WordPress plugins serve as tools that maximize the performance, security, and efficiency of a website. However, some plugins should be your priority, the presence of excessive plugins will burden the website and make your website difficult to create or conflict with each other. Therefore, the selected plugins must be of high quality, up-to-date, and in accordance with the specific needs of the site for the smooth running of your website without affecting the performance or security that is maintained.
Here are 5 categories of plugins that you must have for the smooth running of your WordPress website along with recommendations for plugins with free and paid features
1. WordPress Plugins to Speed Up Websites
Speed is one of the important factors to provide a good user experience in accessing a website and supporting SEO. With a slow website, you will lose visitors and even rankings in search engines. Therefore, plugins to speed up the site are very important.
WP Rocket
Only paid version available
WP Rocket is a very popular premium caching in WordPress plugins. It is easy to use and provides features such as lazy loading of images, database optimization, and minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With WP Rocket, your site can be accessed faster without the need for complicated technical settings.
Key Feature :
- Page Caching: Creates static HTML versions of pages to reduce server load and speed up load times.
- Browser Caching: Stores frequently accessed resources in a user’s browser to speed up load times for returning visitors.
- Cache Preloading: Generates a cache before a user visits the site, ensuring that pages are ready to be served quickly.
- Lazy Load Media: Loads images and videos only when they are visible on screen, reducing the initial page load time.
- File Optimization: Combines and minifies CSS and JavaScript files to reduce file size and increase speed.
- Unused CSS Removal: Removes unused CSS to improve page performance.
- CDN Integration: Supports integration with multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to improve content delivery speed.
- Database Optimization: Cleans and optimizes the WordPress database to improve efficiency.
LiteSpeed Cache
Free and paid versions available
WordPress plugins are great tools that help improve your website’s performance, security, and efficiency. One fantastic option is LiteSpeed Cache, a free caching plugin made just for servers running LiteSpeed. It’s an all-in-one tool that speeds up your site and comes with many helpful features to optimize your content. LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress works well with WordPress Multisite and is compatible with many popular plugins, like WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO. Plus, it also works with ClassicPress!
Free Key Features :
- Static Page Caching: Provides full page caching to improve site speed.
- Browser Cache Support: Allows caching in the user’s browser to speed up page loading on subsequent visits.
- Image Optimization: Supports image compression and lazy loading to reduce page load times.
- Minify CSS/JS/HTML: Reduces file sizes by removing unnecessary spaces and characters.
- Database Cleaner: Allows users to clean and optimize the WordPress database.
- CDN Support: Integration with Content Delivery Network for faster content distribution.
Paid Features :
- Private Content Caching: Enables caching for logged-in users, improving the user experience on sites with many users.
- Auto Purge: Automatically clears the cache based on certain events, such as content updates.
- REST API Caching: Improves the performance of applications that use the REST API by caching API responses.
- Pre-caching: Enables preloading of pages using a crawler to improve access speed.
- ESI (Edge Side Includes) Support: Allows management of dynamic content in the cache, such as widgets and shortcodes.
2. WordPress Plugins for Website Security
Security is a top priority to ensure your website is protected from malware, DDoS, or hacker attacks. plugins serve to protect user data and maintain your site’s reputation. A secure website will provide a sense of security for its users so that it can increase the number of users.
Wordfence Security
Free and paid versions available
Wordfence is a security plugin for firewall protection and malware scanning. Wordfence will monitor all traffic to your website, block malicious threats, and provide detailed security reports, with a 24/7 global security team and two-factor authentication (2FA) adding to the protection of your site. It is one of the most widely used WordPress security plugins.
Free Key Features
- Web Application Firewall: Detects and blocks malicious traffic, protecting sites from a variety of attacks, including brute-force attacks and malicious file upload attempts.
- Security Scanner: Checks core files, themes, and plugins for malware, malicious URLs, and other vulnerabilities. Users receive malware signatures with a 30-day delay compared to premium users.
