Any website owner wants to make a great online impression. In fact, everybody strives to increase their online business and create highly-engaging and successful blogs. Behind any website, there’s a lot of effort in the long-term. Building a website is easy, but the real struggle is to create content that matters for people, which is helpful, and they resonate with. To tweak every piece of content and make it loved by Google, you need to bring on the quality and apply the best search optimization practices. Also, even the fastest WordPress themes out there need some additional powerful WordPress plugins to get the best results for a website. In this article, we’re going to talk about the most popular WordPress plugins that can make the difference for your site.
SEO Optimization
One key factor of online presence is SEO Optimization. With the right tools, quality content, and extreme care for details, you can boost your pages in front of the audience, searching for you even if they don’t know it yet. There are indeed so many SEO tactics to use, but you should start with the on-page SEO. This means you need to fine-tune the content on your pages, posts, including on media files.
Yoast SEO
Among other SEO plugins, Yoast SEO is the most popular. This plugin helps you optimize keywords, keyphrases, see your readability score and improve it as well. Yoast SEO comes with both free and premium versions.
If you’re still wondering why SEO is important for your WordPress website, you need the best Search Engine Optimization strategy to stand out with your website in SERP. You can check out our article for more details on how SEO works and why you need it so badly.
Price: free or premium starting from €89 to €890, depending on how many websites you want to use it.
Performance
What is the performance of your website referring to? The overall performance refers to the loading speed of web elements on a page and is highly influenced by various factors, such as the server, scripts, media content, plugins, style sheets, bottlenecks between the webpage and the database, and others.
There are a lot of tools out there so you can test your site’s performance, that also give you hints about what changes you should make on Javascript or CSS files, and how to handle HTTP errors. Look no further than GT Metrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or Web Page Test. As a takeaway note, just consider to minimize HTTP requests on your websites, optimize your media content, and use proper image or video sizes. It’s important not to clutter the pages with large files. Usually, the performance-optimizing plugins take care of your lazy loading images, CDNs, backups, and so on.
WP Super Cache
The WP Super Cache plugin is created by the Automattic team to generate static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress website. Ranked by speed, this plugin allows you to cache files by using three different methods: expert, which involves web developer skills, simple using the PHP method, and WP-Cache compression. By having a caching plugin like WP Super Cache that doesn’t take too much server resources, you’ll have your site perform at its best.
Free of charge.
WP Rocket
The WP Rocket is an intuitive performance plugin, released in 2013 by Jonathan Buttigieg and Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier to help the WordPress newbies optimize their websites quickly. Some of its best features include database optimization, lazyload, defer JavaScript loading, CloudFlare Compatibility, page caching, Gzip compression, Google Fonts optimization, Cache preloading, browser caching, DNS prefetching, and more.
Price: Starts from $49 to $249.
Website Security
What is WordPress? WordPress is an open-source CMS that runs on PHP and a MySQL database. So, it’s important to keep it safe, as well as your website too. With technology within everybody’s grasp, cyberattacks happen daily. The latest statistics on cybersecurity highlight that every 39 seconds, a website is being hacked. They can place malware on your websites, and without having the right tool to block these types of attacks, you’re 100% exposed.
Sucuri
Launched in 2008 by Daniel Cid and Tony Perez, the Sucuri Security plugin makes it simple to monitor your website, removes possible malware, sets up a firewall, and helps you backup your site. It is a solution based on cloud technologies for professional website owners in terms of security and performance.
Price: from basic $199.99 to custom, depending on your requirements.
WordFence
WordFence is a popular security plugin that can help you protect your WordPress website in several ways. This plugin scans all the files that your website contains, for suspicious code lines, phishing URLs, malware, detects unauthorized DNS modifications, and so on.
Price: $99 per license.
Anti-Spam
How much tolerance do you have for spam? Not at all, right? Well, if you want to keep the spammy comments, you need to protect your website with a plugin that helps you achieve that without using too many site resources.
Akismet
Spammy content on your blog can ruin your website’s credibility. With the Akismet WordPress plugin, you can protect your website against spammy comments. It has a personal, plus, or enterprise package for each business domain. Easy to install, get rid of spam!
Price: free or premium, starting at $5 up to $50.
Conclusions
Whether you choose a free or a premium version, select a popular WordPress plugin that is constantly updated and serves your needs. Don’t forget to ensure that your content is the right one for your audience, as well as for the SERP. Guide people to learn more on your website and offer them good reasons to stay longer. You have to keep maintaining these plugins up to date and optimize every inch of your website to get the desired results. For sure, there are a lot more plugins to add a plus of specific functionality on your website. Some plugins are related to Communities and Memberships, Marketing, eShop capabilities, and multi-language ones. Let us know in the comments which category of plugins you are using to extend your website’s needs.
In my opinion, Rank Math is the best SEO plugin for WordPress.
Hi Raj! Thank you for commenting. Indeed, Rank Math is a top SEO plugin for WordPress sites.
