Top WordPress Plugins To Help You Rank and Secure Your Site

Just so that you are aware I get asked a lot what plugins we use here on our blog. So below is a list of plugins we use; one thing you should note is not all the plugins listed below are specifically for website speed.

However we have researched and use the best plugins we feel that meets our websites’ needs. Where we have bloated plugins like Contact Form 7 and Contextual Related Posts we use Asset Clean Up to remove the plugins’ codes from pages where the scripts are not needed.

Plugins I use on this website
I’ve listed the plugins we use and the role they play on our website – you should only use and test plugins that you need and that works with your website.

Ad Inserter ( free and pro )
This plugin is more than AdSense plugin or plugin for ads. It provides many advanced options to insert opt-in forms, header scripts, Javascript, CSS, HTML, PHP, analytics, tracking or advert code anywhere on the page.

AdRotate ( free and pro )
With AdRotate you can easily place advertising banners pretty much anywhere on your website while managing everything from the easy to use dashboard. No fussing with your themes code or complex functions if you don’t want to.

Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Contextual Related Posts
Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed.

Cookie Notice
Cookie Notice allows you to elegantly inform users that your site uses cookies and helps you comply with the EU GDPR cookie law and CCPA regulations.

Genesis Simple Edits
This plugin creates a new Genesis settings page that allows you to modify the post-info (byline), post-meta, and footer area on any Genesis theme.

iThemes Security ( free and pro )
iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.

OneSignal ( free and pro )
OneSignal is an easy way to increase user engagement. Use OneSignal to send visitors targeted push notifications so they keep coming back. It takes just a few minutes to install.

Pretty Links ( free and pro )
Pretty Links helps you shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look how you want using your own domain name!

Rank Math SEO
SEO is the most consistent source of traffic for any website. We created Rank Math, a WordPress SEO plugin, to help every website owner get access to the SEO tools they need to improve their SEO and attract more traffic to their website.

Really Simple SSL
Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL.

Smush ( free and pro )
Optimize your images turn on lazy load, resize, compress and improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!

Social Warfare (free and pro)
Get more social shares which can lead to more website traffic with the best WordPress social sharing plugin! Built by a group of social media marketing experts and world class developers who are obsessed with performance.

Ultimate Blocks
Ultimate Blocks is a Gutenberg blocks Plugin for bloggers and marketers. Their goal is to make it insanely easy for you to create better and engaging content with Gutenberg.

UpdraftPlus ( free and pro )
UpdraftPlus simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently-active installs. Backup your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!

WP Rocket ( premium only )
Make WordPress load fast in a few clicks. WP Rocket reduces the weight of your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files through minification. Lighter files means faster load time!

Asset CleanUp ( free and pro )
Don’t just minify & combine CSS/JavaScript files ending up with large, bloated and slow loading pages: Strip the “fat” first and get a faster website. For instance, you might use a plugin that generates contact forms and it loads its assets (.CSS and .JS files) in every page of your website instead of doing it only in the /contact page (if that’s the only place where you need it).

WPS Hide Login
WPS Hide Login is a very light plugin that lets you easily and safely change the url of the login form page to anything you want. It doesn’t literally rename or change files in core, nor does it add rewrite rules.

Remember to always back up your website before installing new plugins.

 

Nice post! I have a ton of Wordpress sites hosted on Godaddy's Hosting Service and this is good info, SSL is a must now a days and so is ad rotation but I will be checking out the rest!

Thanks again

 

LOL and people say wordpress is free!!!
Look at the cost of some of those plugins...

 

Hi,

Thanks for mentioning Ultimate Blocks on your list. I'm the co-founder of the plugin.

I'd also like to invite you to try our another plugin - WP Table Builder.

Thanks & Regards
Istiak Rayhan

 

I am using many of almost all of these plugins on my site Apk Chunk but bounce rate is still high. Can anyone suggest any plugin to control the bounce rate. TIA

 

20 plugins are way too many for an installation and as mentioned above by JEET the price of those plugins.
Personally, I thought Rank Math was a great tool at first but while I knew my site was only a few months old there was something wrong with my SEO. Rank Math said in the analysis that it scored 95/100 I disabled it Saturday and have already seen my search impressions go up by maybe 30% in Google search console.