WordPress plugins
offer all kinds of customization for site admins, however, with almost 40,000
options to choose from it the WordPress Plugin Directory, not to mention all
the premium products available, it can be difficult sorting the good from the,
well, not so good.
So here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the
WordPress plugins that can help take your site from good to great. I’ve
included options for everything from caching the image optimization to security
and membership.
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1. Hummingbird
The average visitor to
your site won’t wait even eight seconds for your site to load and Google
recommends that your site loads within about two seconds.
If your site takes
longer than that, then your visitors are likely going to leave before they even
have a chance to check out one element on your site. Plus, Google won’t be keen
on ranking you higher in search results.
Related Posts
Caching is one of the
best ways you can speed up your site since it saves a fast-loading version that
gets served up in browsers lickety-split. This is where Hummingbird swoops in
for the rescue to take care of this for you. Plus, it’s easy to use.
Hummingbird scans your
site, then gives you an analysis of your site. You can see the overall score
for your site’s speed, then fix any issues in a couple clicks.
This plugin also goes
above and beyond the clouds because it doesn’t just do page caching.
Hummingbird also minifies, compresses and merges.
This plugin is like the little birdie that tells your site how
to fly as fast as a hummingbird. Pun intended. It’s also included in a WPMU DEV
membership and you can try Hummingbird for free with a 14-day trial.
Interested
in 1. Hummingbird?
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2. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is
designed to increase the page load speed for WordPress sites, which will
improve your visitors’ overall experience.
The plugin helps to
increase server performance by reducing download times. By reducing page load
times, overall site performance improves which helps your site’s rank in search
engines.
W3 Total Cache can also help to improve web server performance
during high traffic periods, which is crucial for larger websites.
Interested
in 2. W3 Total Cache?
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3. Defender
WordPress is a popular
choice for creating websites and this makes it a perfect target for hackers
because they can create a bot to infect millions of sites without lifting a
finger. It’s not a matter of if your site may be targeted, but when.
That’s why staying on
top of your security game is so important. If you can set up a good defence,
you can protect your site from hackers and the Defender plugin helps you do
this and more.
Defender searches your
site for vulnerabilities and lets you know if any were found so you can patch
them up in a single click. This means installing it can also help you clean up
your site if you have been hacked. It also works to harden your site’s security
to save you from future disasters in one click. Now that’s a superhero.
The best part is, you can set it and forget it when you enable
scheduled scans. On second thought, the best part may actually be that this
plugin is included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can also try
Defender for free with a 14-day trial.
Interested
in 3. Defender?
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4. Jetpack
Jetpack offers a suite
of powerful features for your WordPress site. Enhanced security, improved site
performance, plenty of content tools, and visitor engagement features are all
part of this plugin.
Additional features
include spam-free Comments, Social Sharing, Related Posts, Post by Email,
and much more.
Jetpack even offers a mobile theme option that is lightweight
and responsive, designed for phones and tablets.
Interested
in 4. Jetpack?
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5. Akismet
Akismet helps to
filter out any comments on your blog that look like spam. The plugin
automatically checks comments against the Akismet Web service.
All comments will have a history for users to view that shows
which comments were flagged or cleared by Akismet. In addition, those comments
that were marked as spam or unmarked by a moderator will be highlighted in the
history.
Interested
in 5. Akismet?
·
6. Google Analytics +
Tracking how and when
users visit your site is important if you want your site to gain popularity
since it gives you the opportunity to see where you can make improvements to
your site. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for this purpose and the
Google Analytics + plugin brings this information right to your admin
dashboard.
Not only can you track
visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration and referrers, but you
can also enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest
for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’
performance.
Also, you can easily track statistics for your entire site or
network with the quick setup and easy to understand display.
Interested
in 6. Google Analytics +?
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7. Google XML Sitemaps
This must-have plugin
will automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site. Having an XML sitemap
is crucial in helping search engines better index your blog.
With a sitemap, web crawlers
can see the structure of your site and retrieve the results more efficiently.
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will be notified
every time you create a post about your new content.
