WordPress plugins are great tools for adding and extending functionality to WordPress. In this post, I will discuss 20+ best WordPress plugins you should have on your WordPress website. These plugins will add awesome functionality to your site and make it ‘great’.
Although the kind/ niche of your website mostly determines what plugins you should have on your website, there are some plugins that every WP blog needs. Like Techieword says security, speed, SEO, etc. are some of the universal concerns of every website owner which you cannot simply afford to ignore.
There are plenty of handy plugins in the WordPress framework which reduce lots of work on your part. The official plugin repository has over 55,000 WordPress plugins and counting. That means there are plugins for almost every function or feature you need on your website. Great news for WordPress lovers!
In addition, you’ll find multiple plugins for the same feature. All you need to do is to choose the best one for yourself that suits your project and install the plugin. You can find both free and premium plugins for WordPress while most of the plugins are developed as freemiums. A freemium plugin is a free plugin with an upgrading option to the premium version for advanced features.
#1 Wordfence Security
As a website owner, one of the most crucial things to do is to keep your site secure from the hackers. It is something that you cannot afford to ignore. There may be thousands of malicious bots on the web which can attack your website anytime and destroy your entire work in no time. That is why you must always prevent the spams and keep your website secure.
To keep your WordPress site secure, there are many security plugins available in WordPress. Among them, Wordfence Security is the one you can rely on. The plugin features Firewall protection, malware scan, blocking, login security, live traffic monitoring and a lot more. The plugin lets you monitor all your traffic in real-time including robots, humans, 404 errors, logins, logouts, etc. as shown in the screenshot below:
With the monitoring your real-time traffic, you can be aware of the security threats your site is facing and take instant action against it.
Moreover, the plugin has a firewall application which prevents your site from being hacked. Blocking feature blocks all the known attackers, malicious networks which can be harmful to your site. To enhance login security, it adopts Two Factor Authentication while it also checks the strength of all the user and admin passwords. This technique can greatly help you to fight brute-force attacks.
In conclusion, Wordfence Security is a great security plugin for WordPress.
#2 Yoast SEO
No doubt, search engines are the major source of traffic for every website. The number of internet users using search engines is reported to increase steadily, making the importance of Search Engine Optimization more relevant than ever. Fortunately, there is a great plugin like Yoast SEO for WordPress users.
Yoast SEO is an awesome plugin which guides you all the way to create better content and improve your ranking on search results. It focuses on creating the content which is useful to the users as well as technically SEO friendly. The goal is to help the users, gain trust and sustain the rankings which they call sustainable SEO.
Firstly, it makes you choose a focus keyword and use the keyword appropriately in the article you are writing. Page analysis feature checks if you have used the focus keyword everywhere on the image alt tags, meta description, headings, and the whole post. Furthermore, it suggests you to properly set up the text and images for better usability and visibility for search engines.
In addition, it helps you improve the way your page/ post looks on the search results with snippet preview. Creating better headlines and catchy Meta description can greatly increase the click-through rates for your site. It has added Readability feature which helps you to create simple and understandable content.
Finally, here is another plugin called All in One SEO Pack which works quite similarly. You can try this too.
#3 Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is another very useful SEO plugin for WordPress. The plugin helps the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. to better index your site with a special XML sitemap.
As you activate the plugin, it will automatically create an XML sitemap for your site making it easy to index. A sitemap enables the search engine bots view the complete structure of your website and retrieve the results more efficiently.
The plugin notifies all the major search engines every time you publish something on your site.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Google analytics is a great free to use statistical tool for understanding website traffic. Understanding your audience and catering to them is a great way to improve your user traffic. Therefore, it’s an obvious choice to use a Google analytics plugin for your WordPress website and MonsterInsights’ Google analytics tool is one of the best plugins out there for this purpose.
The plugin allows you to monitor various real time stats regarding your website. Furthermore, using Universal tracking, you can track user views from multiple platforms and devices as well as receive various demographic and interest reports.
The plugin is also commerce-ready. This means that you can track product popularity, conversion rates, and order values with no difficulty at all. The plugin is also integrated with Google Adsense, so you can track your ad performance as well.
Other additional features of the plugin allow you to track download numbers, outbound link tracking, events and performance tracking, user discovery reports and more.
#4 WP Smush
Images are the great assets for your post/ page which easily grab the users’ attention. Uploading images helps you deliver the message many times better that simply the texts can. They make your page look attractive, catchy and engaging.
While being so helpful to make you site more appealing to users, images also take up a lot of storage space and slow down your website. You can’t simply afford to ignore the slow site speed and look for the disaster to happen. Wait a while, here’s good news – you can compress images!
Yes, you can compress and optimize the images without reducing the quality of the images using WP Smush plugin. It optimizes all of your image files in JPEG, GIF and PNG formats using advanced compression techniques and saves lots of storage space. It au
In addition, the plugin lets you smush bulk data (up to 50 attachments) at a time. The plugin is very useful as it helps your post/page look attractive while being fast.
#5 W3 Total Cache
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.
W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin is one of the most popular plugins and probably the best caching plugin for WordPress. It features page cache, database caching, object caching, browser caching and a lot more. Besides, it lets you integrate CDN services to reduce page load time. Besides, it has options to minify and HTTP compression of the HTML, JS, and CSS files so that you can save bandwidth up to 80%.
