Must Have WordPress Plugins – Essential Plugins for WordPress Websites
WordPress plugins are great tools for extending the functionality of WordPress websites. The official plugin repository currently provides over 56,000 plugins for almost every function or feature imaginable for your website — and it’s expanding. Although the choice of plugins depends on the specific type of website you run, some of them are essential to every WordPress platform. Our dedicated team at WishDesk prepared a list of 10 must have WordPress plugins.
Must have WordPress plugins for professional websites
The list includes our choice of the best SEO, security and speed optimization WordPress plugins for a website. These plugins will improve a site’s performance as well as help make your digital platform SEO-friendly, robust and secure.
- W3 Total Cache
- All In One WP Security
- Duplicator
- Yoast SEO
- Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
- Contact Form 7
- Sassy Social Share
- SSL Insecure Content Fixer
- AMP for WP — Accelerated Mobile Pages
- Elementor Page Builder
Check out this article to learn more about must have WordPress plugins.
Plugins for WordPress Websites
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W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a caching plugin that speeds up a WordPress website. It stores the versions of web pages beforehand and sends them to browsers directly. A website will become faster and a server will become more responsive. Increased website performance affects a site’s rank on Google.com and improves SEO and user experience of a platform.
Key features:
- different kinds of caching (page, object, database, browser, fragment)
- minification for files (HTML, CSS, JS) and database
- transparent content delivery network (CDN) management
- mobile support
- monitoring
Cost: W3 Total Cache is free to download.
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All In One WP Security
All in One WP Security plugin takes website security to a whole new level. Although the plugin performs difficult and important tasks, it is easy to use and understand for a person who is not familiar with programming. All in One WP Security checks for vulnerabilities and implements the latest WordPress security techniques to reduce security risks.
Key features:
- user accounts, login and registration security
- database security
- blacklist functionality
- firewall functionality
- security scanner
Cost: All in One WP Security plugin is free to use.
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Duplicator
Duplicator plugin serves as a backup utility and enables users to migrate, copy or move a website between domains or hosts with zero downtime. This plugin also reports on possible problems and informs if you need to update permalinks and clean up temporary files. Throughout the process, Duplicator performs several scans and checks to make sure all the content has been deployed successfully.
Key features:
- WordPress migration within domains or hosts
- manual WordPress backups
- easy plugin updates
- WordPress website transfer from one host to another
- bundle up an entire website for reuse or distribution
Cost: Duplicator plugin is available both in free and pro versions. A pro version gives you a number of advantages, such as scheduled backups, cloud storage, auto database creation, professional multisite support, email notifications and much more.
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Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO enables website optimization for search engines. This plugin is centered around the creation of useful, SEO-friendly content and guides users through all the stages of content creation. It offers advice on appropriate keywords usage, suggests proper image and text set up and helps improve the way a website looks in search results.
Key features:
- title and meta description templating
- content & SEO analysis
- XML Sitemaps functionality
- snippet preview
- bulk editor
Cost: All the essential features of the Yoast SEO plugin are free. A premium version provides you with internal linking suggestions, content insights, a redirect manager and focus keyword export. Yoast SEO premium costs €79 per website and includes one year of free updates and support.
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Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Google Analytics is the most convenient tool for understanding and improving website traffic. MonsterInsights allows you to connect a WordPress website with Google Analytics. It is the best plugin for monitoring real time stats. MonsterInsights tracks user views from multiple platforms and complies various demographic and interest reports.
Key features:
- quick and easy setup
- real time stats
- different types of tracking (performance, link, ads, events tracking)
- Google Analytics tools
- Google Analytics dashboard
Cost: MonsterInsights is free to download. However, you’ll have to choose a service plan to get access to Custom Reports and Tracking Solutions features. Check out the service plans offered by MonsterInsights.
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Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is the most user-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. It comes with a demo form that you can look at to learn how to build your own forms. Once you are done with creating it, you get a shortcode to insert the form anywhere on a website. What is more, this plugin keeps the users’ privacy. It neither tracks users nor saves any personal data to database. Contact Form 7 is a worthy alternative to premium plugins.
Key features:
- user-friendly interface
- privacy
- automatically inherits WordPress theme’s style
- extensive documentation
- translated into 50 languages
Cost: Contact Form 7 is a free plugin.
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Sassy Social Share
Sassy Social Share is a WordPress social sharing plugin. It supports 100+ sharing/bookmarking services. You can insert your share buttons to specific post types or certain pieces of content. Sassy Social Share is mobile responsive and provides both vertical or horizontal floating buttons on mobile devices. This plugin supports share counts as well.
Key features:
- 100+ Social Sharing/Bookmarking services
- redirect to social media platforms
- icon customization option
- optimal loading time
- mobile responsiveness
Cost: Sassy Social Share plugin is free to download.
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SSL Insecure Content Fixer
SSL Insecure Content Fixer plugin automatically cleans up a WordPress website’s HTTPS insecure content and mixed content warnings. This helps to keep your web pages secured and recognized as such by browsers. Note that this plugin performs fixes after you’ve already implemented SSL. Insecure Content Fixer doesn’t collect any personally identifying data and doesn’t set up cookies.
Key features:
- clean-up insecure content
- insecure file upload handling
- deserialization of untrusted data
- force static files
- security test
Cost: SSL Insecure Content Fixer is an open source plugin.
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AMP for WP — Accelerated Mobile Pages
AMP for WP is a plugin that helps to create mobile content and make a website faster for mobile visitors. AMP for WP automatically adds an Accelerated Mobile Pages (Google AMP Project) functionality to a WordPress website. AMP increases the speed of a website and impacts mobile search rankings. AMP analytics feature tracks visitor count, average session duration, bounce rate, page views and much more.
Key features:
- automatic integration to your website
- AMP plugins manager
- structured data options
- AMP analytics
- drag & drop page builder
Cost: AMP plugin is free to download.
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Elementor Page Builder
Elementor Page Builder plugin is a live page builder without any limits in design. This plugin offers an instant drag & drop page builder, live edit and page load. With Elementor Page Builder you can edit the page and simultaneously see how it looks like. The process of writing and designing is done directly on the page, which means you don’t have to go to preview mode.
Key features:
- live design
- undo/redo & revision history
- mobile editing
- built-in maintenance mode & under construction
- multilingual & RTL supported
Cost: Elementor Page Builder is an open source software. It is a solution for basic style pages. In fact, Elementor offers the most feature-rich free plugin of all the builder plugins available.
If you need Elementor to build out an entire website, then Elementor Pro is a great option because of the new elements, extra controls, and other functionality.
Summing up
Obviously, the list does not constitute the full set of plugins needed for establishing a successful WordPress website. As we mentioned, these plugins provide some basic but essential features such as SEO improvement, website security and speed optimization.
We want to know what you think about must have WordPress plugins list
If you’re already using any of the ten must have WordPress plugins on our list, please leave a comment below.
Contact our WordPress support team if you have any questions or need further assistance or support regarding your WordPress platform.