Hi Alina, Your listed article is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.
I want to suggest one more plugin for your list for security enhancement which is User Activity Log Pro. It helps you monitor and keep track of all the activities that occur on the admin side also informs you about WordPress core updates, post updates, user activities, etc. It notified when a particular user is logged in, so you can track all user’s activity on your website easily.
Hi Michael,
Great! Thank you so much for sending us this awesome suggestion. We’ll make sure to analyze this plugin. Have a lovely 2021!
Great information,
I am using all the default plugins installed by on my site.
Thank you for choosing our theme for your project!
Hey, thanks for sharing these plugins. Adding an anti-spamming plugin can save the website from malware and from spammers. Is there any other plugin with a lower pricing plan?
Thank you for commenting, Mellissa! Akismet is a great solution for anti-spamming, and you can opt for a free plan or premium starting from $5 up to $50. There are for sure many others, and you can also take a look to this top made by WPExplorer. Thanks!
Thanks For sharing this amazing plugins
Thank you for your message. I’m glad you find the article a useful one. Have a lovely day!
All excellent suggestions. In my opinion, I remain convinced that the best investment is certainly WPROCKET because it really makes a leap in quality to the site.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us and our audience!
Hey, thanks for this article.
I already purchased the newspaper theme and intend to use it on my blog consultpaul.com
But I was told by a friend that it works best for news and Entertainment blogs. Is it really true.
Looking forward to hear your reply soon.
Hi Paul! Thank you for getting Newspaper WordPress theme for your website. It will definitely fit your blog :). Please take a look at our tagDiv Showcase page to see websites from all over the world, and from all industries using the Newspaper theme. Thank you!
thnks a lot for sharing this knowledge……
You’re welcome! I’m glad the info about the plugins helped you 🙂
That’s a great information and for a WordPress user its a great ideas you have shared. I have always thought – why this is beneficial in with tons of plugin. Your article makes sense and appreciate that.
Thank you, Nabeel! I’m glad you found useful information 🙂
Im using a simple theme on my blog. how can i create section on this.
Hi,
Please note that you can set up the Blog Mode from the WordPress settings from here -> https://www.screencast.com/t/2FllbrLN76 Also, please note that you can use a static page and set up a simple Block filtered by latest articles.
If you need more technical assistance, please open a new topic at our support forum from here -> https://forum.tagdiv.com/forum/newspaper/ and we are ready to help you.
Best regards!
I found Rank Math far better alternative than Yoast. Most important they are giving stuffs for FREE.
I am using all the default wordpress plugins installed by worpress on my site
And also using some other plugins, like ads.txt, header & footer inserter etc.
Total plugins, i am using, are almost 27.
It’s too much.
Dont?
How much plugins are safe for site speed?
Hi,
Thank you for your feedback! You have many plugins installed on your website, but if the site performs at its best, then it’s ok. There’s no recipe of how many plugins you should have activated on your site, because this depends on your needs, and also on the installed WordPress theme.
If you want to achieve a better theme performance, we strongly recommend using the tested plugins with the theme you’re using. For example, the list of the tested plugins that come bundled with our Newspaper WordPress theme can be found here -> https://www.screencast.com/t/5sD6oPzH. I hope this helps.
Best regards!
I am just using only two plugin about of these and I also want to know about social counter?
Hi,
For more details about Social Counter, please check the guide from here -> https://forum.tagdiv.com/tagdiv-social-counter-tutorial-2/ If you need more technical assistance, please open a new topic at our support forum from here -> https://forum.tagdiv.com/forum/newspaper/ and we are ready to help you.
Best regards!
Hey i am using Newspaper
How do i create a news section which is different than the basic post type?
Thanks
Mobeen
Hi Mobeen! Thank you for choosing Newspaper to create your beautiful website. Can you please include your inquiry in a new topic on forum.tagdiv.com or via email at contact@tagdiv.com? This way, you’ll get technical help. Unfortunately, the Blog area is not assigned to the Customer Support Center. Thank you so much for understanding!
I am using all the plugins other than WP Rocket because I can’t afford it now.. One thing I want to ask is that I am using RankMath SEO plugin for one of my website. Can you tell me how is it? Is it as good as Yoast?
Hi Nitseh! Thank you for commenting. Both SEO plugins are well known are used by million of users. I suggest you to try both of them, and decide which one fits your needs the best 🙂
I prefer WP Rocket any day! I find it very stable and easy to configure compared to the free ones out there.
Hi Tim! Thanks for commenting 🙂
At the moment, do not rush to update the yoast SEO plugin to version 14.0 – there are a lot of bugs, we are waiting for fixes.
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo/
Hello,
Unfortunately, we did not receive any bad report in this case, until now. If you need more technical assistance, please open a new topic at our support forum from here -> https://forum.tagdiv.com/forum/newspaper/ where you need to provide more details about your problem and we are ready to help you.
Best regards!