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Which are the best WordPress plugins for your website?
To answer this question, I'm going to show you which plugins I install based on my more than 7 years of experience building WordPress websites.
Anyone who wants to know more tips and details about the plugins can read the short version here skip.
Hereinafter My must-have WordPress plugins:
- All-in One WP Migration Plugin (Backups/Migrations)
- Elementor Pro (page builder, saves a lot of time when building the WordPress site)
- Duplicate Page
- Duplicate Post (Duplicate a post)
- JetEngine (For dynamic content such as blogs)
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer (image compression)
- WP Rocket (optimizes load times)
- Solid Security Pro (Protects against Hackers)
- Anti-Spam by CleanTalk (prevents spam on contact forms)
- Rank Math SEO (Very good for SEO settings)
Hereinafter optional WordPress plugins:
- WPML (best plugin for multilingualism)
- Classic Editor (I personally find the classic editor easier to use than Gutenberg)
- Easy Table of Contents (easy addition of a table of contents)
- TablePress (easy addition of tables)
- TypeForm (very good contact form)
- ManageWP Worker (Easy management of multiple websites)
- AltText.ai (automatic writing of alt texts)
- LinkWhisperer (helps with internal linking)
I only recommend the following plugins for advanced users They know what they're doing. If the settings are incorrect, your homepage could be damaged.
- WP Staging Pro (for anyone who wants to set up a staging server)
- Media Cleaner Pro (removes all unused images)
- WP Offload Media (required to connect a content delivery network to Amazon Web Services)
- Redirection (helps set 301 redirects)
Open source software WordPress as the most used CMS
More than 63% of all websites with a content management system (CMS) running on WordPress.
This makes WordPress the most used CMS worldwide, which owes its success to its open-source character and more than 60,000 plugins.
Challenges of WordPress Plugins
But this number of plugins also poses challenges:
- Too many plugins are often installed for the same purpose, which can lead to compatibility issues.
- Outdated plugins pose security risks and can affect performance. Maintenance can therefore be complex.
- A poor plugin selection can have a negative impact on Google's ranking.
To solve these problems, I recommend that you only install essential plugins and never install two for the same purpose. Less is more here.
The best WordPress plugins for WordPress
However, finding the right plugins is often challenging. There are numerous additional programs in the WordPress jumble.
Good for you that over the last 7 years I've created my own plugin stack for my WordPress agency I have constantly optimized. So you don't have to test out the numerous plugins yourself.
Here is my selection with the 25 best WordPress plugins for 2024.
The best backup plugins for WordPress
One of the first plugins I set up for every new WordPress website is the ability to create backups in case something goes wrong.
All-in-one WP Migration
With more than 60 million installations, All-in-one WP Migration one of the most popular backup plugins for WordPress.
- The backup plugin allows you to quickly back up and restore your website, including the database, files, and settings.
- It supports a wide range of cloud storage, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, to store your backups offsite.
- For larger projects, I recommend upgrading to the premium version, as it has no file size limit.
The following is an excerpt of how backups are stored in WordPress:
It is the perfect choice for anyone looking for an easy-to-use and cost-effective solution, as the premium version costs just 5 CHF per month.
If you ever need to restore your site, the investment in this backup plugin will pay off many times over.
WP Staging Pro
For more complex WordPress projects, setting up a staging environment is essential.
A staging server can also be set up via the hosting provider. However, if you want to solve this via a plugin, I can WP Staging Pro recommend.
- This allows you to test changes and updates on a copy of your site before they go live.
- Automated backups can also be set up, which are linked to cloud solutions such as Google Drive or Amazon web services.
- And multilingual WordPress websites can also be easily transferred from the staging environment to the live site.
The only downside compared to the previous plugin is that installing and linking to a cloud solution requires good technical knowledge and you need to be able to understand the documentation. This can be a bit more complicated.
Still, if you want a always-on WordPress site with no downtime, 133 CHF per year is a good investment.
Installing WP Staging Pro also eliminates the need for other backup plugins.
