worth all of the investment you’ve made into your website. That’s why it’s important to create regular backups letting you can recover lost data or revert to an older version in the event of an accident. UpdraftPlus is one of the best plugins for that task, easy and intuitive to use, with it you can create and restore backups with a click, schedule routine backups, and push your backups to cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Much better to install a backup plugin before than after a data incident.
WP-Optimize Cache
WP-Optimize Cache is an all-in-one WordPress performance plugin that caches your site, cleans your database and compresses your images. It is very important for any site that has a big WordPress database. A quick explanation: your WordPress database (MySQP) stores everything that you need for your website and after a while it gets stuffed also with unnecessary data, for example trashed/unapproved/spam comments, auto drafts or revisions of posts or pages (as every-time you save a new post or pages, WordPress creates a revision of that post or page, meaning you might have multiple copies of that post as revisions – which quickly adds lots of data to your database tables, making them slower to access). WP-Optimize Cache clears out all of this unnecessary data, that don’t add any value to your site but slow down its performance. The plugin allows also compressing images to load more quickly. All of these functionalities are easy to use.
iThemes Security
iThemes Security is a plugin that allows to protect your site and users against hackers and malware. WordPress websites can be easy targets for hackers. On average, 30,000 websites are hacked every day, it is a real risk. Even if you think that your website is not particularly in danger, you should take seriously the security. iThemes Security offers multiple ways to protect the site and users, including password expiration, two-factor authentication, reCAPTCHA, and malware scanning. You can permanently block bots or offending users from accessing your site. You can also monitor your site’s security health, thanks to File change detection functionality (the plugin logs changes made to your website that can help detect malicious activity on your website), and Site Scanner (which checks daily for known vulnerabilities of WordPress core file, plugins and themes, including checks of your Google’s blocklist status and alerts if Google has found any malware on your website). The plugin also provides security templates to work for your specific kind of site, whether it’s an online store, a blog, or an online portfolio. By using iThemes Security you can identify and stop attacks on your website, saving yourself the time and cost of repairing a hacked website. The iThemes Security is designed to allow anyone to secure their WordPress website quickly, no cybersecurity expertise required.
Jetpack
Jetpack is an awesome toolkit that offers many useful functionalities for the website. In fact it combines capabilities of many plugins in one. Now, normally when I hear that something is good for everything, I am thinking that in practice it is good for nothing : ) But in this case apparently it is not true. Jetpack is a great plugin for WordPress security, performance, marketing, and it also includes design tools. It handles lead generation, backups, security, and speed all in one tool, making it great for users that do not want to use too many plugins at once. Also worth to note, Jetpack is modular, so you can purchase and install only the tools you need to grow your site. Features highlighted by the creators include easy-to-use, comprehensive WordPress site security including auto real-time backups and easy restores, malware scans, and spam protection / site speed tools that help optimize your site on mobile devices and auto optimizes your images / advanced site stats and analytics to help you understand your audience / auto publish blog posts and products to social media by using our tools to connect to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin / quickly customize your site to make it stand out — no coding needed. Themes , Gallery and Slideshow tools — Image galleries, carousel slider, and slideshows for WP sites and stores.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. Caching is the method of storing website content in the user’s browser, in order to provide that data even faster the next time they access your website. In practice, W3 Total Cache reduces your website’s loading times. Because a slowly loading website is very not cool for the visitors – either we see the content right after clicking on a link, or most likely we move to another place to find the information we need – this type of plugin is definitely worth our attention. Increased site speed means better search engine rankings, user experience, likely even conversion rates due to increased visitor time on site; visitors view more pages. Website performance should be one of highest priorities for website owner. W3 Total Cache is a great performance solution for optimizing WordPress websites, helping to ensure that your pages loads as fast as possible.
Smush
Another plugin very useful for site performance, Smush is focused on speeding up website slow-loading due to the image contents. Image optimization is the easiest way to make the site load faster and Smush will compress images without a visible drop in quality. Optimizing every image file on your site will improve speed, but performing this task this manually for every image can be a time-consuming, frustrating task (depending on how many images are on the website, but text-only sites are rather rare today). Smush does the job automatically, it compresses images across your site as you upload them to your media folder.
Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet is probably the most popular anti-spam plugin for WordPress. It checks your contact form and comments for suspicious submissions, keeping your blog clean and spam-free. That should not be underestimated, as a page full of obvious spam / ad comments showing below an article is not at all professional-looking and will likely discourage the readers to continue exploring it. After you install and activate Akismet plugin, it will automatically handle the incoming comments and contact form submissions, saving you a great deal of time. It checks all of them against a global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. It also lets you review which comments are stopped, so you can block or unblock comments yourself in the “Comments” section of the admin screen (my own experience is 100% accuracy of Akismet). There is also a discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.