WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems available, and for good reason. It’s easy to use, free to download, and open source. There are a lot of plugins that can be integrated into your blog or website in order to help you customize it as well as provide additional features. In this post we will discuss some of the best WordPress plugins that you should integrate on your site!
I have broken this down into the main categories of plugins, they are;
- Security Plugins
- Backup Plugins
- SEO Plugins
- Form Plugins
- Utility and Management
- Speed Optimization
Table of contents
Security Plugins
WordPress is very secure on its own, but as soon as you start installing Themes or Plugins the attack surface becomes larger. There are a lot of options for security plugins, but the best ones I have found and regularly use are;
iThemes Security
iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) is available in two versions: a free version and a premium version. I use this on pretty much every website that I deploy both for clients and here at WPSpidr. It offers many ways of locking down your WordPress install including Security Logging, Site Scan Scheduling (Premium), Database Backups and the ability to hide the back end. This plugin also has a great feature called “WordPress Tweaks” which will help you configure advanced settings to further harden your WordPress install.
iThemes Security on the WordPress repository:
iThemes also has a Pro version of their plugin.
Wordfence
If you’re looking for a super user-friendly and effective WordPress plugin that ensures your website will stay secure, then WordFence is the perfect choice. Wordfence is a plugin that includes a firewall and malware scanner so you can protect your WordPress blog. WordFence’s built-in firewall blocks malicious traffic, is maintained by dedicated WordFence staff, and provides 100% protection for WordPress sites.
Wordfence on the WordPress repository:
WordFence is available as a premium product with more features.
Sucuri Security
Sucuri is great at identifying malware in WordPress files. If your website is infected with Malware Sucuri is great for detecting such issues. The Sucuri Security WordPress plugin for free gives any website or blog owner peace of mind, and one of the best ways to protect against hackers. There is also a premium version available that offers a Website Firewall.
Sucuri on the WordPress repository:
Sucuri also has a fully featured premium solution.
Can you secure WordPress without a plugin? Yes you can – It really depends on the server software being used. If your hosting provider uses Apache, then you would configure a lot of the security through the .htaccess file. If they use nginx, then the config will be done through a nginx config file.
Backup Plugins
This is another important plugin you will need for WordPress. A backup is what you’ll need if anything goes wrong. You can use a plugin to backup your site. Some backup plugins allow you to backup to Google Drive, DropBox or AWS S3. I would always recommend that you backup to somewhere other than the service you host your site with.
UpdraftPlus
Updraft offer a free and a premium version of their plugin – the premium version is well worth the cost. UpdraftPlus offers a backup system that will automatically keep your site backed up and ready for when disaster strikes, or if you want to move it somewhere else – like from one hosting provider to another. Updraft can automatically backup into the cloud on Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3.
UpdraftPlus on the WordPress repository.
Check out the premium features of UpdraftPlus here.
BackWPUp
BackWPUp also offers the ability to backup to external cloud services like DropBox and AWS’s S3 service. With just one backup file, you are able to easily restore an install of WordPress easily. The premium version of BackWPup provides you with first class support and many more features.
BackWPUp also has a premium version too.
WPvivid Backup
WPvivid Backup Plugin offers backup and migration straight out of the box. It also has a handy tool that allows you to remove unused images from your WordPress install – saving you valuable disk space. You can migrate a copy of WP site to a new host (a new domain), schedule backups, send backups to leading remote storage solutions such as AWS S3, clean unused images before backup and migration and so much more!
Also check the Premium version of WPVivid.
Can you backup WordPress without a plugin? Quite simply, yes . You can use your hosting provider’s backup solution. It depends if they use cPanel, Plesk or other software. Any decent hosting provider will provide a backup solution of some description. Alternatively, you can zip up all the WordPress files and export the database – this is enough for a complete backup of your website.
SEO Plugins
WordPress offers amazing SEO out of the box but there’s always room for improvement. Whats the point of a website if it cannot be found? SEO plugins offer enhanced SEO functionality to your WordPress website. These offer a range from basic on-page optimization through more advanced features such as keyword research tools or sitemap generation for improved indexing by search engines like Google.
Rank Math
Rank Math SEO is a great plugin to get your site ranked higher in search engines. It’s a comprehensive SEO plugin with all the features you need to rank your website on Google, Yahoo and Bing! The Rank Math Plugin has many powerful tools that will help increase rankings for any WordPress site such as Schema Markup, Search Console Integration, Keyword Ranking, Title and meta description editor and so much more.
Rank Math has a Pro and business plan for WordPress.
Yoast SEO
The Yoast SEO plugin is a robust suite of tools and features to help you optimize your website’s SEO and has both free and premium tiers. Yoast SEO is a powerful suite of plugins that offer a variety of features, designed to help you appeal to your audience and optimize your website. There are many features included such as XML Sitemaps, Site breadcrumbs, SEO analysis and readability analysis.
