10 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

When it comes to website design and development, WordPress is the stand out choice for users. Its flexibility, ease of use and range of plugins available make it an ideal option for small, medium and large businesses, bloggers, and eCommerce websites.

As we start to move towards 2025, WordPress still powers over 40% of websites online. However, ensuring that your website is optimised for performance, security, user experience, accessibility and offering essential features is more crucial than ever.

Let’s take a look at some of the very best plugins which can elevate your WordPress website from the standard blogging platform to a high-performing lead generating machine.

What is a WordPress Plugin?

A WordPress plugin is essentially pieces of code that extend the functionality and usability of your website. These plugins can not only add new features to your website, but also enhance existing ones. By using plugins, you can easily customise and improve certain elements of your website without having an extensive knowledge of coding.

As of writing, there are over 59,000 free WordPress plugins available – and that’s just on the Plugin Directory. Many more are available on other websites such as CodeCanyon and individual developer websites. In the below article, we give our opinion on the best plugins that we use on the WordPress websites that we develop, what they do and the key features they provide.

10 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

RankMath SEO

Category: SEO

Why It’s Essential: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is critical for attracting organic traffic to your site from search engines such as Google and Bing. Rank Math SEO simplifies the process of optimising your content for these search engines, improving your on-page SEO, setting SEO titles and meta descriptions and much more through their range of easy to use modules.

Key Features:

  • Content analysis with real-time feedback
  • XML and HTML sitemap generation
  • Meta title and description templates
  • Readability check
  • Integration with Google Search Console
  • Schema markup

How to Use It: Install and activate the plugin, then follow the setup wizard to configure your site’s basic SEO settings. You can then use certain tools such as the Rank Math SEO meta box on your post and page editor to optimise individual pieces of content.

There are a huge range of advanced settings for those who are looking to further enhance their websites performance on search engines. If you are an inexperienced WordPress user, it may be worthwhile to contact an SEO agency to help with your search engine optimisation to avoid any potential pitfalls you may encounter.

Pro Version: There is a pro version of RankMath available through their website, which offers advanced SEO analytics, custom schema generator, keyword rank tracking, better integration with page builders and extra modules.

Admin and Site Enhancements (ASE)

Category: Site Management

Why It’s Essential: ASE provides a collection of tools that improve the overall management, look and functionality of your WordPress site – mainly for backend users. Ideal for client sites, you can completely modify how the WordPress dashboard is viewed by hiding and customising certain elements such as the admin bar and menu offering a more streamlined and easy to use interface.

This plugin also combines the functionalities of other popular plugins you will see on many sites such as Limit Login Attempts, WPS Hide Login, Code Snippets and Enable Media Replace allowing you to minimise the amount of plugins you have installed on your website.

Key Features:

  • Performance optimisations
  • Disabling of unused and legacy WordPress features
  • Additional security options
  • Enhanced media library functionality
  • Clean and organised admin interface
  • Additional login security, functionality and styling options
  • Code snippets manager

How to Use It: Install and activate ASE, then explore the settings to enable the features that best suit your site’s needs.

Pro Version: Available, offering additional features such as enhanced media library tools, and advanced performance optimisations.

10 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

WooCommerce

Category: eCommerce

Why It’s Essential: WooCommerce is for those looking to transform their standard WordPress website into an easy to use and fully functional eCommerce platform. WooCommerce is highly customisable, and integrates seamlessly with WordPress as well as most themes and website builders.

Out of the box, WooCommerce will have everything you need to get started selling online, but there is also a wide range of add ons to enhance its functionality. These add ons include plugins to allow additional payment gateways, advanced shipping options, wishlists and integration to your dropshipping providers.

Key Features:

  • Product management
  • Secure payment gateways
  • Shipping options
  • Extensive library of extensions and addons
  • Comprehensive analytics and reporting

How to Use It: To get started with WooCommerce, simply install and activate the WooCommerce plugin from the WordPress plugin library. After this, you can then follow the setup wizard to configure your store’s basic settings. Once this initial setup is complete, you will be able to add products, set up payment and shipping methods, and customise your store’s appearance with themes and extensions.

WooCommerce is a free plugin, and many extensions also come free. However, there is a wide range of freemium or premium addons available to help enhance your store.

WooCommerce is an extensive plugin, so if you need help we would recommend that you contact a professional WordPress developer to build your eCommerce website.

WP Rocket

Category: Performance and caching

Why It’s Essential: Speed is a critical factor for user experience and SEO. Integrating seamlessly with many themes and page builders, WP Rocket is a comprehensive caching plugin that significantly enhances your site’s loading speed by using a range of optimisation tools.

Key Features:

  • Page and browser caching
  • Lazy loading of images and videos
  • Minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
  • GZIP compression

How to Use It: Install and activate WP Rocket, then follow the setup wizard. The default settings are typically sufficient for most sites, but if you are an advanced user you can fine-tune the configuration based on your website’s design and functionality.

Pro Version: This is a premium only plugin. All features will be available upon purchase of a subscription on their website with support available if required.

10 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

Elementor

Category: Page Builder

Why It’s Essential: Elementor is a powerful page builder that allows you to create stunning, custom layouts and design your website without needing to write code. Offering a user-friendly drag and drop interface, Elementor is behind over 16 million websites online, making it a favourite among both beginners and advanced developers and web design agencies.

Key Features:

  • Drag-and-drop editor
  • Pre-designed templates and blocks
  • Responsive design controls
  • Easy to use front end drag and drop builder
  • Advanced styling options
  • Integrations with popular marketing tools

How to Use It: You can download and activate Elementor from the WordPress plugin directory. After this, you can then start creating or editing pages using the drag-and-drop interface to design your pages.

