13 Most Essential and Must-Have Plugins for any WordPress Sites

Its doesn’t matter what kind of website you’re operating, or what niche it belongs to, and there are certain plugins that you can always install in any WordPress Websites. And those are the Plugins we are going to discuss in this blog. In this post, we’re going to introduce you to thirteen Most Essential and Must-Have WordPress plugins, and that may be available Free or Paid one, but that makes each one stand out from the crowd. Let’s get right to it!

01. Caching Plugin

I am always on the lookout for ways to increase the speed of my client’s WordPress websites and used almost all popular Cache Plugins like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache but WPRocket surpass all in terms of features and easy to use! Support Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, any CDN, Cloudflare and Cleanup Unnecessary data from Database. Speed up your WordPress website, get more traffic. It is such a simple plugin to configure and use, and yet it is very powerful!

02. SEO Plugin

For SEO, previously I have used Premium Yoast SEO for a few sites, but we started using used SEOPress, which is a freemium plugin to optimize A to Z of your WordPress site for better SEO. It includes everything you need for a good SEO without installing any other Plugins. All in one. All the features you need in one plugin: breadcrumbs, redirections, schemas, HTML sitemaps, XML sitemaps, broken link checker, Titles, meta descriptions, Google Knowledge Graph, Local Business, Google Structured Data Types (schemas), Dublin Core, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, Google Analytics, Google Ads, 404 monitoring, Google Page Speed, URL Rewriting, WooCommerce and much more!

03. Security Plugin

WordPress CMS is already a secure platform in the way it is designed, but the common security holes and issues found in most WordPress websites usually come from careless users or bad security practices, poor hosting configuration and poorly coded plugins or themes and so I have started using few famous plugins like Wordfence, Sucuri Security, but I found Cerber Security is quite good and recommended by many hosting providers but setting up Cerber Security need a good level of security knowledge. However, I want something easy to manage, highly secure and All In One WP Security & Firewall add extra security and firewall to your WordPress site that enforces a lot of important security practices and measures. It reduces the security risk of your website by checking for malware or any vulnerabilities, and by implementing WordPress security practices.

04. Visual Builder Plugin

In WordPress CMS, your website design primarily depends on your WordPress theme. Many premium WordPress themes offer tons of features for customization, but sometimes that becomes too complex for novice users with no coding skills to take full advantage of. That’s where drag and drop WordPress page builder plugins come in handy. A simple WordPress page builder plugin can give you the ability to build beautiful custom layouts and landing pages on your site. I have used few like Beaver Builder, Elementor but I started liking Visual Composer. This page builder WP plugin helps the user in the construction of the pages giving you the features to Drag and Drop content in Backend and as well as Frontend, thus providing intuitive layout customization tools for your website and most important, Visual Composer is supported by 80% popular theme developer.

05. Duplicator Plugin

Post Duplicator plugin was created to make an exact duplicate of a selected post. Custom post types are supported, along with custom taxonomies and custom fields. This plugin is simply meant to quickly and easily duplicate a post. Just hover over a post in the edit screen and select ‘Duplicate {post_type}’ to create a duplicate post. I created this plugin mainly for myself when I’m developing WordPress sites. I always need dummy content to fill out the look of a website and wanted a quick and easy way to create multiple posts.

06. SSL Plugin

If your website is not secured yet, it definitely should be. It increases Google Rankings, improves Security, updates Bowser Level, increases Conversions, increases Customer Confidence. Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. The entire site will move to SSL with a few simple clicks.

07. Form Builder Plugins

A contact form on any websites is one of the most important elements you need on your own website. And using a good free form builder can skyrocket your website’s growth. I have used WPForms, Gravity Forms but the free, easiest-to-use, secure, and reliable WordPress form builder plugin is Contact Form 7. It can manage multiple website contact forms as well as you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

08. Email Sender/Email Logger Plugin

We build any website to generate enquires, and if the email system won’t work, there is no point on having a website. I have a bad experience when a few of my client WordPress site, not sending emails? I have used “Easy WP SMTP”, but right now I am using WPMailSMTP Pro. Over 1,000,000 websites use WPMailSMTP to fix their email deliverability issues. Making Email Deliverability Easy for WordPress. The Most Popular WordPress SMTP and PHP Mailer Plugin. Most important, you can also keep track of every email sent from your WordPress site in the EMail Log option. You can view all your past emails after login to your dashboard and by clicking on the Email Log menu.

09. Slider Plugin

In my opinion, every site nowadays needs an Image/Video Slider plugin to give the best look and smooth effects on the slider we have added revolution slider as the best. However, not all slider plugins are created equal. Most of them load too many scripts which slow down your website. Among other good plugins, I have also used Master Slider, Soliloquy, Nivo Slider but presently I am using Slider Revolution (Revolution Slider) which is an innovative, responsive WordPress Slider Plugin that displays your content the beautiful way. Whether it’s a Slider, Carousel, Hero Scene or even a whole Front Page, all can be design easily with Revolution Slider plugin.

10. Custom Login Plugin

I really hate seeing default WordPress Login screen and login URL for any of the client websites I built. YITH Custom Login plugin gives you the ability to customize the login page of WordPress. Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, you will be able to change the default style of WordPress login’s page. You can set a pretty and personal style, change the logo, change colour, link logo to your own domain according to your style! To change the default Login URL for better security to a custom URL, you can use the AIO Security plugin as mentioned in point 3 above, and they have this feature to change default WP Login URL.

11. Image Optimizer Plugin

Images can improve the brand; however, unnecessarily large images can increase page load speeds, which negatively impacts your SEO and causes frustration for your visitors. I have used few well-known Image Optimizer Plugins like Optimus, Smush Image, EWWW Image Optimizer and all of them are good, but I have decided to use Imagify as it can be easily combined and fully supported by WPRocket Cache plugin which can convert any images to WebP format easily. Imagify Optimizer will optimize your website images for all those people who are struggling with Google, saying that their images can be optimized better. Therefore the optimization has the exact same compression ratio as Google PageSpeed recommend if Google API key is set.

12. Performance Booster Plugin

Faster page load = Happier Visitors = More Conversions = More Revenue. There are often times when you are using a theme and a number of plugins which are enabled and run on the same page. However, you don’t need to use all of them and to improve the speed of your website and make the HTML source code cleaner; it’s better to prevent those styles and scripts from loading. WP Asset CleanUp scans your page and detects all the assets that are loaded. All you have to do when editing a page/post is just to select the CSS/JS that is not necessary to load, this way reducing the bloat. Also, it fully supports and works nicely with WPRocket Cache Plugin.

13. Security / Performance / Marketing Plugin

This WordPress plugin for just about anything, though I am not using it for any client sites as it covers many things but not broadly. This plugin will replace all plugins mentioned in Point 2, 3, 7, 9, 11, 12 above. You can have One service packed with powerful tools to help you reach your goals. Security, Performance, Marketing, and Design tools — Jetpack is made by the WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic. Jetpack Security provides real-time auto backups and easy restores, malware scanning, and spam protection. Essential features like brute force protection and downtime/uptime monitoring are free. Get blazing fast site speed by using AMP, a tool that helps optimize your site on mobile devices. Jetpack’s free CDN (content delivery network) auto optimizes your images. Works great with WP Super Cache, Cloudflare, Contact Form 7, Mailchimp, WooCommerce, Google Analytics, Social media platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.

Concluding

Anblik from Kolkata, India is one of the most reputed names in the field of WordPress related website design and development Should you need to build any plugins or wanted to design any new websites using WordPress, do Contact Anblik Web Design Company.