We are going to discuss the “Must Have Important WordPress Plugins” for every basic site out there in 2018. So, today we list only important plugins that a Basic WordPress website really need.
What are those Must Have Important WordPress Plugins?
We extracted important plugins considering security, performance, safety and publicity. So, go ahead and find out.
What are Plugins?
A plugin/add-on is a Zip File that adds specific feature to your WordPress site. Now it lets you extend your WordPress experience with 55,000+ plugins and counting.
1. Wordfence Security
Is your WordPress site secure? When this question arises you can consider a simple plugin to protect your website. Hence today we come up with a great plugin called “Wordfence Security Plugin”.
Wordfence Security Plugin provides the best and robust protection for your website.
Now why this plugin? Just go ahead and read why.
Features:
1. Web Application Firewall that identifies and blocks malicious traffic.
2. Malware scanner that scans for Backdoors, malware, vulnerabilities and Modified core files.
3. View Blocked Login/Intrusion Attempts.
4. Track Logs while someone logs in/out.
5. Blocks Brute Force Attacks as a result it limits login attempts.
6. Alerts you when suspicious changes made to your website.
7. Live Traffic to see all types of traffic coming to your site such as bad bots, humans and web crawlers.
2. W3 Total Cache
Again is your WordPress site fast enough? No? Then install W3 Total Cache to gain 10x improved site performance.
W3 Total Cache improves SEO by increasing website performance and reducing download times.
Features:
1. Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript files due to which it saves up to 80% of bandwidth.
2. Also Improve conversion rate which affect your site’s rank on Google
3. This tool has content delivery network(CDN) management thus enables global reach.
4. Also contains Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support.
5. In Short it has all features like page cache, browser cache, object cache, database cache etc..
3. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
Yay! This plugin is a life saver. Because it simplified backups and restoration.
UpdraftPlus is simply the best plugin and packed with standard features.
Features:
1. Remote Backup into cloud such as Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP, OneDrive etc..
2. Manual Backup files into PC which keeps your files at your fingertips.
3. Restore your website from cloud or local PC with just a click.
4. Clone/Migrate your website to another host with ease.
4. Akismet Anti-Spam
Running a blog is not enough as there are spammers/bots all over the world to fill clutter in your site. In cut short you can protect your site with this harsh plugin called “Akismet“. Harsh for spammers/bots and smooth for blogger that simple.
Akismet has its own global database to check weather the comment is spam. while each visitors comment go through this plugin and blocks only the one that are spam.
Features:
1. Checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
2. Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
3. A discard feature that blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speed up your site.
4. Each comment has a status history, so you can see comments that cleared by Akismet. You can also check comments that spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
5. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Why Smush? Do you know a website loaded with too many images also effect load times. That is why this plugin is a must.
Resize, optimize and compress all your images with this powerful smusher.
Features:
1. Bulk Smush helps you smush all your images with a single click.
2. All new images are automatically smushed when you enable Automatic Smush.
3. You got images outside your upload directory? No Problem. You can add those other directories too.
4. You can see how well you saved storage space in stats page.
6. Yoast SEO
Here comes another important plugin that elevates your website to the next level in SEO.
Yoast SEO is easy to setup and works out of the box. Even a layman can understand this plugin to setup to its best. This plugin is for serious SEO enthusiasts.
Features:
1. Automatically optimizes your titles for Google and other search engines.
2. Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content. Never have to worry about Google penalties again.
3. Content & SEO analysis tool to write SEO friendly texts.
4. Snippet preview feature displays you how your post or page will look in the search results.
5. Last but not the least is XML Sitemap Generator that helps you submit sitemap to search engines.
7. WP-Optimize
Another reason of a slow wordpress site is a clogged database. Hence we have backed up with WP-Optimize.
WP- Optimize keeps your WordPress database healthy & active. A healthy & active database responds faster that results in quick response. Thus quick response results in improved page load times.
Features:
1. Removes all unnecessary data (e.g. trashed/unapproved/spam comments, stale data).
2. Optimize database tables with ease.
3. Schedule weekly clean-ups while making you sit back and relax.
4. Got option that takes a backup with UpdraftPlus before making changes to database.
Wrapping Up:
Why we consider them as important plugins? Because security, safety and publicity are basic. And rest of the plugins are optional or on use basis.
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Just let us know how useful this article was by posting your comment in comment section below.
Sudheer Ankireddypalli is an Entrepreneur, Tech Enthusiast, Hardcore Gamer, Traveler and Geek.
