Must-Have Plugins for WordPress Sites

Building Wordpress sites can be a lot of fun, even for the novice developer. The great thing about WordPress development is that you can code your own custom-built solutions to create virtually any functionality your project may require. There’s also plethora of plugins available for the WordPress community to aid you in your development. When first starting off a WordPress project, there’s a few basic yet invaluable plugins you should incorporate into your site.

Yoast SEO

For anyone creating a content site in WordPress, this is a necessity. Increase your SEO performance post by post with Yoast’s SEO plugin, formerly called WordPress SEO. Each page and post has an SEO section on the edit screen that will help analyze keyword usage, change page title, and create and modify meta description. With Yoast SEO, you can change settings for meta robots, change social networking info for the post and more. The majority of the SEO options in Yoast SEO are not readily available in WordPress out of the box.

View Yoast’s SEO plugin here.

Wordfence

WordPress sites are notoriously known to be hackable. Users can get caught up using too many plugins on their site and forget to update them. These old plugins can contain security holes, allowing a site to be hacked in multiple fashions. Wordfence scans your site, checking for irregularities in core files and scanning every bit of your WordPress install. It even runs a scan to see if your site is in Google’s Safe browsing list and can see if your site is being “spamvertized.” If your site is infected, Wordfence automatically sends you an email, alerting you to this. Wordfence also provides the URL to the possibly infected files on your server. It’s a must-have security plugin, plain and simple.

View the Wordfence plugin here.

EWWW Image Optimizer

A good developer will take the necessary steps to make sure their site is fully optimized. Image optimizing is a valuable task to stay on top of. Having unoptimized images can affect your site load time, which in turn affects your search engine rankings. EWWW Image Optimizer goes through each of your images, including JPGs, GIFs, and PNGs alike, and can losslessly optimize them. Many web designers actually don’t take into account the properties of their images or how it can affect their site’s performance. Install EWWW Image Optimizer to give your WordPress site that extra SEO boost.

View the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin here.