Things to consider before installing a plugin
Top 10 essential plugins for every WordPress website
Do you want to keep your fastest web hosting for wordpress website up-to-date with the most recent plugins, which are essential for increasing its functionality as well as efficiency? But overwhelmed by the 60,000+ WordPress plugins to choose from?
Also, buy hosting for wordpress has been in the web development landscape for a long time, so it’s important to understand everything about its must-have plugins. In 2024, a lot of alternatives were available in the WordPress plugin landscape, starting from advanced ways to enhance the user experience and simplify website management to basic safety and SEO tools.
So to help you out, weâve compiled a list of the top 10 expert-picked essential plugins for your WordPress websites.
But before disclosing them, have a look at the things to consider before installing them.
Crucial elements to look for before installing a WordPress plugin
WordPress plugins are nothing but packets of code that increase the basic functionality of WordPress, offering extra features or enhancements. Customized plugins can be developed especially for your website needs, or public plugins can be downloaded from WordPress.org or Themeforest.
Here are the things to consider before making any final decision:
- Analyze customer reviews
One of the best ways to evaluate the quality of a WordPress plugin is by analyzing its customer reviews. Also, make certain to check the total number of reviews received by that plugin. Itâll help you provide insights on whether it is newly launched in the market or is an old pro.
- Check out the ratings
Similar to reviews, ratings are just as important in weighing a WordPress plugin. At times, users hesitate to write reviews, but with ratings, they immediately do so. It is a clever decision to trust plugins with more ratings because theyâre usually fast, well-managed, and provide honest support.
- Check Free or Premium
The term âfreeâ fascinates every person, but it doesnât assure quality. When it comes to WordPress plugins, free versions are suitable only for those whoâre looking for basic elements. On the contrary, premium versions help fulfill advanced needs.
Top 10 most used WordPress plugins
Here’s a comprehensive and more technical overview of the expert picks for the top 10 essential plugins for every WordPress website.
Yoast SEO
As per experts, Yoast SEO is the only option concerning SEO WordPress plugins. WordPress is well known for search engine optimization, and it is the highly recommended CMS for the majority of search experts.
Despite that, Yoast integrates a few additional features, like managing metadata, sitemaps, and 301 redirects, just to mention a few. This plugin also presents a few premium add-ons to boost SEO further. It also includes personalized Schema data, video SEO, and AI-powered content.
Prominent Features
- Modify metadata, like meta titles, descriptions, and much more.
- Produce XML sitemaps.
- Control which content must and must not be indexed in SERPs.
Cost
- Free version
- Premium version: $99 per year
Gravity Forms
It is an extremely flexible WordPress form plugin in the market, and according to experts, itâs the best.
Gravity Forms Visual Form Builder authorizes site owners to develop custom web forms to earn leads, automate workflows, and grow their business presence online.
This plugin also provides a diverse range of add-ons to assist in integrating your forms with third-party services. Whether or not you want to transfer your form data to another CRM like MailChimp or Hubspot or develop a payment form with the help of PayPal, Gravity Forms always has a solution that can be beneficial for you.
With more than 2 million Gravity Form installations around the world, itâs quite evident why it is such a favorite choice.
Prominent Features
- Help in building flexible web forms.
- Offers integrations of a similar nature include Stripe, Paypal, and much more.
Cost
- Basic License: $59 per year
- Elite License: $259 per year and
- Pro License: $159 per year
Advanced Custom Fields
From the point of view of a developer, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) are the pinnacle of WordPress plugins. It provides developers with the capability to effortlessly develop new fields, create flexible template layouts, and create custom Gutenberg blocks.
Prominent Features
- Build custom fields.
- Build flexible template layouts and Gutenberg blocks.
Cost
- Free version
- Premium version: $49 per year
Wordfence
As WordPress is so successful and commonly used, Wordfence is the number one choice concerning WordPress security plugins. With more than 4 million implementations, this plugin offers several important security features that every WordPress website must install to secure them.
Some of the features include a WordPress firewall, malware scanning, and enhanced login security like 2-factor authentication.