Interested
in 7. Google XML Sitemaps?
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8. iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)
iThemes Security helps
to fix common holes in your WordPress site from potential automated attacks.
Many WordPress administrators generally don’t know they have these holes or
vulnerabilities, but iThemes Security can help.
Because of unknown vulnerabilities from other installed plugins,
your site can be an easy target for attacks. iThemes Security works to identify
and protect these holes in your site.
Interested
in 8. iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)?
·
9. Contact Form 7
Multiple contact forms
can be created and managed through this plugin. No need for extra coding with
the Contact Form 7 plugin, as the form and mail contents can be easily
customized through the settings.
The Contact Form 7 also supports Ajax-powered submitting,
CAPTCHA, and Akismet filtering to help with spam.
Interested
in 9. Contact Form 7?
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10. Snapshot
Backing up your site
can save you from a lot of future grief. Did your site just go down? Was your
site just hacked? No problem – just restore your site from a backup and it’s as
good as new.
But what if your
backup was lost, compromised, corrupted or accidentally deleted? Do you have a
backup of your backup? Most people don’t, but you don’t have to worry about
that with Snapshot Pro.
This plugin can backup
your site, but you can also save your backups to multiple locations such as
Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, your computer and more. Backups can also be
scheduled so you don’t have to lift a finger to help save your site the next
time disaster strikes.
Soon, you’re also going to be able to manage backups and
restores remotely from your WPMU DEV Hub while also keeping your backups locked
away securely on our cloud. It all comes with the benefits of membership and
you can also try
out Snapshot Pro free for 14 days.
Interested
in 10. Snapshot?
·
11. Ultimate Branding
When you’re running a
WordPress site and a business at the same time, you know looking professional
is important and just as crucial as your content and products. That’s why being
able to turn WordPress into a white labeling machine is a great idea.
You could replace the
WordPress logo for your own, customize the admin bar and add your own company
name to achieve consistent branding across your site. This plugin can do all
this and more.
You can completely
customize the admin bar, login page, footer, dashboard and everywhere else
WordPress logos and branding appears. You can even add your branding to even
more places than that. Plus, you don’t have to touch any code.
It’s easy to set up and
use and it works across your entire Multisite network or your single install of
WordPress.
Ultimate Branding is the only branding plugin you need to turn a
WordPress site into your company’s site.
Interested
in 11. Ultimate Branding?
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12. Appointments +
If your business needs
to schedule appointments, consultations or even meetings, a pen and planner
isn’t enough. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and double book clients. It’s far
easier and more efficient to streamline your appointments digitally and Appointments
+ can handle that.
This plugin also lets
users book and even pay for appointments themselves. You can choose to have
your clients book an appointment for free, pay a deposit or pay in full. You
can also fully customize this plugin’s styles and how appointments are booked
with shortcodes, widgets and over 20 add-ons.
Clients can also add
the appointment to their schedule with Google Calendar integration. You can
even enable social media logins to make it even easier for clients to book an
appointment without having to fill out every single detail since their
information is captured automatically.
You also have the
flexibility of being able to add in your entire staff including their schedules
so users can choose a staff member for their appointment or just a service.
It installs as easy as most other plugins and is compatible with
single and Multisite installations of WordPress. If you want to give Appointments
+ a try, there’s a free version available on WordPress.org.
Interested
in 12. Appointments +?
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13. MarketPress eCommerce
When trying to sell
products on your site, it’s important to choose the right solution since you
want the shopping experience to be easy and delightful for your customers,
while also being easy for you to manage. Not only that, but making sure you
have all the tools you need to run a successful online store is also a must.
That’s where
MarketPress comes in. It gives your customers a delightful user experience
while simultaneously integrating with your site and its pre-existing styles.
MarketPress also makes it easy to manage your sales, inventory, shipping
requirements and products. You can even manage an eCommerce network.
It also comes with
everything you need to sell physical, digital or external items without needing
to resort to installing other plugins to take care of important tasks.
