There are tens of thousands of plugins available to WordPress users. So many, in fact, that it’s difficult to know which ones really make a difference and which are overhyped. Plenty offer useful niche solutions, but few are truly must-have WordPress plugins for all sites.
No matter what kind of site you’re running, or what niche it belongs to, there are certain plugins that you’ll want to install. And those are the tools we’re going to discuss today.
🤔 Looking for a more ultimate list of the 20+ very best WordPress plugins out there? 👈 Check this out.
In this article, we’re going to introduce you to ten must-have WordPress plugins and explain what makes each one stand out. Better yet, we’re also going to provide real data to justify why we think each plugin is essential.
Let’s get right to it!
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is by far the most popular SEO tool in the WordPress landscape, and it’s easy to see why it’s one of our must-have WordPress plugins. Not only can it help you improve your SEO, it can even analyze your content’s readability. About 79% of users only scan through your posts and pages, so the more accessible your copy is, the greater your chance of retaining their attention.
As far as SEO is concerned, there are plenty of ways to drive traffic to your site. However, none offer as much potential as search engines. Each day, Google alone handles nine billion searches.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that organic traffic can make or break a website, and you can’t buy your way to the top in most cases. Just to drive home that point, only 1.7% of paid leads in the search engine traffic convert. That’s why working on your keyword strategy is critical for every website.
⚙️ Key Features
- Optimize your WordPress posts and pages using keywords and meta descriptions.
- See how well your content is currently optimized, and make improvements easily.
- Improve your content’s readability with simple tips.
💰 Price
The base version of Yoast SEO is 100% free, and there’s a premium version with other additional features presented in our full Yoast review.
2. UpdraftPlus
An estimate of 13,000 websites get hacked every day. When you consider the fact that WordPress powers 43.2% of sites on the web, you can see why it’s a frequent target. Moreover, parts of your WordPress website can sometimes stop working due to simple errors.
For example, if most people use 10 or fewer plugins on their sites and half of those receive monthly updates, it’s clear that the risk of running into compatibility errors is common. A single recent backup can save you a ton of headaches, whether you’ve been attacked, encounter a compatibility issue, or simply want to migrate your site.
This is where our next must-have WordPress plugin comes into play. There are plenty of WordPress backup plugins available online, but few of them are as powerful and easy to use as UpdraftPlus. It integrates with multiple cloud storage options to safeguard your backups. And you can even automate your backups with a recurring schedule.
⚙️ Key Features
- Create automatic or manual backups of your website.
- Store your backups locally or on the cloud.
- Restore your website to a previous state.
💰 Price
There are both free and premium versions of UpdraftPlus available.
3. Optimole
Images take up more than 50% of the average webpage size. That means optimizing your images can make a huge difference to your site’s page load times.
Why is that important? Because if your website takes more than three seconds to load, the bounce rate can reach 38%.
In case that isn’t worrying enough, 79% of online shoppers might not return to your website if they find its performance lackluster. While images aren’t the only thing that impacts website performance, optimizing your WordPress images is a key component of improving your page load times.
Optimole takes every graphic you upload to WordPress and optimizes it so that it takes up less space. In addition to that, it uses a cloud-based system to speed up your site. Optimole auto-detects the screen size, and resizes images to provide a fast loading, responsive experience to your users.
⚙️ Key Features
- Automatically compress your images.
- Optimize your JPEG and PNG images.
- Bulk optimize any old images that you have
- Resize any images you upload to your website.
- Supports both Retina and WebP images.
- Uses global CDN.
- Compatible with modern page builders like Elementor.
💰 Price
This plugin is free for up to 5,000 visits per month. After that, you can opt for the premium version for $22.50 / month charged annually.
4. Revive Old Post
Social media is the source of over 30% of referral traffic to most websites.
(Charts by Visualizer Lite.)
That means you’re losing out on a massive amount of potential traffic if you don’t remain active on social media. Just to give you an idea, approximately 2 billion and 300 million users log into Facebook and Twitter respectively each day. If every post on those networks can increase your chances of reaching even a sliver of those users, it means that the plugin we want to point out to you here is definitely worth your time.
Another one of the must-have WordPress plugins on our list is Revive Old Post. It’s designed to help drive more traffic to your website via social media. To accomplish this, the plugin takes your site’s new and old publications and automatically shares them to Twitter and Facebook.
⚙️ Key Features
- Share your new and old posts to Twitter and Facebook automatically.
- Set a schedule for your social media publications.
- Include hashtags and links back to your website.
💰 Price
There are both free and premium versions available.
5. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a powerful caching plugin that helps you to speed up your loading times. It does this by creating cached copies of each dynamically-generated page on your site, so your servers have to do less work.
We’ve already talked about why quick page load times are critical, and caching solutions can be an even more effective solution than image optimization. For example, the W3 Total Cache plugin can decrease your loading times by over 43% on average.
WP Rocket does even better – in our caching plugin tests, it decreased page load times by a whopping 63%. It may not be free, but the results are more than worth it, especially if there are conversions on the line.
⚙️ Key Features
- Cache your website’s dynamically generated pages.
- Improve user-end browser caching.
- Enable lazy loading for faster loading times.
- Integrate your caching solution with a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
💰 Price
WP Rocket is a premium tool that starts at $59 for a single site’s year-long license.
