WordPress is one of the most popular CMS in this planet and it became number 1 with the huge support of different open source and available plugins and themes. With the help of plugins you can accomplish a lot and secure your site.
In this article, I will discuss the most essential plugins used in any kind of sites whether it is for blog or corporate. I myself manage at least 10 WordPress site and use all of these plugins for SEO, security and performance.
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Google Site Kit
Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free.
Akismet
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.
W3 total cache
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
W3TC is the only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress trusted by millions of publishers, web developers, and web hosts worldwide for more than a decade. It is the total performance solution for optimizing your WordPress Website.
iThemes security
ITHEMES SECURITY IS THE #1 WORDPRESS SECURITY PLUGIN
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.
Most WordPress admins don’t know they’re vulnerable, but iThemes Security works to lock down WordPress, fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. With advanced features for experienced users, our WordPress security plugin can help harden WordPress.
Yoast seo
YOAST SEO: THE #1 WORDPRESS SEO PLUGIN
Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines. This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. Are you not entirely convinced? Yoast SEO is the favorite WordPress SEO plugin of millions of users worldwide!
As Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone, the plugin’s users range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.
Flamingo
Flamingo is a message storage plugin originally created for Contact Form 7, which doesn’t store submitted messages.
After activation of the plugin, you’ll find Flamingo on the WordPress admin screen menu. All messages through contact forms are listed there and are searchable. With Flamingo, you are no longer need to worry about losing important messages due to mail server issues or misconfiguration in mail setup.
WP Offload SES Lite
With WP Offload SES Lite, you get the high deliverability, powerful managed infrastructure, and low cost of Amazon SES but with the support of a quality WordPress plugin that’s easy to set up and lets you know when there are sending failures.
WP Offload Media Lite
This plugin automatically copies images, videos, documents, and any other media added through WordPress’ media uploader to Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces or Google Cloud Storage. It then automatically replaces the URL to each media file with their respective Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces or Google Cloud Storage URL or, if you have configured Amazon CloudFront or another CDN with or without a custom domain, that URL instead. Image thumbnails are also copied to the bucket and delivered through the correct remote URL.
Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media)
Social media plugin which let’s you add share icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom share icons of your choice.
This list is my own opinion and there is no raking given because all I use in different projects. Interested in themes, then checkout my themes section here.