One of the main reasons WordPress is fast becoming the most popular CMS is its directory of free plugins. There are literally thousands of plugins available. But how to find the best plugin is a question. can help you build your most powerful and solid website.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin and one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there. Currently installed on over 4 million (!) WordPress sites.
It’s nicely preconfigured and works by showing you a simple list of SEO recommendations for the keyword you want to target. It tells you how to write your page title, meta description, and other elements. You can also add social sharing images from here
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the tool to use if you’re considering starting an ecommerce store on WordPress. There is no better solution to give you a complete all-in-one package with features every online store needs.
WooCommerce has no restrictions on what you can sell and how much. You can also accept payments online through multiple payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, and more).
Moreover, WooCommerce is pretty easy to use, so you can focus on maintaining your products instead of worrying about getting your ecommerce store up and running from a technical point of view.
Wordfence Security
Unfortunately, the fact that WordPress is the most popular website platform also means that it is the most hacked platform. WordPress has a big goal on its back, but that doesn’t mean we can’t mitigate some risks and keep attackers at bay. That’s where Wordfence comes in: it’s the best security plugin for WordPress.
Wordfence can do a lot for your WordPress security, and most of it happens on autopilot. First, install a firewall that protects your website from unauthorized access and other common attacks. Then there are security scans that you need to run. can do to further protect your website from attacks. It will also remove malware and protect your WordPress users.
Really Simple SSL
Most web hosts nowadays offer free SSL certificates, which is great as it makes the web more secure overall. However, in order to use this free certificate, you must allow your website to integrate it. That’s what the Really Simple SSL plugin does.
It’s easy to use and doesn’t require any server-side work. Once you install the plugin, you will be guided through the process of getting your SSL working.
WP Fastest Cache
Caching is a pretty complicated (and boring) concept for those who aren’t too keen on server-level and browser-level optimizations. consecutive visitors to your site, rather than generating that content on the fly each time.
The details of how this happens are, as I said, complicated and tedious, but the most important thing is that it’s pretty easy to use. WP Fastest Cache comes with a nice out-of-the-box configuration that allows you to take full advantage of caching and improve your loading times.
Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR / CCPA
When you target your website to readers in Europe, you must comply with applicable privacy laws and regulations. These rules result in practice (*) in your website having to display a “cookie notice” to your EU readers. With this plugin you can do exactly that.
After installing it, you can enable a cookie notice either based on a template or write your own.
Regenerate Thumbnails
Regenerate Thumbnails is one of those little plugins that sits quietly in the background, only coming out every once in a while to get some work done. However, they are still invaluable when it comes to the quality of that work.
What this plugin does is simple; It checks the correct image sizes set in your current theme and then regenerates all your thumbnails accordingly. For example, every time you change your WordPress theme, use this plugin to reset your images so they look good.
Redirection
At some point while you’re running your site, you’re probably going to want to change the URL of a post or page. It happens to all of us.
When that happens, you’ll need a way to redirect traffic from the old post to the new post.
That’s what Redirection does.
It provides you with a graphical interface to easily manage all 301 redirects on your website, which is much easier to use than trying to go into your .htaccess every time you want to add a new redirect -Invade file.
You can also get creative with your redirects, e.g. conditionally forward someone based on whether they’re logged in or not, and all of this is available for free via a responsive developer working on Automattic.
Advanced Custom Fields
Advanced Custom Fields, dubbed ACF by experts, is a must-have plugin if you plan to custom code an original customization on your website.
ACF allows you to add custom fields to different areas of your WordPress website: it can be your posts, pages, users or any type of post. What these custom fields can do is really a blank canvas as they do whatever you want. ACF also makes it easy to display custom field data on any page of your website.
Code Snippets
Code Snippets is a very clever plugin. Its basic idea is very simple. It allows you to add custom code snippets to your website, customize them, and turn them on or off as needed. can be anything: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, shortcodes, PHP, etc.
For example, if you want to add a new image style to be applied to all images in your WordPress blog posts, it would be counterproductive to do it directly in your theme source files. Once you update this theme, your changes will be gone. .However, if you make these customizations via code snippets, they still work.
Adding your Google Analytics code via code snippets is also a great idea and saves you from installing a separate analytics plugin for it (like MonsterInsights).