Optimize WordPress images
Based on my experience, image files that are too large are one of the main reasons for long load times, because the larger the images that a user has to load, the slower the page.
Compression of images and media content is therefore crucial to ensure fast loading times and thus achieve a good ranking on Google.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
With ShortPixel images can be effectively optimized. This is done fully automatically with all newly uploaded images.
- ShortPixel compresses image files by up to 70% with minimal to barely noticeable losses in image quality.
- ShortPixel also automatically converts PNG, JPEG, and JPG images to a web-friendly format, such as WebP, which is better for online viewing.
- The automatic compression of images also saves a lot of time.
ShortPixel offers a very good price-performance ratio. Up to 30,000 images can be compressed for 18 CHF.
Given the many subscription plans for plugins, this is a refreshing change, as this package can be purchased as needed.
The best SEO plugins WordPress
I've tested a lot of different SEO plugins during my time as a developer.
These include Yoast SEO Premium, the All In One SEO Pack and also The SEO Framework. However, only one thing convinced me.
I'll tell you why right away.
Rank Math
The SEO plugin Rank Math has already been downloaded more than 2 million times.
It offers comprehensive tools that help you track specific metrics and thus create a basis for optimizing your site for search engines.
- It helps you automatically generate an XML sitemap, schema markup, and rich snippets.
- Rank Math helps you review content.
- You can set a main keyword. Rank Math then checks keyword density, meta titles, and descriptions for their appropriate length.
Based on a pediatric eye doctor's practice, the following is an example of how Rank Math measures the text length of meta titles and descriptions:
Rank Math is more streamlined than other SEO plugins and includes features that are only available in paid versions of competing products such as Yoast or All in One SEO Pack.
Although Rank Math requires more memory than The SEO Framework, it offers significantly more functionalities, including settings for local SEO, WooCommerce, and multilingual WordPress websites.
One of the most important features is the ability to set XML sitemaps. Rank Math is very easy to set, especially when there are multiple content types.
For Rank Math, you don't have to go for the Pro version, the free version already meets most requirements.
However, an SEO tool like Rank Math won't just help your site rank directly, it's just a tool that allows you to track metrics and analyze where your site is doing.
That is why working with a SEO agency recommended.
Because website content must be written and backlinks placed before results are visible.
Redirection
With more than 2.1 million downloads, Redirection one of the most used plugins to set 301 redirects easily and effectively.
This helps you fix 404 errors, improve the user experience, and avoid potential ranking problems.
- It is possible to monitor 404 errors and existing redirects.
- A broken link checker tool is available to check broken links.
Especially for very large websites with several hundred URLs, the bulk upload tool saves a huge amount of time.
This allows you to manage the redirects in an Excel or Google sheet and easily upload them.
Redirection is also free of charge, so there are no additional costs.
LinkWhisperer
Link Whisper is another WordPress plugin that helps you with redirects.
However, in contrast to redirection, the main function here is internal linking.
- It automatically suggests internal links as you write your posts, based on the content and existing links on your website.
- The plugin provides a detailed overview of all internal links on your site, so you can easily see which blog articles need more internal links.
LinkWhisperer is unfortunately not available as a free version.
However, I can highly recommend this tool to you. The 90 CHF per year is worthwhile, especially if you want to keep track of your internal links.
AltText.ai
You've probably already heard that alt texts have a positive effect on your Google ranking.
Adding alt texts to images is often very time-consuming.
Fortunately, there is AltText.ai. This provides an AI-based solution for generating alt texts.
- It automatically creates suitable alt texts for images, saving you a lot of manual effort.
- It improves reading using screen readers for people with visual impairment.
Especially if you have a blog where you regularly publish new articles, AltText.ai saves you a huge amount of time.
For around 43 CHF a year, you can automatically add descriptions for 1,200 images.
The best WordPress security plugin
The high popularity of WordPress not only has advantages, it is also a popular target, especially for hackers.
In addition, you must be aware that any plugin that is not regularly maintained increases the risk of a hacker attack.
That's why it's important to protect your WordPress site from spam and unwanted attacks to ensure security.