MarketPress can handle it all, including VAT tax requirements, coupons,
discounts, product variations, one-page checkout, PDF invoices, 16 built-in
payment gateways and a heck of a lot more. You can even let your customers pay
with points they acquire on your site for crying out loud.
With MarketPress, you can sell anything. It’s also a piece of
cake to set up and use which is also nice. You can try the free
version of MarketPress at WordPress.org.
Interested
in 13. MarketPress eCommerce?
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14. Membership
Managing users can be
a bit tricky, especially when you want to customize the user experience and
what they have access to on your site. Membership 2 Pro can do this, plus
offers every feature you could need to run a scalable membership site.
Membership 2 Pro can
do it all. You can offer free or paid memberships, present content over time,
offer free trials, customize the registration form or protect anything on your
site from posts and media to plugins and categories. You can also customize or
assign the default user roles and use shortcodes to protect anything else
including only parts of a page or post.
All the add-ons you
need are already in the plugin and just need to be enabled. You can direct
users to a certain page after logging in and out and also turn on invoicing and
Taxamo to take care of EU VAT laws.
Membership 2 Pro works with both single and Multisite installs
of WordPress integrates with BuddyPress and it’s also a cinch to set up and
use. It’s definitely on the “easiest plugins to use” list somewhere toward the
top. You can try the free version, called Membership
2, on WordPress.org.
Interested
in 14. Membership?
·
15. Pro Sites
Pro Sites is a
powerful plugin that we developed and use ourselves to help us manage
subscriptions, capabilities, and memberships. You can also use Pro Sites to
create a network of sites like WordPress.com or Edublogs.org that have paid
upgrades for blogging and creating sites.
It’s specifically
designed for Multisite networks and can integrate with BuddyPress. If you’re
looking to limit user access, set a quota and even offer paid upgrades for
storage space, uploads, domain mapping, publishing posts, offering support,
plugins, themes and more, this is the plugin you need.
You can also view rich
statistics and analytics as well as easily manage memberships and
subscriptions. Setting up paid subscriptions is easy, but you can also offer
free membership levels, free trials, discounts and coupons as well.
It’s customizable from payment screens to full-on branding,
creates pricing tables for you, includes four payment gateways, takes care of
VAT requirements and can automatically process cancellations and refunds.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg, too. It’s a trusted plugin that you can use
for your network and business.
Interested
in 15. Pro Sites?
·
16. Smartcrawl
You work hard creating
phenomenal content to draw visitors to your site, but are you really drawing in
all the users you could be? Good SEO practices can help, but you can go much
further with SmartCrawl.
This plugin makes your
site more visible to search engines by informing web crawlers when your site
has important content that needs registering instead of waiting for web
crawlers to find you.
On top of that,
SmartCrawl can create a sitemap, customize how your titles and descriptions
appear on search engines, add automated keyword linking and you can also view
industry leading reports by Moz.
On top of all that, setting up and using SmartCrawl is quick and
easy with the setup wizard. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can
do it for free
with a 14-day trial or with a WPMU DEV membership.
Interested
in 16. Smartcrawl?
·
17. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
The Yet Another
Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) can display a list of posts or pages that relate
to the current post. This feature provides a great opportunity for your readers
to see other relevant content from your site.
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Users have the option of displaying
only content found on their site or can make extra money by displaying
sponsored content.
Interested in 17. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin?
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18. WP Smush Pro
Uploading images to use on your site and in posts is an
excellent way to grab your visitors’ attention, but they do weigh down your
site. They take up a lot of storage space, but most importantly, they slow down
your site. Fortunately, you can compress your images to take care of that
problem.
WP Smush Pro has been benchmarked as the best image compression
and optimization plugin. Not only that, but it works in a way that saves
storage space and helps your site load faster without reducing the quality of
your images.
You can compress and optimize images automatically, manually or
in bulk and also Super Smush for 10 times the compression power while still not
losing out on image quality. It also integrates with NextGEN and WP Retina 2x
so photographers need not worry about displaying crisp, stunning images.
You can try the free version of WP
Smush on WordPress.org or try out the premium version for free with a 14-day trial. If you’re
already a WPMU DEV member, you already have access to WP Smush Pro so you can
check it out and see how easy it is to use and maybe even boast that your site
has superpowers.
