The WordPress plugins that get installed on everything!

Every WordPress website requires a little something extra right from the beginning. Something to help with custom contact forms, adding SEO tags, WordPress security etc… Here’s a short list of must have plugins on every website we build.

Security

Most websites on the internet get attacked at one point in time or another… it’s just a part of life.

Fortunately, there are ways to make things more difficult for attackers. One way is to have a security plugin installed that can block users with suspicious activity on your website.

For instance, block after so many failed attempts at login. The plugin we use most often is WordFence. The basic features are plenty for most websites.

Contact Forms

There’s actually a couple of form plugins in our favorites list that we turn to. The one that gets used the most by us is Caldera Forms.

This custom form builder allows you to make multi-page forms and has a ton of cool features… we like this one.

However, the other form builder that deserves mentioning is Contact Form 7.

This plugin has been around for awhile and has extensive community support behind it. It is compatible with most of the popular WordPress plugins.

SEO

There’s a handful of SEO plugins for WordPress but we just use the free version of Yoast SEO.

It accomplishes everything you absolutely need for decent SEO. Meta descriptions for your content, xml sitemap, and it even comes with a helpful gauge to tell you if your page is measuring up for the keywords you are shooting for.

Caching

Some sites are slow unfortunately. Can be the host (it happens), but most of the time it is simply too much scripts. Everything from video backgrounds, sliders to social fan boxes.

There’s a way to compress all of your java & css on your website using a caching plugin.

These plugins will minify a lot of the stuff that has a hard time loading quickly… which will make it load a lot faster. The plugin we use most for this WP Super Cache.

The basic features are more than enough to speed up most sites and get them to pass any speed tests.

I hope you found this information useful. If so, we thank you for sharing.

Happy Coding!