Summary
Working on your WordPress site can be overwhelming as you may not know where to start. The great thing is you can multitask with the help of the plugins.
Plugins are used according to their functions and features to manage your database and user interface so that you can focus more on your content, insights from web traffic, and lead generation.
Plugins are additional tools, much like how we install apps on our phones, adding extra help so we can optimize their usage. These plugins are like your mini-assistants that can give reports, results, or an enticing and engaging interface, depending on their features.
The best things about these plugins are that most are free, with thousands of them to download. The premium ones can provide you with more access to the features of the plugins, and you can check on those that are worth investing in.
Here are the plugins that I would recommend that WordPress sites should download. These combinations of plugins would help you more than enough, like a starter pack in the maintenance, backing up, and customization of your site.
I have listed the following plugins from their key features and ratings from their WordPress plugin page.
All In One SEO (AIOSEO)
For a starting site like yours, web traffic indicates growth. So how can you drive the traffic towards your site?
Let people know your contents exist, and this is where you can count All In One SEO.
All In One SEO has over 3 million active installations and has many features that provide the SEO tools for particular needs. For example, they have a TruSEO score that analyzes your content and its readability for you to work on your content and create higher SEO rankings.
Type of plugin: marketing plugin
Key Features:
- Increase your traffic by improving your ranking on search engines
- Optimized for Google and other search engines as they follow up on date SEO standards and best practices
- Created SEO workflows for outranking competitors with the similar content on the search results pages
- In less than 10 minutes, you are all set to SEO XML sitemaps, SEO keywords, SEO meta title, SEO meta description, social media integration, and a lot more
- Speaking of social media integration, it provides seamless integration with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social media platforms
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
iThemes Security
Such a hassle if your site, data, or contents get hacked. Retrieving all of these can be time-consuming.
Since your WordPress contents are exclusive to the public, these hackers may attack at any time, anywhere, and probably every month. You have to go all through that process of retrieving again.
iThemes Security has over 1 million active installations, which means they are trusted enough to prevent those attacks on your site. They also have premium features like using reCAPTCHA, passwordless logins, and trusted devices you can add to prevent logins from unfamiliar devices.
Type of plugin: security plugin
Key Features:
- Real-time security dashboard
- Create backups of your WordPress database
- Login security using Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) and password requirements
- Ban repeat offenders who try to access your site
- Other advanced security tools
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
WP-Optimize
How fast and smooth your site run can affect the traffic and the retention of the visitors or followers. Let them focus more on the content than on the glitch and lags your site could have.
WP-Optimize can clean and optimize your database so it would make your site fast and efficient. WP-Optimize Cache Premium features include managing multiple WordPress sites at a time, a wide range of options for automatic scheduling at a specified time, and a seamless Graphical User Interface (GUI).
Type of plugin: performance or site maintenance plugin
Key Features:
- Cleans your database
- Compress images to reduce their size for more storage space
- Caches pages to increase speed and performance while reducing the server’s use of resources
- Advanced minification and combine CSS and Java
- Customizable automatic clean-up schedule depending on the set range
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus acts as an app for backing up your contents into Amazon S3, Openstack Swift, Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP, DreamObjects, UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, and email. Doing manual backups is tedious, especially if you have tons of other things to accomplish for your site.
Your security plugin prevents attacks from hackers, but it would be safer to double secure your data with backups. Since you are also cleaning your database for faster site loading, those important data would also need backups.
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Their premium allows you to back up on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft OneDrive, and more backup drives, free expert support, easy duplication or migration of your website, and backs up non-WordPress files.
Type of plugin: backup or site maintenance plugin
Key Features:
- Backs up to more cloud options
- Manage multiple website backups
- Creates a temporary clone of your site that will run on their servers using their UpdraftClone, which you can use to run our test some features rather than on the actual live site
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Elementor
During the times of HTML, you must at least know the basics of coding to customize your website background and interface. Other websites may let you copy and paste codes, but customizing fonts, colors, and backgrounds would still need you to edit the codes.
But times have changed, and now you can drag and drop to design your WordPress site. You can visualize more of your site design for your audience.
Type of plugin: webpage builder plugin
Key Features:
- More than 300 design templates to choose and edit or create or export your templates
- Live drag and drop editing feature, no coding needed
- Automatically saves and backup your work
- Landing page templates are essential for SEO and ad campaigns
- Responsive design for different types of devices like smartphones or tablets
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
WP Maintenance Mode
You can use WP Maintenance Mode to post on your WordPress site if your page is undergoing maintenance and needs to be down for several hours or days.
This plugin lets your audience know what’s up and can excite them to look forward to revisiting the page.
Type of plugin: site maintenance plugin
Features:
- Responsive design, which is mobile and tablet-friendly
- Customizable design
- Has countdown timer and ‘Coming soon page
- Subscription and contact form
- Includes landing page templates
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Ninja Forms
Collect data and payments easily with Ninja Forms.
Ninja Forms uses a drag-and-drop to create and design your forms. It also has templates to choose from that are customizable for a registration form, application form, MailChimp form, subscription forms, quote request form, PayPal form, survey form, and more.
It has more than 1 million active installations with its user-friendly features that lets you create engaging and lead-generating WordPress forms in just a few minutes.
Type of plugin: form builder plugin
Features:
- Very customizable templates and in designing your forms
- Accepts PayPal and credit card payments and donations with options for a single payment, subscriptions, or user-entered amounts
- Responsive design and mobile-friendly
- Export submissions as PDF, Microsoft Excel file, and to Google Sheets
- Follows GDPR Compliance and has Right to Be Forgotten and Data Export requests templates
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Broken Link Checker
The user experience, from smooth loading of the website page to working links to videos, other websites, social media platforms, missing images, redirects, and more, can increase your SEO and web traffic.
But as your contents increase in number, it would be hard enough to keep track of which links within your contents still work.
The Broken Link Checker plugin can do all the work, as manually checking it would be time-consuming. It runs through the contents to look for broken links.
As soon as it finds the broken link, it can notify you through your widget on the Dashboard. It can also send an email notification, or the WordPress admin panel, under Tools, where you can see the Broken Links option.
Type of plugin: site maintenance plugin
Key Features:
- Runs through your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields to track both external links and internal links
- You can edit the URL of the broken link directly on the plugin page without updating the post itself
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Sites Where You Can Download WordPress Plugins
Plugins are available and can be downloaded either for free or on the premium on these sites.
Plugins, just like apps, may have great features but sometimes tend to fall short of the specific features you are looking for. They also looked like app stores, complete with plugin descriptions, ratings, reviews, and number of downloads.
You can explore different plugins that would best serve as the right tools.
WordPress
WordPress has a page dedicated to thousands of plugins, and all of the mentioned plugins are available here for free or on premium.
CodeCanyon
CodeCanyon has over 1000 premium WordPress plugins you can purchase for as low as $2.
WPMU DEV
WPMU DEV also has premium plugins you can download. But you must sign up first for membership to download the plugins.
It has more than 900,000 members with either a monthly or yearly membership subscription and different packages for personal, freelancer, or agency, each with varying rates.
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