Top 5 Must-Have WordPress Plugins – 2016
If you are a WordPress websites developer and looking for a list of must-have WordPress plugins, you have come to the right place.
Here I have shortlisted the list of WordPress plugins that I have used myself in the last 4 years on almost every web project.
Let’s take a look at each of them one by one.
1. BackupWordpress
Taking backup of your website is the most important & essential task. Many (shared)hosting providers already provide an inbuilt auto-backup facility. But most of the time it is for a very limited timeframe or very limited number of backups. When it’s about WordPress websites, BackupWordpress is the best plugin I have used for the last 3+ years, and never had to look for an alternative.
It provides features as below:
- Very simple to use, no technical knowledge required.
- Manage more than one schedule.
- Allows sending backups by email.
- Backups are done in the compressed zip file.
- Works on both Linux & Windows Servers.
- Allows excluding files and folders to backup.
- Great support to get help with your issues or queries.
- Works with low memory, “shared host” environments.
- Supports translation up to 10 languages
Download: https://wordpress.org/plugins/backupwordpress/
2. Jetpack by WordPress.com
Jetpack is a kind of plugin that has grown into something that makes it an All-in-One WordPress plugin.
It provides a huge list of features and that is also for free. If you go for Paid plans, it gives provides more features. As it has been built by the developers who did build the WordPress, it provides great support.
Let’s take a look at the features that are provided for free.
Traffic Growth
- Site stats
- Related Posts
- Enhanced distribution
- Sharing tools
Security
- Brute-force protection
- Single sign-on
Site Management
- Plugin management
- Auto-updates
- Cross-platform tools
Content Creation
- High-speed CDN for images
- Easy CSS editing
- Contact forms
- Custom image galleries
Download: https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/
3. Contact Form 7
Although the previous plugin(jetpack ) also allows us to place contact forms on the website, some people just want to provide limited features for the website and do not prefer to go too much flexible by providing a huge list of jetpack features.
Contact Form 7 is a very simplistic form builder plugin for WordPress. It allows us to create Web forms using a very easy-to-follow interface where you can add form tags by just using buttons. It also allows us to customize the email we receive from Form submission.
They also provide support to add captcha validation using reCAPTCHA which is very useful to protect from spam.
Other than that it provides support for form validations and all the form submission is done using AJAX.
Download: https://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7/
4. Regenerate Thumbnails
Assume that you have made changes to the thumbnail dimensions settings via “WordPress Admin -> Settings -> Media” for some reason. That will store all the newly uploaded images with new dimensions. But what about previously uploaded images? They are still stored with old dimensions. So to make them in new thumbnail dimensions, you have to regenerate all the images. There is no inbuilt function provided in WordPress to do that easily. The Regenerate Thumbnails plugin is the one that provides you to regenerate all the images with just one click. This is one of those plugins which I have always used on all of my WordPress website projects. I even used it on the websites that had more than 2000+ images on it and all images got regenerated with just one click.
Download: https://wordpress.org/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/
5. Yoast SEO
When it’s about search engine optimization, the Yoast SEO plugin is the first choice for most WordPress developers and SEO professionals. There are currently 1+ million active installs done for Yoast SEO. And it is one of the highest-ranked WordPress plugins.
Here is the list of all the features provided by the free version :
- Write better content with Yoast SEO
- Page Analysis
- Technical WordPress Search Engine Optimization
- Meta & Link Elements
- XML Sitemaps
- RSS Optimization
- Breadcrumbs
- Edit your .htaccess and robots.txt file
- Social Integration
- Multi-Site Compatible
- Import & Export functionality
- Import functionality for other WordPress SEO plugins
- Multilingual support
Download: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Honorable Mentions
Here are some other plugins which I can not forget to mention. As they are also ones that I have used on most of the WordPress website projects.