Most of the websites today are made with WordPress, and I encourage that. WordPress is an amazing CMS and is good for beginners and experts too. But in the sea of plugins, sometimes is hard to choose which ones to use, so today I’m sharing my list of top plugins to use on your website. (and a couple of ones you should avoid).
So, let’s begin:
Wordfence
The security of your website is so important, and Wordfence is the right plugin for that. There are thousands of malicious bots on the web that try to attack your website and destroy your entire work. That is why you must always prevent the spams and keep your website secure.
This plugin offers Firewall protection, malware scan, blocking, login security, live traffic monitoring and so much more.
It has a free and premium version and you can check it out here.
Akismet
Who loves spam? Only a crazy person would say yes 🙂
Since Askimet is developed by the people behind WordPress, it is one of the default plugins that come with every new WordPress core installation. It is an anti-spam plugin that checks all comments and filters out the spammy comments.
The plugin is free for personal sites and blogs while you have to subscribe to its monthly plans for commercial sites.
Rank Math
I know that every one of you knows what SEO is and how it can help your website. And most of you have heard of Yoast plugin, and I absolutely love Yoast. But I recently came across this great (free) plugin that I love a little bit more than Yoast and it’s Rank Math.
It is really easy to set up (the setup wizard takes you through most of the setup), it has Rich Snippets Integrated, it can optimize up to 5 Keywords (and most of the plugins offer only 1 in free versions), you can connect your Google Search Console, 404 Monitor, Internal Link Suggestions, Sitemap generator and so much more.
Believe me, if you decide to try Rank Math, you will not be sorry.
WP Smush
We all know you need to have images on your website, because, let’s face it, we are all extremely visual people and we just love to look at pretty pictures 🙂
But images can also be so “heavy” on our website and most of you don’t think about scaling them before uploading to your website.
This is where WP Smush comes into play 🙂
It optimizes all of your image files in JPEG, GIF and PNG formats using advanced compression techniques and saves lots of storage space. It auto-smushes all your attachments on upload while you can also smush your attachments manually in the media library.
The free version has some restrictions, but it’s good anyway 🙂
Plugins I don’t like or recommend
Jetpack
Yes I know, most of you are shocked right now 🙂 Jetpack is recommended by WordPress and it’s developed by the people behind WordPress. But I still don’t recommend it. Why? Because it’s really heavy on your website. It uses a lot of your hosting resources (memory) that it makes your website so slow. So, for me, these plugins just aren’t worth the installing.
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets, Redirection, 404 Monitoring and Sitemap plugins
A big NO from me for all the plugins like that. Why? It’s pretty simple. All these plugins are already included in Rank Math so there is no need to have additional plugins that suck the life out of your hosting when you can only have one plugin that does the job.
Caching plugins
You might have seen that I didn’t include any caching plugins in this list. And the reason why is because I hate them all 🙂 Yes, I love just one that does an extremely great job, but that one is hosting related. My hosting provider has its own caching plugin and you can only use it with that hosting (but I will talk about that some other time).
Why I hate all the caching plugins is because they are all extremely difficult to set up and configure properly, most of them don’t even work properly and you have to install additional plugins because they don’t do the whole work. And c’mon! If I install a caching plugin then I would want that 1 plugin to do the job. I don’t want to install a million plugins to have a fast website.
So this is really tricky because you SHOULD have a caching plugin but which one?
My final advice
I know that we all love plugins and different functions they provide. But remember, the fewer plugins you have, the better your website will work. So next time, when you think about clicking that “Install” button, take a minute and think – do I really really really need that plugin that makes snowflakes fall all over my website? 🙂
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I am definitely trying Rank Math as I have never heard of it before now. It sounds like something I would love giving that it provides more features than Yoast does. Thanks for sharing this information with us.
You should definitely try it. It is fantastic.
Hi Karmen. I have Rank Math and I absolutely love it. It works great for me. Akismet is something that I also would like to have, but somewhere in the future when my website grows some more.
Wordfence has to be my most prized plugin! I use Akismet as well. As always I really appreciate your insight into improving my website.
Thank you Julie 🙂 Wordfence really is a great plugin for all kinds of bots and intruders.
I currently use Squarespace but was thinking about switching to WordPress. I love that with WordPress there are a lot of apps that are free to use. All of these plugins are ones that I would use. Thanks for sharing!
I have worked with Squarespace and WordPress and although both have their advantages and minuses, I would always go with WordPress since it has way more freedom. But you also have to be very careful with plugins, because not all of them are secure or working properly.
I have none of these plugins and need ALL of them! I need to get on it! This is really good information. Also good to know about jetpack. I haven’t used it but it did come automatically.
Hi Karmen,
Great List! I am definitely going to check out Rank Math, I use Yoast now and like it, but this sounds even better. I will have to check out wordfence too, for some reason I thought Akismet did all that as well, but looks like they only do spam.
I recently took away Jetpack for the same reason you say and my site runs way better without it. Thank you for the great info!
-Heather
I love Yoast, and you can never go wrong if you use it. But for now, I like Rank Math a little bit better 🙂 The interface is better and it provides a few options that Yoast only has in the premium version.
Didn’t know Wordfence has a free version, Karmen. Akismet I cannot use because it keeps saying my API expired or something and I can’t get it unless I go for the paid version, even though I have a personal blog. I started using Rank Math in place of Yoast SEO recently and I enjoy using it. I still have some way to go before I fully understand it but so far, so good. Haven’t had any internal link suggestions so far, though. Maybe I need to do something more to see that. Have not tried WP Smush. It’s probably useful considering that my site is quite image heavy.
I know most people are not fans of Jetpack because of the way it slows down sites and hogs resources. Trying to wean off, but it will take a while. I have learned how to disable most features though. Thank you Karmen, I always learn something useful from your posts!
Oh geez I know all about why not to try Jetpack – it killed my website so fast! The strange thing is that I see so many people recommending it!
I’m interested to know about redirection though, I use that for a few of my websites – of course those sites are using All In One SEO since Rank Math did not exist then. I know that if I change from All In One to Rank Math I can have all my settings moved over, but what about redirections? Do you know? I’ve got loads of redirections on one of my sites!
And yes I LOVE Rank Math, it is so much better than Yoast which caused problems for me and while I really like All In One SEO it does not have all those awesome checklists and it does not have the same functionality.