In this article I’m going to tell you what I think are the best plugins for WordPress, ideal to have in any installation you do and that will make your life much easier.
Anyone who has ever considered setting up a website in WordPress knows the section of plugins, with which you can give our website features and functionalities that were not previously present and that can help us to perform the most common or strangest tasks.
What are WordPress plugins?
As the name suggests, plugins are add-ons to the main code of your WordPress blog and are responsible for a variety of tasks. As WordPress is a veteran platform, there are plugins for almost any need.
In the past it was a bit cumbersome because you had to download them and upload them to our server manually. Nowadays it’s much easier, you just have to choose one from the plugins repository inside your WordPress blog and install it.
There are some plugins that are not available in the repository and you have to download them from the author’s website, after payment (or not).
To see the ones you have installed, click on the Plugins option in your WordPress menu and you will see the list of the ones you have installed, if it is updated and if it is not the case, update it for a more modern version.
Best WordPress Plugins
There are some plugins that are common and that almost everyone uses, let’s go over the ones we like the most:
Anti-Spam created by webvitaly: A plugin to avoid spam in comments. It is quite useful and convenient because it does not use any API key, so in that sense is easier to activate than the well-known Akismet. It has good spam blocking statistics so I recommend it.
Contact Form 7 created by Takayuki Miyoshi: It is surely the most known and most used plugin for contact forms.
Cookiw Law Info created by Richard Ashby: Used to display the warning that your website uses cookies. Something that is required by law. It shows a bar warning the user to accept that the site uses cookies. The bar can be set to appear above or below.
Duplicator created by Lifeinthegrid: It is a very useful plugin for backing up our WordPress website, especially if we are going to migrate from one hosting to another.
Google XML Sitemaps created by Arne Brachhold: It is probably the most used plugin to create sitemaps of our website and that search engines find it in the most effective way.
Loco Translate: It is a very useful plugin to translate WordPress plugins or templates. From its options we can translate practically any text that contains the template or plugins we are using, resulting in a perfect translation in a matter of minutes.
Smushit: Serves to automatically optimize the images you upload to your page, so they take up less space. This obviously has a benefit both in loading time and free space in your hosting account.
Pretty Link lite created by Caseproof: This is not strictly necessary. It is mainly used on websites with affiliate links to hide those links.
That is to say, instead of appearing an ugly and long link when putting the mouse over the link, as: amazon.es/refid=1648748527, something like yourweb.com/visitar-amazon would appear. That generates more confidence to the visitor and there are more chances of him clicking. It’s very easy to use.
TinyMCE Advanced created by Andrew Ozz: This is one of my favourites, it adds more functions to the WordPress text editor and makes it easier to create articles, as you have many more options at hand, making it easy to change text formatting, colours and much more. Recommended.
Wp-NoCategorybase created by Idope: Behind that long name hides a plugin that removes the default category. This improves the SEO optimization of your page, so it is a recommended plugin.
Wordfence Security: It is a well-known plugin to protect your WordPress website from malicious attacks. It has an infinite number of options and yet it is easy to use. There are free and paid versions, although with the free, most users have enough.
Some of its features are to see the users and bots that pass through our website, have the ability to block them, see who logs into our page or tries (many alerts come by bots that try to log into our website), you can establish different security profiles from less to more restrictive … in short.
The only bad thing is that it consumes a lot of resources and can slow down a little the load of the web, but otherwise it is totally recommendable.
Yoast SEO: It is the SEO plugin par excellence. With it we will be able to optimize to the maximum our articles, pages and categories.