12 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Better Functioning of Your Site

Undoubtedly, WordPress offers a lot of features, still, there are several functionalities missing from its core software. And one of the best ways to leverage WordPress is to get the right plugins.

With WordPress plugins, site admin can change each element and customize it as per their preferences. There are more than 40,000 options available to choose from, excluding premium plugins. Among this stock, it can be difficult to choose the best for your website.

Below given some of the must-have free and premium WordPress plugins that can take your website to another level. Let’s have a quick glance.


1. Hummingbird

On an average, visitors don’t wait more than 8 seconds for a site to load and Google recommends to keep your site load time to the least, i.e. 2 seconds. To achieve this, Caching is the best and most effective way to increase your site speed.

Lightweight and fast, Hummingbird scans your site, caches, minifies, defers, combines,  and compresses, make optimization in-line with the Google PageSpeed. It turns your site into a speed machine.

2. W3 Total Cache

This plugin is designed to enhance server performance and page load speed by reducing download times. With reduced page load times, the overall performance of the site will be improved, helps you rank better in Google.

3. Defender

Defender helps you protect your site against hackers and evil bots with security scans, safety recommendations, vulnerability reports, customized hardening and blacklist monitoring.

As WordPress is one of the most popular and best options to create a website, this is a primary target for the hackers. Defender plugin can help make your security game stronger than ever.

This plugin searches website for vulnerabilities and if found something, let the owner know and patch those vulnerabilities in one click. It will help you even if your site is already hacked and also save the site from any upcoming disaster.

 4. Jetpack

It offers a complete suite of strong features for your site, including improved site performance, enhanced security, visitor engagement, and content tools.

Jetpack also offers an interactive, responsive, and lightweight mobile theme option, designed for tablets and smartphones.

5. Akismet

This plugin helps you filter out the comments from your blogs that you find spam. Akismet automatically checks all comments against its Akismet web service.

Users can also view the comments which have been cleared or flagged by Akismet with the history option.

6. Google Analytics +

It is necessary to track when and how users visit your website in order to check the areas where you can improve and attract more users. To get this, Google Analytics is a perfect tool and the Google Analytics + plugin brings all this information to the admin dashboard.

Moreover, with this plugin, you can boost your site’s performance by tracking certain tabs and working on them. These include tracking page views, visits, bounce rates, and average referrers and visit duration. You can also enable the advanced settings and track site’s demographic and analyze shopping behaviors.

7. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates an XML sitemap for the site. It is crucial to have an XML sitemap for your site to help search engine index your blogs in a better way. Sitemaps enable web crawlers to see your site structure and retrieve results efficiently.

8. iThemes Security  

This plugin helps you fix common loopholes in your site from the potential attacks. Because of the vulnerabilities that unknowingly enter your site due to some installed plugins, can make your site an easy-to-target option for the hackers and other evil bots.

9. Contact Form 7

With contact form 7, you can create as well as manage multiple contact forms. No more coding needed to create these forms as the mail content and form can be customized easily with its settings.


10. Snapshot

Snapshot lets you backup your site for restoration later. You can also save the backups in more than one location. backing up your WordPress site can save your time and efforts, even if the site goes down or gets hacked.

11. Ultimate Branding

With this plugin, you can add, change, or remove WordPress branding on the site or anywhere on the multi-site network.

When you handle your site and business simultaneously, it is important to look professional with your products and content. That’s why you can have a white labeling machine from WordPress.

You can also replace the WordPress logo, customize the admin panel, add your company name, customize login page, dashboard, admin bar, and footer, and every place where WordPress logo appears to get consistent branding for your site.

12. Optimize Database

WordPress keeps deleted posts, comments, pages, post revisions, unused tags, spam comments with its default settings. Until these sections are manually flushed from the site, they bloat, stick around, and slow down the site.

WordPress’ optimize database plugin helps you purge the database from the extra data tables that you don’t need such as expired transients. Once you have cleaned up the database, this plugin optimizes it for the smoother running site.

Hope this article has given you a clearer idea and helped you learn more about the must-have WordPress plugins you need for your site.


Author Bio: Ritesh Patil is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech, leading healthcare mobile app development company in India, USA. He’s an avid blogger, loves innovation, and writes on diverse healthcare application areas. He works with skilled digital health app developers that has delivered innovative mobile applications. He believes in sharing knowledge and has leaned concentration on startups.

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