One of the most notable advantages of WordPress sites is the excellent plugin database available for the world's most popular content management system. The free WordPress plugin library includes about 60,000 plugins for free use, and there are thousands more plugins available for a minimal fee, making life easier for website owners.
In principle, we recommend using as few plugins as possible and not overdoing it with installations, as a large number of plugins can cause problems on the site, slow it down, and make it cumbersome to use. In addition, the plugins you choose should be appropriate for the type of website—a small blog is not the same as a large store website when it comes to WordPress plugins. However, there are some recommended plugins that are relevant to almost any website, and here is our list:
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular and longest-standing plugins, allowing you to easily build contact forms. It is used by approximately 5 million WordPress websites. You can use it to build simple or complex forms, and it does not track users or use cookies - which can definitely be important for websites abroad, or for anyone interested in privacy.
SEO plugin
First of all, it is important to emphasize that an SEO plugin will not automatically promote your website for you – you need to know how to use it and perform organic SEO on all fronts. However, it is an effective and convenient tool that greatly assists and facilitates SEO work. Many websites use YOAST, but we recommend trying a leaner and more effective alternative, such as SEO Framework or All in one SEO. In general, SEO plugins help you create the right titles for pages and posts, write summaries, ensure that there are page references where needed, and they also generate a sitemap for Google, prevent page indexing as needed, and more.
WordPress backup plugin - UpdraftPlus
If your website is hosted by a high-quality, professional web hosting service, then you should have a daily automatic backup on the server (and on an additional server), and you should not have to deal with backing up the website, at least in theory. However, it is always a good idea to have an additional backup in case of an emergency. You can back up WordPress manually, but you can also use a plugin such as UpdraftPlus, which allows you to back up all the content on your website and database, and send the backup to cloud storage or download it to your computer. The plugin also allows you to perform backups according to a predefined schedule.
Website Acceleration Plugin - CACHE
We recommend that you host your website on a Lightspeed server and not settle for anything less. If you've listened to us, then the next step is to install the LSCache plugin, which helps with caching and speeding up your website. LightSpeed becomes particularly powerful when it comes to open source websites such as WordPress, as it allows you to run a cache plugin that communicates directly with the server, ensuring extremely fast performance, even compared to other standard cache plugins.
Website security plugin - Wordfence
Not mandatory for every website, especially if you have properly secured website hosting. If you need an extra layer of protection for your WordPress website, Wordfence is an excellent security plugin with many features, available in both a free and a paid premium version. Wordfence scans website files for malware, secures the WordPress login screen, has a firewall, and offers a variety of other excellent website security features.
Page and Post Duplication Plugin
The Duplicate Page plugin performs a very simple task—it duplicates pages and posts with a single click, allowing you to create large amounts of content quickly and easily. This plugin is especially helpful for websites with a large number of similar items (e.g., products in a store).