5 Must-Have Plugins for WordPress + Why You Need Them

Photo by Negative Space on Pexels

Techie Mamma is reader supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases. I only recommend products and services that I think will help you on your Mompreneur journey and all opinions expressed here are our own. You can read my full disclaimer here.

Share or save for later

What are the 5 super necessary and needed plugins for every WordPress site? Whether it is a blog, store, or a small business site you need these 5 plugins to best manage your site.

Tens of thousands of plugins populate the free directory of plugins. There are many decisions to make when starting a site like choosing a host, a domain name, and a theme. Plugins also fall into this category. The fact that there are tens of thousands of plugins just makes the task challenging and daunting.

Plugins can add so much to your site. They can also be your worst enemy because the wrong plugin or too many plugins can severely slow down your site or worse break it. Many plugins are overhyped and do little for your site or distract you from a better option. Plenty offer niche features such as e-commerce, online learning, forums, etc. Few are truly must-have plugins for all sites and should be the first thing installed whether your site is a blog, a storefront or informational.

If you think of the functions and necessities of every site, there are 5 things that every site needs. These include contact forms, speed improvement, SEO, and defense against attackers.

Forms

The most basic interaction that a user might have with your website is with a form. A form provides a way to send information back to the site builder or add content to the site, like in the form of comments. Forms are essential for any kind of website. A business site might have a contact form or a proposal form. A blog site might have an email subscription form and comment forms.

The list is endless for form plugins. There are several popular form plugins because as you can see this is a huge functionality. Some popular form plugins include Gravity Forms, WP Forms, and Contact Form 7. These are great plugins. They range from free to premium. Recently though a new form plugin has come on the market. It is called Forminator. The Forminator developers are some of the most trusted in the community. This plugin can create many types of forms.

Forminator

Forminator Forms, Surveys, Quizzes, Polls, Calculations, and More …

Forms – Custom forms for all your needs with as many fields as you like.
Polls – Interactive polls to collect users’ opinions, with lots of dynamic options and settings.
Quizzes – Fun or challenging quizzes for your visitors to take and share on social media.
Calculations – Collect information, generate leads, take orders, and engage visitors.
Payments – Take payments, donations, down payments, sell merch with the included Stripe and PayPal integrations.

It also has tons of integrations with all your favorite apps:

It is amazing and will likely do everything or more of any of the premium form plugins available.

Forminator is available from the WordPress plugin repository or the pro version is available as part of the massive benefits of the WPMUDEV subscription.

SEO

SEO is your ticket to get more traffic. The way search engines read websites and rank them changes all the time. This keeps the biggest SEO experts on their toes. There are some basic things though that help SEO no matter how the algorithms change. These include keywords, content readability, and metadata. Several plugins that help with SEO. A super popular one is Yoast SEO. My personal favorite though is SmartCrawl.

SmartCrawl has many of the same features of Yoast but it is more lightweight (it will not slow down your site as much). The plugin features sitemap creation, keywords, and Moz integrations. It also has several features to help with social media.

SmartCrawl

Smartcrawl’s SEO Tools for WordPress include:

One-Click Setup Wizard – SmartCrawl will analyze your site and activate settings to boost your reach – no more guesswork!
Titles & Meta Descriptions – SmartCrawl SEO customizes how titles and descriptions display on search pages to optimize your content.
Leverage Social Media – SmartCrawl SEO/Open Graph integration connects your social accounts and credits you when someone shares your posts.
Smart Page Analyzer – SmartCrawl has an SEO checker that scans pages and posts for readability and keyword density and makes suggestions for optimizing your content.
SEO Audit & Crawl – Every time you add new content to your site, SmartCrawl will let Google know it’s time to recrawl your site.
301 Redirect – Use SmartCrawl to redirect traffic from one URL to another to protect your hard work and take advantage of high producing links.
Integrate With Moz SEO Tools – Already use Moz? Connect your Moz reports and comparison analysis including rank and links.
Quick Setup Import/Export – Quickly add your custom SmartCrawl SEO settings to all your sites with included import.

SmartCrawl is available from the WordPress plugin repository. The WPMU DEV Membership includes schedule reports and scans that can be emailed right to your inbox.

