With a 636 billion dollar market value and 43% market share, WordPress has become synonymous with website building. Moreover, people increasingly trust the iconic CMS platform. In fact, 64% of all websites use WP, regardless of whether they build their website on it. In the US alone, over 9 million websites were built on WordPress. But why is WP such a dominant force in the website-building platform stage? Well, it’s because it offers one truly effortless way to build a website regardless of the user’s previous experience and knowledge. The best part is that adding functionalities to a WordPress website is as easy as installing a few plugins.

The plugins are the cornerstone behind WordPress’s success. They allow users to implement various website features, making them more interactive and unique. With over 60,400 free plugins, there is practically no functionality WP plugins haven’t covered. The abundance is great, but it can be a two-edged sword, especially when you are just starting. Such numbers can be extremely overwhelming, especially when you’re just trying to make your website work. So, to save you from the heavy lifting, we’ve prepared a list of 10 plugins each website needs to have installed.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is arguably the most famous SEO plugin in WordPress. Frankly, although there are some pretty good alternatives, like the All-in-one SEO Pack and SEO Framework, Yoast SEO offers the best product, in our humble opinion. Still, regardless of which SEO plugin you choose, you need to have an SEO optimization plugin installed on your website. As most new entrepreneurs know, search engine optimization is a goldmine for leads. About 93% of all website traffic comes from search engines, so playing ball with their demands is a no-brainer.

Of course, your SEO strategy should be much more significant than a simple SEO plugin, but installing Yoast SEO on your website is definitely a must. It makes SEO optimization seamless with its various capabilities. Its free features allow you to effortlessly add keywords and descriptions to your pages and posts. Moreover, it gives you valuable advice on making your content more readable and optimizing your images so they can help your SEO efforts as well.

This will allow you to ensure your content is always optimized to the max without wasting precious time counting how many words are there in a sentence, paragraph, or subheading.

If you want to go beyond, you can always install the paid version. It gives you additional insights into your SEO readiness. Still, the free version is quite enough for any type of website.

2. OptinMonster

The point of having a website is to capitalize on it. This usually can be done in one of two ways – you can sell products or services or find leads for offline transactions. No matter which way of monetization you prefer, OptinMonster can help you with your lead generation efforts. Through this marvelous tool, you can create a lead generation campaign from A to Z. You can create everything, from a popup form to a coupon wheel, using a seamless drag-and-drop builder.

One of the most challenging marketing tasks in front of a new business is gathering the email addresses of potential clients. With OptinMonster, you can create one marvelous subscription campaign entirely based on your preferences and budget. For example, you can integrate coupons into the campaign, so everyone who shares their email will get a discount or another benefit.

OptinMonster is a must because your website would be pointless without pushing the users toward a monetization goal. Thus, using this plugin will help you build your entire campaign, give you suggestions, and provide you with templates. It’s essentially the easiest way to start with your marketing from the very first day of your website.

Still, OptinMonster’s free version supports only 500 page views per month. So, once you grow, you will need to either go for the paid version or just start creating your own lead generation campaigns from scratch.

3. Revive Old Posts

On average, about 5% of website traffic comes from social media. While that may sound a bit unimpressive, consider that more than 3 billion people visit Facebook and Twitter alone. This is an audience you wouldn’t want to miss out on. Sure, Facebook algorithms are dreadful when it comes to free shares, as only about 10% of your fans will see your content on their timeline, but still, utilizing the power of Social Media to gain as much free traffic as possible is a must for a growing business.

So, instead of wasting time posting your content on Twitter and Facebook manually, use Revive Old Post. It’s a much better and easier solution. Moreover, the plugin will significantly increase your traffic on Social media.

Revive Old Post is a goldmine for micro, family, and small businesses that can’t afford to hire a dedicated person to take care of their Social Media marketing. The plugin will automatically share your website’s publications on Twitter and Facebook. The best part is that you can schedule when the Social media posts will go live. As hashtags and backlinks are essential to your SMM, Revive Old Posts allows you to add them without much hassle. So just delegate this otherwise incredibly boring but necessary task to a machine and dedicate your time to more important duties.

