If you’re a blogger or own a website, it’s likely that you use WordPress to power your site. WordPress powers over 27% of the Modern Web and over 58% of all websites that use a Content Management System.
There are thousands of Free & Premium Themes and there are tens of thousands of Free & Premium Plugins to choose from. This provides a virtually unlimited amount of options on how to configure your website to suit your needs. I recently wrote an article over on my blog about How to Make a Small Business Website
The problem with so many choices is that there’s so many choices. How do you choose which theme to use for your site? How do you choose the right mix of plugins to handle the various types of functionality your website will need.
This article provides a list of the Top Plugins you should use for your site.
It can be quite confusing when you start to dive into the various options that exists. What makes it tougher is the fact that it seems like there are so many competing plugins that provide the same functionality and often, they are all well reviewed.
That’s why I’ve put together a list of WordPress Plugins that I believe would be useful for the vast majority of websites out there. The best part is they are all free. If you want to learn more about WordPress in general, Checkout the WordPress Tutorials for Beginners Playlist.
The WordPress Plugins I recommend will take care of almost all the basic types of functionality a website needs. It covers SEO, SocialMedia, Contact forms, Security, Backups, Optimization/Performance, Updates and more.
Here’s the list of WordPress Plugins:
Fast Secure Contact Form – An easy and powerful form builder that lets your visitors send you email. Blocks all automated spammers. No templates to mess with.
iThemes Security – Take the guesswork out of WordPress security. iThemes Security offers 30+ ways to lock down WordPress in an easy-to-use WordPress security plugin.
Wordfence Security – Secure your website with the most comprehensive WordPress security plugin. Firewall, malware scan, blocking, live traffic, login security & more.
Black Studio TinyMCE Widget – The visual editor widget for WordPress.
Simple Social Icons – This plugin allows you to insert social icons in any widget area.
Easy Updates Manager – Manage all your WordPress updates, including individual updates, automatic updates, logs, and loads more. Also works with WordPress Multisite.
UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin – Backup and restoration made easy. Complete backups; manual or scheduled (backup to S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email + others).
Yoast SEO – Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the Yoast SEO plugin.
WP Fastest Cache – The simplest and fastest WP Cache system
Smush Image Compression and Optimization – Compress and optimize image files, improve performance and boost your SEO rank using Smush WordPress image compression and optimization.
WP-Sweep – WP-Sweep allows you to clean up unused, orphaned and duplicated data in your WordPress. It also optimizes your database tables.
So there you have it, the Top 10 WordPress Plugins you should be using for your website. Wait, it’s actually the Top 11 Plugins you should be using. Consider the extra one a bonus plugin. I tried to keep it down to 10 but I couldn’t decide which one to drop from the list.
Take a look at the #YouTube video above to get more information about these plugins and why I think they will be great for your site.
If you want to learn more about WordPress Plugins and which one’s you should use, I have an entire playlist that’s dedicated to helping people choose the right plugins and how to configure them. WordPress Plugins YouTube Playlist