10 WordPress Plugins Every Site Should at Least Consider Using

  1. Security – WordFence checks your site security vulnerabilities and alerts you to any issues. Also alerts you to potential security issues when a plugin has been closed or compromised.
  2. SEO – Yoast SEO makes your site meet the highest technical SEO standards. It also gives you the tools to bring your content to the highest standards of SEO and overall readability.
  3. Performance – Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. You can optimize (and even convert to WebP) and lazy-load images, optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more. As such it can improve your site’s performance even when already on HTTP/2!
  4. Layout – Beaver Builder is a flexible drag and drop page builder that works on the front end of your WordPress website. Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, you’re going to love taking control of your website. With Beaver Builder, building beautiful, professional WordPress pages is as easy as dragging and dropping.
  5. Content Management – Custom Post Type UI provides an easy to use interface for registering and managing custom post types and taxonomies for your website.
  6. Forms – Ninja Forms is the ultimate FREE contact form creation tool for WordPress. Build forms within minutes using our simple, yet powerful, drag-and-drop form creator. For beginners, quickly and easily design complex forms with absolutely no code. For developers, utilize built-in hooks, filters, and even custom field templates to do whatever you need at any step in the form building or submission using Ninja Forms as a framework.
  7. Image optimization –Smush Optimize your images turn on lazy load, resize, compress and improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!
  8. Backup / migration – Duplicator makes it easy to back up all your WordPress files in zip format, so you can download them offline, migrating across the same or different servers. One of the unique advantages of using Duplicator is its ability to clone your pre-configured sites. Rather than manually configuring your favorite themes or plugins, Duplicator allows you to configure a single site and bundle it up. 
  9. E-commerce – Woo Commerce is a flexible, open-source eCommerce solution built on WordPress. Whether you’re launching a business, taking an existing brick and mortar store online, or designing sites for clients you can get started quickly and build exactly the store you want.
  10. Events Management – Create an events calendar and manage it with ease. The Events Calendar plugin provides professional-level quality and features backed by a team you can trust. Packed with loads of useful features, The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe is ready to go right out of the box. It’s extensible, easy to use, and completely customizable

Don’t forget about these two stalwarts!

Spam – Akismet

All purpose – JetPack

Source: Google Search / WordPress.org

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