Best WordPress plugin for your website in 2021
- WordPress SEO By Yoast
This is the most essential plugin for SEO for any WordPress site. This plugin allows you to change settings in your WordPress dashboard that greatly benefit your SEO.
- WP-Optimize
Over time your WordPress database will get quite big and it will start to slow down your site. This plugin will help you optimize your database so it stays small and efficient.
- WP Smush
WP Smush compresses your image files without a lot of degradation so they load quicker. Speed is super important to Google rankings, so this is a must-have plugin.
- WP Super Cache
Designed to create a cache of your site so that when visitors return, they are shown a much faster loading page as they are being shown a static HTML version of the page, not a slow loading WordPress PHP version. Super helpful
- BackWPup
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I can’t stress how important it is to make sure you back up your website often. Every time you make a sizable change to your site, you should make a backup of it in case anything goes wrong.
- Google Analytics Plugin
This plugin lets you put in your Google Analytics code once and be done with it. Otherwise, you would have to put the analytics code manually into your header file. If you know how to do this, you don’t need this plugin.
- Akismet
Helps to block out comment spam on your site. Unless you are running a blog-style site, I’d recommend turning WordPress comments off, especially for small and local businesses. If you turn comments off, you don’t need this plugin.
- Advanced Lazy Load
Another plugin that helps you load images in a better way. Advanced Lazy Load only loads an image on your page if the visitor scrolls down to it. Without this plugin, all images must load before the page is displayed properly.
- Wordfence Security
100% free security plugin for WordPress. It will check to see if you are The WordPress site has been infected by any trojans and will run in the background and protect you from intrusions. It can slow your WordPress site speed down a bit and it does eat resources, but still a worthwhile plugin.
- Cloudflare
Cloudflare is my favorite CDN (content delivery network). It allows you to host files/media on their servers instead of on your server to take the pressure of your hosting. It will speed up the site significantly and I highly recommend using a CDN. It also has great security features to protect you from DDOS attacks.