The Yoast premium plugin is available here.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO)
AIOSEO is probably the oldest WordPress SEO plugin and it is still one of the most popular. AIOSEO offers a variety features such as SEO, XML sitemaps and keyword analysis to help you optimize your site for search engines like Google or Bing. The plugin also includes social media integration with Facebook Open Graph Protocol. The plugin started way back in 2007 and is a very comprehensive tool for all WordPress website owners.
All in One SEO also has a premium version.
Can you use WordPress without an SEO plugin? Absolutely yes… I have dozens of websites that do not have an SEO plugin. Its so easy to get blind-sighted by all the options that an SEO plugin gives you. Most of the search engines are clever enough to understand your content and rank you accordingly.
Form Plugins
Having a contact form on your website is a great way to keep in touch with your audience. It is also important that you have the right contact form plugin for WordPress as there are many different types of forms and plugins available. When having a contact form on your site, it s also a great idea to enable Google ReCAPTCHA to help prevent spam submissions. Most contact form plugins allow this feature on their plugins.
Formidable Forms
I really love formidable forms, its not just a form builder for contact but can also be an app builder – it will allow you to build amazing looking forms and have the ability to display those as pages or posts on the front end of your website.
Check out the different version of Formidable Forms here.
Contact Form Seven
CF7 is a great plugin to use for contact forms on your site. It has many different features that you can customize. I haven’t used CF7 as much as Formidable but it is really solid and does the job nicely. Some CSS knowledge would be good to style your forms to match your site as well.
WPForms
WPForms allows you to quickly build contact forms, feedback forms, subscriptions forms, or payment forms. There are a lot of templates to choose from and it is really beginner focused.
WPForms premium version is available here.
Can you add a Form without a plugin? Yes you can, however you will probably need some coding experience and also ensure that emails from the form get delivered to your inbox. In this case, I would normally go for using a plugin in most cases.
Utility and Management Plugins
Extending WordPress not only for the front end but for also the admin’s benefit is easily done with a few plugins.
WP-DBManager
This plugin allows you to easily manage your database, tables and queries. You can also export the data in CSV format which is really handy for backups or other purposes such as migration of a site from one host/server environment into another.
MainWP
I use MainWP to manage all the websites that I have deployed over the years. It is a powerful plugin that allows you to manage all the aspects of your site.
The best thing about MainWP, in my opinion at least? It’s free! And it has an amazing support team behind them who are always willing and ready for any questions or queries I may have. An alternative to MainWP would be ManageWP, however it can be quite expensive once you have a number of sites to manage.
MainWP has a premium version as well that gives you a ton of extra features.
FileManager
Rather than using FTP or logging into your hosting dashboard, it can be easier to use FileManager to access files on your WordPress install. I only use this on client sites where I don’t have access to the hosting panel, however it is a very useful tool when I need it.
Speed Optimization
With Google’s potential algorithm update coming, there are many website owners concerned about page speeds of their websites. There are a number of plugins that can help with this.
WPRocket
This is a very simple plugin and does amazingly well to get your site up to par when it comes to speed. It is a great plugin for those who don’t want to spend hours tweaking their website. The only downside I have found with this one, and it’s not even that big of an issue really but you should be aware – if your site has any ads on the sidebar or in other places then they will sometimes disappear when using WPRocket.
WP Rocket is a premium plugin only.
ShortPixel
I use ShortPixel on every website that I manage. It saves me countless hours resizing and compressing images. It also has a really nice feature that allows you to compress images on the fly. You can set it up so when someone uploads an image, ShortPixel will automatically resize and optimize for web use without any manual work from your end! This plugin is great because of its simplicity – there are no confusing settings to get confused with!
You can subscribe and get more credits with a paid plan.
Redis Object Cache
My hosting provider uses redis cache to speed up my site. I use this plugin because it’s a really easy way for me to take advantage of this feature – so Redis Object cache is installed on all sites that are on my hosting plan.
A pro version is also available for Redis object cache here.
Asset CleanUp
If you really want your site to get amazing page speed scores, my go to plugin is Asset CleanUp. This plugin is a great way to optimize your site and reduce the number of requests that it takes for someone to render on their browser. A good example is that a form plugin will typically load CSS on pages that do not need it, Asset CleanUp allows you to prevent that from loading on a page by page basis… awesome!
Conclusion
Not all websites are the same. Some times you only need a handful of plugins and that will suffice for most people. I tend to try and look for a solution that doesn’t require a plugin for the most part if possible.
I hope this article has given some insight into what WordPress Plugins I think should be integrated in any blog or website. I hope you enjoyed reading this article and if so please share it with your friends!