Solid Security
One of the best security plugins is Solid Security. It used to be called iThemes Security but was renamed last year.
Solid Security has a few features:
- This allows you to set up a separate login area, which protects your site from hackers.
- This is because most bots attack a page via the login area or via the /admin or /login in the URL.
- You can also add two-factor authentication, as you know with your bank account or other online services, which provides an extra layer of security when signing in.
- Solid Security also has file change monitoring, which detects unwanted changes to the code or content and alerts you in good time.
- It can prevent access to spam comments.
The following is an overview of the security dashboard, which shows the prevented attacks and plugin versions which need to be updated.
From my own experience, I can assure you that this plugin, which costs almost 90 CHF per year, is definitely worth the money.
This plugin has prevented one of our own WordPress websites that we maintain from being hacked more than once.
Without the plugin, we would have spent a lot of time recovering a hacked website.
Anti-Spam by CleanTalk
Anti-Spam by CleanTalk is another very effective plugin to increase the security of your WordPress website.
Especially when it comes to blocking spam comments.
- It automatically blocks spam comments and unwanted content.
- Clean Talk provides real-time spam detection for a secure website.
- It doesn't use captchas, which increases usability for your website visitors.
CleanTalk is one of the latest plugins that we've added to our standard plugin series.
Since we installed Clean Talk, we no longer receive spam messages.
Here is an excerpt of which attacks were blocked.
CleanTalk also costs just 1 CHF per month, which is a fair price-performance ratio.
Antispam Bee
If the price for CleanTalk is still too high for you, I have a good, free alternative for you here.
Antispam Bee is an effective anti-spam plugin. Just like CleanTalk, it does not collect any personal data and is compliant with the new Swiss data protection guidelines of 2023.
Like CleanTalk, it offers a variety of features to prevent spam comments and trackbacks
It ensures that your site stays free of unwanted content.
My tip: Compared to CleanTalk, Antispam Bee still gets spam through from time to time. Which is why I prefer CleanTalk.
However, it's better than not having an anti-spam plugin at all.
The best WordPress plugins for faster load times
The performance and load times of your WordPress website are crucial for a good user experience and a higher Google ranking.
WP Rocket
One of the best WordPress plugins when it comes to optimizing load times is WP Rocket.
With WP Rocket, you can achieve fast loading times even without much know-how.
In addition, it is also a caching plugin, which is very useful if you want to clear the cache (cache).
- It speeds up load times through efficient caching, CSS and JS minification.
- In addition, it helps to reduce the amount of data when loading the website through browser caching and gzip compression.
- In addition, you can set lazy load for images and videos so that it only loads an image when it appears in the user's visible area.
In the screenshot below, I optimized a customer website using WP Rocket. Achieved a performance score of 98/100.
At around 54 CHF per year, WP Rocket is one of the more expensive caching plugins for WordPress, but it saves several hours of time if you have to do these optimizations manually.
Before you use the plugin, however, you should definitely back up your site.
Especially with more complex websites, where a lot of custom code is used, some WP Rocket settings may lead to errors on the website.
Therefore, the individual optimization methods of WP Rocket should be carried out and tested sequentially.
Media Cleaner (Pro)
I'm sure you've already experienced that.
You work on your website, create new content, upload new images and suddenly you have images in the media library that are no longer needed.
So after a few months, you have countless files that aren't being used. There is now a solution for this.
Media Cleaner is a plugin that detects and removes unused and superfluous media files on your WordPress site.
- It creates more space on your server by removing unnecessary files.
- It also improved load times as there is less media in your database.
Especially with websites where you don't regularly clean up the media library, sooner or later there will be a loss of overview of the media library.
Media Cleaner Pro does a lot of work.
But watch out, as with WP Rocket, a backup should be created beforehand before the files are deleted by Media Cleaner Pro.
With around 26 CHF, the plugin can save a few hours of manual work.
WP Offload Media
Now there is a solution for people who want 100 percent load time optimization.