- Login Security: Provides two-factor authentication (2FA) and CAPTCHA to prevent unauthorized access.
- Centralized Management: Compatible with Wordfence Central to manage multiple sites simultaneously at no additional cost.
- Vulnerability Notifications: Provides alerts about outdated or vulnerable plugins or themes.
- Attack Log: Records attacks on a site and allows blocking based on IP address or user agent.
Paid features
- Real-Time Updates for Firewall and Scanner: Get real-time updates of firewall rules and malware signatures, enabling faster protection against new threats.
- Premium Blocked IP List: Access a dynamically updated list of known malicious IPs, providing additional protection against attacks from identified IP addresses.
- Geoblocking: Allows blocking access from specific countries, increasing security by restricting access from high-risk locations.
- Priority Customer Support: Provides technical support via tickets with faster response times compared to forum support for free users.
- Reputation Check: Allows users to check the reputation of specific IP addresses and domains, aiding in security decision making.
Sucuri Security
Free and paid versions available
Sucuri Security is a free and paid plugins in a security solution that includes website monitoring, malware scanning, and DDoS mitigation. In addition, Sucuri also offers a cloud-based firewall, which can block attacks before they reach your server, thereby increasing site security and speed.
Free Key Features
- Malware Scanning: Performs automatic scans to detect malware and vulnerabilities on your site.
- Security Monitoring: Monitors suspicious activity and notifies you if a threat is detected.
- Blacklist Monitoring: Checks whether your site is blacklisted, such as Google Safe Browsing.
- Core File Security: Verifies the integrity of WordPress core files to detect unauthorized changes.
- Email Notifications: Sends notifications to users when security issues are detected.
Paid features
- Web Application Firewall (WAF): Provides protection from DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, and other threats with a powerful firewall.
- Uptime Monitoring: Monitors your site’s availability in real time and reports if your site is unavailable.
- Site Backup: Provides backup services to protect your site’s data from loss.
- Priority Customer Support: Get access to technical support from Sucuri’s team of experts when you encounter a security issue.
- Detailed Security Reports: Provides a comprehensive report on your site’s security status, including vulnerability analysis.
3. WordPress Plugins for Website Email Management
Email management is essential to ensure that messages or notifications from your site reach users without ending up in the spam folder. This plugin helps enhance WordPress’ built-in email functionality and provides tools for managing newsletters.
WP Mail SMTP
Free and paid versions available
WP Mail SMTP ensures that emails sent from your WordPress site end up in the spam folder. This plugin fixes email deliverability issues by changing WordPress’s built-in email delivery function to SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). It also ensures that emails from your site don’t end up in the spam folder with SMTP.
A pro version is also available with additional features like email logging, advanced email reporting and statistics, backup connections, email alerts, smart conditional routing, and more
Free Key Features
- SMTP Basic Configuration: Changes the way WordPress sends emails using your preferred SMTP provider. This will help improve email deliverability.
- Setup Wizard: The wizard will walk you through the steps of configuring the plugin.
- Support for Multiple SMTP Providers: Supports providers like Gmail, Mailgun, SendGrid, and many more.
- Email Notifications: Allows you to receive email notifications if something goes wrong with your email delivery.
- Test Send Email: You can use this feature to send a test email to make sure that your SMTP settings are working as intended.
Paid features
- Email Logging: All emails sent from your site are logged here. This feature allows you to track the emails that are sent.
- Advanced Reports and Statistics: Provides graphs and statistics on email delivery rates and engagement rates, such as open rates and click-through rates.
- Backup Connections: Allows you to set backup options in case your primary provider experiences issues.
- Smart Conditional Routing: This feature allows users to set conditional logic that will route certain types of emails through different SMTP providers.
- Email Alerts: You will be notified instantly when your email fails to deliver.
- Priority Customer Support: You will get access to faster and more responsive technical customer support.
