There are thousands of plugins available on WordPress. It is a tough task to locate the right WordPress plugins for our site. In this post, I will be listing all those plugins which I found to be must/useful for a website.
Basic Plugins
The list of plugins for basic functionality of a site is as follows:-
- Email Subscribers & Newsletters – This plugin helps to setup subscription on our website with a simple widget. It can deliver automatic as well as custom notification for new posts to subscribers. Please visit my article “Best Subscribers Plugin to choose for WordPress“to know about all the features of it along with merit demerit of various subscriber plugins.
- wpdiscuz – It is the best free comment plugin available for WordPress. To know more about it, please go through my post “WordPress Comment Plugins Review“.
- PayPal Donation – To collect donations from visitors of site. Please go through my page “Best Donation Plugin for WordPress | Donation Plugins Review” to read more about donation plugins.
- Jetpack by WordPress.com – I found this plugin to be necessary though many consider it cause of slowing down of website. It brings with it an assortment of features like commenting, subscription, analytics etc. Please visit my article “Whether to Install WordPress Jetpack Plugin on your site?” to know why I recommend this plugin.
- Contact Form 7 – The default contact form available with WordPress has all the functionality required from a contact form. However it can’t prevent spam entries making entry into our website. Contact Form 7 is the plugin I like the most when it comes to designing a spam free contact form. It has features of adding quiz, recaptcha etc.
- Contact Form 7 Honeypot – This plugin adds a new feature ‘Honeypot’ to Contact Form 7. With honeypot, an actual visitor is not required to solve a complex quiz or enter recaptcha.
Security Plugins
Our hosting provider is not responsible if our site gets hacked or affected by malware. In case site gets affected, we may have to pay to professionals in order to clean it. Another loss is of viewers and search engine rankings. Though a number of paid services are available to secure a website, I will be listing the free plugins available to safeguard a site:-
- UpdraftPlus – UpdraftPlus is a free plugin to provide automated backup solution for a website. In case of eventuality, we can easily restore the data from backup. The plugin provides a lot of options about backup frequency and places to store backup. Regarding location for backup, we can backup the website to Google Drive, Email and Dropbox to name a few.
- Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Hardening – It will keep us updated about everything like logins, plugins installation, page updates, comments etc happening on site via e-mails. It will also suggest problem areas on a site.
- All In One WP Security – It is a must plugin when it comes to security of a site. USP of this plugin is that it measures security in terms of score on a security strength meter. Not only it notifies about vulnerabilities, it provides simple ways to implement all the best security practices and gain security score.
SEO Plugins
We open websites to let the world search and view our content. For that, we have to enable search engines to locate our content easily and present it to viewers. This process of designing contents on a website for better search rankings is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Don’t worry! There are WordPress plugins to help you out.
- Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights – We must know the current traffic to our website and then only we can better it. This plugin adds Google Analytics on our website. In the absence of it, we have to manually add Google tracking code either to each page or theme header.php file. Google Analytics provides us info about landing pages, pageviews, country of viewers etc. I suggest use of Android app for the round the clock monitoring.
- Yoast SEO – Yoast SEO is a must SEO plugin for WordPress. It will help us in improving our writing skills and enable content to be searched easily on browsers. For full review of this plugin, please go through my article “Yoast SEO Plugin Review“.
- 404 to 301 – Redirect, Log and Notify 404 Errors – Page not found (404) error badly affects a website search ranking. Hence it is wise to avoid them as much as possible. This plugin redirects all 404 (page not found) requests to a specific URL on website and also log such requests. Notifications via e-mail is also possible of such requests. From the logs, we can know about genuine 404 errors and also of web attacks a site is facing 🙂 kinda scaring. Some or other attacker is always trying to find vulnerabilities on our site and a lot of errors are due to that. We can reduce genuine 404 errors by avoiding changes in URLs of the posts as many search engines & bookmarks may still be referring to old URL.
- Redirection – If it is must for us to change a page URL, then this plugin helps us to set up a redirection from old URL to new URL.
