As mentioned above, the list includes some of the best WordPress SEO plugins, security plugins, speed optimization plugins, marketing and social media plugins. These plugins will help you to make your site robust, secure, SEO friendly and complete with all the aesthetics needed on a modern website.
1. Jetpack
A powerful plugin from the brilliant team behind the WordPress software itself (Automattic), Jetpack is a must have plugin for every WordPress website. As the name suggests, it offers a pack of awesome features for your website to fly up high and make it a success.
Jetpack takes care of your site security, website performance, traffic growth, image optimization, website appearance and a lot more.
It features enhanced distribution which automatically shares your published content to third-party services like search engines and helps to increase your reach and traffic. Additionally, it creates sitemaps so that search engines can easily index your site.
Most of all, it protects your website security by preventing brute force attacks. It also monitors your site every five minutes for downtime and instantly notifies you of any issues found.
2. Everest Forms
One of the fundamental pages you need in a website is ‘Contact‘ page. No matter how big or small website you have or whatever type of website it is, you definitely need a contact page from where your website audience can contact you. The purpose of contact can be anything; to provide you feedback on your work, reach you out for business deals, or suggestions in general, a well-designed contact page is a must.
So, to create contact forms, here is a plugin ‘Everest Forms‘. It’s a modern WordPress contact form plugin with drag and drop interface that lets you build beautiful contact forms easily and quickly. It has a set of general fields along with advanced fields which you can easily drag and drop to create forms.
Further, it allows you to create two column WordPress contact forms as well as advanced forms with advanced fields like radio buttons, dropdowns, checkboxes, date, and more. View Everest Forms demo, and learn how it works.
The plugin is available for free, however, it comes with a complete set of features to enable you to build full-fledged forms. It features Google reCaptcha support, editable email settings, redirect page options after successful submission, editable form validation message etc. Summing up, it’s an incredible plugin for WordPress contact forms.
3. Akismet
Akismet is yet another plugin developed by the people behind WordPress (Matt and his team at Automattic). It is one of the default plugins of WordPress that comes with every new WordPress core installation. It is basically an anti-spam plugin which checks all comments and filters out the spammy comments.
The plugin provides a status history for each comment so that you can learn which comments were found spammy by Akismet or the moderator. Moderators also can view the number of approved comments for each user, see the URLs in the comment body and remove the suspicious links.
The plugin is free for the personal site and blogs while you have to subscribe its monthly plans for commercial sites. The premium plans provide advanced security solution besides spam protection.
4. User Registration
WordPress user registration is yet another integral feature you would not want to miss. Essentially, ‘register’ feature is available on default WordPress installation which can be enabled from WP dashboard following the given steps.
Once it is enabled, users now can find a register option at your website’s login page ((e.g: yoursite.com/wp-login.php). Now, users can get registered to your site by entering a username and email, however, it doesn’t look ideal.
First, it’s not user-friendly that a user must find the login URL to get registering option. Next, as a website owner, you cannot collect more information as it has a limited two-field form allowing users to enter just a username and email.
Therefore, you need a virtual WordPress registration plugin. Thankfully, here is a carefully crafted simple and user-friendly plugin at your disposal: User Registration.
User Registration is a free drag and drop user registration plugin for WordPress. The plugin comes up with a plenty of amazing features so that you can easily create a beautiful front-end user registration form within a few minutes.
Some of the main features of the plugin are Unlimited registration forms, multi-column support, ReCaptcha support, email notifications, etc. In addition, you can extend its features by purchasing its premium add-ons.
5. Yoast SEO
No doubt, search engines are the major source of traffic for every website. The number of internet users using search engines is reported to increase steadily, making the importance of Search Engine Optimization more relevant than ever. Fortunately, there is a great plugin like Yoast SEO for WordPress users.
Yoast SEO is an awesome plugin which guides you all the way to create better content and improve your ranking on search results. It focuses on creating the content which is useful to the users as well as technically SEO friendly. The goal is to help the users, gain trust and sustain the rankings which they call sustainable SEO.
Firstly, it makes you choose a focus keyword and use the keyword appropriately in the article you are writing. Page analysis feature checks if you have used the focus keyword everywhere on the image alt tags, meta description, headings and the whole post. Furthermore, it suggests you to properly set up the text and images for better usability and visibility for search engines.
