Another one of the questions I get asked frequently is…
“What plugins should I install on my freshly minted WordPress site?”
Well folks, here are my top 5 must have WordPress plugins to answer your most burning question!
WordFence (Has Free and Paid Version)
If all the recent hacks into websites haven’t made you wary and called your attention to your website, they should. I searched the cosmos to find a plugin that I thought was up to the task of keeping the bad guys at bay and finally found WordFence. What I love about this is even its free version does an amazing job with scans, a firewall, and blocking attacks. It even has the capability of alerting you whenever someone with administrator privileges logs in so you are not blind to who’s logging in and out. This is generally the first plugin I put on my sites or client sites I am building.
WP Rocket (Paid)
One of the biggest pain points I see with websites is speed. Well I do not know about you, but I have the need for speed! I tested all the caching plugins out there, and while I was moderately impressed W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache, I was BLOWN AWAY by WP Rocket. I found it much more user friendly, but above that I shaved off a whole 2 seconds of load time and have not looked back. It isn’t free like the other two but it is the best $39 I have ever spent!
Updraft (Has Free and Paid Version)
Dear sweet baby Jesus if I see another website backend without a backup, I may just lose my mind. Seriously guys, listen close – BACK UP YOUR WEBSITE!!! You can read my post on How Frequently You Should Back Up Your Website, but seriously guys do not ever put yourself in a position where everything you built is gone with no way of getting it back. Trust me on this, it will make grown men cry and it is 100% avoidable by having regularly scheduled backups and backing up before mayor changes. I have tested them all and I find UpDraft to be the best and most simple to work with. Check it out!
All in One SEO (Has Free and Paid Version)
Before you get upset I am not recommending Yoast, I do want you to know I gave it a far shot and I just didn’t love it. I found it clunky and I hates the way it looked with all the colors and mess. For me All in One SEO does a great job with SEO and it gives me much more flexibility over my sites SEO. It has really great features that add to its value:
- Bad robot blocker – stops badly behaving bots from slowing down your website.
- Social Meta – easily add Social Meta data to your site to deliver closer integration between your website/blog and social media.
- XML Sitemaps – create and manage your XML Sitemaps using this feature and submit your XML Sitemap to Google, Bing/Yahoo and Ask.com.
- Robot File – one click generate and validate your robots.txt file to guide search engines through your site.
- Performance – easily optimize performance related to SEO and check your system status.
- Other great features: Video Sitemap, plus Image SEO is coming soon!
WooCommerce (Freemium)
If you are selling anything on your WordPress site, then this is the plugin for you! It is “free” but there are certain features that require paid plugins like subscriptions, shipping, etc. Learn more about all its cool bells and whistles at WooCommerce.com
