One of the toughest challenges when getting started on WordPress is knowing what plugins to start with. With over 50,000 plugins in the WordPress directory and thousands of articles about best WordPress plugins, it’s difficult to browse through all of that information and feel confident that you’ve chosen the best ones.
While we believe that these are the best plugins you can start with, others may disagree, and we’re okay with that. The goal is to help you get started with trustworthy plugins for your website and make sure you don’t need to spend hours researching them on your own.
We hope that this will help you spend less time worrying about plugins and focus on what you do best, whether it be writing content, running your business, or building your product.
Here are seven plugins to get started on WordPress.
Sucuri Security
With numerous WordPress hacks happening every month, a security plugin is one of the most important plugins you can have. Sucuri Security is a free WordPress plugin that provides the following:
- Security Activity Auditing
- File Integrity Monitoring
- Remote Malware Scanning
- Blacklist Monitoring
- Effective Security Hardening
- Post-Hack Security Actions
- Security Notifications
Slim SEO
Slim SEO is for anyone that wants to be found on Google and plans to do content marketing which likely includes you. The plugin provides a series of recommendations to improve the SEO of a blog post. It automatically generates meta description, sitemap, breadcrumbs and so on.
The plugin covers the most important SEO needs for the majority of folks and includes:
- Simple XML sitemaps functionality
- Full control site breadcrumbs
- Canonical URLs
- Title and meta description templates
- Structured data optimization
To get more details about how to optimize your website with Slim SEO, refer to this article.
WP Rocket
A newer entrant to the ecosystem, WP Rocket is a premium caching and performance plugin that speeds up your WordPress site. With over 90,000 customers, WP Rocket has received hundreds of great reviews from people who have improved the performance of their WordPress website.
WP Rocket also helps you:
- Minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
- Concatenate your CSS and JavaScript files
- Add lazy loading for images and videos
- Optimize your database
- Make tons of smaller tweaks, like removing query strings, disabling emojis, and more.
See detailed review about WP Rocket here.
HubSpot
More popular in the martech space, HubSpot provides a free marketing plugin that provides access to their free tools including forms, pop-up forms, and live chat which are built on top of their free CRM. This plugin allows you to use all these tools with one plugin, removing the need to connect multiple tools together and potentially putting your website at risk of code conflicts and security breaches.
The plugin provides the following features:
- Forms and Pop-Up Forms – the generation tools to capture leads on your website.
- Live Chat – Chat with your website visitors in real time.
- Bots – Can’t have someone chatting with your visitors? Set up a bot to automatically respond to them.
- Sync with HubSpot CRM – All leads connected via forms, pop-up forms, and live chat will sync with your free HubSpot CRM database
- Simple Email Automation – Send an automated email after each form submission.
- Visitor Tracking and Lead Intelligence – See which pages your contacts view on your website so you’re more informed about your audience and what they’re interested in.
Wordable
If you write your blog post drafts in Google Docs, depending on the amount of formatting and images you have in your post, you’ll realize that it takes a lot of time to migrate your post over into WordPress. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as copying and pasting your post into WordPress. Wordable makes this process easier might letting you convert your Google Docs into WordPress drafts and ensuring text formatting and images are all transferred over.
Head, Footer and Post Injections
As you use WordPress and begin implementing various tools such as Google Analytics, you’ll be asked to add code to your website within the <head> and <footer> tags.
If you aren’t familiar with HTML, this will be difficult to do manually. This plugin makes it significantly easier to add those codes to your website and add templated text boxes at the end of every blog post.
This is one of the plugins that future you will thank you for installing.
Elementor
One of the fastest growing plugins in the history of WordPress, the free Elementor page builder plugin has over 2 million active installations, available in 52 languages, and has over 3,000 five-star reviews.
Elementor provides a simple drag and drop page builder so you can create all types of custom landing page layouts without touching any code. They provide over 30 widgets to give you as many options as possible and also provide page templates so you don’t have to start building from scratch.
That means you can quickly build beautiful pages without the help of a developer.
This is a guest post contributed by David Ly Khim, who works on growth and product at HubSpot and founder at Omniscient Digital.