In addition, it helps you improve the way your page/ post looks on the search results with snippet preview. Creating better headlines and catchy Meta description can greatly increase the click-through rates for your site. It has added Readability feature which helps you to create a simple and understandable content.
Finally, here is another plugin called All in One SEO Pack which works quite similarly. You can try this too.
6. Nivo Slider
For most websites, especially commercial ones, it is advantageous when you are able to showcase more than one image. Some might wish to showcase different work samples, products and more. For those who are looking for an alternative to video files, you can even opt for slideshows. Thus, sliders and carousels are one of the major and effective design elements that help with the site’s engagement rate.
And with WordPress, the easiest way to do so is with the plugin Nivo Slider. It is one of the best and also the most popular plugin you find out there. Downloaded over 3 million timessince their launch, you can either use their free or premium version. The plugin lets you easily add post slider, image carousel or even a slideshow. It is user-friendly and the intuitive design structure is easy to work with.
Adding a hint of creativeness and engaging content can never go wrong. The Sliders you create can also be added as a Home Page Slider. Get automatic updates for all the latest features and get premium like plugin support.
7. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the most popular conversion rate optimization software. It allows you to convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers. If you want to grow your email list, then this is a must have WordPress plugin in 2018.
8. Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is another very useful SEO plugin for WordPress. The plugin helps the search engines like like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. to better index your site with a special XML sitemap.
As you activate the plugin, it will automatically create an XML sitemap for your site making it easy to index. A sitemap enables the search engine bots view the complete structure of your website and retrieve the results more efficiently.
The plugin notifies all the major search engines every time you publish something on your site.
9. WPForms
As a business owner, allowing your customers to contact you should be your top priority. WPForms is the most beginner friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag & drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other type of online forms with just a few clicks.
10. W3 Total Cache
WordPress caching is one of the best ways to improve website performance. The general idea of caching is storing the website data temporarily in the cache so that it loads faster the next time the user opens the same page. Cache is a place to store something temporarily in the computing environment.
To enable caching in WordPress, you can use WordPress caching plugins. Caching plugins will cache your posts and pages as static HTML files which are served to the users. This reduces page loading time drastically and helps to optimize overall site performance. Additionally, enhanced site-speed will profoundly impact your site SEO.
W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin is one of the most popular plugins and probably the best caching plugin for WordPress. It features page cache, database caching, object caching, browser caching and a lot more. Besides, it lets you integrate CDN services to reduce page load time. Besides, it has options to minify and HTTP compression of the HTML, JS, and CSS files so that you can save bandwidth up to 80%.
With the reduced loading time, you will get better ranking on search results which consecutively result into high traffic and more conversions.
11. WP Smush
Images are the great assets for your post/ page which easily grab the users’ attention. Uploading images helps you deliver the message many times better that simply the texts can. They make your page look attractive, catchy and engaging.
While being so helpful to make you site more appealing to users, images also take up a lot of storage space and slow down your website. You can’t simply afford to ignore the slow site speed and look for the disaster to happen. Wait a while, here’s good news – you can compress images!
Yes, you can compress and optimize the images without reducing the quality of the images using WP Smush plugin. It optimizes all of your image files in JPEG, GIF and PNG formats using advanced compression techniques and saves lots of storage space. It auto-smushes all your attachments on upload while you can also smush your attachments manually in the media library.
In addition, the plugin lets you smush bulk data (up to 50 attachments) at a time. The plugin is very useful as it helps your post/page look attractive while being fast.
12. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to connect your website with Google Analytics, so you can learn more about your website visitors such as where are they coming from and what are they doing on your website.
13. VaultPress
VaultPress is a security-oriented WordPress plugin built to create real-time automated backups for your website. The Jetpack powered theme easily syncs up every content, post, comment and media file on your website seamless and furthermore provides protection from many web issues and attacks.
VaultPress allows you to create optimized backups regularly and restore your website in a matter of seconds with just a single click. With multiple subscriptions, you can also monitor, backup and manage multiple websites through a single dashboard.
The plugin also scans and detects dangerous files on your website and emails the administrator if it detects any changes to your installation. Furthermore, you can easily review and manage suspicious codes and solve their issues in a matter of clicks.