- Broken Link Checker – One of the recommendation by Yoast SEO is to have a good number of internal as well as external hyperlinks from a post. Broken Link Checker plugin checks a website and provide all broken link details on dashboard.
- Nofollow for external link – It adds an attribute ‘rel=nofollow’ to external links from website to tell search engine that this link should not be counted towards popularity of destination website. Confusing! Please read my post on “How to add Nofollow to External Links” to know more about it.
- Ultimate Nofollow – It provides a check box option in the Insert/edit link dialog box to add rel=”nofollow” attribute to a hyperlink and complements work of ‘Nofollow for external link’ plugin. To know more about it, please go through my post “How to add Nofollow to External Links“.
Useful WordPress Plugins
- AddToAny Share Buttons – We need this plugin to spread the word about our posts as this plugin provides share buttons for almost all social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, WeChat etc. One can test this plugin by sharing this post using the floating buttons on left 🙂
- Top 10 – Often we see websites with sidebar containing list of popular posts. This helps in directing viewers to more number of pages and in turn increasing pageviews. Top 10 is the best plugin when it comes to displaying a list of popular posts. We can display the list anywhere we want with the help of shortcode/widget provided by the plugin. Features like thumbnail, small excerpt for each post etc make the list visually appealing. Though its name signifies top 10 posts, one can display as many as number of posts and also define number of days to measure popularity.
- WP Show Posts – We need this plugin if we like to add list of recent/latest post to our website. Showing recent posts on front page of a website is a good idea for showing viewers what is new on the website. Please visit my post ‘How to Display Recent Posts List‘ to read more about it.
- CC Child Pages – This plugin lets you display all child pages of a page for easy navigation. To know more about it, please visit my post “How to Display Recent Posts List | Child Pages List“.
- Category to Pages WUD – One can categories the pages using this plugin for effective management of website. For example, categorization of books in physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer etc. This categorization is useful for custom subscription and notification on your site. Another advantage is that many useful plugins which are meant for posts can be used for pages. For example, I have noticed that almost all subscription plugins works for posts. Using this plugin, I can use them for pages also. I will add more on this later.
- Last Modified Timestamp – WordPress has support for showing only published date of a post/page. If we update an already published page, then there is no field to show the last modified date and time. This plugin add this feature automatically. We can even show the last modified date on a post/page with the help of a short-code provided by the plugin. It is to noted that Google loves latest content. Often our posts have to be modified to add updated information.
- Insert Adsense Auto Ads – If we like to monetize our blog using Google Adsense, then we have to add Adsense script code to our pages. Recently Google has introduced an option of auto-ads where the format, size and place of ads to be displayed will be automatically determined. Earlier one had to only option of manually choosing format, size and places of ads. In order to use auto-ads feature, we have to add a script code between <head></head> tag of a html page. ‘Insert Adsense Auto Ads’ plugin automatically does this work for all our pages freeing us from updating each and every page.
Misc WordPress Plugins
- Simple Mathjax – If we are happen to show mathematics on our site, then we need this plugin. The default WordPress support to write mathematical equations on a page is not good enough. This plugin makes life easy by providing ability to write mathematical equations in Latex.
- SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – Hey programmers! We will need this plugin to highlight programming code in a page. I am showing below a sample highlighted code.
N = 6; % number of points for correspondence % each column in one coordinate WldPts = zeros(3,N); Img1Pts = zeros(2,N); % points as per my camera calibration % matrix for world coordinates. Each point will be a column vector WldPts(1,:) = [58.6,58.6, 0, 0, 0, 58.6]; % all x coordinates are mentioned WldPts(2,:) = [0, 0, 0, 58.6, 58.6, 58.6]; % all y coordinates are mentioned WldPts(3,:) = [0, 10, 10, 10, 0, 0]; % all z coordinates are mentioned
That was all I had to provide about essential and useful plugins for WordPress. With the above list of WordPress plugins, I am sure that you will be able to easily build a secure, functioning, SEO friendly website. Best of luck for your endeavor!