Installing too many WordPress plugins, especially low quality ones, can slow down your site. But if you don’t install the right ones you’d be missing out on fuctionality and not installing a caching plugin can actually make your site slow too! Here are our picks for top 5 essential WordPress plugins.
Why?
Wondering why we picked those particular plugins, we’ll break it down into 3 separate categories:
Security WordPress Plugins
Before you do anything with your site, you should make sure it’s secure! One of the worst things that can happen with your WordPress is a bad hacker take over your site. Aside from basics like not using the user name “admin”, and choosing a complex enough password, you should consider installing some security related plugins:
- Really Simple SSL: if the connection to your website isn’t secure, then other sites could impersonate yours, or other computers on the internet could eavesdrop and steal your password.
- Loginizer: to prevent hackers from brute force attacking to find your password.
Site Speed WordPress Plugins – The Fastest!
Because nobody likes to wait for a website to load. We’ve done lots of tests, and compared and found these two plugins are the best for most site configurations:
- Autoptimize: consolidate an minify files on your site, to minimize the number of connections on your site.
- Cache Enabler: caches your pages so that the serve doesn’t have to re-render them every time a serves one of your site’s page.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There is not much point having a site if people can’t find it. This plugin will help you write great content, and optimize it for search engines, so that Google will rank your content highly. The higher Google ranks your content, the more visitors you’re likely to get to your site!
Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress
This is the official Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, plus some extras, like the Google Search Console and LiteHouse speed test! If you want to know how many users are coming to your web pages, and why, this plugin is a must have! For more details see our latest article on Google Analytics plugins.
More?
Looking for more high quality free WordPress plugins? We’ve searched the depths of the over 50,000 plugins and found our top free plugins which we use most often.
If your existing plugins are slowing your site down and you’re looking for a new faster web host, consider AccelerHosting for their accelerated WordPress hosting, which some third party results show is faster than other top hosts.
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