must-have wordpress plugins

Must-Have WordPress Plugins: Are They Installed on Your Site?

WordPress is the most popular CMS, occupying the majority of the market share. Out of the box, it’s a powerful platform, and WordPress plugins truly enhance the platform’s versatility, allowing for configuration in many different ways.

The WordPress plugin community truly brings the platform to life, allowing publishers and developers to build websites that enhance the experience for both site visitors and publishers.

Plugin Categories

Below is a list of essential plugins that many bloggers might find useful, categorized into six areas:

  • SEO Plugins: A list of six top WordPress SEO plugins.
  • Website Security: Protects your website from hacking and loss of rankings.
  • Website Backups: Safeguards your website from errors and provides a way to restore it after a hack.
  • WordPress Search Engine Plugins: Provide website visitors with a better way to find your content and products. Additionally, it improves user engagement and satisfaction signals.
  • Website Staging: A way to protect your website from crashes while also testing improvements and updates before rolling them out to the live site.
  • Contact Forms: Because communicating with website visitors is important.

📌WordPress SEO Plugins

SEO Plugins

Installations

Yoast SEO

≈ 10 million

Rank Math

≈ 3 million

All in One SEO

≈ 3 million

SEOPress

≈ 300,000

The SEO Framework

≈ 200,000

Squirrly SEO Plugin

≈ 100,000

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📌WordPress Security Plugins

Website security is often overlooked, not considered a sales or SEO-related factor. Just one hacking incident is enough to make clear how directly website security relates to publishing and ranking.

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WordFence

wordfence banner image

Installed on over 5 million websites.

The free version of Wordfence protects websites from external threats by locking down areas commonly exploited, and includes a malware scanning feature to check for intrusions.

It can perform actions such as blocking malicious files from executing in their typically hidden WordPress folders, sending alerts when plugins and themes need updates, and offering an option to enforce the use of strong passwords.

It even provides an option for implementing two-factor authentication—previously a premium feature, now available in the free version.

The standout feature is its firewall. Wordfence’s built-in firewall rules automatically detect and block malicious activities or suspicious user agents.

These blocks are temporary and are automatically lifted after a preset time to prevent database bloat. While the firewall is effective at blocking external threats, adding custom rules can deliver a decisive blow to malicious bots (learn how to use Wordfence custom rules).

Wordfence is also authorized by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program as a CVE Numbering Authority. This gives it the right to contribute vulnerability information discovered by its researchers to the CVEÂŽ database. I mention this to illustrate that Wordfence is an authoritative and professional organization.

Over 5 million users trust Wordfence, and the reason is simple—it’s easy to configure and effective.

The premium version of Wordfence offers a more advanced proactive stance, receiving the latest threat signatures to defend against newly discovered vulnerabilities.

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Sucuri Security

Sucuri Security banner

Installed on over 700,000 websites.

Sucuri, currently owned by GoDaddy, is a security auditing, malware scanning, and website hardening solution.

It does not replicate the functions in Wordfence, so it can be used alongside Wordfence as a two-part security solution.

Sucuri features file integrity scanning that alerts users when files change, strengthens website defenses against intrusion, and provides security notifications when someone logs in.

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Patchstack

Patchstack

20,000+ Installations.

Patchstack provides 48-hour early warning alerts of security vulnerabilities in plugins and themes, offering an additional layer of protection.

This early warning often gives users the opportunity to take proactive action before a vulnerability can be exploited by hackers.

Paid versions of the plugin receive real-time alerts and patches to mitigate vulnerabilities.

Premium plugins start at $5 per month, making it a very affordable solution.

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Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection

Akismet banner

Installed on over 6 million websites.

Akismet Spam Protection has over 6 million users. It was created by Automattic, a for-profit company founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg.

You can rely on Akismet for seamless integration with the WordPress CMS.

Akismet is easy to implement and protects contact forms and comment sections. It’s a practical plugin to install on any website that has comments and/or contact forms enabled.

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📌WordPress Backup Plugins

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UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin banner

Installed on over 3 million websites.

