Ariel One of the main reasons for WordPress’s world-wide popularity, is its inexhaustible Plugin Repository, where there are over 36,237 plugins with over 854,011,237 downloads!
Thousands of developers all over the world are developing plugins and extensions, free or to buy. As of now just keep going up. All this is even before the thousands of premium plugins that are sold by developers outside the official repository.
Along with an endless amount, there are many plugins that do the work especially well and you help you in a much faster and easier management of the system, in comparison to many plugins that cause various bugs.
There’s a number of parameters for a good plugin:
- Constant updating and maintenance, as displayed in the Changelog
- Compatibilty to the system’s latest version
- The plugin’s rating
- The developer’s profile and reputation
Therefore, even if you’ve found the plugin which suits you, don’t forget to check these parameters, because they will usually give you an indication of the its coding level.
Below are our 10 recommended plugins for any WordPress website:
WordPress SEO – There’s no doubt that as of today this is the best SEO WordPress plugin. Aside the many meta tag-management options that come in this plugin, you can also manage: XML Sitemaps, Breadcrumbs, Social Integration and more. The plugin is developed by Yoast and has a number of Premium plugins. For example: eCommerce sites, news and more.
Bonus: It allows you to add Redirect 301 from any page on your website.
iThemes Security – A multi-purpose security plugin once called Better WP Security. It’s no secret that the system’s popularity causes many hackers to find security holes. This plugin gets frequently updated and covers over 30 various aspects in the system’s security.
Bonus: It emails you a database backups on a customizable schedule.
Contact Form 7 – Or in short CF7. A form creating plugin with over 24 million downloads, hundreds of upgardes and countless online tutorials, all which guarantees you a solution for almost any problem. With this plugin you can create almost any form that comes to your mind.
Bonus: Contact Form DB – A very popular extension for the CF7 plugin which saves contact form submissions to your WordPress database
Polylang – If you need a multilingual website and the MultiSite solution doesn’t suit you, this useful plugin will do all the work for you. With this plugin, you can easily add languages in the system, as well as set a default language in every user’s profile. The plugin works great with RTL languages, supports them 100%.
Bonus: This plugin is a simple alternative to the WPML plugin – which may save you money.
Read more in our blog: Building a Multilingual WordPress Site Without Touching Code >>
Activity Log – How many times have you noticed changes in your website, and didn’t know where they came from? If you’re managing the site with other active users this probably happened to you too many times. With this plugin you can track every action in the Dashboard, in organized detail.
Bonus: You can create notifications to be sent to your email, according to actions that you had set.
Advanced Custom Fields – This plugin, unlike others, is intended for WordPress theme developers. If you need to add custom fields in posts, pages or taxonomies, this plugin will enable you to do so easily. The plugin has a wide documentary, as well as extensions with which you can a variety of things.
Bonus: For years, all the custom fields issue was very complex for developers, by using this plugin you’ll never understand how you worked without it.
Aksimet – A plugin developed by the Automatic company, and is included in every WordPress installation. This plugin allows you to block any spam replies, as well as spam in CF7 forms. The disadvantage: Requires registration to WP.com to recieve a key to activate the plugin for free for non-commercial sites, commercial sites need a license with a monthly fee of $5.
Bonus: Cookies for Comments is a great free plugin that can save you money and spam replies.
Google Doc Embedder – Have you always wanted to embed PDF files and various other documents in the page, with the option of downloading the original file? With this plugin you can embed the files from the media directly into the post, and it will be displayed by the Google Viewer.
Bonus: By adding Event Analytics in the plugin page, you can track the amount of files that have been downloaded by the users of the site.
Google Analytics for WordPress – Another successful plugin by Yoast, with it you can best track your site with the latest codes. The plugin’s big advantage is that it doesn’t depend on your theme. If you change your theme, the plugin will continue to work great. In addition, it has many advanced features for tracking various parameters.
Bonus: Allows interfacing with other plugins such as Linker, so you could track outbound links.
Jetpack – The WP.com plugin template gives you many tools to improve your system. WP statistics, forms, widget managing, sharing, subscriptions and more. In order to use it you need to login to your WP.com account, like in Akismet.
Bonus: Allows an exclusive CSS editing according to the themes that are in the system.
A few more useful plugins:
UpdraftPlus – This plugin allows you to backup your site and store it FTP, Google Drive, Dropbox and more.
Regenerate Thumbnails – Have you ever changed your site’s theme to find that your images lost their quality? This plugin will cut all the media images by the sizes of your new theme.
User Switching – This plugin allows you to easily view the Dashboard in every user account in your site.
Please note that too many plugins on the system is not always optimal. So make sure to only install the plugins that you really need, and remove the ones that are not in use. It’s also very important to make sure that the system and plugins are always updated to their latest versions.
If you would also like to recommend on a plugin, we’ll be happy to read about it in the comments.
Great list… I only knew 5 of them! I’ve been using them for a while… they do work just fine!
I want to ask something about SEO plugins, please tell me can I use two SEO plugins at same time. I want to use Yoast and Easy SEO plugins.
We don’t recommend using two SEO plugins, it’s a but of an overkill and can cause SEO issues. SEO Yoast is a great SEO plugin that incorporate the most important features you’ll need for SEO.