10 Recommended WordPress Plugins Every Website Should Have

WordPress Plugins are very important to boost up your website rank in search engines and make the user experience better.

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Let’s jump right into it and start with the first on the list of the top 10 most recommended WordPress plugins:

1. AddToAny Share Buttons

The AddToAny sharing plugin for WordPress increases traffic & engagement by helping people share your posts and pages to any service.

Services include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and over 100 more sharing and social media sites & apps.

AddToAny is the universal sharing platform, and the AddToAny plugin is the most popular share plugin for WordPress, making sites social media ready since 2006.

2. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)

This Google Analytics for WordPress plugin enables you to track your site using the latest Google Analytics tracking code and allows you to view key Google Analytics stats in your WordPress install.

In addition to a set of general Google Analytics stats, in-depth Page reports and in-depth Post reports allow further segmentation of your analytics data, providing performance details for each post or page from your website.

The Google Analytics tracking code is fully customizable through options and hooks, allowing advanced data collection like custom dimensions and events.

3. iThemes Security

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day.

WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords, and obsolete software.

Most WordPress admins don’t know they’re vulnerable, but iThemes Security works to lock down WordPress, fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials.

With advanced features for experienced users, our WordPress security plugin can help harden WordPress.

iThemes Security is one of the most recommended WordPress plugins you can get, not only it secures your website, it also prevent spam and protect other plugins as well.

4. Jetpack by WordPress.com

Create and customize your WordPress site from start to finish. Jetpack helps you with:
* Hundreds of professional themes for any kind of site
* Intuitive and powerful customization tools
* Unlimited and high-speed image and video content delivery network
* Lazy image loading for a faster mobile experience
* Integration with the official WordPress mobile apps

Marketing Services

Measure, promote, and earn moment from your site. Jetpack helps you with:

• Site stats and analytics
• Automated social media posting and scheduling in advance
• Elasticsearch-powered related content and site search
• SEO tools for Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com
• Advertising program that includes the best of AdSense, Facebook Ads, AOL, Amazon, Google AdX, and Yahoo
• Simple PayPal payment buttons

Security Services

Stop worrying about data loss, downtime, and hacking. Jetpack helps you with:

• Brute force attack protection, spam filtering, and downtime monitoring
• Daily or real-time backups of your entire site
• Secure logins with optional two-factor authentication
• Malware scanning, code scanning, and automated threat resolution
• Fast, priority support from WordPress experts

5. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore

UpdraftPlus simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over a million currently-active installs. Backup your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!

Backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), Rackspace Cloud, DreamObjects, FTP, Openstack Swift, Updraft Vault and email. The paid version also backs up to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.

6. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users:

• Users who are not logged in.
• Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
• Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

99% of your visitors will be served static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them.

7. Yoast SEO

This one is very important if you want your website to rank on google. Tips and Coffee highly recommend you this plugin, and this is one of the most recommended WordPress plugins you can find.

Need an SEO plugin that helps you reach for the stars? Yoast SEO is the original WordPress SEO plugin since 2008. It is the favorite tool of millions of users, ranging from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet. With Yoast SEO, you get a solid toolset that helps you aim for that number one spot in the search results. Yoast: SEO for everyone.

Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. How? Below you’ll find a small sampling of the powers of Yoast SEO:

Taking care of your WordPress SEO

• The most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.
• Full control over site breadcrumbs: add a piece of code and you’re good to go.
• Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content. Never have to worry about Google penalties again.
• Title and meta description templating for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.

8. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Major features in Akismet include:

• Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
• Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
• URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
• Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
• A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

We highly recommend this plugin as we use it for a while and it blocks 99% of the spam.

This is also one of the most recommended WordPress Plugins you can get.

9. Sumo – Free Tools to Automate Your Site Growth

If you want to increase your email subscriptions list – Sumo is one of the most recommended WordPress plugins for the job.

Most blogs are designed for hit-and-run readers. People find your blog, read your article, and leave. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of those people subscribed or shared your amazing post?

Sumo provides free tools you need to grow your WordPress site. This plugin will make it easy for your readers to join your email list, share your articles, and optimize with analytics. The free tools include:

List Builder will let you create a fancy lightbox pop up to build email subscriptions (for MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, ActiveCampaign, MyEmma, Mad Mimi, Infusionsoft, Feedblitz, HubSpot, MyNewsletterBuilder, Inbox First, Sailthru, Klaviyo, Vero, Pardot, Zapier, Ontraport, ExactTarget, Vertical Response, Drip, MailerLite, WhatCounts, ConvertKit, MailJet, Maropost, and others).

Share makes it insanely easy for people to share your content on mobile or web.

Welcome Mat displays a full-screen call-to-action that shows when visitors land on your site.

Heat Maps help you see where people are clicking (or not clicking) on your website.

Scroll Box is an email collection box triggered by how far your reader makes it down the screen.

Smart Bar is a Floating Bar that can appear at the top or bottom of your website. You can encourage people to subscribe to your newsletter, go to a specific page or follow you on your social networks.

Highlighter makes it easy to click to tweet about your article by selecting popular parts of your writing (like Kindle and Medium).

Image Sharer makes it simple to share your images (with a link to your post) on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

And even more great free tools in our Sumo Store.

Now, people will find your blog, read your article, share your article on Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest, and subscribe via email to your email newsletter.

10. Contact Form 7

The final plugin on the recommended WordPress plugins list is this one.

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

That’s it for now! We hope you liked this list of recommended WordPress plugins and learned how to improve your website look!