Top WordPress Plugins


Some plugins we use and recommend.

As fans of WordPress optimization, these are some of the things we use and recommend as best practices due to its good performance and functionality.

Akismet

Akismet Top WordPress Plugin

As you may already know, the Internet is full of spam and in WordPress is common to receive a lot of spam through comments. If you take some time managing your blog or website, you’ll know how annoying it can be to have to deal with this situation, in addition to the risks of the content – sometimes malicious – of these messages.

Akismet is installed by default with WordPress and definitely is one of the best tools to mitigate this problem.


BackWPup

BackWPup Top WordPress Plugin

We all know how important it is to make backups periodically; It is a fact that we can get out of trouble and avoid to lose the information on our website, which you’ve probably invested a lot of time to generate. Whether we suffer some type of attack or malpractices end up damaging them, we will always be sure to have a backup to restore our site and minimize data loss.

BackWPup Plugin, even in its free version is one of the most complete options for backup.

My advise is always store at least one backup at an external service or server, for example, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.


Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 - Top WordPress Plugin

Most websites use contact forms to facilitate its users a quick and easy way to communicate with them.

Contact Form 7 is simply an easy and reliable way to manage these forms, their integration with Akismet and Google reCaptcha make it a very convenient option for simple applications.

If your requirements are more advanced, you should definitely consider some premium plugins like: Gravity Forms or WPForms.


EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer - Top WordPress Plugin

There are many benefits we gain by optimizing the images shown on our website, improves the speed of loading pages, reduces the use of bandwidth, etc. With several options available in the WP Plugins ecosystem, we opted for EWWW for several reasons:

  • It is the only or the few options that do not send the images to external services or third parties for processing.
  • The image processing is performed on our own server, depending on the amount of images, available resources and server features, could result in significant CPU consumption.
  • No limits on the size of the file to be processed.
  • No limits on the amount of images that we can process.
  • Easy to set up and it has options for different levels of processing depending on the image format.
  • Can process existing images.
  • Option to automatically process new images when uploading to WordPress library.

Lazy Blocks

Google Analytics for WordPress - Top WordPress Plugins

In the Gutenberg era, this is the easiest way to create your own custom blocks.

Output code for your custom block with HTML and PHP support.

There’s not so much to say, it’s that easy. Plain and simple!


Newsletter

Google Analytics for WordPress - Top WordPress Plugins

Create and manage an awesome Newsletter community, the best all-in-one email marketing solution.

They also have an amazing variety of paid add-ons. You will see a professional commitment behind this plugin.

It would be awesome if they could have a better offer for people who need just a couple of add-ons for just one site.


Polylang

Polylang Top WordPress Plugin

If your site is deployed in more than one language, Polylang is definitely the best choice to manage different languages easily and with very convenient options to keep in sync different versions and elements of each page depending on the language.


QR Twitter Widget

QR Twitter Widget - Top WordPress Plugin

A small and simple plugin of our creation, very useful to show your latest tweets anywhere on your site, whether in the sidebar, footer or even within the content of your publications. In addition, it is very easy to customize to integrate with the design of your website.


Relevanssi

It replaces the native WordPress search engine so it is not necessary to make any changes to the code of your theme. Significantly improve the results your visitors get with more accurate and relevant searches. It is worth mentioning that it allows you to modify various aspects of the search engine to adapt it to your needs and has interesting features such as a function similar to Google’s “Did you mean”.


Soliloquy Slider

Soliloquy Slider - Top WordPress Plugin

With a huge amount of options to choose from, Soliloquy is one of the most popular and for good reasons, it is easy to set up, does not require flash to run, is responsive, search engines friendly, only loads the JS / CSS on pages where the slider is displayed; further that integrates natively with WordPress using CPT’s, making it a very reliable, safe and fast option.


SEO Plugins

There was a time when Yoast was the obvious choice, but nowadays we are lucky enough to have a lot more and better options to try.

Rank Math

As a plugin that offers a plethora of cool features despite being completely free, Rank Math is threatening to become a serious competition to other popular SEO plugins. However, it still needs to stand the test of time in order to earn the title of the next best SEO plugin.

PROS – Nobody can beat what they offer in their free version, all the schema markups, redirection manager, WooCommerce, bbPress and AMP integrations, the 404 monitor is awesome and they also have a FAQ and How-To blocks.

CONS – It may have a lot of things you will never use and I don’t really like the idea that they ask you to create an account to use some services (that implies that you will send content and data to their servers to be processed).

SEOPress

It’s simple, this is what we are currently using!

PROS – Very nice and clean interface and easy to use, the Google Analytics module is awesome and their pricing strategy is very convenient. No footprints in the source code, no ads, no anonymous data sent, white label, even in the free version.

CONS – Structured markup (schema) is not included in the free version, not even the most basic for “Article” and “FAQ” that we normally find in other plugins. After a couple of years using this plugin I have found several minor flaws that do not affect most users, but they definitely show a poor quality in its development that you simply do not expect to find in a commercial product (malformed URL’s, incompatibility with CDN’s and some details in the sitemaps), in addition to including completely absurd elements such as the meta tag “author” and “thumbnail”.

SEO Framework

This is the perfect solution if you know what you’re doing. It’s the most lightweight solution for people that don’t need any kind of automated SEO analysis, it just includes everything what you need in a very simple and clean way.

PROS – Lightweight, secure, with no fancy things included, built with experts in mind, it perfectly follows white-hat SEO best practices and it never induces their own ideals. No ads, no branding and no fake magic.

CONS – Migrating an existing site can be hard, not all the data can be imported. The premium version can be expensive and only one schema markup is included “Article” (premium). The structure they use including an “extension manager” can be unnecessarily confusing.

* It worths mentioning that each one of these SEO plugins has a very different implementation of the schema markup, all of them are technically correct, but it would be a great discussion to make a fair comparison.

** The “All-In-One SEO” plugin was not included because at least for us, it has a very big limitation, taxonomies (categories, tags, etc) are not supported in the free version.


3 responses to “Top WordPress Plugins”

  1. There are many excellent Contact Form plugins to choose from, so I am surprised you recommend Contact Form 7. It has a bad habit of leaving its javascript and CSS on every page of your site, which will negatively impacts page load times.

  2. I’m not sure about my personal knowledge, but after many years of working with WordPress websites, I find these plugins to be the most necessary for a website running in basic NGINX:
    SEO: Rankmath (it fully integrates google search console and google analytics)
    Performance: wprocket (cache optimization) + smushpro (image optimization)
    Control NGINX cache: NGINX Helper
    Objectcache control: Redis Object cache
    Page builder: Elementor: it has built-in elements like form, sidebar, contact,…almost all in 1 to create a great website
    Have a happy day for all :)

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