With the reduced loading time, you will get better ranking on search results which consecutively result into high traffic and more conversions.
Alternatively, you can use WP Super Cache which works quite similarly to the above plugin.
#6 WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is a great tool for cleaning up WordPress database and optimizing WordPress. It automatically removes the unnecessary data from the WordPress without manual queries. The plugin always keeps your database optimized for the best performance.
There may be a lot of useless data in your website which weighs down your site while you may not be even aware of it. With the plugin installed, you have lots of work done automatically. It removes all the spammy and un-approved comments, trash posts, and comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks etc. It will keep your database always clean and optimized.
#7 BJ Lazy Load
If you have a lot of images used in your site, it may take hours to load. That is annoying to users which often results in higher bounce rates. However, there is a solution to every problem and mostly in WordPress. Lazy loading is the mantra to make your site load faster with lots of images in the page.
To add lazy loading functionality in a WordPress site, you can use a plugin like BJ Lazy Load. The plugin replaces all your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images and content iframes with a placeholder and loads the content as it gets close to entering the browser screen. It displays the content (images) only when a user scrolls the page. Therefore, your site loads faster as well as saves bandwidth.
In addition, it works with text widgets, embedded videos from YouTube, Vimeo etc. It is a great plugin for website performance optimization and SEO.
#8 VaultPress
VaultPress is a security-oriented WordPress plugin built to create real-time automated backups for your website. The Jetpack powered theme easily syncs up every content, post, comment and media file on your website seamless and furthermore provides protection from many web issues and attacks.
VaultPress allows you to create optimized backups regularly and restore your website in a matter of seconds with just a single click. With multiple subscriptions, you can also monitor, backup and manage multiple websites through a single dashboard.
The plugin also scans and detects dangerous files on your website and emails the administrator if it detects any changes to your installation. Furthermore, you can easily review and manage suspicious codes and solve their issues in a matter of clicks.
The plugin also comes with strong spam protection. With Akismet support, you can easily use its anti-spam tools to prevent any measures of spam on your website with zero user involvement.
Furthermore, VaultPress’ subscription is bundled together with Jetpack. Combining the features of these two plugins, you can implement a perfect solution to your internet protection.
The support team has been praised highly for its helpful work and their useful insight into the user’s issues. This means that regardless of what problem you face, a simple request to VaultPress’ team of experts should help you set your website right easily.
#9 Redirection
There are times when you have to change the permalinks of your posts/ pages but you forget to redirect them. That is when users will land on a not available page following the old URL which doesn’t exist anymore. And, it is another way you are making your visitors upset.
In such cases, Redirection is the right plugin to pick. It helps you to manage all the 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors. The plugin automatically adds a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes whereas you can also add 301, 302, and 307 redirections manually for a post. You can redirect all the URLs and also have full logs for all redirected URLs.
Redirection is mainly useful when you are migrating pages from an old website or changing the directory of WP installation.
#10 Everest Forms
One of the fundamental pages you need on a website is the ‘Contact‘ page. No matter how big or small website you have or whatever type of website it is, you definitely need a contact page from where your website audience can contact you. The purpose of contact can be anything; to provide you feedback on your work, reach you out for business deals, or suggestions in general, a well-designed contact page is a must.
So, to create contact forms, here is a plugin ‘Everest Forms‘. It’s a modern WordPress contact form plugin with drag and drop interface that lets you build beautiful contact forms easily and quickly. It has a set of general fields along with advanced fields which you can easily drag and drop to create forms.
The plugin lets you create unlimited WordPress forms and in multiple design layouts. The plugin offers two design layouts: 1. Default and 2. Classic layout to choose from.
Further, it allows you to create two column WordPress contact forms as well as advanced forms with advanced fields like radio buttons, dropdowns, checkboxes, date, and more. View Everest Forms demo, and learn how it works.
The plugin is available for free, however, it comes with a complete set of features to enable you to build full-fledged forms. It features Google reCaptcha support, editable email settings, redirect page options after successful submission, editable form validation message etc. Summing up, it’s an incredible plugin for WordPress contact forms.
#11 User Registration
WordPress user registration is yet another integral feature you would not want to miss. Essentially, ‘register’ feature is available on the default WordPress installation which can be enabled from WP dashboard following the given steps.
Go to your WP admin panel > Settings > General.
As shown in the image above, you can simply put a check on the ‘Anyone can register‘ option to enable WordPress registration or membership feature.
Once it is enabled, users now can find a register option at your website’s login page ((e.g: yoursite.com/wp-login.php). Now, users can get registered to your site by entering a username and email, however, it doesn’t look ideal.
First, it’s not user-friendly that a user must find the login URL to get registering option. Next, as a website owner, you cannot collect more information as it has a limited two-field form allowing users to enter just a username and email.
Therefore, you need a virtual WordPress registration plugin. Thankfully, here is a carefully crafted simple and user-friendly plugin at your disposal: User Registration.
User Registration is a free drag and drop user registration plugin for WordPress. The plugin comes up with plenty of amazing features so that you can easily create a beautiful front-end user registration form within a few minutes.
Some of the main features of the plugin are Unlimited registration forms, multi-column support, ReCaptcha support, email notifications, etc. In addition, you can extend its features by purchasing its premium add-ons.
