If you’re creating a new website, you would need to add some functionalities before going live. These can be as simple as adding a basic contact form to set up an email marketing tool. All these can be added to your website with the help of plugins.
WordPress, being a content management system allows adding the extra functionalities using specific plugins. A beginner can always get confused by looking at the vast library of the plugins. And therefore we have jotted down the best plugins for a new WordPress website.
This list has basically covered a plugin for most of the functionalities needed for a website. You may add other plugins depending on the requirement.
Best WordPress plugins:
In this list, we are discussing the plugins that are essential for a new website. Of course, there are many other plugins that can be considered for installing but we’re focusing on keeping our list short and subtle for new website makers.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugin used on WordPress websites. The free version itself has a lot to offer like creating a sitemap, generating robots.txt files, enabling and disabling the pages to appear in the search results, and so on.
Yoast SEO helps to optimize the content in such a way that it becomes easier to rank on the web. It uses some on-page SEO factors and suggests modification which helps achieve better results.
Yoast SEO is freely available in the WordPress repository and they do have a premium version as well, but we would not suggest taking up a premium plugin initially.
2. UpdraftPlus
With a number of websites getting hacked everything, the most frustrating thing is to get recovered from the attack.
UpdraftPlus helps to create website backups that can be stored on Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, Amazon S3, and so on.
With 2+ million downloads, the plugin provides a variety of settings to create automatic/manual backup, control the number of backups to generate and storing options.
3. Contact Form 7
Every website needs a contact page so that the readers can get in touch with the website owners.
Contact Form 7 is the most downloaded contact form plugin with over 5 million + installs.
It is very easy to use and customize. It integrates with Akismet spam, Google reCAPTCHA, and many other form elements. You just need to create a contact form of your style and embed using a shortcode anywhere on a page.
4. W3 Total Cache
Caching plugins helps in improving the website speed by minifying the files on the frontend.
W3 Total Cache is a cache plugin that optimizes the website speed by offering page cache, browser cache, server cache, and many more options to minify the CSS and JS files.
This reduces the load time for any website by creating temporary static pages which save time for calling server resources.
Overall W3 Total Cache helps to fasten the website speed which improves the reader experience.
Some other cache plugins we would like to recommend are Autoptimize, Litespeed cache, etc as these plugins are also lightweight and easy to use.
5. Ultimate Blocks
Since the release the WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg is the default editor which is faster and improving day-by-day after WordPress updates.
Ultimate blocks is a Gutenberg block plugin with many blocks to choose from. You can select from a variety of different blocks ranging from the content builder, schema blocks to all the basic blocks like Star Rating, Image Slider, Buttons, Divider, etc.
You can also try using other blocks but this is the best user-experience block plugin so far to use on your WordPress website.
6. WooCommerce
All websites are not meant to be static with only a few important pages to describe the business. A business might also have plenty of products for selling it on the website.
WooCommerce is an e-commerce solution for creating an online store. It is open -source and created by the team behind WordPress itself.
You can sell physical goods, variable products, downloadable products, and much other e-commerce experience just like other e-commerce platforms like Amazon, etc.
7. Redirection
Redirection plugins help you to create custom 301 redirects within your website. Google and other search engines do not want their users to have a bad user-experience by showing them a 404 page.
This plugin not only helps in redirection but also keeps track of the 404 broken links on the website. This is quite helpful if your website has 10s and 100s of posts and pages which makes it difficult to find broken links.
Tracking 404 errors, login status, easy to use and import/export options are some of the major factors to be considered while installing the best WordPress plugins
8. Wordfence Security
Security is perhaps one of the most overlooked areas when it comes to making a website. You might create the best-looking website but if you keep it open for the attackers, they will erase all your efforts just with a few scripts.
Wordfence is a free security plugin with 2 million+ active installs and has an endpoint firewall installed that prevents the entry of malicious traffic.
Not only this, but it has also got way more powerful features like leaked password protection, advanced manual blocking, two-factor authentication, and repairing files.
9. Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet Anti-Spam is a plugin that provides filters to check for a number of parameters like commenter Gravatar, IP address of commenters, comment timings, the frequency of comments, etc.
Akismet anti-spam is absolutely free and helps in maintaining a spam-free website. It is present by default int the WordPress website and is one of the best WordPress plugins for new websites to stay away from spammers.
10. Mailchimp
Since launching a website and doing SEO is not enough to gain enough traction. You will need to spread a word about your newly created website and email marketing plays an important role in bringing traffic to a new website.
Mailchimp is a popular and free email marketing tool for creating email subscribers lists. You can create a list of up to 2000 subscribers and that too with easy-peasy steps to follow.
With emails having the highest ROI from all the marketing strategies, missing onto this is serious harm to the website.
Wrapping up:
That’s a wrap up on our lists of best WordPress plugins. Surely, we can make the list long and go up to 20 or 40 plugins, but that we would not suggest anyone install these many plugins.
Hope you install these plugins and let us know, which plugin you like the most and which other plugins you would love to see on the list.