MailPoet
Free and paid versions available
MailPoet is a plugins WordPress that lets you send, create, manage, and grow your emails directly from your WordPress dashboard. You can create beautiful emails from scratch or use our responsive templates that work on all devices. MailPoet allows for automatic and scheduled sending.
Free Key Features
- Newsletter Builder : Users can create and send newsletters using an easy-to-use editor and responsive templates;
- Signup Form : provides the use of installing a signup form to their website to collect their subscribers;
- Subscriber Management : customers can easily manage their subscriber list by visiting either checklist in the WordPress plugin;
- New Post Notification : can set a special time for automatic email departure when the target article master reports a new message on their blog;
- Automatic Welcome Email : can direct you to set two possible welcome emails for your subscribers;
- Basic Statistics : Provides basic statistics reports of your email marketing group and open curves.
Paid features
- Email Delivery & Inbox Ample : Asyurkem Hotel must access MailPoet Sending Service so that your emails go to the correct inbox.
- Subscriber Statistics : You report on how well your email deliverability is doing on another level.
- Multi-Segment Implementation: Filtering or distillation is centered on traits or interests, giving you a clear way to almost all Candaiye users only.
- Google Analytics: See your customer experience with you install you via Google Analytics.
- Customer Support: Customers get support from any time and channel, manager or cs MailPoet.
4. WordPress Plugins for Website Backup
Backup is an essential step to keep your site data and content safe for recovery. If your website crashes or is cyber-attacked, a backup plugin allows you to quickly restore your website.
UpdraftPlus
Free and paid versions available
UpdraftPlus is a free backup plugins WordPress that allows you to backup, restore, and migrate your entire website and store it in cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, or email. You can also set up an automated backup schedule as needed.
The paid version also allows you to backup to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, pCloud, WebDAV, or UpdraftVault, our integrated storage option for UpdraftPlus.
Free Key Features
- Manual and Scheduled Backups: Users can manually backup or schedule automatic backups for WordPress files and databases.
- Direct Restore: Users can restore backups directly from the WordPress dashboard without the need for FTP.
- Simple Migration: Allows site migration to a new server or domain by downloading and uploading backup files.
- Remote Storage Support: Supports storage on services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon S3.
- Easy User Interface: Offers an intuitive interface to manage backups and restores.
Paid features
- Automatic Backup Before Update: Automatically performs a backup before updating a plugin, theme, or WordPress core.
- Incremental Backup: Allows users to back up only the changes that have occurred since the last backup, saving storage space.
- More Remote Storage Options: Provides more storage options like Microsoft OneDrive, SFTP, Microsoft Azure, and more.
- Multisite Support: Allows users to manage backups across multisite WordPress installations.
- Detailed Reports: Provides detailed reports on errors and status of backups performed.
- UpdraftCentral: Feature to efficiently manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard.
Solid Backups
Only paid version available
Solid Backups is a premium WordPress plugin that helps you to backup, restore and move your site. It creates the complete backup of your website, including database, theme files, plugins and media to download as a zip file with few easy clicks. Automate your WordPress backups to any fishing server such as Google Drive, Dropbox or Solid Backups Stash It has an Instant restore feature that lets you quickly restore your files or site even by using the ImportBuddy tool. Solid Backups also lets you move your site to a different host or domain name quickly, and it is the best overall option for WordPress backup and migration.
Paid Features
- Full Backup: Solid Backups allows users to create a full backup of their WordPress site, including files, database, and plugins.
- Automatic Backup Schedule: Users can schedule automatic backups at a customizable frequency (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.).
- Off-Site Storage: Backups can be stored in a variety of locations, including cloud storage such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, and even on FTP servers.
- Easy Restore: Allows users to easily restore their site from a backup with just a few clicks using the ImportBuddy feature.
- Stash Live Feature: Provides automatic snapshots of the website that allow users to revert to a previous state without affecting server performance.
- Data Security: Backups are performed over an encrypted SSL connection and protected with AES-256 encryption.
