The question of how many WordPress plugins you should have on a site comes up quite often. It’s also not uncommon to hear questions about the best WordPress plugins to include with every new WordPress installation.
Are you going to slow down a site by having too many? Are there some must-have WordPress plugins that you should never skip out on?
I wouldn’t say there’s such thing as a must-have plugin. After all, WordPress works just fine on its own. However, security, marketing, social media and other things like SEO come into the picture, and most companies would like to improve in all of those areas.
Therefore, we do have a list of the best WordPress plugins. It’s recommended you utilize this list as a starting point for all WordPress sites. After that you can look into more niche plugins that are more focused on your particular industry.
Keep reading to learn about the best WordPress plugins for brand new sites.
Collecting email addresses from your site visitors and adding them to a mailing list can be a really effective way to engage with your audience, market your products and services (and affiliate products) and keep them coming back to your site.
To get people to sign up to your mailing list you’ll need an opt-in form that integrates with your email marketing service.
While there are dozens of plugins you could choose that add email marketing functionality to your site, Thrive Leads does a lot more than adding a simple sign up form.
Thrive Leads is a full lead generation plugin that allows you to create any kind of opt-in form you can imagine, target offers to different website users, and optimize your opt-ins for higher conversions.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Thrive Leads is most definitely one of the best WordPress list building plugins around but it’s a premium option. If you’re not yet generating enough income from your email list to justify the monthly fee for Thrive Leads, Optin Forms is a great budget option
Optin Forms is a free plugin from the team at Fancy Themes that’s simple and easy to use but very effective.
You can add an opt-in form to your WordPress site with a single click, or use a shortcode to add it to specific posts and pages.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
WordPress is pretty well optimized for SEO but there are always improvements you can make. Plus, as soon as you start publishing posts, you’ll want to make sure your content is optimized for search engines so you can get more traffic to your site.
An SEO plugin can take you through some simple steps to improve the SEO of your site and make sure all new content you publish is optimized too.
Quite a few SEO plugins are sold and given away for free online. The best one is Yoast SEO. The plugin boosts your search engine rankings by giving suggestions, offering tools for tweaking your meta data and exploring the world of keywords.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Although it may seem intuitive to get as many performance plugins as possible, the opposite is often true. Basically, you don’t want two caching plugins conflicting with each other, and multiple CDNs can cause problems as well.
You can find tons of caching plugins online, but WP Rocket is an old reliable one with rather basic tools and default settings filled in once you install it. This means that you typically don’t have to go through and adjust anything besides turning the plugin on.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
CloudFlare is a free content delivery network, meaning that it uses an entire network of servers around the world to deliver your website to the end users. For example, if you have a customer in China, but your server is located in Chicago, it will most likely take the site longer to load for that user. However, a network like this chooses the server that’s closest to the customer, speeding things up quite a bit.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
The core version of Jetpack is free but you’ll need to sign up for a premium plan if you want to get backup, advanced security, and other additional features.
It’s tough to cover all of the aspects of Jetpack, but the shorter version includes image tools, SEO, security, spam filtering, site performance, backup, and content creation. If you were to choose only one plugin for your WordPress site, this would most likely be the one. Why? Because it has so many features packed in that you can eliminate the need for multiple plugins.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
We’ve talked a little about how images and other types of media can slow down your site. Well, optimizing your images is a pain in the butt, especially if you’re doing it manually. The Smush plugin takes the hassle out of image optimization by doing it all automatically.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
While SEO is one way of getting more visitors to your site, social media can also be a really effective way to grow your traffic. There are some really useful social media plugins out there that can automate your social media activity and encourage readers to share your content.
Any small business owner knows that social media can quickly become a full-time job. Buffer strives to expedite the process with scheduling, cool buttons and multimedia engagement.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
SumoMe has all sorts of tools, making it a full suite of options. I recommend it as a free plugin for email marketing, site performance, social media and more.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Okay, so a membership plugin isn’t going to be included on all sites, but I figure this is going to be the bedrock of any membership site, and you might end up using it if trying to find a new way to make money for your website. Memberships can be sold in a wide variety of ways, from yearly to monthly subscriptions, and for anything from online magazine content to videos.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Security and backup plugins are similar to performance plugins since you don’t want to have multiple ones conflicting with each other. Besides Akismet, one security plugin will do the trick.