Interested in 18. WP Smush Pro?
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19. BJ Lazy Load
BJ Lazy Load can help your WordPress site load faster and save
bandwidth. By replacing most images on your site with a placeholder, the plugin
loads the content as it gets close to entering the browser screen when a visitor
scrolls the page.
The plugin works for all post images,
thumbnails, gravatar images, and content iframes. Other images within your site
can also be included by using a delivered function.
Interested in 19. BJ Lazy Load?
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20. Duplicator
Have you ever needed to backup or move an entire WordPress site
from one location to another? The Duplicator plugin can duplicate, backup,
move, and transfer a site.
The plugin can also serve as an easy utility for those administrators
looking to backup their sites.
Need to make a clone of your
production site for testing purposes? Yep, the Duplicator plugin is perfect for
making a backup of a WordPress site for testing and validation.
Interested in 20. Duplicator?
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21. Floating Social
These days, being able to share content on social media is a
must and your site’s no exception. You need to empower your visitors to share
your posts and pages, and to spread the word about your business by making it
easy to share your content.
Floating Social lets you display buttons to let users share your
posts and pages by connecting to their social media accounts. The buttons also
float on the side of the page so it’s easy for users to see and click on it
since it follows them down the page as they scroll.
You’re able to fully customize the styling of the buttons to fit
your site’s design and it’s also responsive. You can also choose which social
media buttons are displayed so you can show only what your audience uses to
make it even easier for them to decide to share.
It’s easy to set up and use,
compatible with single and Multisite installs of WordPress and also includes
all the major social media sites. You can also choose to show the sharing
buttons on all posts and pages or you can limit them to specific posts, pages
or post types.
Interested in 21. Floating Social?
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22. Relevanssi
Relevanssi can replace the default search option on your site
where results are sorted in order of relevance, instead of by date.
The plugin is customizable so that it can be setup to do fuzzy
matching on partial words. Content can be found by matching on just one search
term or it can be required that all words be found.
There is a free version of Relevanssi
that supports a single site, while the premium version offers multi-site
support along with other features.
Interested in 22. Relevanssi?
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23. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts,
pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin identifies any broken links
that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects.
Once broken links are identified on
your site, links can be edited directly from the plugin page to avoid manually
updating each post.
Interested in 23. Broken Link Checker?
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24. Disable Comments
The Disable Comments plugin enables administrators to globally
control comments on their site. Comments can be disabled according to post
type, on pages, attachments, etc.
This plugin works well if you want to
disable comments on certain post types or on your entire site. However, if you
plan to selectively disable comments on individual posts, then this function is
better handled directly through WordPress.
Interested in 24. Disable Comments?
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25. Regenerate Thumbnails
The Regenerate Thumbnails plugin enables you to regenerate
thumbnails for image attachments. You have the option to regenerate the
thumbnails for all image uploads, individual images, or specific multiple image
uploads.
This plugin is very helpful if you
have altered any of your thumbnail dimensions or have changed to a new theme
that features different image dimensions.
Interested in 25. Regenerate Thumbnails?
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26. Easy Updates Manager
Easy Updates Manager enables you to manage all of your WordPress
updates for a single site or Multisite install. There are tons of settings
included within the plugin making it highly customizable.
Features include options to
automatically update WordPress major and minor releases. Site administrators
can also opt to automatically update plugins, themes, and much more.
Interested in 26. Easy Updates Manager?
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27. Redirection
Redirection can help manage 301 redirects and keep track of 404
errors without digging into .htaccess files. This plugin can be very useful if
you are migrating pages from a different website and changing the directory
structures of your WordPress installation.
A redirection can be setup to pass a
URL through to another page, file, or website. Any URL can be redirected, not
just those that no longer exist.
Interested in 27. Redirection?
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28. TablePress
With TablePress, you can easily create tables that can be
embedded into posts, pages, or text widgets by using a Shortcode. No special
coding is necessary as table data can be entered directly into a spreadsheet
interface.
