WordPress is the most popular CMS with majority market share. Out of the box, it’s a powerful platform, but it’s the WordPress plugins that really add the functionality and versatility to be configured in many different ways.
The WordPress plugin community is what really brings the platform to life and enables publishers and developers to build websites that enhance the experience for site visitors and publishers.
Based on my own experience and from others in the WordPress community, the following plugins were chosen for their reliability and effectiveness in helping SEOs and marketers grow audiences, increase sales, and improve site security and usability.
Plugin Categories
The following is a list of essential plugins, organized into six categories, that many publishers may find useful.
SEO Plugins: List of top six WordPress SEO plugins.
Site Security: Keeps your site from getting hacked and losing rankings.
Website Backups: Protects websites from mistakes and offers a way to come back from getting hacked.
WordPress Search Engine Plugins: Gives site visitors a better way to find your content and products to buy. Plus, it can improve user engagement and satisfaction signals.
Website Staging: This is a way to protect your site from crashing, as well as to test out improvements and updates before rolling them out to the live site.
Contact Forms: Because it’s important to communicate with site visitors
WordPress SEO Plugins
SEO plugins streamline basic tasks like adding meta descriptions, title tags, article excerpts, and Schema.org structured data.
These are the six most popular SEO plugins, listed by number of installations:
Yoast SEO (10+ million installations).
Rank Math (3+ million installations).
All-in-One SEO (3+ million installations).
SEOPress (300,000+ installations).
The SEO Framework (200,000+ installations).
SEO Plugin by Squirrly SEO (100,000+ installations).
A special note about The SEO Framework:
The SEO Framework caught my attention several years ago for its modular approach, allowing users to activate only the features they needed – a unique method at the time for creating a plugin that won’t slow your website down.
This thoughtful approach continues in the latest versions, which include automation to streamline deployment, helpful suggestions, and accessibility optimizations such as enhanced color contrast for colorblind users, keyboard navigation, and screen reader compatibility.
The SEO Framework is ad-free, privacy-focused, and can import settings from Yoast, Rank Math, and SEOPress.
Premium extensions provide additional features, including local SEO optimizations, comprehensive Schema.org structured data for news sites and bloggers, and more.
WordPress Security Plugins
Site security is often overlooked as a sales or SEO-related consideration. All it takes is to be hacked one time to understand how directly related website security is to publishing and ranking a website.
Read: The WordPress Security Guide To Keep Your Site Safe
Wordfence
Installed on 5+ million websites.
The free version of Wordfence protects a website against external threats by locking down areas of the site that are commonly exploited – and has a malware scan to check for intrusions.
It does things like blocking malicious files from executing in WordPress folders where they commonly hide, sending alerts when plugins and themes need updating, and providing an option to force strong passwords.
It even provides the option for instituting 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 automatically lifted after a pre-set duration to prevent database bloat. While the firewall effectively blocks external threats, adding custom rules delivers a decisive blow to malicious bots (learn how to use Wordfence custom rules).
Wordfence is also authorized by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Program as a CVE Numbering Authority. This gives it the authority to contribute vulnerability information that its researchers discover and add it to the CVE® Program, a database of vulnerabilities. I mention this only to show how Wordfence is an authoritative and expert organization.
Over 5 million users trust Wordfence, and for a good reason – it’s easy to configure, and it works.
The Premium version of Wordfence offers a more advanced proactive stance that receives up-to-the-minute threat signatures that protect against newly discovered vulnerabilities.
Sucuri Security
Installed in 700,000+ websites.
Sucuri, which is currently owned by GoDaddy, is a security auditing, malware scanning, and website hardening solution.
It doesn’t duplicate the features in Wordfence, so it can work together with Wordfence as a two-part security solution.
Sucuri features a file integrity scanner that alerts users to changed files, hardens the website against intrusions, and offers security notices like when someone logs in.
The paid version of Sucuri offers a firewall that actively blocks threats.
Using the free version of Sucuri, together with Wordfence, offers an outstanding level of WordPress security.
Patchstack
Patchstack provides 48-hour early warning alerts of security vulnerabilities on plugins and themes, providing an extra layer of protection.
This early warning generally provides users a chance to take proactive action before hackers are able to take advantage of the vulnerability.
Users of the paid version receive real-time alerts and patches to mitigate the vulnerabilities.
Pricing for the premium plugin starts at $5 per month, which makes it a highly affordable solution.
Akismet Spam Protection
Installed on 6+ million websites.
Akismet Spam Protection is used by over 6 million users. It was created by Automattic, which is a for-profit company founded by Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress.
You can count on seamless integration between Akismet and the WordPress CMS.
Akismet is easy to implement to protect contact forms and comment sections. It’s a useful plugin to install on any site that has comments turned on and/or a contact form.
WordPress Backup Plugins
Backing up and archiving a WordPress site is critical to protecting a site from catastrophic failure.
For example, if a site becomes hacked, a complete backup from before the site was hacked will ensure that a site can be restored on a staging server and fully updated with the latest security patches, with a clean WordPress installation, and then restored to the live server.
A backup can save a site from a bad update that crashes the website or a mistake that completely wipes out the important data.
UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup
Installed on 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 the site back to a previous version.
I’ve used it to successfully migrate a site from one server to another server. It also helped me recover after pushing the wrong button and deleting my website template. Yeah, I did that once.
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 installation, and then using it to recover the site from a backup. That’s it.
Moving a site with UpdraftPlus is so easy – it feels like magic.
BlogVault
This plugin offers real-time incremental backup that offers free offsite storage and a 90-day archive. The plugin backs up the WordPress database, themes, plugins, settings, images – everything.
The official WordPress repository page for the plugin advertises that BlogVault is the official site migration plugin for Cloudways, FlyWheel, LiquidWeb, Pantheon, and WPEngine.
BlogVault also provides a free staging environment. The paid pro version offers automation features, one-click recovery, and migration, plus priority customer support starting at $149.
Higher tiers offer built-in malware scans. The free version offers many of the backup and storage functionalities that most websites need.
The free staging capabilities are a strong bonus that may allow users of the free plugin to create a staging site that can be used for testing new plugins and themes before deploying on a live site.
The BlogVault plugin was developed by the same company behind the MalCare WordPress security plugin, which has over 400,000 WordPress website installations. Its products are advertised to be trusted by companies like eBay, Intel, and other enterprise brands.
WPvivid Backup & Migration
600,000+ website installations.
WPvivid enables users to create website backups and can be used for site migrations.
It can also be used to create a staging site on a subdirectory so that new versions of the WordPress core, plugins, or themes can be tested for compatibility before being pushed to the live production site.
The difference between the free and the paid pro version is that the pro version offers incremental backups, exclusion/inclusion 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 site is trusted on over 600,000 websites. I reached out to the developers, and they confirmed that they are based in California.
The plugin has received over a thousand five-star reviews, indicating the high level of satisfaction users experience.
WordPress Search Engine Plugins
The default WordPress search engine is basic and offers limited functionality.
Its algorithm cannot handle misspellings or use stemming to deliver broader, more relevant results, which can harm user experience and reduce sales.
Replacing it is essential for serious websites. The following plugins address these limitations and should be considered essential for many WordPress websites.
Relevanssi
Relevanssi is a free WordPress search plugin that offers features that other plugins charge for.