Akismet is all about anti-spam. The plugin is recommended for every WordPress site unless you like seeing thousands of spam comments coming through.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
WordFence offers several security solutions, and it can be used together with the backup and security features of Jetpack. Overall, the plugin works to prevent the site from getting hacked, while providing information on what attacks have been made.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Traditionally the design of your WordPress site was controlled solely by the theme, but this is no longer the case.
The WordPress core has evolved to give you more control over the design and layout of your pages and posts via Gutenberg blocks.
There are also now several plugins available that will transform your WordPress site into a drag and drop website builder, giving you full control over the design and essentially making it possible to create your own theme without code.
There are now dozens of drag and drop visual page builders available for WordPress. The introduction of the Gutenberg blocks editor also means that there’s a much higher level of customization of posts and pages in WordPress itself.
So what’s so special about the Thrive Theme Builder?
The Thrive Theme Builder is more than a page builder. It’s an entire WordPress theme builder that enables you to create your own marketing-focused WordPress sites.
The theme builder gives you the flexibility to create or customize your own unique site designs with branding and conversions in mind. Pre-built templates are included as well as hundreds of elements to build your list and optimize conversions.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Premium page builders aren’t for everyone. If you don’t have the budget for expensive design tools right now, you always have the option of using a free WordPress theme and the Gutenberg block editor that comes with WordPress.
The introduction of Gutenberg to the WordPress editor has revolutionized the way WordPress users build pages and publish content.
Gutenberg allows you to build posts and pages with “blocks” of content that are coded to be styled in a particular way. For example, there are Gutenberg blocks for images, lists, tables, and pullquotes.
The core WordPress installation comes with all the basic blocks you need for most type of content and some plugins add their own blocks.
However, you can improve the presentation of your content by using the Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg plugin to extend the blocks available to you and create more visually appealing layouts without spending any time editing code.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Not every site will need eCommerce features but if you want to take payments on your WordPress site, you’ll need a plugin.
If you’re looking to sell physical items on your WordPress site, WooCommerce is the industry leader.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
EDD runs as smoothly as WooCommerce. The only difference is that it only focuses on digital goods.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Here’s a plugin that’s not going to be used for every site. However, it’s a must-have for an online magazine or blog with multiple writers.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
WordPress creates sites that are pretty user friendly but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make further improvements. Adding a couple of simple plugins to your site can make for a much better user experience.
Publishing your email address on your website leaves you open to scrapers and spammers. The easiest way to prevent this and still make it easy for people to get in touch with you is by putting a contact form on your website.
Simple Basic Contact Form is a lightweight plugin that is easy to set up and can put a contact form anywhere on your site using a shortcut or template tag.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
Broken links are bad news for your website. Not only do they mean a poor experience for your users, but fixing broken links also makes sure your site is crawled and indexed properly by search engines and can improve your SEO.
Finding broken links manually can be very time-consuming, and that’s where the Broken Link Checker plugin comes in.
This plugin monitors all internal and external links across your WordPress site and also detects broken images.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
It’s important for any site that represents a business, collects data from users, or generates income via certain affiliate or ad networks to display certain information to ensure legal compliance.
Depending on the type of site and legal jurisdiction, this may include displaying a privacy policy, terms & conditions, notification that the site uses cookies, and other legal information.
You can create this information from scratch and publish it as a standard page but this plugin helps you to create standard versions of the most common legal pages by simply supplying information about your site and business.
Why This WordPress Plugin is Essential for a New Site
If not, it might help out if you explore some of the options we’ve discussed above. Many of the options talked about are completely free, so that’s useful for companies on budgets. I also tried to stick with premium plugins that keep their costs low. If you stumble upon a premium plugin but you don’t want to pay for it, you can typically locate one that’s similar but free.
There you have it. That’s all we have for the best WordPress plugins, so if you can think of any questions, drop them in the comments section below.
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