WordPress is a powerful content management and website creation tool. The reason behind its popularity is the availability of lots of plugins and themes. So WordPress alone has not all the option but it is a modular system where you can enable the features as per your requirement by installing the required plugins. So here in this posts we will discuss the basic plugins that you must have required for a new WordPress installation for every website. Still its your own choice to install them. So lets find out the essential plugins categorized according to their uses.
1. Security Plugins
As WordPress is used by approx. 30% of websites on the internet, so WordPress is also the prime target of the spammers and hackers. So this is the most essential plugin for any website. Though WordPress is secure and its developers team always fix the threats quickly as they came to know about any vulnerability. But hackers can go through the third party plugins, So there is no harm to put an extra layer of protection. Here are best security plugins for the WordPress that you should install.
Wordfence
It is one of the most popular security plugin for the WordPress security. You can call it the antivirus software of the WordPress. It includes firewall and protects from the spammers and malware attacks. It is a free plugin and offer a lot o features to protect the website from real-time threats. There is also a premium license available for this, which offers more robust security. But for new website owners free version works fine. Its default settings works well for all the websites. But there are customization options available to customize it further.
Features:
- Live traffic view
- Virus / Malware scanning
- Firewall Rules
- Login security
- Avoid DDoS attacks
Paid version provide more features
- Country blocking
- Remote scanning
- Scheduling scans
2. Backup Plugins
After securing the WordPress next step is to secure you hard work. So it is always advisable to take the backup of your work. Set up an automatic regular backup system with these backup plugins.
updraftPlus
There are many plugins available for the WordPress backup but Updraft Plus is an easy to use and powerful plugins. Its free plugin works well and has all the basic backup features.
Features
- Create automatic backup or start backup manually.
- Option to store the backup locally or in the cloud.
- Option to integrate with Google Drive, One Drive, DropBox, FTP etc.
- Easily restore the website to the previous backup
- Create separate backups for Database and files.
3. SEO Plugins
After setting up the backup and security. Now you are ready to start writing your posts. And search engine optimization (SEO) is a must have thing to optimize your page content. WordPress default doesn’t have option to write seo title and description which google used to display in their search results. So you require a third party plugins to achieve this.
Yoast SEO
This is a popular seo plugin which provides many functionalities to optimize the posts for the search engines.
Features
- Optimize posts with title, description and keywords.
- Suggestion to improve the content readability to optimize it for the readers.
Its basic version is free and contains all the necessary option. Paid option provide some extra premium features like multiple keyword optimization.
4. Forms Plugins
In every website you require a contact form that visitors can reach to you. So here are the forms plugins.
wpforms
This plugins can be used to create a contact form or other form on the website. It is very user friendly and can create responsive or mobile friendly forms.
Features
- Attractive contact form with any type of input field.
- Pre built templates.
5. SMTP email plugin
Mails are useful to notify you or your users for any action like contact form submission. By default WordPress uses an inbuilt mailing system. which can send your mails to the spam folder, because that is not based on the authentication system. It may result in delivering the emails to Spam box or does not deliver at all. So to avoid this you require to route emails through your email service provider by using the proper authentication. It will deliver the emails directly to the inbox. So it is a must thing that you install a plugin to enable SMTP authentication for the emails.
WP mail SMTP
By reconfiguring WordPress to use the correct SMTP provider when sending emails, the WP Mail SMTP fixes your mail deliverability. It is very easy to configure and there inbuilt settings for some popular providers.
6. Page Speed, Image optimization and cache plugins
Google includes page speed as a ranking factor in their algorithm, so it is necessary to make your pages load faster. There are many plugins which provide different functionalities and features. So here we are listing some of them.
WP Fastest Cache
This plugin create an html file of all the pages and serve them from the cache to load the page faster by reducing the time to fetch from the database. It also helps to reduce the server resources load and can handle a large traffic. This plugin handle all this without doing any modification in the website.
Features
- Generate static html fules from the dynamic pages.
- all cache files regenrated when a post or page is published.
- Option to minify HTML, CSS.
- Enable Gzip compression.
- Leverage browser caching
- option to combine CSS and JS files.
in its premium version it offers
- Better minification and combination of CSS and JS files
- Defer JavaScript
- Optimize images
- Covert to WepP
- Database cleanup
- Google fonts Async
7. Custom page design plugins
Though WordPress’ default editor known as block editor (Gutenberg) offers many kind of block to design a beautiful pages without help of any third party plugin. But there are some great third party plugins, which offer lots of features to produce beautiful pages very quickly, including some pre made designs. Here are the plugins to try out.
Elementor
