22 Must Have WordPress Plugins For Best Performance

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We all agree that building a successful website goes beyond simply buying a domain and installing WordPress.

Much more needs to be done.

It looks like a difficult task but using WordPress plugins, we can build a successful website in a short time.

In this article, we would look at top 24 WordPress plugins to help build your dream website. There are about 50,000 plugins available, and we have picked twenty-four plugins that would more important to build your website to success.

So let’s get started !

SEO

1. Yoast SEO

When you search for something on a search engine like Google, it comes up with answers from a couple of websites.

How did those websites show up on the first page? They did it by creating great content, but also by Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

If you want your website to have a good chance of showing up on the first page, installing Yoast SEO is a huge step in the right direction.

After activating the plugin, its shows tips to help your page perform well on search engine.

2. Google Analytics Dashboard

Website metrics are highly crucial. With them you can make better decisions to help bring more exposure to your blog.

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP helps make it easier to track your websites progress. It uses data received from Google Analytics. You can get to see useful information such as the sources of your website’s traffic, the pages viewed per visit, the bounce rate.

This plugin uses great visualization tools for those important data. Hence, understanding them becomes easier and you can act on them better.

GENERAL

3. MailChimp

Since you do not know who visits your website personally, you need to get their emails to be able to reach out to them.

A mailing list allows you get closer to your visitors, and even invite them to visit again after they visit the first time.

When you have gotten a couple of people on your mailing list, you need to send them useful content regularly. MailChimp helps you create automated mailing system, so you can always have emails sent to members of your mailing list easily.

You can also use MailChimp to send welcome emails as soon as they subscribe and send Newsletters to all your subscribers, without having to include them as recipients of every time you have to send a mail.

MailChimp is easy to use and has a free basic plan of 2000 email subscribers.

4. Revive Old Post

If you ever want to share old posts (and new ones) from your site to social media, Revive Old Post is your go-to tool.

With this plugin, you get to share your site content to social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Without having to always share posts yourself, you can automate posts to go out at intervals. 

Revive Old Post also makes you track clicks from the share.

5. Social Sharing by Danny

When you are doing a good job by producing new content, your visitors would help promote you by sharing your content to their social media accounts.

Social Sharing by Danny helps make this easy. It has beautiful icons for sharing your blog’s content to popular social media websites.

This plugin is lightweight and very user friendly.

FORMS

6. Ninja Forms

As your website grows and has to meet more needs, a form becomes essential.

With Ninja Forms, you can create beautiful forms easily without stress. Ninja Forms has lots of features as you can create all kinds of forms such as contact forms, poll forms.

It integrates with well-known payment gateways, e-commerce platforms depending on your needs.

Ninja Forms is a free plugin:

Therefore, you can do a lot with the free version of Ninja Forms, and then use add-ons later on for an extended functionality.

7. Optin Forms

When we look at it, your real followers are those you have in your mailing list—therefore, building one needs to be in your checklist.

Optin Forms allows you create beautiful, attractive forms so your visitors can send their details and become part of your mailing list.

Optin Forms integrates well with popular mailing services such as MailChimp.

So easy to use, it also has a shortcode option you can use for displaying your forms at specific places on your website. Shortcodes are WordPress codes you can use to embed files such as forms on your website, without having to write code.

UTILITY

8. Akismet

One of the most useful plugins out there, Akismet is developed by Automattic, the team behind WordPress. It is a default plugin that comes with all new WordPress sites’ installation.

As an anti-spam module, it looks for all comments and filters out the spamming ones, providing a status history of each comments to know which and which are spammy.

It is free on personal websites, blogs and provides enough security for them. You need to subscribe for premium on commercial sites.

The premium plan gives advance security solutions, asides the spam protection.

9. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus, is a powerful WordPress backup plugin. You can backup files and be able to restore them if anything goes wrong with your website.

With its free version, you easily make a schedule of automatic backups or carry out manual backups of your website files–themes, database, and plugins. To restore the files is easy, even with little technical know-how.

UpdraftPlus supports a wide range of cloud storage options like Dropbox, Google Drive, and the Amazon S3.

Packed with tons of essential features, you can do a lot with the free version. However, you can improve the key functionalities with the premium version.

10. EWWW Image Optimizer

The WordPress plugin; EWWW Image Optimizer compresses, automatically, site images without reducing image quality.

EWWW image optimizer uses advanced algorithms to improve the speed of websites, and is thus useful for WordPress users who do not always optimize images before uploading to the site, or blog.

11. WP Super Cache

As your WordPress website gets older, the speed reduces. This is due to the cache created for easier access to the main files such as the media files or blog posts.