Elementor can integrate with most themes, but if you are designing a website from scratch then your best option would be to use the Hello Elementor theme.

Pro Version: The Pro version of Elementor adds in many other features, such as the ability to design a header and footer, and many additional widgets. There are many third party add ons available for Elementor, but we would always recommend to see if these features are available in the Pro version before installing.

All-in-One WP Migration

Category: Backup and Migration

Why It’s Essential: Migrating your website to a new hosting environment doesn’t need to be a difficult task. All-in-One WP Migration simplifies this process by giving you a step by step process in moving your website. This small yet powerful plugin also allows you to create and restore on site backups, essential for those who may have limited access to their hosting account.

Key Features:

  • Drag-and-drop site export and import
  • No limitations on host or operating system
  • Bypass all upload size restrictions
  • Customisable export options
  • Backup and restore functionality

How to Use It: Install and activate All-in-One WP Migration, then use the export function to create a fully packaged version of your website to download and upload to another WordPress installation.

Pro Version: There is a premium version of this plugin available, allowing you to migrate larger websites in one go. There are also additional add ons which add on features for migrating and backing up WordPress multisites, and importing and exporting from online storage.

10 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)

Category: Development

Why It’s Essential: ACF allows you to add custom fields to your WordPress edit screens, making it easier to manage custom content which can then be displayed on the front end. Integrating seamlessly with most themes, this plugin is particularly useful for developers looking to create websites with design templates, allowing their clients to add and upload posts and pages to their website without having to code or use a page builder.

ACF can also add custom post types and taxonomies without extensive coding, allowing further customisation possibilities to your WordPress website.

Key Features:

  • Multiple field types
  • Custom field groups
  • Repeater fields
  • Conditional logic
  • Flexible content fields
  • Ability to add custom post types and taxonomies

How to Use It: ACF is free to download on the WordPress plugin directory. Once installed, you can create custom field groups and assign these to appear on the backend of your posts, pages, or custom post types. Use dynamic content areas in your page builder or theme templates to display this content on the front end of your website.

Pro Version: ACF Pro is available as a subscription on their website, offering additional field types, repeater fields, flexible content fields, customer support and more advanced features.

WPForms

Category: Forms

Why It’s Essential: Most modern WordPress themes and page builders come with a basic contact form. However, you may need something a bit more complex to capture the data you need from potential new clients. WPForms is an intuitive drag and drop form builder that allows you to easily create contact forms, surveys, newsletter signup forms, payment forms and more.

Key Features:

  • Drag-and-drop form builder
  • Pre-built form templates
  • Responsive design
  • Spam protection
  • Payment integration
  • Integration with sales platforms, marketing tools and CRMS

How to Use It: Install and activate WPForms, then use the form builder to create and customise your forms. After this, you can then embed the forms on your web pages using shortcodes, your page builder (if integrated) or the block editor.

Pro Version: There are different levels of premium options available for WP Forms, each offering additional features such as conditional logic, form templates, and different integrations.

10 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

Imagify

Category: Image Optimisation

Why It’s Essential: As mentioned in our article The Ultimate Guide to Images for your WordPress Website, large images can slow down your website. The Imagify plugin can automatically compress and optimise your images, improving load times without sacrificing quality.

Key Features:

  • Lossless image compression
  • Bulk optimisation
  • Automatic image resizing
  • WebP conversion
  • Optimised image backup

How to Use It: To use Imagify, you will need to create a free account on their website. After this you can install and activate the Imagify plugin and connect your account. Once completed you can then configure the plugin to your chosen settings. This can include automatically compressing and new images, conversion to modern WebP formats and much more. If you are installing on a previously developed website, then you can use the bulk optimisation feature to optimise existing images.

Pro Version: Although you get the same features on a free account compared to premium levels, you will be limited to a certain amount of optimisation a month. By choosing and paying for the Infinite account you will be able to optimise more images each month – perfect if you are managing multiple websites.

WP Mail SMTP

Category: Email and SMTP

Why It’s Essential: SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is essential for reliable email delivery from your website. This ensures your emails are sent through a trusted provider such as Brevo, Mailgun and email providers such as Gmail and Outlook rather than your web server which can often lead to emails being marked as spam. This means you won’t miss out on important notifications such as contact form submissions or sales emails from your website.

Key Features:

  • Easy SMTP setup
  • Support for popular SMTP services (SendGrid, Mailgun, etc.)
  • Email logging
  • Authentication support
  • Integration with popular email marketing services

How to Use It: Install and activate WP Mail SMTP, then follow the setup wizard to configure your SMTP settings to send websites through a trusted provider. You can then test your email configuration to ensure that your emails are being delivered successfully. Please note that you will need to have an account with the service you have selected.

Pro Version: Available, offering additional features such as one click activation for certain providers, email logging, advanced reporting, priority support and setup.

While plugins can bring in extra functionality, it’s crucial to ensure they are compatible with your current plugins, theme, current version of WordPress, and PHP settings. We would always advise to opt for premium versions of plugins if they are available as they are well-supported, regularly updated against vulnerabilities, and offer new features. If you are unsure, then it is best to contact your website developer before installing or making any changes to your website.

By incorporating some of these plugins, you can ensure your site is well-optimised, secure, and user-friendly, setting the stage for success in the digital landscape. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, these plugins will help you get the most out of your WordPress site.

If you are interested in our website development and SEO services, then please get in touch with us today for a free, no obligation chat.

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