To get off to a good start with WordPress and build a solid foundation, it’s essential to install a few plugins. But what exactly are they? Which ones should you use on a daily basis to effectively manage your WordPress website? That’s what we’ll explore together in this checklist of WordPress plugins to help you get started.
What is a plug-in?
A plugin is an add-on for a WordPress site that allows you to expand its functionality or add new features.
As we saw in our previous article How to Get Started with WordPress: 9 Things You Need to Know, there are tens of thousands of WordPress plugins. Some are completely free, some are a little less so, and others are paid plugins at various price points.
If you can't find what you're looking for among the vast selection of WordPress plugins, keep in mind that you can create your own plugin with unique features. If you find yourself needing to do so, reach out to your preferred contact.
The Checklist of Essentials
With more than 6,000 possible extensions, it's hard to know where to start! Especially since the plugins you need also depend on the nature of your site.
The purpose of this article is to provide a list of plugins to help you get started with WordPress. These plugins are designed to be easy to use and comprehensive. To avoid having too many of them, we’ve selected a range of so-called “Swiss Army knife” plugins.
To take it a step further, you can entrust the management of your website project to our WordPress experts, who will find the solution that best meets your needs. If it doesn’t exist, INGENIUS’s web developers will create it for you!
The page builder
A page builder is a plugin that allows you to design complex pages on WordPress without having to write code. Recommended for beginners as well as more advanced WordPress users, the page builders available on the market are extremely powerful website-building tools with endless possibilities.
Among the best WordPress page builders in 2022 is Elementor. Launched in 2016, Elementor is THE gold standard among WordPress page builders. As a freemium plugin, Elementor saves you from having to write hundreds of lines of code to create the website of your dreams. Its premium version includes several interesting features to take your page design to the next level.
Elementor is very intuitive and lets you see changes in real time. Simply dragging and dropping modules allows you to create effective content layouts. The paid version unlocks access to templates, which provide a solid foundation so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Elementor is compatible with nearly all themes and plugins on the market and has its own management interface.
Another alternative to Elementor: Divi Builder. Offered by the theme developer ElegantThemes, Divi is a plugin that’s just as effective—and versatile—and suitable for all types of WordPress websites. This page builder lets you customize every aspect of a site, with responsive designs that adapt to all screen sizes.
Create and Manage Your Online Store
In this digital age, it’s hard to ignore the importance of an online store (or “e-commerce”) for any business venture. Even today, far too many entrepreneurs and business owners are hesitant to take the plunge for fear of facing what they believe to be insurmountable challenges.
However, there are now several solutions available for creating and managing an online store.
When it comes to WordPress, the one plugin that’s 200% essential for an e-commerce site is, of course, the WooCommerce.
WooCommerce is the perfect tool for creating an online store. It’s free to use with no obligation to purchase, and WooCommerce offers a wide range of features for selling both physical and digital products and services. It’s a comprehensive solution that also lets you manage customer accounts, product inventory, sales tax, and more. Several extensions at various price points complement the WooCommerce offering, such as those that add different payment methods.
All of these features—which are essential for effectively managing an online store—make WooCommerce the most widely used e-commerce plugin in the world.
We’ll have the opportunity to go into more detail about how WooCommerce works. You can already check out the advantages of WooCommerce over Pestashop, an alternative solution for creating an e-commerce site.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO ) is a set of best practices designed to improve a website’s ranking in search engine results.
To help you ask the right questions when developing an SEO strategy and rank most effectively for keywords, Yoast SEO is THE go-to guide for WordPress sites.
Yoast SEO is a freemium plugin designed for WordPress SEO that’s packed with features. Acting as a true virtual assistant, it highlights the elements that need optimization to ensure a website complies with SEO best practices: tags, internal and external links, keywords, meta descriptions, slugs, and more. More broadly, Yoast analyzes a text’s SEO and readability, and allows you to customize how an article or page will appear when shared on various social media platforms.
The premium version of Yoast SEO adds useful features such as internal link suggestions and the ability to focus on phrases in addition to the chosen keyword. In addition, this paid option handles 301 redirects and removes ads.
Safety
The security of a WordPress website should not be overlooked. That’s why we recommend THE WordPress security plugin: Wordfence Security.
Wordfence is a freemium plugin, meaning that the basic features are free, while the more advanced features are available only to users who purchase the plugin. Wordfence is a comprehensive plugin that allows you to manage key security concerns: firewall, anti-spam, integrity scans, real-time traffic monitoring, IP blocking, and more.
Although Wordfence offers a variety of effective options for securing your WordPress website, there is one drawback: the system isn't intuitive enough for a beginner.
For such a comprehensive alternative, we recommend the Jetpack Security. A true Swiss Army knife, Jetpack includes a comprehensive, easy-to-use security solution. It offers features such as malware scanning, protection against brute-force attacks, automatic backups, and website monitoring.
JetPack also covers other areas that prove very useful for the day-to-day management of a WordPress site, making it a very interesting and comprehensive plugin that deserves a more in-depth look all on its own… Stay tuned!
Monitor the Performance of Your WordPress Site
Keeping an eye on the performance of a WordPress website is just as important as security. A website that is poorly optimized or slowed down by large images will negatively impact its credibility and search engine rankings.
For a truly effective cleanup, we recommend WP-Optimize. As a freemium plugin, WP-Optimize is an all-in-one solution for cache optimization, image compression, and database cleanup. It excels in this last area, detecting and removing obsolete database tables to free up a few MB of storage and ensure your website stays in top shape performance-wise.