Prominent Features
- Website application firewall
- Malware scanning
- Enhanced login security, like 2-factor authentication
Cost
- Free version
- Premium version: from $119 per year
WooCommerce
It is the number one e-commerce plugin for WordPress websites, and the major reason why lots of people use it as their major CMS is that it is a free plugin and offers all the tools and services to start your online store with very few complications.
WooCommerce also boasts a large variety of features, and it is developed in such a way that itâs extremely customizable. This makes it a common pick for web developers. Despite that, it was also developed by the owners of WordPress, i.e., Automatic, which ensures that youâre secure.
Because it is so successful, there’s, of course, a great demand for WooCommerce add-ons that can expand the plugin, add additional functionality, or easily incorporate with 3rd party solutions.
Prominent Features
- Capability to sell products and services online
- Easily integrate with third-party payment service providers like Paypal and Stripe.
- Efficiently manage orders and report
Cost
- Free
WPML
Does your WordPress website have to serve customers around the globe? Since WordPress doesnât provide multilinguistic support, there are a few plugins like WPML and Polylang that can help you create localized versions of your website content using the WordPress CMS.
WPML enables you to translate your web content manually or make use of an automatic translation service if you canât do so on-site.
Prominent Features
- Multilingual support
- Workflow translation
- Multilingual SEO optimization
Cost
- From $39 per year
EWWW Image Optimizer
When it comes to optimizing your websiteâs performance, image optimization is important. Experts recommend the EWWW WordPress plugin, as it is free and a great solution to assist you in compressing and optimizing website images with a minute of configuration.
This plugin allows users to select how vigorous image compression they want and lazy loading techniques for images, and it also helps in converting images into high-tech WEBP format.
Prominent Features
- Image compression
- Lazy loading techniques for images
- Convert images into high-tech WEBP format.
Cost
- Free version
- Premium version: $7 per month
Redirection
Creating 301 redirects at the time of website launch or migration is a crucial step to make sure that you donât lose the actual SEO that your WordPress site has achieved.
In the same way, you might find certain irrelevant content on your webpage and want to delete that page. But without properly adding a redirect rule, visitors accessing that URL might meet with a â404 page not foundâ error message, which is not only bad from a user experience point of view but will also affect your SEO.
In this case, the Redirection plugin will offer an excellent user interface to let you seamlessly manage your redirections with only a few clicks.
Prominent Features
- Create and manage redirect rules.
- Create redirects for the server and aliases.
Cost
- Free
Duplicate Page
This is one of the best WordPress plugins that gives users the capability to duplicate a page, post, or customized post type with just a click of a button. It can be greatly helpful when youâre trying to clone the same type of product or service page instead of building it from scratch.
Prominent Features
- Capability to duplicate web content
Cost
- Free
- Premium version – From $15 per year
Autoptimize
Nowadays as website speed is being considered as a crucial factor when it comes to ranking your website in the search engine result page, it’s essential to make sure that your resources are as optimized as required.
Autoptimize WordPress plugin provides several helpful features that can help developers compress, combine, or enhance the loading of CSS or JavaScript files that might prevent the rest of the webpage from loading smoothly.
Experts recommend using this plugin carefully and correctly allowing the developers to design it for you, because it could be troublesome if not configured perfectly.
Prominent Features
- Compress and combine CSS and JavaScript files.
- Load assets asynchronously.
- Lazy load images
Cost
- Free
- Premium version: $79 per year
Conclusion
Capitalize fully on these must-have WordPress plugins! But at the same time, keep in mind that no two websites are similar; therefore, you might not require every plugin present on this list. But having said that, the majority of websites can take advantage of these must-have plugins.
Also, remember that you might need some other plugin options beyond this list to add to your overall functionality and the distinct web design elements youâre planning to add. So it is recommended to list out the functionalities you require and always review the plugins you want to install on your site.
It is just as important that any WordPress you implement is periodically maintained by the plugin developer to fix bugs and release security patches quickly for your website.