Top WordPress plugins every site should have

Out of the box, WordPress is a great system for blogging and managing websites. But to truly unlock its power, you need to add plugins to tailor it to your precise needs. Adding some of our top plugin recommendations can make really turbo-charge your site!
People frequently ask us for recommendations on which WordPress plugins they should use on their site. Of course, we’ve written quite a few WordPress plugins ourselves, but the list of great WordPress plugins is much larger than that.
Table of contents
Key features
These plugins add entirely new areas of functionality to WordPress – from supporting multiple languages, to selling online, and beyond.
- Yoast SEO – The best way to optimize your website for search engines. But you already knew that, right?
- WooCommerce – Adds ecommerce capabilities, with a huge ecosystem of addons and extensions for every type of store and website.
- Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms – Adds sophisticated form creation and management tools, with loads of integrations and addons.
- wpDiscuz – A great, modern, fully-featured replacement to WordPress’ default comments system.
- MultilingualPress or WPML – Translate and localize your website for different territories and languages.
- Relevanssi – Overhauls WordPress’ search functionality to prioritize relevance over date.
Site speed
Making your website lightning fast can be a complex task. These plugins can help to speed up the process, and speed up your site.
Be careful when installing multiple caching or optimization plugins; they can get in each others way, and slow down your site!
- WP Rocket – Very powerful, and one of the best options to make your site faster. Designed to be simple. No free option.
- W3 Total Cache – Extremely powerful, and extremely flexible. Designed to be comprehensive. Hundreds of checkboxes and options.
- WP Optimize – A good middle ground, with basic full page caching, and some sophisticated database + media optimization tools.
- WP Super Cache – A basic solution which offers full page caching, but lacks other/advanced optimization techniques.
- AMP – Automatically converts your website’s theme to be compliant with AMP HTML standards.
- Autoptimize – Some really clever JavaScript/CSS/HTML optimization, though no full page caching (should work well with a dedicated full page caching solution)
- Compress JPEG & PNG images or Optimole – Compress, optimize and manage your images.
Measurement
Monitoring and understanding your website’s performance is key if you want to improve those key metrics. These plugins can help you to measure how you’re doing.
- Site Kit by Google – Connects your website to Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Search Console, and more, all in one place.
- Monster Insights – Puts Google Analytics data right in your WordPress. Great for beginners.
- Google Tag Manager For WordPress – Adds a whole bunch of data to your Google Tag Manager container, which you can pick up in Google Analytics and other systems.
- Microsoft Clarity – A privacy-friendly approach to monitoring how users interact with your website, with session recordings, heatmaps and clever metrics.
Admin improvements
Managing and running a website doesn’t need to be a chore. These plugins help you to streamline the process.
- Admin Menu Editor – Helps manage and tidy up the WordPress admin sidebar menu when you run lots of plugins or features.
- User Role Editor – Tweak which roles and individual users have access and permissions to which features.
- Public Post Preview – Share private links to posts which you’re still writing, drafting or proof-reading.
- Nested Pages – Makes it much easier to organize larger sites with complex page structures and hierarchies.
Security & backups
An extra layer of defence can protect you from unwanted intruders, and, help you restore order if somebody breaks in.
- UpdraftPlus – Take regular backups of your filesystem and database, and restore snapshots with a click.
- Sucuri or WordFence – Lock down your site, manage access and security settings, and monitor for problems.
- Two Factor Authentication – Add extra security to your login process.
- WP Activity Log – Keep a record of everything that happens on your website.
Anything else?
Are we missing any critical plugins, which every site should know about? Or, do you have a suggestion for a replacement to one of our top plugin recommendations? Let us know in the comments!
thanks for the tips, I’ll use a plugin to maximize the image plugins that are suggested.
Thanks for a great list.
We posted a comparison of image optimizing plugins a couple of weeks ago, where we had a closer look at WP Smush, Imagify and ShortPixel.
You can find it here https://www.serveu.net/blog/image-optimizers-compared-smush-imagify-shortpixel.html
Regarding “Google Analytics by Monster Insights” I am in two minds about adding it to your site.
On the one hand, Google Analytics displays important information about your visitors etc, but on the other, it appears to slow your website down – whenever I do a page speed test it is almost the last thing to load and on average adds up to half a second to the page speed load time.
But overall I think it is worth adding, thank you for the post.
Great list!! I have used some of them and I think all are free plugins
A great article to get business rolling!
I love wordpress becuase its give me power to do my work easily and wordpress plugins help me to boost my SEO. I recently posted one post about WordPress Plugins for Blogging.
Thanks.
This article is priceless for WP users. Thanks!
Great post.
Regarding images, I am getting best rsults by using imagify with the ultra option turn on.
Great article. Helps a lot.
What about Akismet? Gotta control those spams comments.
As always found a new thing to test.
Thanks
Great plugin list… Btw – I always install firstly Yoast SEO. :) I also recommend WP Super Cache and Shortcodes Ultimate.
Thanks Michiel, 2 years ago, the majority of bloggers recommended Smuch, So, I wanted to give it a try, it worked, however, when I discovered Imagify, I found the difference in Image compression, so, I wanted to test it and it outranked Smush in a few minutes. It saved almost 40% of the disk space used for media. I used the premium version and I highly recommend using the aggressive mode.
Best of all, WP Rocked is the team behind the plugin. Also, I’d like to recommend Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP, at least for now as it’s not in the default plugin core.
I’ve used Smush and now using Imagfy. Both premium versions. The Imagfy is way better imho – compress the images faster and with much less compression artifacts!
Thanks for that addition, Andrew!
Hey Michiel, thanks for your plugin list. I will definitely check out blogvault! I use Imagify Premium on our Image -heavy foodblog and it works out really good. The image compression is fine, the quality stable and it saved us a lot of time and gave the website more speed. YAY! Cheers, Florian
Np, Florian, glad you like it. And thanks for your Imagify recommendation. I’m sure it’ll help other readers wondering what to use.
Thanks for provide really use full plugins. But is case of SEO, yoast is no.1 plugin. Any thing more details about WP Rocket?
Hi Max, not sure what you mean? All the details are on their website wp-rocket.me :)
I use Yoast SEO premium 4.3.0 and I very satisfied thank you.
Thanks for this list of plugins. What do you think about Jetpack? Another musthave plug-in or not?
Depends on what you are looking for, Robert. Jetpack is packed with features and has a dedicated team that is improving these all the time. If one of these features fulfills your website’s needs, use it. I can only recommend to test-drive it for yourself. I do think there are little people that need all its features, that’s why I did not include it.
Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress plugin is one of the first I install on a new WP site. should be even part of the WP core.
Thanks for that compliment, Thierry!
Great list. WP Rocket wins for me as the ultimate plugin!