This requires expert knowledge. With WP Offload Media You can automatically export all files (images, fonts, PDFs and icons) to cloud storage services, such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
Such a system is also known as a content delivery network or CDN for short.
The media content is no longer provided by your WordPress server, but by a cloud service such as Amazon S3.
To set up the cloud environment correctly, you need a WordPress expert, otherwise errors may occur.
With this plugin and Amazon web services, I was able to massively reduce loading times.
This enabled us to save more than 1GB of storage space at Beyondweb and thus reduce the backup size from 2.5GB to 1.5GB.
Alternatively, WP Rocket's CDN could be used.
While this would be easier to set up, it would be more expensive than WP Offload Media in the long run.
The best WordPress page builder plugin
Page builders have become an integral part of today's website development.
I've tested several page builders, including Astra Pro, WPBakery, Divi, and Beaver Builder. The best page builder is still Elementor.
Elementor Pro
Elementor is the most successful page builder plugin that allows you to build appealing and individual designs with a simple drag-and-drop function.
Elementor has a wide variety of widgets and templates, for beginners and experienced designers alike.
- Elementor is very easy to use using the drag-and-drop function.
- There are countless templates and standard elements that enable unique designs.
- Elementor's ecosystem is very extensive, and there are now numerous integrations with other plugins and software.
Compared to the other page builders, Elementor is the most comprehensive and offers the best price/performance ratio.
Elementor is also suitable for multilingual websites.
JetEngine
JetEngine is not a page builder, but it is very compatible with Elementor for creating dynamic content.
It allows you to create various layouts with dynamic content.
Such as a blog, membership site, or hotel site. With JetEngine, portfolio pages with dynamic content can also be created.
- It gives you lots of flexibility to create custom post types, taxonomies, and metadata.
- With JetEngine, advanced search and filter options can also be set.
JetEngine costs around 40 CHF per year. Compared to ACF, it is cheaper and offers a wider range of functions.
Best WordPress Plugin for Multilingualism
Supporting multilingual websites and translations is critical to reaching a wide audience and opening up international markets.
WPML
WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) is the leading plugin for creating multilingual websites.
- It allows you to create and manage content in multiple languages without the need for separate WordPress installations.
- The URL structures or taxonomies can also be translated, which is not possible with some plugins.
- In addition, it is possible to have the texts translated automatically using AI.
The following is an excerpt from WPML's translation management.
On the left side is the text in the original language and on the right side is the translation.
At 100 CHF per year, WPML is more expensive than TranslatePress, for example, but it is much easier to use and has a wider range of functions.
Plus, it's compatible with most WordPress themes and plugins.
Since WPML is a comprehensive plugin, installation requires a few hours of time and technical knowledge.
It is also important to make sure that you also set Rank Math correctly when using it with WPML.
The best plugin to manage multiple WordPress sites
Managing and maintaining your WordPress site is critical to keeping it secure, up to date, and easy to use.
ManageWP - Worker
ManageWP Worker is a handy tool for managing multiple WordPress websites from a central dashboard.
It allows you to efficiently perform updates, backups, and other tasks for all of your websites.
- With ManageWP Worker, you can update all plugins from one central location.
- It automatically creates regular backups.
- Once you have multiple WordPress sites, it can be a huge time saver for you to do this from a central location.
The basic function of ManageWP Worker is free of charge. There is a charge if you need additional features, such as daily backups instead of monthly backups or automatic security checks.
The best blog plugins for WordPress
Managing individual pages and articles is critical to keeping your WordPress site up to date and appealing. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that I use myself.
Classic Editor
The Classic Editor is a WordPress plugin that restores the original WordPress editor preferred by many users.
It provides a familiar environment for creating and editing content and is a good option for those who don't want to use the new block editor called Gutenberg.
Personally, I find the classic editor easier to understand than the new one.
It also ensures that older content and plugins that may not be compatible with Gutenberg continue to work.
Duplicate Page
that Duplicate Page plugin helps you to copy individual existing pages.
It saves a lot of time when pages can be copied directly.
The plugin is free and is one of my standard plugins with every new WordPress installation.