Tables can contain any type of data,
including formulas. Sorting, pagination, and filtering add additional
functionality for TablePress. Tables can also be imported and/or exported
from/to Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON formats.
Interested in 28. TablePress?
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29. Edit Flow
Edit Flow makes it easy to communicate with your team members
directly within WordPress. It can be customized to fit your specific workflow
needs.
Features include a calendar that
offers a view of your scheduled content. Custom statuses can be created to
define specific stages of your editorial workflow. Writers and editors can have
private discussions through editorial comments all from within WordPress.
Interested in 29. Edit Flow?
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30. Advanced Custom Fields
The Advanced Custom Fields plugin gives WordPress users the
flexibility to visually create custom fields for their site.
Custom field input types include:
text, textarea, wysiwyg, image, file, page link, post object, relationship,
select, checkbox, radio buttons, date picker, true/false, repeater, flexible
content, and gallery.
Interested in 30. Advanced Custom Fields?
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31. WP Mail SMTP
The WP Mail SMTP plugin reconfigures
the WordPress delivered mail function to use SMTP. It offers a setup page that
enables you to configure various email options. These options include
specifying an SMTP host and SMTP port, specifying the from name and email
address for outgoing mail, setting SMTP username and password, and more.
Interested in 31. WP Mail SMTP?
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32. Gallery
Gallery offers tools that will assist in adding and editing
images for different views on your site that are 100% responsive. Photo
galleries and albums can be easily added to posts and pages within WordPress as
well as to multiple widgets.
The plugin can also make it easy to
rename, upload, remove, and copy images in just a few steps. Image descriptions
and tags can also be added through this tool.
Interested in 32. Gallery?
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33. All In One Schema.org Rich
Snippets
The All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin can help give
search engines a useful summary of your content to display. These useful
snippets of information for your content can help you stand out from your
competition.
The plugin supports the following
content types: review, event, people, product, recipe, software application,
video, and articles.
Interested in 33. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets?
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34. Fast Secure Contact Form
The Fast Secure Contact Form plugin enables you to easily create
and add forms to your WordPress site. Multiple forms can be created with an
option to redirect visitors to any URL once the message is sent.
Contact forms created by this plugin can easily be customized to
fit your site. Extra fields of any type can be added, including: text,
textarea, checkbox, checkbox-multiple, radio, select, select-multiple,
attachment, date, time, hidden, password, and fieldset.
The plugin also includes CAPTCHA and
Akismet support to help block spam.
Interested in 34. Fast Secure Contact Form?
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35. Display Widgets
Display Widgets enables you to change your sidebar content for
different pages, categories, and more. No more extra coding is required to
create multiple sidebars for different scenarios on your site.
All you need to do is click a
checkbox on or off for where you want widgets to display or be hidden.
Interested in 35. Display Widgets?
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36. Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
Black Studio TinyMCE Widget enables you to insert rich text
and/or media objects directly into your sidebars without any HTML coding
through a visual editor.
As a default, WordPress text widgets lack the editor
capabilities that are offered in posts and pages. The Black Studio TinyMCE
Widget overcomes these limitations by providing a clean visual interface to add
media and text.
Those that prefer to switch from a
visual editor to HTML (like posts and pages) also have that option.
Interested in 36. Black Studio TinyMCE Widget?
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37. Optimize Database
By default, WordPress keeps all your deleted posts, pages,
comments and all your post revisions, spam comments, unused tags and the like.
Until you manually flush your site from all of these excess items, they stick
around, bloating and slowing down your site.
The free Optimize Database plugin purges your database from all
the extra table data you don’t need including other stray data such as orphan
postmeta items and expired transients. You can choose exactly what you want
removed so you don’t accidentally delete items you want to keep.
Once your database is all cleaned up, it gets to work optimizing
your database for an even smoother running site.
It’s Multisite compatible so you can
network activate the plugin and lets you clean and optimize your database in
one click each. You can even schedule your database to be automatically
optimized on a regular basis so you can keep your database running like a
well-oiled machine without having to worry about it.
