Best Plugins For WordPress

If you’ve ever setup a WordPress website before, you’ll have probably seen the dizzying amount of plugins and themes that are available to you. So today I want to go over what I think are the best plugins for WordPress

You can also read this on Medium.com!

So you’ve got a brand new WordPress website. Completely clean of any plugins and don’t know where to start. Let me guide you though how I setup each setup.

Whilst this isn’t something I can force for each of my clients – these are certainly my preferred plugins simply for ease of use and cost. Most of these are free!

First of all, Spectra is the best free WordPress design tool I’ve found so far.

I think it’s far better than Elementor!

For one, it allows custom CSS per page and per post. This isn’t something offered to you by the free tier of Elementor and really allows you to be creative when building your website.

I like to pair this plugin with the Astra theme. Again, this theme allows almost anything to be changed and customized which is sadly lacking in a lot of free themes.

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What can I say, Hummingbird is the single best and free plugin for making your website and content faster.

Its does everything from file compression, minification and browser caching. A lot of other free caching tools have prohibitively restricted capabilities until you pay what I think is an extortionate price.

Worse still are the plugins that sign you up to a monthly recurring charge instead of a single flat purchase rate.

This plugin helps so much when it comes to tools like PageSpeed, and has allowed me to improve sites with scores around 30-50 all the way to around 90. Whilst I do know that these sorts of performance tests are the be-all-and-end-all on the web, it’s nice to know that your website loads fast.

What a simple and amazing tool, and it’s free! Internal Juice Linker allows you to make automatic internal links easy. All you need to do it assign some keywords to each post you write and it does all the magic behind the scenes.

This is powerful because it’s important to have internal links to other resources on your website to have the best setup for SEO. Basically, internal links help build topical authroity which allows search engines to view your website as more trust worthy on the topic overall.

It’s worth mentioning that this shouldn’t be used excessively either. Too many internal links can make your content seem like spam and could make it harder to read for an actual human.

This is another completely free tool that really helps you build an SEO focused website without having to really think about it.

RankMath provides tools for adding keywords, changing meta descriptions and even provides a nice score out of 100 for each post. I honestly don’t see any easier way to make your website show up better on search engines than this tool.

This one kind of builds from RankMath SEO previously. I’d say that this is an absolutely must for any WordPress website as I’ve found it can be a huge boost for Google trusting your site.

Before I added this to my site, my traffic was quite stagnant and I didn’t get many organic rankings. After adding Site Kit by Google, I’ve found that search engines are just trusting my website and content a whole lot more.

The plugin also allows you to use Google Analytics, Keywords and AdSense all in the same page. Saves having to use 3 or 4 different plugins.

To be honest this plugin is quite similar to Hummingbird but varies in some ways that I find it’s useful to have both.

Smush helps to reduce image sizes and improve website performance. Again, this can help boost SEO scores since images are served in better formats.

Brave is absolutely amazing. It’s a completely free popup and form plugin that allows just an unrivalled experience for zero cost.

It’s super easy to setup responsive forms and have custom actions and behaviour. I especially like that you can exclude certain pages, add a time delay and have it to that the user needs to press a button for the form to show.

It’s also sends emails whenever a form is submitted, making it super easy to stay on top of submissions.

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ve discovered a new plugin that you haven’t heard of before.

Like I said in the article, there are many alternatives to these. I do still stand by these plugins and install them on every single site that I can. Just be careful not to install conflicting performance and caching tools though as that can cause additional issues.

Enjoy! 🎉