4. WP Rocket

It’s not a secret that loading speed has a huge impact on conversion rates. Thus, if you want to be successful, instant page load is the first step. Of course, this can be arranged by securing a lightning-fast hosting plan from HostArmada. Still, to ensure your server won’t get overloaded, and your customers will get to your website as quickly as possible to your content, caching is mandatory. Thankfully, with WordPress plugins, caching your website is just a couple of clicks away. All you need is a secure and reliable caching plugin.

Now, there are plenty of those in the plugin library, and frankly, there are a bunch that will do a fantastic job. WP Super Cache is a good choice. So are Hummingbird, Cache Enabler, Comet Cache, and W3 Total Cache. Still, we prefer WP Rocket as it’s the easiest to use. This powerful tool creates a cached copy of each dynamically generated page on your website.

This may sound redundant, but WP Rocket actually decreases your page load time by up to 63%. It’s among the best performers out there. Moreover, WP Rocket has one truly outstanding support, which is essential for beginners.

So, even if you decided against WP Rocket for some reason, make sure to get a caching plugin. It will make a whole lot of difference.

5. Akismet Anti-Spam

Whenever there is a website, there are spammers following. Bots flood your comments and email if you don’t ensure your protection. Of course, you can always take care of the spam manually, but this will be excruciatingly slow and tedious. You will have to delete all spammy comments on your own one by one. On the other hand, you can delegate this task to Akismet.

Akismet is one of the best free WordPress plugins, as it will take care of spammers regardless of how “human” they look. Yes, spam comments are usually made by bots, who crawl through the internet and search for unprotected websites where they can spill their invasive links. Akismet can effortlessly distinguish them from genuine comments and delete them without needing any additional interaction from you.

Moreover, this plugin will check all your contacts against a global spam database and delete all fake and spammy information.

Akismet works with an API key, which is free for personal websites and blogs. However, commercial and business websites must pay a symbolic fee to get the service.

6. Google XML Sitemaps

With Google having over 92% of the global search engine market, it’s only natural you’d want this giant to have all your details and share your website seamlessly. However, for Google to share your content with its users, it first needs to know it exists. This can happen in one of two ways. The Search engine can index your page, which can take some time. Or you can submit an XML sitemap. The XML sitemap helps search engines understand and navigate your website’s structure seamlessly.

Of course, setting up a sitemap is anything but easy. It’s time-consuming and, more often than not, way too complicated for fresh website owners to understand. Thus, installing the Google XML Sitemaps plugin will instantly take care of this tedious task.

Moreover, this plugin creates a dynamic sitemap compatible with all of the top search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Ask.com, and others. The dynamic sitemap follows each change in your website and automatically submits it to the search engines. It’s a massive time-saver. Best of all, it’s free for all personal and commercial websites.

7. WPForms

In every business, communication with your customers is key. When it comes to your website, communication is predominantly one-sided. You give your customers a lot of information, but getting feedback is tricky. Still, to be perceived as trustworthy, you will have to open a communication channel. The easiest and primary channel you must have is a contact form.

Now, there are many ways to get a contact form, but by far, the most effortless and stylish is with WPFroms. This plugin gives you the opportunity to create various contact and other forms that can serve you for your subscriptions and for communicating with your customers. The best part is that the free version is enough to cover all the basics. The easy drag-and-drop builder allows even absolute beginners to create a stunning contact form without much hassle.

Moreover, WP Forms has built-in spam prevention, and you can add CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. Or, if you don’t want to annoy your visitors, you can go for the Google Invisible reCAPTCHA.

The paid version will give you even more handy features, but for starters, the free version will do just fine.

8. MonsterInsights

Analyzing data and making decisions based on numbers is the cornerstone behind any business growth. Fortunately, your website collects a huge amount of data, which you can use to see what’s working, what’s failing, and what needs improvement. Google has developed several highly efficient tools to help you collect and read that data. The most important one of all is Google Analytics.