5. WordPress Plugins for SSL
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is essential for encrypting data sent between the server and the user, providing better security and increasing visitor trust in your website. This plugin makes it easy to install and configure an SSL certificate on your WordPress site.
Really Simple SSL (Really Simple Security)
Free and paid versions available
Really Simple Security is the lightest and easiest to use security plugins for WordPress. It secures your WordPress website with SSL certificate generation, properly implements https redirection, scans for potential vulnerabilities, Login Protection, and implements essential WordPress features.
Really Simple SSL drives SSL certificates on your WordPress installation. Once you enable SSL on your hosting, this plugin will help to route all your site traffic through HTTPS protocol quickly without any manual configuration.
Free Key Features
- Automatic SSL Installation: triggers users to automatically install a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt if one is not already installed.
- Migrate to HTTPS: Automatically changes site URLs from HTTP to HTTPS and sets a frequency to ensure all traffic is redirected to HTTPS.
- Check Server Health: Checks server configuration to ensure SSL settings are working properly.
- Vulnerability Notifications: Security vulnerability detection for plugins, themes, and WordPress core, notifying users of security issues that need to be addressed.
Paid features
- Mixed Content Fixer: fixes mixed content issues on the backend and frontend, which often occur after migrating to HTTPS.
- HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS): Enables HSTS and allows users to submit their sites to the HSTS preload list.
- Additional Security Headers: Makes it easy to implement security headers such as Content Security Policies and others to improve site security.
- Premium Email Support: Get faster technical support via email to help resolve any issues that may arise.
- Certificate Expiration Alert: Provides notification via email before SSL certificate expires, so users can renew the certificate in time.
SSL Zen
Free and paid versions available
SSL Zen is the most trusted ‘Free SSL Certificate’ WordPress plugins that helps you secure your website, protect your customers’ data, and show your visitors that you are trustworthy and authentic. SSL Zen is what makes it easy to install SSL on WordPress. In addition to configuring HTTPS, this plugin also helps you get a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, without any coding, hassle, mixed content, or insecure content warnings. In other words, you don’t need any experience to move HTTP web pages to HTTPS or force SSL on your website.
Key Free Features
- SSL Certificate Generation: Allows users to create a free SSL certificate through Let’s Encrypt with domain ownership verification.
- Manual Installation: Users can follow the video tutorial to install the SSL certificate on their server or cPanel.
- Certificate Renewal: Users need to renew the certificate every 90 days by re-verifying and installing manually.
- Email Reminder: Get an email reminder 30 days before the SSL certificate expires.
- Browser Security Alert: Displays a padlock icon in the browser if the SSL certificate is installed correctly.
SEO Boost: Improves SEO rankings as HTTPS usage is considered a ranking factor.
Paid Features
- Automatic Domain Verification: Enables automatic domain verification.
- Global CDN: Uses StackPath to accelerate websites through a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
- Automatic HTTPS Redirection: Sets up automatic redirection from HTTP to HTTPS for all traffic.
- Premium Support: Provides support via live chat and email to resolve any issues that may arise.
- Automatic Renewal: Ensures automatic certificate renewal without any user action.
- Spam and Brute Force Protection: Provides additional protection against spam and brute force attacks.
- Real-Time Threat Intelligence: Monitors IP addresses and source locations to detect threats in real-time.
- Automatic Certificate Creation and Installation: Automatically creates and installs SSL certificates without manual intervention.
Conclusion : WordPress Plugins to running well your Website
Using these plugins can significantly speed up your website, improving user experience and overall performance. Pail SMTP, UpdraftPlus, and Real Simple SSL are enough for free plugins like LiteSpeed Cache, WP M to improve the performance, security, and basic functionality of your WordPress site. They provide essential features like caching, email delivery, backup, and SSL installation easily and effectively. However, for more optimal performance and more advanced control, paid plugins like WP Rocket, Wordfence Security, BackupBuddy, and SSL Zen offer more additional features and premium support, so they are highly recommended if you want better results in the long run..
