One of the great perks of building your website with WordPress is that you have access to thousands of free plugins. These free plugins allow you to add a wide range of functionality to your website at no cost. With such a great variety of plugins, you may be tempted to act like a kid in a candy store and install any plugin that strikes your fancy. However, installing a large number of plugins on your website could be one of the biggest mistakes you make for a variety of reasons:

• Performance: Each plugin you activate sends several requests to your web server, which slows down your site’s load time.
• Security: Low-quality plugins can leave security holes in your site, making it easier for hackers to get in.
• Storage space: Each plugin takes up space on your server, which can lead to higher hosting costs
• Bloat: Installing too many plugins can add bloat to your site which slows down your website
• Plugin/theme conflict: The more plugins you install, the more you increase the odds that your website does not function as it should. You may start getting random errors, or potentially crashing your website. This is a result of the code in one of your plugins not playing nice with either your theme or another plugin.

The general rule of thumb is that you should have at most 10 plugins installed for features like a page builder, speed and image optimization, SEO, a contact form and a security plugin.

5 must have WordPress plugins

So what are the plugins that you must have on your WordPress website? Don’t worry, I have got you covered. The following is a list of plugins that I highly recommend that you install on your website.

1. Security plugin: WordPress is one of the most popular website building platforms. However, with such great popularity comes great vulnerability. WordPress is known for being a notorious target for hackers looking to exploit security holes in your website. To mitigate those security risks, you must install a security plugin. The best one to install is Wordfence Security. Wordfence is a WordPress security plugin that protects websites from malware, security threats, and other cyber attacks.
2. Caching plugin: It can be frustrating for a visitor to your website when your a page takes too long to load. Slow load times can happen for a variety of reasons. These include installing too many plugins, a poorly developed plugin/theme. large unoptimized images, slow server, or having a large number of visitors on your website. There are a few measures that you can take to improve the speed of your website. One of them is installing a caching plugin. A caching plugin makes it easy for returning visitors to access your website content faster by eliminating the many steps a browser takes to generate pages dynamically. It stores data so future requests can be served faster and prevent the origin server from overloading. WordPress has a couple of free caching plugins that highly recommended: WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. You can never go wrong with installing either one of these plugins when it comes to speeding up your website.
3. Image optimizer plugin: While images make for a more immersive experience for your visitors, they tend to be the largest contributors to slow load times for your webpages. This issue can be exacerbated if you have very large images in a format that is not optimized for the web. That is where an image optimzer like EWWW Image Optimizer can prove to be invaluable. This plugin helps improve the performance of your website by automatically converting uploaded images to the best format, and also compresses and resizes them.
4. SEO plugin: Whenever you build a WordPress website, you are no doubt looking to attract as many visitors as you can to your website. One of the ways you do that is by performing Search Engine Optimization(SEO). SEO is a set of tasks that you can perform that will improve the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. These tasks include improving visibility in search engines like Google. The goal of SEO is to rank a website higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) so that it appears on the first page of results for relevant search terms. There are a couple of plugins that you should consider installing to aid you in SEO. They are Yoast SEO or All in One SEO. If you install either one of these plugins, you will have access to a variety of cool tools that will help you improve your ranking on search engines.
5. Backup plugin: when you have a WordPress website, chances are that your website may go down for a variety of reasons – whether it’s a hacker attack, server crash or human error – you need to have a backup plan in place so that you can restore your website quickly and minimize any damage. That is why it is imperative that you install a backup plugin. UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress plugins for scheduling backups. It gives the option of backing up your website to Dropbox, Google Drive among other options.

With these set of of plugins you should have a website that is optimized to load faster, is more secure, has greater visibility in search engines and can easily be restored in case anything goes wrong. In future blog posts, I will provide tutorials on how you can configure each of these plugins.

If you have any other questions feel free to contact me here or reach out to me on Twitter.

Happy Tooning!