Must have WordPress Plugins for Your Blog or Business Website
WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, yet it is open-source, implemented, coded, and developed for websites in a wide range of ways.
The number of themes, page builders, plugins, and hosting plans makes it easy for a novice to set up a site pretty quickly.
It also allows custom theme development, integration and use of custom code, and some pretty sophisticated applications.
Despite the wide range of implementation and deployment, there are some common plugins that serve the novice and experienced WordPress admin or developer well.
Trust is a key factor in the open-source environment when it comes to plugins and code bases that others have developed.
I highly recommend that you try to limit the number of plugins you use.
The more plugins you have, the more you’ll need to keep them up-to — date to reduce security risks and reduce time testing with each update to make sure things don’t break down.
Plus, you can avoid some unintended consequences of plugins that conflict with each other.
While this list is not comprehensive and opinions and approaches will vary, I’ve compiled my list of key plugins that I recommend for WordPress websites ranging from blogs to business focus.
1. Advanced Custom Fields
There are a variety of opinions on the best way to build WordPress websites and use themes and page builders.
I’m not going to get into that here because my focus is on sharing specific plugins that my team has had a lot of success with and trust.
The one thing I’m going to mention, though, is that if you’re going on a custom theme route, we strongly recommend Advanced Custom Fields.
It is a basic plugin for us as it complements our custom page builder and provides a great balance between being robust with options, but not being overkill or overloading information for users.
ACF is well supported and designed to be as flexible as possible in terms of being able to add fields and customize taxonomies essentially anywhere in WordPress. It makes content editing really easy.
Advanced Custom Fields has both free and pro-paid versions for developers.
2. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a plugin that provides caching services primarily. By caching content, your site can load faster, enhancing both user experience and SEO performance.
It goes beyond WordPress defaults and gives you more control to get the right balance between caching and loading content to meet your goals and needs.
This plugin has a nominal annual subscription that covers the number of sites you want to use and the number or nature of updates you would like to receive during the year.
3. Gravity Forms
There are multiple popular WordPress form builder plugins available. Gravity Forms is probably the most popular and most powerful and easy to use.
The key is the ability of the user to quickly and easily spin forms to be embedded in any page.
On top of that, the reliability of the plugin, the ways you can integrate it with a wide range of email marketing platforms and CRMs, as well as the ability to receive notifications, make it my way to form the builder plugin.
Like many form builders, Gravity Forms has licensing third party pricing based on the feature set you want or need.
It offers a free trial of paid features that helps with the evaluation process.
4. Better Search Replace
If you’re ever confronted with a project or an update that requires migration, this plugin is a must. It fills gaps and automates the type of work that would be time-consuming and time-consuming.
Whether you’re trying to quickly find all the links that broke during the migration, trying to find and replace, or moving a database, it can cover you on all fronts.
This plugin does require some human logic as it is powerful, but it needs your input and understanding to apply to what needs to be migrated, updated, and fixed. However, it saves a lot of time and manual effort.
Better Search Replace has basic and pro options for a range of price points based on the features required.
5. Imagify
Caching is important, as noted above in the WP Rocket section. Beyond that, one of the biggest convicts for page load speed is images.
Imagify is a compression tool for the image.
It helps you automate the process of optimizing the size of your images without sacrificing quality.
This time-saving plugin can help if you can’t keep users from uploading large images and don’t have the ability to modify WordPress’ default upload settings.
Imagify has a very nominal monthly subscription price and is rated based on the number of images your site has.
6. Yoast
I can’t say a lot about Yoast here without unpacking all the power it has for SEOs.
Yoast gives you control over a wide range of things that matter to SEO, ranging from indexing files to specific on-page factors.
It sometimes comes with a learning curve, and because of Yoast ‘s robust nature, it can cause some conflicts with other apps.
Some SEOs have been disabled due to security issues or bugs that have taken time to be disclosed and have gone with alternatives.
Despite that, it’s still the industry standard SEO plugin for WordPress.
Yoast is offering both free and premium versions.
7. Redirection
Even if you are not in the process of migrating or moving to a new website, you may occasionally need 301 redirects.
When a page is gone, moved, or content is refreshed and republished, you’ll want to be able to quickly and easily redirect the old URL to the new one.
Redirect is a simple tool that allows a user to use WordPress to specify an old and new content URL and save it.
The redirect goes live instantly and does not require a developer, IT, or any confusion or issues over 301s vs 302s, etc. You can go beyond the basic 301s and make conditional redirects as well.
The John Godley Redirect Plugin is supported by a donation.
Verdict
As noted, the disclaimer here is that this is not the end-to-be-all list of plugins. There are probably a lot of good alternatives to those I’ve noticed.
However, I wanted to share what’s in my team’s toolbox based on years of experience in developing custom WordPress sites and working on pre-built themes.
We trust these plugins, the developers, and the track record they have with stability , security, and updates.
Exceptions do happen, but we continue to use these in our standard set of critical WordPress plugins that we build and manage.
