14 Must-Have Plugins for Your WordPress Website

The WordPress Plugin Directory features over 55,000 plugins!

Selecting the right plugins for your WordPress or WooCommerce site is essential for creating, updating, or maintaining your website.

In the article below, we'll give our recommendations for 14 of the top WordPress plugins that we've personally used across hundreds of websites. 

1. Yoast SEO (5M+ Active Users)

Having an SEO plugin on your WordPress website is essential to ranking on Google and even gives recommendations for creating better content, optimizing your Meta Data, and managing your Sitemap submissions.

Here are some of the main reasons we like Yoast SEO:

- Yoast will give recommendations for Meta Data (such as titles, descriptions, and target keywords)

- Yoast gives recommendations for linking to internal pages

- Yoast offers the ability to connect your site to Google Search Console

Additional SEO plugins we like: All In One SEO

2. WP Forms (5M+ Active Users)

Contact forms are essential for capturing interested leads on your website and giving your customers an alternative way to reach you besides phone call and email.

We recommend using WP Forms for your contact form plugin for the following reasons:

- The plugin offers a free version that covers most contact form needs

- It's extremely lightweight and doesn't load unnecessary code

- Offers extensive functionality and integrations with major CRMs

Additional Forms plugins we like: Ninja Forms

3. Updraft Plus (2M+ Active Users)

Backups are essential for any website and Updraft makes it easy to schedule backups and restore a backup directly from the WordPress Dashboard or from a Zip file.

We recommend Updraft Plus ($70/year for 2 sites) for a few main reasons:

- Flexibility with backups to specific files on the website

- Offers compatibility for multi-site backups

- Ability to schedule backups every 2, 4, 8, or 12 hours, daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly

Additional backup plugins we like: All-in-one WP Migration and Backup Buddy

4. Akismet (5M+ Active Users)

Spam comments can damage your website's reputation and distract your visitors from leaving legitimate, quality comments.

We recommend Akismet to protect against spam comments for the following reasons:

- Akismet will automatically filter spam comments and separate them in a private folder for review

- Comments have a status history, where you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.

An additional tip for protecting against spam: If you're still seeing spam on your website, you can add Honeypot's spam protection plugin to all your website's forms.

5. Stream (70k+ Active Users)

When you have multiple users making updates to your website on a regular basis, it can be difficult to pinpoint which user accessed the website, what was edited, and when the changes were made.

We recommend Stream to monitor user activity for the following reasons:

- Stream tracks every single change and you can easily filter by user to see what was edited and when

- Stream offers real-time user tracking, so you can stay on top of updates as soon as they're made

6. Sucuri (800K+ Active Users)

With almost 11 million website hacks per year, it's extremely important to keep your protect your website against unknown threats by setting up a website security plugin.

We recommend Sucuri's plugin for the following reasons:

- Automatic Malware Scanning and notifications

- Plugin, Theme, and Core file vulnerability scanning

Additional Tip: We recommend setting up Sucuri's DNS firewall for additional protection. DNS-level firewalls protect against hackers before they reach the website.

7. Smart Slider 3 (800K+ Active Users)

Sliders can help showcase multiple areas of your website to your visitors in a short amount of time.

We recommend Smart Slider 3's plugin for the following reasons:

- It's one of the fastest WordPress Slider Plugins

- It comes with a built-in editor to easily build sliders and simple shortcodes to display anywhere on the site

Additional slider plugins we like: Meta Slider

8. Memberpress (200K+ Active Users)

Setting up a membership plugin allows you to take payments, set custom permissions, and manage users all in one place.

We recommend Memberpress's plugin for the following reasons:

- Compatibility with most WordPress themes

- Offers a custom dashboard for users to manage their subscription

9. Migrate Guru (70K+ Active Users)

Migrating your website can be necessary for moving to a new hosting company, creating a staging server, or building a new website.

We recommend Migrate Guru's plugin for the following reasons:

- 80% faster than most migration plugins

- 99% migration success rate

- Zero risk of crashing your website

Other migration plugins we like: All in one WP Migration (With Dropbox Extension).

10. WooCommerce (5M+ Active Users)

Integrating E-Commerce on your website will allow you to sell products or services, integrate membership options, and track customer analytics all in one place.

We recommend WooCommerce's plugin for the following reasons:

- WooCommerce is the largest and most reliable E-Commerce plugin for WordPress

- WooCommerce offers hundreds of extensions to help with advanced functionality

11. Perfmatters 

Most popular WordPress plugins load their code sitewide. With a script manager, you can select which code loads on which pages. For example, you can limit WooCommerce code to the product, checkout, cart, and login pages.

We recommend Perfmatters' plugin for the following reasons:

- Complete control over which scripts load on which pages

- Offers additional features for Code Optimization, Image Optimization, and Locally Hosting External Scripts.

Additional Script Managers we like: Asset Cleanup Pro

12. Smush Pro (1M+ Active Users)

Compressing your images is a vital part of improving your website's speed and can lead to a better user experience.

We recommend Smush Pro's plugin for the following reasons:

- Offers compression of images automatically upon upload

- Offers ability to lazy-load images and set proper dimensions which helps in passing Google's speed metrics

Additional Image Compression plugins we like: Imagify and Shortpixel

13. WP Rocket (2M+ Active Users)

Setting up a caching plugin on your website can help speed up the load time for repeat visitors and help in passing Google's speed test recommendations.

We recommend WP Rocket's plugin for the following reasons:

- Easy-to-use interface with a large library of resources

- Helps meet the Google Core Web Vitals which helps improve website ranking

Other caching plugins we like: W3 Total Cache and WP Fastest Cache

14. WP Sweep (100K+ Active Users)

The WordPress Database can easily become bloated with post revisions, auto drafts, spam comments, and more.

We recommend WP Sweep plugin for the following reasons:

- Safely and easily optimize database tables

- Uses proper WordPress delete functions as much as possible instead of running direct delete MySQL queries

Pro tip: Make sure to back up your database before making any optimizations. We recommend the plugin "WP Database Backup"

Interested in more plugin recommendations?

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