While WordPress offers a ton of features and flexibility, there is still a lot of functionality missing from the core software. The best way to fill in the missing pieces, of course, is to get yourself the right plugins.
WordPress plugins offer all kinds of customization for site admins; however, with over 55,000 options to choose from in the WordPress Plugin Directory, not to mention all the premium products available, it can be difficult sorting the good from the, well, not so good.
So here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the WordPress plugins that can help take your site from good to great. I’ve included options for everything from caching the image optimization to security and more.
The 30 Best WordPress Plugins
- Hummingbird
- HubSpot
- W3 Total Cache
- Defender
- Jetpack
- Akismet
- Beehive
- Google XML Sitemaps
- iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)
- Forminator
- Snapshot
- Branda (the plugin formerly known as Ultimate Branding)
- SmartCrawl
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
- Smush Pro
- Contact Form 7
- Duplicator
- Relevanssi
- Broken Link Checker
- Disable Comments
- Regenerate Thumbnails
- Easy Updates Manager
- Redirection
- TablePress
- Advanced Custom Fields
- WP Mail SMTP
- Photo Gallery
- All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
- Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
- Optimize Database
1. Hummingbird
The average visitor to your site won’t wait even eight seconds for your site to load and Google recommends that your site loads within about two seconds.
If your site takes longer than that, then your visitors are likely going to leave before they even have a chance to check out one element on your site. Plus, Google won’t be keen on ranking you higher in search results.
Caching is one of the best ways you can speed up your site since it saves a fast-loading version that gets served up in browsers lickety-split. This is where Hummingbird swoops in for the rescue to take care of this for you. Plus, it’s easy to use.
Hummingbird scans your site, then gives you an analysis of your site. You can see the overall score for your site’s speed, then fix any issues in a couple of clicks.
This plugin also goes above and beyond the clouds because it doesn’t just do page caching. Hummingbird also minifies, compresses and merges.
This plugin is like the little birdie that tells your site how to fly as fast as a hummingbird. It’s also included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can try Hummingbird for free with a 30-day
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This article was written by Tom Ewer and originally published on WPMU DEV Blog.