Stop wondering about which is the best WordPress plugin for this and that.
No doubt that WordPress is the most used CMS and has a ton of plugins to do almost everything you imagine.
But this also brings a lot of confusion about what to choose and what to avoid. Am I right?
I know, I am!
That’s why in this post, I’ve mentioned all the best WordPress plugins out there that might be useful for you while avoiding the unnecessary ones.
Regardless of what type of website or blog you have, I’m pretty sure that the plugins listed here will make it up to your website.
Now let’s go ahead and talk about them.
Sucuri is the best WordPress security plugin out there. And I’ve provided Wordfence as an alternative if for some reason you don’t like Sucuri.
Both are extremely powerful and will keep your website safe from the bad guys that want to hack your website.
Millions of websites get hacked almost every month and yours can end up being one of them very soon if you don’t take precautions.
Even after using all the security measures, you’ll only be 99.99% secure and there’s always a chance of getting hacked. To deal with it, you must also enable auto backup. More on auto backup later.
Plugins like Sucuri and Wordfence will help you to fight brute-force attack, create a firewall, block IPs, create firewall rules, create login alert, improve login security, improve data security, and much more.
I’ll categorize these plugins as essential WordPress plugins. Do not skip on this one. Make sure to install and activated one of the plugins to keep your website secure.
Remember the GDPR? Well, the internet and users are now fully aware of the privacy issues and therefore there are rules and regulations that must be followed.
GDPR and CCPA are the most famous laws that we saw recently and you must comply with them to avoid the penalty that you might not even be able to afford.
I have already written a detailed article about it where you learn more about GDPR and CCPA and how you can comply with them using some plugins like WP Cookie Consent.
Again, this is an essential WordPress plugin that you must use.
Akismet is the best WordPress plugin for blocking spam comments. Almost all the WordPress site uses it and you should too. Otherwise, you’ll end up deleting and moderating comments manually which will take years to complete.
Please don’t leave your website out there without any spam comment blocking plugin, I swear you’ll regret it. Like the security plugins, this is also an essential WordPress plugin that you shouldn’t ignore.
Even after using the best WordPress plugin to avoid spam comments, you might get some of them undetected.
Think of what will happen if you don’t have a spam comments blocker on your WordPress website.
Are you still relying on WordPress Mail function? Well, you should know that it doesn’t work too well. And in some WordPress hosting, it doesn’t work at all.
You are most likely to lose important emails and you won’t even know that it failed or it was undelivered.
To avoid situations like this, you must use proper mail systems like SMTP.
WP Mail SMTP is the only plugin I know that can help you with that. Doesn’t matter if you use the email service provided by your hosting or cPanel, or services like Amazon SES, G Suite, etc.
With WP Mail SMTP, you can configure it and you’ll never have to guess or worry about your emails getting undelivered or ending up in spam box for no reason.
To learn more about how to avoid these situations, read this. Or go ahead and grab WP Mail SMTP now.
Have you heard of caching? If you have tried to speed up your website then you might already know about it.
WP Rocket is the best caching plugin for WordPress websites. Caching plugins help you out to speed up your website by caching static content and by providing a lot of optimization options.
For example, combining all the CSS files and minifying them, and the same for the HTML, JavaScripts, etc.
A good caching plugin will also allow optimizing your images and most of them will also have the ability to configure CDNs.
If you want a faster website caching plugin is a must and along with it, you must have a CDN enabled on your website.
I highly recommend using BunnyCDN! The one that I’m using for this and all my other websites as well.
While caching plugins allow you to optimize images as well, they are often not that good or effective.
That’s why I recommend using a dedicated image optimizer like Optimole. This is the most effective WordPress plugin on the internet for image optimization.
Along with image optimization, it also provides features to serve CSS and JavaScripts to be served from their world-class CDN.
However, it’s up to you if you want to use them or not. I personally recommend it for its unimaginable image optimization capabilities and for the fact that they serve your images via the most powerful CDN in the world.
By the way, the same features are available in BunnyCDN as well. So if you are using the BunnyCDN image optimizer then you don’t need this one.
And if you don’t use BunnyCDN then I highly recommend using Optimole for your image optimization needs.
Knowing about your visitors’ activities really helps you in growing your blogs and businesses. And one way to do it is to implement Google Analytics on your WordPress website.
However, for most of the non-techies out there Google Analytics is complicated. That’s where MonsterInsights comes to save you.
MonsterInsights plugin helps you to install and manage your Google Analytics from your WordPress dashboard itself very easily.
You can enable and track various kinds of stuff with just a bunch of clicks in the settings panel of MonsterInsights and you are good to go.
No coding or technical skills required.
I’m a bit of a technical guy but I still use it for the ease and for the integrated analytics dashboard which looks way better than the Google Analytics dashboard.
It makes it easier to look and understand your stats without overwhelming you with the flood of data collected from your website.
Google Site Kit is an official plugin by Google for WordPress users. This plugin will help you out with almost anything related to your website and Google.
For example, you can connect and install Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google Search Console, etc. with just a few clicks.
It’s similar to MonsterInsights but not close enough.
However, as it is officially a Google plugin, I highly recommend using it for your website.
It helps you to see the data from Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google Search Console, etc. directly on your website which is very useful.
You no longer have to do the back and forth with those websites anymore for looking at some basic stats.
Some people like it, some people don’t. I personally like it because it brings a lot of traffic for me.
OneSignal is a push notification service provider. It’s completely free to use and also provides a WordPress plugin to capture your visitors and to send notifications when you publish a new blog post or update an old one. Depending on your preferences.
I will not consider it a necessary plugin but if it works for you too then definitely use it to get more traffic via push notifications.
WP Legal Pages is one of the most popular WordPress plugins that allow you to automatically generate legal pages such as the privacy policy page, terms of service page, cookie policies page, etc.
Unless you are very very good with the law, you must hire a lawyer to write these pages or if you can’t afford a lawyer, you can take the help of plugins like this to generate those legal pages automatically.
No doubt that if you are unsure about it then you should consult your lawyer. Because sometimes those generic auto-generated legal pages might not be that useful.
However, in most cases, the auto-generated legal pages are enough. So don’t waste your precious money on lawyers unnecessarily.
Conclusion
So those were some of the best WordPress plugins or essential WordPress plugins that you might find useful for your website.
I've only shared 10 of them for now with the intention to keep updating this blog post with more and more plugins in the future. I hope you like it.
Let me know which one you are already using or which one you are going to try next in the comments below.