WP Super Cache is that plugin you need to help manage cache files better.

This plugin has a wonderful caching mechanism that ensures your website never runs slow anymore.

12. All-In-One WP Migration

In the lifetime of a website, there sometimes would be a need to execute a complete transfer of files.

You would need this when changing hosting services, or when changing URLs.

All-In-One WP Migration plugin can be used to transfer your website’s database, themes, installed plugins and even media files.

This plugin is easy to use and barely needs any technical knowledge.

13. Redirection

Sometimes, we move web pages to another location or change domain names. If after those changes those links are visited, it would display errors.

To prevent these errors, we need to redirect those links to the new links of the pages or our new domain name.

If you ever need to redirect your visitors after such changes, Redirection is the plugin to turn to.

You can use Redirection to redirect 404 errors. It can also redirect from a different link to your current website link, very important when you make a change of URLs.

You do not want your visitors to have an error message greeting them at your previous URL redirect them to your current URL with the Redirection plugin.

14. WP Mail SMTP

Major email service clients such as Gmail and Yahoo. constantly improve their services filter out spam emails.

If you want to avoid from your wordpress emails going into spam, you can use WP Mail SMTP plugin if fix that issue.

FUNCTIONALITY

15. WooCommerce

One of the elite and most popular e-commerce WordPress plugins is WooCommerce. It focuses on building e-commerce sites, and is the most complete of all e-commerce solutions.

WooCommerce has many free and premium extensions, giving the opportunity to create and maintain your store, and thus allows you sell your products in minutes.

It comes packaged with PayPal, BACS and cash-on-delivery schemes for accepting payments. It is also possible to install adds-on on your WooCommerce store, for more payment gateways.

One great advantage of WooCommerce is that it gives step-by-step, easy-to-follow documentation to show the different aspects of creating, maintaining and enhancing an online store.

16. BB Press

By default, your WordPress website is structured for you to write a post and have your visitors comment on them.

To change the status quo, you may decide to add the feature of a forum to your website. So, visitor can share their ideas and views on different topics.

BB Press is the plugin for adding that feature and it remains one of the most popular WordPress forum plugins.

BB Press is easy to configure and use as you or your visitors need not have much technical knowledge to find your way around.

17. Crisp Chat

For businesses using WordPress as their means of building an online presence, there is a need for a customer support system online. Therefore, a live chat plugin like Crisp Chat is needed.

Crisp Live Chat plugin allows customers reach out to your business. It is used for customer support purposes and is user friendly. It has video and audio chat features and also supports chatbots.

This plugin allows you to add teammates to support chat and email for a single user interface, to emphasize its user-friendliness.

It can be integrated with a lot of services such as Slack, Twitter, SMS.

18. Learn Press

For blogs created for educational purposes such as online schools. There is a need to sell or provide courses for visitors that wish to learn a particular skill.

Building a website that supports this could be quite tasking, but with Learn Press, it is much easier. It allows you create, manage and sell courses.

With the Learn Press plugin, course curriculums are created, and they would contain lessons and quizzes.

Learn Press allows you choose themes for your education website, giving it a unique look. This plugin is free, but to achieve extended functionality, some premium features are available.

SECURITY

19. WordFence Security

Only a few things feel worse than having a hacker break into your website to cause havoc.

WordFence Security helps provide adequate security for your website from all sorts of attacks.

With this plugin, the login security of your website is tighter as you can sign-in using your cellphone, not just a password.

In addition to that, WordFence Security offers a strong resistance against brute force attacks, evil file attacks as it scans the website’s files thoroughly. Plus, it provides real-time attack reporting.

20. WP Limit Login Attempts

One major method hackers use for breaking into websites is by guessing the password. They continue to guess, combining different characters until they get it right and gain access.

Limit Login Attempts is a very useful plugin for restricting the number of login attempts as it blocks out an IP address after a couple of failed tries to login.

21. Google Authenticator by miniOrange

These days, username and password alone doesn’t provide enough security. Hence, the need for two factor authentication systems.

With the Google Authenticator plugin, you can add other means of authentication such as QR code, push notifications, security questions.

APPEARANCE

22. Elementor Page Builder

To make a website attractive, knowledge of CSS is required. On WordPress, you may need to install themes and then find your way around.

With Elementor Page Builder, it’s zero stress. Elementor Page Builder is a drag-and-drop live page builder that allows you give your website that dream appearance with no technical skill.

It also allows you create mobile, responsive web pages with ease. It allows custom fonts, integrates well with a lot of services and even lets you add your own custom CSS if you wish to.

Elementor is largely a free plugin, however you can go pro if you want more features for your website.

Thanks for read the article by skylearn.