Do you know which are the ‘Essential Plugins for WordPress site’? You should find out and install the most required plugins into your WordPress site. It’s a good endeavor if you have created a site from scratch or want to make a new WordPress site to start your digital journey. Thanks to your good efforts but the matter of fact is that you have to make your site more advanced in features and function. To let your site work what you want to do should be done by installing plugins into the site. There are thousands of plugins both in the WordPress plugin directory and on the third-party plugin developers’ site.
Your site must have installed some specific plugins to let your site work what you like to do. It is found that most of the site owners who have built their site on WordPress have installed some essential plugins.
Rank Math aka the Swiss Army Knife of WordPress SEO is one of the best SEO plugins to optimize your site so that it can be better crawled and indexed. The posts and pages you have written must be properly optimized in respect of search engine optimization. The posts which have SEO-friendly content will have more visibility in the search engines. The websites which show their contents on the first or second page of Google have relevant and well-optimized content.
This plugin has more than 800,000 active installations and is available in 18 languages. It has both (1) the free and (2) the premium version. You can install the free version of Rank Math from the WordPress plugin directory. But with the free version, you can’t use all the features. However, in the beginning, it is good for your site. You can add meta descriptions, SEO titles, keyword density, and a lot of options.
This is the screenshot of a post on backup plugins from Rank Math. You can see that it displays all the options in SEO Basics like targeted keyword used in the SEO title, inside meta description, inside URL, and also in the first 10% of the content.
The pro version of Rank Math SEO lets you use all the features to optimize your website and its content for search engine visibility.
The individual PRO plan costs about $59/year and the Business plan costs about $199/year for the first year. Upgrading to either of these plans, you can have the following features, such as:
- Advanced Google Analytics Integration
- Keyword Rank Tracker
- Advanced Schema Generator
- Image SEO PRO
- Track Top 5 Winning Keywords
- Complete Divi Integration
- Advanced Content SEO Overview
- Ranking Keywords for Each Post
- Import GSC & GA Data from Particular Country
UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular, simple, and reliable WordPress backup plugins which has 3 million active installations. It supports multilinguality, namely, the plugin is available in 32 languages.
WordPress is most vulnerable to various threats, malware injection, security flaws, insecure web hosts, and bad theme or plugin updates. The hosting server too may crash. That’s why a backup plugin is needed to schedule a backup of the website. UpdraftPlus is a great backup plugin and it too has both the free and paid versions. With this plugin, you can back up your WordPress site or exclusively database, theme, plugins, and non-wp files and restore in one click.
It is comprehensive in features and you can back up your site into cloud storage like Google Drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Dreamobject, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, etc.
The premium version of UpdraftPlus lets you back up your database and files into Google cloud, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft OneDrive, SFTP, etc. Also, it provides:
- Incremental backup
- Database encryption
- WP-CLI
- Easy site duplication or site migration with migrator
- Multiple remote storages
The personal plan starts at $42/year. It also facilitates a premium versions for business, agency, enterprise, and Gold level plans.
EWWW Image Optimizer is a great image compression plugin having 900,000+ installations and supports multilinguality. It helps to reduce image sizes to fit the device’s screen automatically. The plugin supports lazy load and the images are automatically converted to the next-gen WebP format.
EWWW Image Optimizer has both free and paid versions. The free version is available in the WordPress plugin directory and it has fewer advantages than the premium one. To unlock all the features, you need to upgrade to the premium plan.
With the free version of EWWW Image Optimizer, you can have the following features, such as:
- It can optimize unlimited image files and don’t worry about site speed. You can reduce all kinds of images—-Bet it is JPG, PNG, GIF, or PDF. All the images are reduced to smaller sizes to fit the device’s screen layout. Reducing image size hastens your site speed. Thus it affects your site’s SEO.
- All images are properly optimized based on your needs with an exact optimization ratio. The free version reduces the image size to 30% while the paid version can reduce it to 80%. You can convert any image to Google’s next-generation WebP format at no extra cost.
- Also, it supports bulk optimization. With bulk optimization, you can compress images of WP Media Library, folders, themes, plugins, and other add-ons. Besides, you can schedule bulk optimization if needed.
- The plugin works well with other plugins. So, don’t think about plugin compatibility as it has been tested with hundreds of plugins and add-ons.
- You know that CDN is a great tool to speed up your site. The web pages and posts which load very fast are more popular to users than those which take too much time to load. It greatly affects user experience. To counter such kind of issue, CDN is a great tool that loads pages and posts to users’ devices from the nearest servers. EWWW Image Optimizer has the ability to work with CDNs like Max CDN, Key CDN, Succuri, etc. You can use CDN with the pro version.
The premium version of EWWW Image Optimizer provides three types of plans such as:
- Standard: With the standard plan, you can install the plugin into one site and have all the premium features integrated with it. It supports image lazy load, US or EU CDN, auto-compress, and auto-WebP along with 200GB bandwidth. The plan costs about $7/month.
- Growth: The Growth plan lets you install the plugin into 10 sites. With it, you can have global CDN delivery, 400GB bandwidth, and all other features included in the standard plan. The plan costs about $15/month.
- Infinite: The Infinite plan lets you use all the features included in the Growth plan. It lets you install the plugin into as many sites as you want. Also, the plugin gives you 800 GB bandwidth and site speed audits.