The plugin also comes with strong spam protection. With Akismet support, you can easily use its anti-spam tools to prevent any measures of spam on your website with zero user involvement.
Furthermore, VaultPress’ subscription is bundled together with Jetpack. Combining the features of these two plugins, you can implement a perfect solution to your internet protection.
The support team has been praised highly for its helpful work and their useful insight into the user’s issues. This means that regardless of what problem you face, a simple request to VaultPress’ team of experts should help you set your website right easily.
14. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is a great tool for cleaning up WordPress database and optimizing WordPress. It automatically removes the unnecessary data from the WordPress without manual queries. The plugin always keeps your database optimized for the best performance.
There may be a lot of useless data in your website which weighs down your site while you may not be even aware of it. With the plugin installed, you have lots of work done automatically. It removes all the spammy and un-approved comments, trash posts, and comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks etc. It will keep your database always clean and optimized.
15. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
You might have seen extra pieces of information like star ratings, images, number of reviews etc. below some of the pages on the search results. They provide further information about the post/ page which users may want to know. Such brief extracts/ pieces of information like ratings are called Rich Snippets.
Rich snippets are the best way to beautify the appearance of your page/ post on search engine result pages. The snippets provide the main information about the product/ page briefly i.e. highlight the attractions of the product. This is why they help you get more click-through rates through search engines.
To create rich snippets in WordPress website, you can use the handy plugin All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets. It provides the search engines with the precise information to be displayed in the search engine result pages. This helps your site rank better as well as get more click-through rates.
16. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the best email marketing service providers. It allows you to build an email lists and send emails to your subscribers.
It is by far the most beginner friendly platform, with quick and easy setup. It comes with built-in tools to add signup forms and also works well with lead generation software like OptinMonster.
17. BJ Lazy Load
If you have a lot of images used in your site, it may take hours to load. That is annoying to users which often results in higher bounce rates. However, there is a solution to every problem and mostly in WordPress. Lazy loading is the mantra to make your site load faster with lots of images in the page.
To add lazy loading functionality in a WordPress site, you can use a plugin like BJ Lazy Load. The plugin replaces all your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images and content iframes with a placeholder and loads the content as it gets close to entering the browser screen. It displays the content (images) only when a user scrolls the page. Therefore, your site loads faster as well as saves bandwidth.
In addition, it works with text widgets, embedded videos from YouTube, Vimeo etc. It is a great plugin for website performance optimization and SEO.
18. Sucuri
Security is going to be a big concern for online business owners in 2018. Sucuri’s web application firewall is probably one of the best protection you can get for your site.
They monitor and protect your site from DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, and basically every other type of attack.
If you don’t have a firewall on your website, then add one today.
19. Wordfence Security
As a website owner, one of the most crucial things to do is to keep your site secure from the hackers. It is something that you cannot afford to ignore. There may be thousands of malicious bots on the web which can attack your website anytime and destroy your entire work in no time. That is why you must always prevent the spams and keep your website secure.
To keep your WordPress site secure, there are many security plugins available in WordPress. Among them, Wordfence Security is the one you can rely on. The plugin features Firewall protection, malware scan, blocking, login security, live traffic monitoring and a lot more. The plugin lets you monitor all your traffic in real-time including robots, humans, 404 errors, logins, logouts etc. as shown in the screenshot below:
With the monitoring your real-time traffic, you can be aware of the security threats your site is facing and take an instant action against it.
Moreover, the plugin has firewall application which prevents your site from being hacked. Blocking feature blocks all the known attackers, malicious networks which can be harmful to your site. To enhance login security, it adopts Two Factor Authentication while it also checks the strength of all the user and admin passwords. This technique can greatly help you to fight brute-force attacks.
In conclusion, Wordfence Security is a great security plugin for WordPress.
20. Disable Comments
As the name suggests, Disable Comments is useful to globally disable comments on your entire site or certain post types. Considering that all the pages/ posts are not likely to accept user comments, the plugin provides an easy solution for disabling comments on post types, pages, and attachments. Besides, comments sometimes contain spam and unnecessary stuff.
In addition, the plugin provides an option to remove all the comment-related items from the Dashboard, widgets, Admin menu, and Admin Bar. It provides full-fledged features that you need to avoid comment spamming.