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup plugin is trusted by over 3 million users. It’s an easy-to-use backup solution that makes it simple to roll back your website to a previous version.

Migrating from one server to another is as simple as backing up with UpdraftPlus, setting up WordPress on the new server, adding the plugin to the new install, and then using it to restore the site from the backup. That’s it.

Moving websites with UpdraftPlus is straightforward – it feels like magic.

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BlogVault

BlogVault banner

This plugin provides real-time incremental backups, offering free offsite storage and 90-day archives. The plugin backs up the WordPress database, themes, plugins, settings, images…

The plugin’s official WordPress repository page declares BlogVault to be the official site migration plugin for Cloudways, FlyWheel, LiquidWeb, Pantheon, and WPEngine.

BlogVault also offers free staging environments. Paid Pro versions provide automation, one-click restores and migrations, and priority customer support, starting at $149.

Higher-tier versions offer built-in malware scanning. The free version offers many of the backup and storage features that most websites need.

The BlogVault plugin is developed by the same company behind the MalCare WordPress Security Plugin, which has been installed on over 400,000 WordPress sites. Its products are reportedly trusted by companies like eBay, Intel, and other enterprise brands.

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WPvivid Backup & Migration

WPvivid Backup & Migration

600,000+ website installations.

WPvivid allows users to create website backups and can be used for website migrations.

It can also be used to create a staging site on a subdirectory for compatibility testing before pushing new versions of the WordPress core, plugins or themes to the live site.

The difference between the free and paid Pro versions is that the Pro version offers incremental backups, exclude/include rules, partial backups, and crash protection for site migrations.

Both versions offer backups to third-party cloud servers like DigitalOcean Space, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and other popular cloud storage providers.

The website is trusted by over 600,000 websites. The plugin has received over a thousand five-star reviews, indicating a high level of user satisfaction.

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WordPress Search Engine Plugins

The default WordPress search engine is basic and offers limited functionality.

Its algorithm cannot handle misspellings or use stemming to provide broader, more relevant results, which can harm the user experience and reduce sales.

For large, formal websites, it is necessary to replace it. The following plugins address these limitations and should be considered essential for many WordPress websites.

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Relevanssi

Relevanssi – A Better Search

100,000+ Installations.

Relevanssi is a free WordPress search plugin that provides functionality that other plugins charge for.

For searches, it offers partial word matching sorted by relevance (instead of date), supports “and”, “or” and quotation mark exact match search operators.

Search results can be set to display excerpts, display context of the search result on the page (showing paragraphs), and highlight search terms on the webpage when the user clicks on it. The plugin also integrates with WPML and Polylang.

The plugin’s developers point out that it uses “hundreds of megabytes” of database space. They advise noting the current size of the wp_posts database table, and increasing that by a factor of three, to get an idea of how much server storage space is needed.

The paid Pro version includes a “Did you mean?” feature, can display search results in PDF format, includes taxonomy (navigation data), and weights search results.

Particularly useful in the paid version is that it offers stemming, a natural language processing feature that can match search results to a page’s topic and not just exact keyword matches.

This can expand the range of relevant search results, that don’t necessarily contain exact keyword matches. It has a welcome side effect of reducing the size of the search index.

The annual cost is $109, but there is also a $379 lifetime offer that includes lifetime support and upgrades.

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Ajax Search Lite

Ajax Search Lite

80,000+ Installations.

This plugin replaces the default WordPress search box, allowing searches in posts, pages, and custom post types such as events, portfolio items, and WooCommerce products. It can search in titles, descriptions, article excerpts, and custom fields.

A convenient feature is the ability to exclude specific categories and posts. It also integrates with Google Analytics. It also supports multiple languages and is compatible with Polylang, QtranslateX and WPML.

The paid Pro version adds support for popular page builders, support for more kinds of content (PDFs, event calendars, etc) and the WooCommerce plugin, along with many other features.

Lifetime licenses start at $49.

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ElasticPress

ElasticPress

According to Taylor Lovett, Project Lead ElasticPress and Director of Web Engineering at 10up:

“MySQL is inherently not created for complex search queries. Elasticsearch, on the other hand, is. To achieve highly relevant search results, filtration, or any other sort of advanced search functionality with WordPress, Elasticsearch is pretty much required. ElasticPress is the easiest and most effective way to integrate Elasticsearch with WordPress.”

