8 Essential WordPress Plugins We Use On Every Site

WordPress plugins are one of the best things about WordPress CMS. Plugins add some of its most popular features and extend the usability of WordPress.

The following are a few essential plugins we use on almost every site we build:

Yoast SEO

Over 5 million other WordPress sites agree that Yoast is the best free SEO plugin. At WPTeks we incorporate it into every WordPress site we build. While WordPress is relatively SEO friendly straight out of the box Yoast takes it even further by adding meta tags for titles and descriptions, canonical urls, XML sitemaps and more. Yoast also scores your content for SEO and readability and helps you create better content which results in better search engine rankings.

WP Bakery Page Builder

Probably the most popular WordPress drag and drop page builder, the only plugin on the list that isn’t free. WP Bakery makes it easy to quickly build responsive web pages and save page and post templates. WordPress bakery contains numerous responsive design elements that let you easily create more complex page layouts with no real coding required. This makes creating page layouts and posts quick and easy vs using the standard WordPress editor. WP Bakery is also compatible with Yoast and Woocommerce and is multilingual ready.

WP Fastest Cache

While WordPress is the greatest CMS ever it leaves a lot to be desired performance wise. Without page and database caching WordPress builds each page from scratch each time it’s loaded resulting in high CPU and RAM usage. This simple free caching plugin that works great right out of the box and is quick and easy to setup. Fast Cache creates fast loading static files of your WordPress pages. Features include enable gzip, minify & combine css and javascript, preload pages and leverage caching. WP Fastest Cache is perfect for optimizing the performance of most WordPress sites. Don’t sleep on this very user friendly caching plugin.

Contact Form 7

Fast and free contact form 7, the best and most popular free contact form. We configure CF7 to work with our Google Analytics goals to track conversions. We also use the Flamingo plugin for Contact Form 7 on our site.

Updraft Plus WordPress Backup Plugin

Backs up our site to a DigitalOcean S3 bucket. Best free backup plugin I’ve found. Schedule your backups daily, fortnightly, weekly, biweekly or monthly. Include all your files or just backup your database alone. You can backup your site to your local server, your Dropbox or Amazon S3 type storage. Don’t get caught without a good backup of your site when you need it.

Google Tag Manager For WordPress

Adds your Google Tag Manager scripts so you can easily add analytics and other marketing codes. Gone are the days of adding all your analytics and marketing codes directly to your website. Now you can just use Google Tag Manager to add your codes and track conversions. This simple WordPress plugin adds your Google Tag Manager code to your site. Also integrates with WooCommerce and allows you to fire an event when someone adds an item to their cart and can capture parameters for dynamic Remarketing.

Post SMTP

Connects to our Gmail email server and delivers emails to us from our contact forms. The intelligent setup wizard makes setting up this plugin simple and easy, supports the latest security standards. This SMTP plugin can even send mail on servers like GoDaddy and Bluehost that block their SMTP ports. Post SMTP replaces the default WordPress SMTP library, PHPMailer, with the much improved Zend_Mail.

Wordfence Security

Last but definitely not least, Wordfence Security which includes an application firewall, malware scanner, blocks all sorts of attacks, scans core files for changes and malicious code, blocks brute force attacks, this plugin does it all.

Essential WordPress Plugins

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