Implementing Google Analytics is not that hard if you have some basic coding experience. Still, for a new website owner, touching the website’s code is a recipe for disaster. So, a much easier and more efficient way to implement your Google Analytics is through a plugin. Like most other essential plugins, the library is flooded with such plugins as well. While most of them will do the trick, we still suggest using MonsterInsights.

The tool’s free version is quite enough for beginners. It will provide you with comprehensive e-commerce, user behavior, and SEO reports. Moreover, you can follow your real-time analytics.

With this information, you can see which products or services are most liked and which blogs are most exciting and try to accommodate your users ‘ demands. It’s the only secure way to adjust your business goals and make sure you are following proven data, not just feelings and assumptions.

9. Redirection

When your website gathers some traction and time goes by, it will inevitably start having some issues. Lost pages and incorrectly added URLs will become a regular occurrence. That’s not a reason to panic. Even the best websites and businesses have this problem, but they also have a great solution.

Using 301 redirects and making your 404-page an integrated part of your website will help you not only retain users who didn’t find the page they’ve been looking for, but you can actively convert them into leads or even customers. Thus, using a redirection plugin is mandatory for any WordPress website that aims to retain its visitors.

Redirection is arguably the most popular WordPress plugin for creating and managing redirections. This essential plugin will allow you to set global redirections. For example, if the URL of a popular page is regularly misspelled, you would want to redirect the misspelled URL to the active one. This will help you avoid redirecting users to your 404 page.

Moreover, the plugin allows you to make redirections based on specific scenarios. For example, if a user is logged in, they may be transferred to a more customized page rather than the one everyone else sees.

Furthermore, Redirection allows you to customize your 404-page, which is essential not to lose customers due to mistakes. But more importantly, the plugin will track the frequency of each type of redirection, which will hint at what part of your website needs improvement.

Finally, Redirection will detect every permalink change and automatically set a redirection to the new address, so you won’t lose any customers.

All in all, Redirection is a must for any website as it offers a quick and easy solution to your 301 redirects and 404-error page visits.

10. WP AutoTerms

When creating a business, especially an online one, you need to have the legal part covered. Websites all around the world have to follow some legal guidelines, as otherwise, some hefty fines will follow. For example, if you operate in the EU and you want your website to be seen there, you need to have a GDPR policy.

All of this can be a bit confusing, especially if you’re not a lawyer. Still, you are legally bound to address your website’s terms and conditions and privacy policy. Now, there are two solutions. You can pay a lawyer a hefty price to prepare the needed documents. Or you can use WP AutoTerms to create your legal agreements for free. This will cover your Terms of Service page, privacy policies, and acceptable use policies. Unfortunately, the GDPR is only available with the plugin’s premium version. Still, if you decide to operate in Europe, you can add an additional plugin or just pay the symbolic fee and be done with it.

What about WooCommerce

While WooCommerce is hands down the most used WordPress plugin, it’s definitely not mandatory for all types of websites. For example, if you use your website as a personal portfolio, an online business card, or a corporate news outlet, WooCommerce will only increase your website’s load, but it won’t bring you any benefits. Thus, we can’t say that WooCommerce is a mandatory plugin. However, if you are trying to start an ecommerce website, using WooCommerce is, without a doubt, your best choice. Still, today, we focused on the 10 plugins every website needs, and now that you know them…

It’s time to start building

Beginnings are always hard, especially if that’s your first website. Before you start building your website and implementing these beautiful plugins we just listed, you first need to address your hosting. Choosing the right hosting is the main pillar of your operation, as it will take care of your website’s infrastructure. HostArmada is at the forefront of this industry as we offer all your customers instant website loading, guaranteed access to your website 99.9% of the time, and state-of-the-art security when surfing through your pages. Moreover, with the seamless integration of WordPress with our platform, you’ll be ready to start building your website in no time. Just check out our plans, and if you need help choosing the right one for you, our team is always ready to assist.