This plugin’s Instant Results routes search queries through a dedicated API, separate from WordPress, that’s built for speed: returning results over 10x faster than previous versions of ElasticPress. And, because Elasticsearch isn’t directly exposed to the web, site owners retain total control over their data, deciding what is public and what remains private.

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WordPress Website Staging

Website staging features allow users to create exact copies of websites, then make changes to test that the website is functioning correctly.

It is very useful for testing a website before updating the WordPress core, plugins, or themes. It can also be used to preview how a website will look after using a new template, for debugging, and for customization.

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WP STAGING WordPress Backup Plugin

WP STAGING WordPress Backup Plugin

100,000+ Website installations.

The free version of the WP STAGING plugin allows users to clone their website to a subfolder of the site, including the database.

The clone can be used for website staging, as well as backup and migration.

The Pro version of the plugin allows users to backup their website to third party cloud providers, and offers advanced site migration capabilities.

The free version of the plugin declares that it is very lightweight and will even work on low-powered shared hosting environments. Paid versions of the plugin start at $93 per year.

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Theme Switcha

Theme Switcha

Installed on over 6,000 WordPress websites.

This is a plugin intended for theme developers and is not intended for the average user.

Theme Switcha makes it easy for the site admin to preview and develop new themes without changing the default theme. So visitors will continue to use your site normally without ever knowing that you are testing new themes behind the scenes. And if you want to enable your visitors to switch themes, you can do that as well by adding a shortcode to any WP Post or Page. Then each visitor will be able to select and preview any of your WordPress themes.

This plugin allows logged-in users to preview themes, and can be limited to administrator-level users. This is a method of previewing themes and seeing how they will look. Developers like it because it is a simple way to show clients a redesign.

The software developers emphasize that this is a developer-centric plugin, and warn that it does not work with Gutenberg blocks, though some users report that it does work. The plugin author writes:

“Please understand, this plugin should not be used with WordPress features like the Gutenberg block editor, Theme Customizer, widgets, menus, and other theme-related options. Doing so may result in private changes being exposed on the current active theme.”

The plugin is developed by Jeff Starr of Plugin Planet, a company that offers free and paid WordPress plugins, with over 1.5 million users.

A comment published in a private and dynamic WordPress Facebook group (membership required to see posts) noted that it’s convenient for staging a website for review of templates, without needing to clone files or replicate it on another server.

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Contact Form WordPress Plugins

There are many contact form options to meet the needs of websites.

While a theme’s built-in contact form is usually sufficient, third-party plugins offer more robust features and customization.

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WPForms (WPForms Lite)

WPForms (WPForms Lite)

Installed on over 6 million websites.

WPForms is an easy-to-use, basic contact form which I have experience with. It doesn’t offer the ultimate configurable contact form, but if all you want is an easy to deploy contact form, this is a great one.

It easily integrates with 200+ applications, including page builders such as Divi and Elementor.

Paid versions are available in different tiers, each offering increasingly complex functionality and capabilities.

The free version is a great solution when all you need is a contact form.

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Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms

Installed on over 700,000 websites.

Ninja Forms is another easy-to-use contact form builder – but with increasing complexity in its capabilities.

The appeal of Ninja Forms is that it takes a modular approach, allowing for the purchase of add-ons that extend its functionality. Paid add-ons include features such as multi-step forms and conditional logic.

That being said, the free version of Ninja Forms has advanced features options over other contact forms.

For example, it supports Akismet and Google ReCaptcha, can support uploads, accept payments through PayPal and other gateways, integrate with MailChimp, Constant Contact, multiple CRMs, and more.

This is a great option to start with and expand the available functionality as the website grows.

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Wrap Up

Which plugin is “best” depends on what features are needed.

The WordPress ecosystem provides thousands of plugins that extend the functionality of websites, helping them to rank better, increase sales, create a better user experience, and helping WordPress to be the world’s #1 CMS choice.

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