6. Elementor
With over 5,000,000 active installs, Elementor is one of the coolest additions on our must-have WordPress plugins list. It is a visual page builder that gives you the ability to craft original designs for your pages that are somewhat independent of your current theme.
This means you don’t have to be a web development aficionado to add all those cool effects like background overlays, hover effects, animations, and more, it can all be done with a simple drag-and-drop. It is fully compatible with the Gutenberg editor and other WordPress plugins on this list.
Elementor (read review) is useful for those who want to create a beautiful landing page for their business. It is also a good choice for those who want to have a custom design for parts of their website but don’t have deep pockets to hire a developer to do the task.
⚙️ Key Features
- Select from 300+ beautifully built templates from the Elementor library.
- Create a value proposition with a simple drag and drop.
- Build fully original designs for your website.
💰 Price
The main Elementor plugin is available for free in the WordPress directory. If you need more features, unlocking the premium version has its price tag:
- Essential – $59.00 per year for one site
- Advanced – $99 per year for three sites
- Expert – $199 per year for 25 sites
- Agency – $399 per year for 1,000 sites
7. WPForms
WPForms is an amazing WordPress plugin for building beautiful forms (contact forms and other). This plugin offers a perfect blend of useful features and ease of usage. It is highly user-friendly and mobile responsive.
An ability to create eye-catching contact forms without having to work on any JavaScript or other code is one of the big reasons why over 5 million websites are using this plugin already.
WPForms gives you a customizable, modern contact form that not only improves interaction but also generates better conversions, gets more survey results, and much more.
⚙️ Key Features
- Create an attractive contact form for free.
- Save your time with pre-built form templates.
💰 Price
WPForms Lite is available for free and works well for sites that want to use it on their contact page. WPForms Pro will unlock more features and integrations. You will have access to a lot of form templates for $49.50 per year.
8. Otter
Otter is a lightweight WordPress plugin for adding useful extra functionality to Gutenberg. It is a library featuring Gutenberg templates and additional blocks.
While Gutenberg is a nice replacement for the WordPress classic editor, there’s still a long way down the road for Gutenberg to offer premium class functionality. However, you can install Otter for additional Gutenberg blocks and then create intuitive pages with it.
⚙️ Key Features
- Add Google Maps and advanced heading block.
- Create an attractive contact form for free.
- 30+ Gutenberg blocks for unique pages.
💰 Price
Otter is a free WordPress plugin.
9. Redirection
Since we are talking about must-have WordPress plugins, we cannot possibly miss out on Redirection. It is a redirect manager for WordPress. Redirection lets you set up custom 301 redirects within your website and then keeps a full record of data on clicks. You can even use it to track broken URLs on your site.
We all know how much Google (and other search engines) hates bad user experience. A 404 or broken page contributes to the same. But, you cannot check every single post or page on your website by hand, especially if you have hundreds of posts. Simply installing the Redirection plugin will show you a list of pages that are 404s, and all you need to do is enter the URL where you want the plugin to redirect the visitor.
⚙️ Key Features
- Track all 4xx error pages.
- Set up page-level redirection easily.
💰 Price
Redirection is available for free.
10. MonsterInsights
Knowing your audience is essential if you want to grow your business. Based on the users’ behavior on your website, you can adjust your marketing strategy in order to improve engagement and conversions.
To be able to do that, you need the MonsterInsights plugin. It integrates your WordPress website with Google Analytics so you can get all the relevant data about your visitors. The number of people using this plugin tells a lot about how important it is to understand the way your visitors consume your content.
MonsterInsights is easy to set up. It simply connects your Google Analytics account with your WordPress website in a few simple steps. When it’s all done, you can check the stats right from your WordPress dashboard.
⚙️ Key Features
- See what content performs best and which pages need improvement.
- Create an audience profile: demographics, education, gender, age, and interests.
- Learn about your visitors’ behavior: how they find your site, how much time they spend there, what links they click on, what keywords they search for, and more.
💰 Price
The plugin is free. If you want to unlock more features, these are the available plans:
- Plus – $99.50 per year
- Pro – $199.50 per year
- Agency – $399.50 per year
Enjoy these must-have WordPress plugins
No matter what type of website you’re running, there are certain plugins that are always worth installing.
As far as must-have plugins go, these ten are our top picks based on the data:
- Yoast SEO: You can increase your organic traffic using simple SEO techniques.
- UpdraftPlus: Backups are critical for any website, and this plugin makes them simple.
- Optimole: Image optimization can help you make your site load faster.
- Revive Old Post: This plugin can help you drive traffic to your site using social media.
- WP Rocket: This is a powerful caching solution that will speed up your website.
- Elementor: A page builder to craft custom pages with original designs.
- WPForms: Use it to create beautiful contact forms with simple drag and drop.
- Otter: Gutenberg functionality can be highly improved using this plugin.
- Redirection: Set up custom 301 redirections with a couple of clicks.
- MonsterInsights: Will give you insightful data about your site traffic and audience.
Do you have experience with any of these must-have WordPress plugins? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!
Here you can find list of plugins which will boost your website as well, especially when you are freelancer:
Essential WordPress Plugins For your Site
Thanks for sharing.
I would like to suggest you one more WordPress plugin for redirection and SEO. Trash Duplicate and 301 Redirect PRO is finest plugin which gives you amazing features to delete your duplicate post and permanently redirect to main URL.
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