Security

Our next concern (in reality it should be our first) is security. In this day in age, security is huge. By the mere fact that WordPress runs 35% of all the Internet, security is an issue. If a hacker wants to break in, they will focus on WordPress vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is really important to secure WordPress as best as possible.

Defender

With Defender you can block hackers at every level:

Disable trackbacks and pingbacks – safety first
Core and server update recommendations – stay on top of your systems
Change default database prefix – they won’t find this
Disable file editor – if they get in, they won’t get far
Hide error reporting – don’t reveal your issues
Update security keys – ultimate security reset
Prevent information disclosure – why tell them what you have
Prevent PHP execution – because it’s daaaangerous

Defender can take care of all your security needs, for free!

Features available include:

Google 2-Step Verification
One-click site hardening and security tweaking
WordPress core file scanning and repair
Login Screen Masking
IP Blacklist manager and logging
Unlimited file scans
Timed Lockout brute force attack shield for login protection
404 limiter for blocking vulnerability scans
IP lockout notifications and reports

All this is included in the completely free plugin. However, if you’d like extra scanning, audits, and monitoring, you can always take the next step with Defender Pro.

Image Optimization

Did you realize that the average website’s file size is 63% images? It is a huge deal because unless your website is all text, it means optimizing your images can make a huge difference to your site’s page load times.

Smush is the ultimate king in image optimization. It is one of the oldest on the scene and still so very popular.

Smush

Some of their Award Winning features include:

Lossless Compression – Strip unused data without affecting image quality
Lazy Loader – Defer offscreen images with the flip of a switch
Bulk Smush – Optimize up to 50 images with one click
Image Resizing – Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed
Incorrect Size Image Detection – Quickly locate images that are slowing down your site
Directory Smush – Optimize images even if they are not located in the media library
Automated Optimization – Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload
Unlimited & Free – Optimize all of your images up to 5MB in size forever (no daily, monthly, or annual caps)
Gutenberg Block Integration – View all Smush stats directly in image blocks
Multisite Compatible – Both global and individual Multisite settings
Process All Your Files – Smush will process PNG, JPEG and GIF files for optimum results
Super Servers – Smush images with no slowdown using WPMU DEV’s fast, reliable Smush API
And many, many, more!

All of this is so important because if your website takes more than three seconds to load, over half your visitors will abandon it.

Smush is available from the WordPress plugin repository. The WPMUDEV subscription includes Smush Pro that adds some additional features.

Performance Optimization

Last but not least, on the topic of optimization, is the general speed optimization of your website. There are so many things that can slow down your site and as mentioned above if visitors have to wait more than 3 seconds for your site to load they will leave. That is failed leads, failed purchases, failed followings.

Many hosting companies such as WP Engine or SiteGround provide some kind of caching on a certain level but Hummingbird goes beyond this and offers specific fixes for your specific site. Although there are many caching and speed performance plugins, Hummingbird is my favorite and has proved itself over and over in real-life sites.

Hummingbird

Features in Hummingbird include:

Scan and Fix – Get a scan of your site, find out what’s slowing it down, and use one-click performance improvements
World-class caching – A full caching suite to load pages faster with full-page, Gravatar and browser cache tools
Performance Reports – Pro tips for running your site at super speed
Asset Optimization – Position, minify and combine files for top performance
Better Rankings – improve scores on Google PageSpeed Insights (SEO ranking factor), YSlow, Pingdom and GTmetrix
Increase Your Conversion Rate — Don’t keep visitors waiting: faster sites convert better
GZIP Compression – Blazing fast HTML, JavaScript, and stylesheet transfer

Hummingbird is available from the WordPress plugin repository. Hummingbird Pro part of the WPMUDEV subscription, features automated scanning, uptime monitoring, enhanced minify compression (with 2x the regular optimization), and CDN hosted minification.

Cousett

Known as THE Techie Mamma, I am a boy(x2) mom, and love technology. As a former Educational Technology academic turned Mompreneur, and super passionate educator, I am on a mission to empower Mompreneurs to build, and grow their business to live the Mompreneur Life they want.