Duplicate Post
that Duplicate Post plugin allows you to copy existing contributions quickly and easily. It is similar to the Duplicated Page plugin.
The plugin is also free and is also one of the standard plugins for our WordPress sites.
Easy Table of Contents
Easy Table of Contents is a plugin that automatically creates a table of contents for your blog posts.
- This makes navigation easier and improves the user experience on your WordPress site.
- The plugin is easy to set up and requires no previous installation experience.
A table of contents makes it easier for search engines to crawl and therefore better Google rankings for your website.
The plugin is free and easy to install.
The best spreadsheet plugin for WordPress
Tables are a useful tool for presenting information on a website in an appealing way.
TablePress
TablePress is a popular plugin for creating tables.
- It is easy to use and can be easily integrated into contributions.
- You can also extend the tables with various features such as sorting, filtering, and pagination to make it easier for your website visitors.
- Another advantage is that the tables are responsive. This is not the case with all table plugins.
TablePress is free. However, if you want to adapt your tables to the corporate design of your company, you need the premium version for around 80 CHF per year.
The best contact form plugin for WordPress
Forms are an important part of many websites for getting in touch with users or collecting information.
Typeform
Typeform It's actually not a native WordPress plugin. However, there is WordPress integration.
Why do I recommend Typeform over Ninja Forms or Contact Form 7?
As a contact form, Typeform has one of the highest completion rates.
With many contact forms, the problem is that website visitors don't fill out the form to the end.
Thanks to the interactive multistep form and the appealing design of Typeform, more people fill out this form.
Even though Ninja Forms and Contact Form 7 are sufficient for most applications, I still recommend Typeform because it simply delivers better results.
In addition, Typeform can be used to analyze user responses. There is a dashboard for this on the Typeform website.
Typeform costs around 20 CHF per month, which may not be worthwhile for some companies. However, if you depend on people to fill out the form, then Typform is the right choice.
If you prefer a free contact form plugin, I can recommend Contact Form 7.
Summary of the best WordPress plugins
In conclusion, the right choice of WordPress plugins can make a significant difference to your website's performance, security, and usability.
With my carefully selected list of the best WordPress plugins for 2024, you'll give your website the best possible basis for success and growth.
Remember to update plugins regularly and only install the ones you really need to avoid overloads and potential security risks.
Use these tools to optimize your online presence and get the most out of your WordPress site.
FAQs about the best WordPress plugins
How often should I update my WordPress plugins?
I recommend updating all WordPress plugins and themes at least once a month.
However, the frequency of maintenance also depends on the number of extensions installed. The more plugins, the more often a WordPress website should be maintained.
Which WordPress plugins make my website faster?
My personal recommendation is WP Rocket, as numerous options can be set with one click.
There are also other plugins such as WP Fastest Cache or Cache Enabler, but a premium plugin is better because it ensures that it is always updated.
What are the best plugins for WordPress security?
My tip: A combination of Solid WP (formerly iThemes Security) and Clean Talk, if both are properly configured, will significantly improve the security of your WordPress website.
However, 100% shielding against hackers can never be guaranteed.
Which are the best plugins for better Google rankings?
Rank Math is, in my opinion, the best plugin for search engine optimization. However, a plugin can only help you with tracking SEO.
Successful search engine optimization involves much more than setting up a plugin. SEO should always be tailored to the needs of the target group and your own goals.
Which WordPress plugins make my website faster?
My personal recommendation is WP Rocket, as numerous options can be set with one click.
There are also other plugins such as WP Fastest Cache or Cache Enabler, but a premium plugin is better because it ensures that it is always updated.
Why shouldn't too many WordPress plugins be installed?
My tip: Too many WordPress plugins should not be installed because they slow down the website, increase security gaps and can lead to conflicts between plugins.
Is there a maximum number of plugins I should use on my WordPress site?
There is no set maximum number of plugins that is recommended for a WordPress website.
The most important rule is to only use the plugins that are necessary and make sure they're up to date.
The performance and security of the website should always be in the foreground.
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