People often ask for a list of essential WordPress plugins. However, people also have varying opinions on what constitutes necessary or not. If you are running a simple blog, you may not need any plugins. However, you will add plugins as you add features to your websites, such as a contact form or SEO tools. While you should limit yourself to just the necessary plugins, a few are universally applicable. Therefore, I am going to give a list of plugins that I have found to be indispensable. As a bonus, all of the plugins in this article are either free or offer a free version that is usable for most website owners.
Contact Form 7
One of the most critical elements of any website is your contact information. Embedding a contact form on your website is the best way to encourage the site visitor to reach out. Contact Form 7 is the most straightforward and most reliable plugin on WordPress. It’s effortless to set up, and it is usually rock solid. It’s also incredibly lean, installing the minimal code required to get a working contact form. The only “extra features” included are intended to block spam.
Contact Form 7’s popularity also means it’s supported by a lot of other plugins and themes. Most WordPress themes will style the form with no extra effort. Plugins also exist to extend the features of Contact Form 7. For example, the plugin doesn’t save any contacts by default, but you can install a second plugin to save the information on submit. This eliminates bloat while also providing access to the features you need.
Rank Math
What is the point of a website without visitors? The best way to get traffic to your website is through organic search results. These are usually high-quality visitors as they have actively searched for your content. To ensure your site shows up high on search results, you need to do search engine optimization (SEO). To do proper SEO, you use an SEO plugin. My recommendation is Rank Math SEO. It provides the most features at the free level while costing a minimal amount of performance.
What elevates Rank Math above similar offerings such as Yoast SEO is the user interface. Yoast is a great option, but its administrative panel is more dated and less intuitive. Rank Math takes all of the features you need from an SEO plugin, such as keyword analysis and URL optimization, and packages it in an easy-to-understand interface.
Wordfence
Websites are just like any other piece of technology; you have to consider security. Since websites are public-facing by their very nature, it makes them even more vulnerable to attack. Wordfence is a WordPress security plugin that also employs its own team of security researchers. This enables them to make sure their plugin provides protection from even the latest hacking techniques.
There are many ways for security vulnerabilities to sneak into your website. WordPress itself may have buggy code or any of the plugins and themes installed on the site. Hackers can brute force their way in, repeatedly and quickly, trying to guess passwords. Wordfence has features to protect you from these attacks and scans for any new potential vulnerabilities. One of its most valuable and oft-overlooked features is scanning for installed plugins that haven’t received updates in a while. This can indicate abandoned projects that can be very problematic.
WP-Optimize
After ensuring your website is functional and secure, the next most important thing is optimizing the website. A good optimization plugin will provide many speed benefits to your website. There are many possible places that can cause your website to slow down. For example, there is dead space, called white space, in the code that makes it easier for humans to read but slows down machines. Until they are optimized, your images are probably too big and will load slower. Even your database, the backend of the website that stores all of the data you enter into WordPress, can accumulate extra information over time.
WP-Optimize is my personal favorite optimization plugin. I find it easy to use and provide the maximum amount of optimization without breaking the website. Its standout feature detects which database tables are from removed plugins and allows you to delete the data. As your website ages, the chances are that you have added and removed many plugins. These plugins usually leave data behind in your database. WP-Optimize can delete this data, speeding up your website.
Site Kit by Google
Whether or not you like Google, it is the de facto standard for many web features. Site Kit by Google is far and away the easiest way to integrate your website with Google services. It supports the ever-popular, almost mandatory, Google Analytics, as well as Search Console, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, and Tag Manager.
Site Kit isn’t only the easiest way to take advantage of these services from Google; it also allows you to check many of these services from within the WordPress console. While the WordPress console for these services doesn’t provide all of the features and views available, it does allow you to get a broad overview of how your WordPress website is performing with minimal effort.
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