For greatly simplified image management, Smush is the ideal free plugin. Compression will reduce the file size of your images without compromising their quality. With smaller images, page load times will be optimized—a huge plus for SEO!
Backup
In the event of a glitch, hacking, or a critical bug, it’s essential to always have a backup of your entire website— including the database—on hand. Fortunately, there are WordPress plugins that automate this process.
The ideal plugin from our selection turns out to be UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup. A freemium plugin with a free version that’s more than sufficient, UpdraftPlus is an easy-to-use plugin for creating backups. It also lets you restore a backup, migrate, or clone a WordPress site. Plus, UpdraftPlus lets you upload your backup to various storage platforms, such as FTP, Google Drive, Dropbox, or an external server.
Website Maintenance
When a website is being created or modified, it’s often helpful to prevent visitors from accessing it during this “maintenance” phase. During this time, there are two options. The first is to make the website private, and the second is to add a placeholder page while making the entire site inaccessible. You’re free to choose whichever approach you prefer, but it’s generally better to opt for option 2 to explain why the site is offline.
This is where WP Maintenance comes into play.
This free plugin lets you create a custom maintenance page to notify visitors that maintenance is in progress. A countdown timer can be set up to visually indicate when the website will be back online. Additionally, a chatbot can be added to enhance interactivity. This feature is an effective way to collect email addresses, as visitors can enter their email addresses to be notified when the website goes live. It’s both practical and clever.
Managing Caching for Your WordPress Site
Caching your WordPress site is something you absolutely shouldn’t overlook. In fact, search engines tend to prioritize websites with faster loading times when indexing. This is also an important factor to consider for search engine optimization (SEO).
By definition, a cache is a temporary storage system that allows pages to load more quickly. This system displays to the visitor the most recent version of the page they are viewing using a temporary file stored on their computer.
To manage the cache of your WordPress website as simply and effectively as possible, there is a wide range of plugins available. We chose one of them: WP Rocket, which is quite simply the most powerful WordPress caching plugin.
WP Rocket allows you to manage caching to reduce page load times. This premium (i.e., paid) plugin offers more than 20 settings, such as reducing bandwidth through GZIP compression, preloading, and scheduling a cache cleanup every 10 hours.
For a freemium solution, WP Fastest Cache is another excellent caching tool that is regularly updated and offers features similar to WP Rocket. WP Fastest Cache is designed to be user-friendly with an intuitive interface.
Page Redirection
If you regularly move pages or articles by changing their titles or URLs, we recommend using a dedicated redirection tool. In addition to preventing visitors from being sent to a “404 Not Found” page, redirection eliminates broken links, which can negatively impact a website’s SEO.
To easily manage redirects on your website, we recommend installing dedicated plugins, and we highly recommend Redirection.
Redirection is a free plugin that makes it easy to create and manage redirects. It provides logs so you can track any broken links or 404 errors that visitors to a site using this extension might encounter.
Manage a newsletter
A newsletter is an essential tool for building audience loyalty for a WordPress site, a project, or a business. Easy to set up, a newsletter—also known as a mailing list—sends regular emails to subscribers to generate consistent traffic to a website while maintaining a connection with its readers.
The plug-in MailPoetplugin—which is free for up to 1,000 newsletter subscribers—lets you do all of this. The newsletter administrator won’t have to leave the WordPress interface to build effective mailing lists from scratch or using predefined responsive templates.
Contact Form
What would a website be without a way to contact the people behind it? Sure, but why set up a form when all you need to do is clearly display an email address or phone number?
Including a contact form on your WordPress site offers two advantages that shouldn’t be overlooked. The first is that a form helps protect you from spam caused by having your email address added to mailing lists. The second is that it collects useful information (name, subject, message, etc.) for processing a request submitted by a visitor, prospect, or customer.
Contact Form 7 is a free WordPress plugin for creating and managing multiple contact forms. With just a few lines of HTML and CSS code, you can customize the forms without compromising the site's security.
Anti-spam
Protecting yourself against spam and unwanted comments involves not only solutions such as contact forms, but also spam filters.
The most popular WordPress plugin is Akismet Anti-Spam. Installed by default on any WordPress site, the plugin automatically checks comments posted on a website as well as contact form submissions to filter out malicious messages.
The Comments Section
The comments section helps foster interaction and discussion among readers of a website or blog. This section serves as a wealth of useful information for visitors and for the author, helping them create new content or tailor their offerings.
By default, WordPress includes a comment system that requires no configuration: a text field, two additional fields for the name and email address, and an optional field for entering a website URL. Although this system is fast and efficient, it does not allow for much interaction among readers.
To take things a step further and add new features, there are (of course) plugins: wpDiscuz is one of them.
wpDiscuz adds up to three ready-to-use comment section layouts and allows visitors to log in with their social media accounts to leave comments. The inclusion of a “reply” button and an option to sort comments will breathe new life into a section that’s in need of a refresh.
Translate Your Website
To avoid the tedious and repetitive task of translating an entire website line by line into multiple languages, there are plugins that make life much easier.
WPLM is a premium translation plugin that supports over 40 languages. With WPLM, you can add language variants using an editor.
As a free alternative, Polylang has established itself as a leading language plugin for creating bilingual or multilingual WordPress sites.
Your recommendations
In this article, we’ve introduced you to several WordPress plugins that are sure to make the day-to-day management of your website easier! Keep in mind that this checklist is based on a few plugins with essential features, but there are many others—both features and plugins—with a wide variety of uses.
What about you? If you had one must-have plug-in to recommend, which one would it be?