For image compression, be it for single or bulk, EWWW Image Optimizer is one of the best WordPress plugins having a lot of features to compress and convert images into several formats. Not only image compression but also it offers a Content Delivery Network(CDN) which helps to load images to user’s devices from the nearest servers.
Jetpack is an all-rounder and one of the best WordPress security cum backup plugins that integrates with it a lot of features. Owing to its good performance and multi-functioning, it has more than 5 million active installations. Moreover, the plugin supports multi-linguality. When you install and activate Jetpack on your site, it performs several functions in lieu of a number of plugins. In another word, this single plugin does several types of work and you do not need to install other plugins performing the same work.
Jetpack provides comprehensive WordPress security including automatic site backups, malware scanning, and spam protection. Don’t get worried about brute force attacks if you have installed and activated this plugin on your site. It also monitors downtime and uptime of your site when it loads to users’ devices. Now, you can see what works Jetpack performs.
Security is the most important concern for WordPress. The site you have created must be kept secure from all kinds of brute force attacks. Hackers recourse to thousands of ways to break into your site. They make usernames and passwords in various combinations to log into websites. If hackers succeed to break into your site, they will modify your site, insert malicious codes, and damage databases and other files and folders. Jetpack prevents all kinds of attacks and suspicious activities.
Jetpack also provides automatic real-time backups with unlimited storage with one click restore at any point. Even it can create a complete database backup, migrate themes and plugins to a new host, clones site, and repair broken websites.
Jetpack also prevents spam comments with Akismet. Akismet has its own database to filter comments. It blocks spam on comments and forms. If there is too much spam on your site, Google may blacklist it or it has less visibility in the search results. Even some sites were hit with Google penalties owing to spam infiltration. That’s why comments containing spam must be blocked before reaching your server. The plugin automatically blocks spamming in comments, and forms and saves your site from being manipulated by others.
Jetpack enhances your site speed and boosts SEO. The plugin optimizes CSS structure, defers Javascript, and offers lazy load along with CDN. It serves images, CSS, Javascript, and static files from its own servers integrated with CDN and thus it saves loading time for posts, pages, and images.
WP Super Cache is a frequently used WordPress Cache Plugin which has more than 2 million active installations. Each WordPress site needs to have installed into it a cache plugin. A cache plugin generates a cached copy of your posts and pages and these are served to the visitors instantly. It saves time and hastens your site speed. Some web hosting companies have a built-in caching mechanism and the sites hosted on those hosting do not need to have installed cache plugins. On the other hand, if the hosting company allows you to use a cache plugin, then you can install any cache plugin and WP Super Cache is one of the best plugins used for caching.
The plugin provides a lot of features on caching like enabling caching, the option to disable caching for logged-in visitors, and garbage collection. It serves static files of HTML instead of heavier WordPress PHP scripts. A single cached copy of the file can be served many a time
Akismet is a spam filtering service that runs each comment through its global database to check whether it is real or spam. Each website needs a plugin to prevent unwanted comments containing malicious code or links. And, no doubt, Akismet is one of the Essential plugins for WordPress and it has 5 million plus active installations.
You can either install the plugin or use an Akismet API Key on your WordPress site. It has both free and paid versions. The free version is available for personal sites and you can’t use it for commercial purposes. On the other hand, it also provides a premium version for commercial purposes.
Once the plugin is installed and activated or set up the API Key properly, you can have the following services from it:
- Each comment is forced to run through Akismet’s global database before it hits the targeted site(its server).
- It shows you the status history and by that, you can identify which one is spammed, unspammed, or caught and cleared by Akismet.
- URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal any suspicious or hidden links.
Redirection is another plugin that must be included in the list of Essential Plugins for WordPress which has more than 2 million plus active installations. The plugin lets you redirect an old post or page to a new one with 301 permanent redirection.
It may be that you have to change the URL of a post or page owing to certain facts such as inserting a certain keyword, year, number, or any other words you like to add therein. Were such things to happen to a post, visitors would not see or visit that post if you would not have redirected that post to the new or changed URL. Because when you change the URL of a post or page, the resource must be redirected to the new location, otherwise it will not be available to the old URL address. If visitors visit the post they will show a 404 error which implies that the URL does not exist.
It affects your site’s UX and happening too many incidents of 404 errors is not good in SEO. This is where you need to install a plugin to redirect a post’s old URL to a new one to which it has moved.
The plugin also monitors 404 errors and automatically updates post URLs if configured properly.
WP Forms is one of the Essential Plugins for WordPress sites. This form lets you build any contact form, subscription form, or payment form. The plugin has a drop and drag builder interface using which you can build any form of your choice. It has 4 million plus active installations.
The WP Forms has two versions, namely, the free version known as WP Forms Lite which is available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you use this form, you cannot use its all features unless you upgrade to the paid version. The above screenshots are of the free version.
You can add a new form by clicking on the ‘Add New’ option. Besides, it has other sub-menus like All Forms, Entries, Settings, Tools, Addons, Analytics, SMTP, etc.
When you click on ‘Add New’ to add a new form, it takes you to the from’s template where you can find various forms. Most of the forms are pre-designed with templates and you need to upgrade to the PRO version to use these forms. Besides, you can use the form which is free and you can design using the drop and drag interface integrated with it.
There are many fields in the editing dashboard like text line, paragraph, number, checkbox, name, email, captcha, etc. You can add these fields in any form you like to add. You cannot add phone, address, date, time, and website URL to any form until you upgrade to the Pro version of WP Forms.
