Essential WordPress Plugins Checklist: The Plugins We Use for Every Client

WordPress Plugins can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you can easily add functionality to your website without having to know how to code, and because there are limitless options from which to choose. A curse for the same reason. If you add too many or the wrong plugins to your website, you run a very high risk of increasing your site’s vulnerability to attack from hackers, and slowing down your site’s performance because of conflicting or poor coding.

Plugins can be developed by anyone. That’s a good thing, because it means developers all over the world are innovating and extending the core capability of WordPress. It’s also bad, because not all developers code using web standards best practices. Not all developers support their plugins after they develop them–which allows them to become out-dated and vulnerable over time.

The responsibility for all of this falls on you as the owner of your website–as if you don’t have enough to do! So, how do you manage it and keep it simple so you can spend your time concentrating on what you need to be doing for your business?

1. Don’t add unnecessary plugins to your site. More is definitely not better in this case. The best thing you can do for your website visitors is make sure their experience a good one. A huge component of this has to do with how your site performs (speed). A bunch of plugins you don’t need = slow site performance. Slow site performance = lost visitors to your website and lost revenue for your business.
2. Make sure your plugins are well supported and maintained by the developers. You can tell if a plugin is maintained by looking at the plugin page on WordPress.org. in the right column. Look at the date is was Last Updated. If it has been over six months, the plugin is not being supported and maintained by it’s developer. You can also look at the plugin’s ratings to see whether people are happy with the performance of the plugin overall. Finally, check under support to make sure someone is responding to requests for support.
   
3. Keep your plugins updated. Whenever your plugin has a new release (and it happens frequently as developers discover vulnerabilities, incompatabilities, or glitches in their plugins), an update is released and you are notified in your WordPress admin area. Simply click on updates in the left menu and update all of your plugins. It’s quick and easy and something you should do about once a week to keep your site running smoothly.

You need to know which plugins are necessary and which ones aren’t–and get rid of the unnecessary ones. Best practices online change with time, so I’m sharing with you an Essential WordPress Plugins Checklist that lists the plugins we currently use for our clients. We use them because the’re necessary. Outside of this list, we might add two or three additional plugins for specific functionality required by the client–but when we do, we check to make sure the plugin is well reviewed, well supported, and well maintained.

1. Akismet – controls comment spam and lets you review the spam comments it catches under your comments admin screen. You’ll need an Akismet.com API key to use it. Keys are free for personal blogs and low-cost paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.
2. iThemes Security – is a critical security plugin for WordPress. Roughly 30,000 new websites are hacked each day because database driven websites like WordPress (or any data-base-driven website) can be an easy target because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software. This plugin protects you by hiding vital areas of your site, restricting access to important files, preventing brute-force login attempts, detecting any attack attempts, and immediately notifying you by email if there are any issues with your site.
3. Backup Buddy – is a must for every website. It creates regular, complete backups of your entire site. If anything were to happen to your site, you can simply use the plugin’s quick and easy restore function to completely restore your entire site: themes, plugins, widgets and everything else. This plugin isn’t free, but it will literally save your website if something goes wrong with your site, and is well worth the investment.
4. WordFence – regularly scans your site to make sure it’s free from malware infection, and keeps your site secure. With Wordfence, you don’t need an additional plugin to limit login attempts or a caching plugin because Wordfence does it all, and can makes your site up to 50 times faster.
5. Contact Form 7 – is a simple plugin that makes it easy to manage one or several contact forms on your website. The forms also make it easy to implement important security features like CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering to keep your site safe.
6. Google XML Sitemaps – is one of the best and most important plugins available. It creates an XML sitemap that enables search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to index your blog. It also notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
7. WordPress SEO – is a well supported plugin that’s great for helping client’s write better content for their pages and posts, so they’re optimized for search, and easier to find when people are looking for their content online.
8. Broken Link Checker – checks your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notifies you if any are found. It’s a necessary plugin because broken links are bad for your visitors and bad for your seo. The longer you have a website, the easier it is for links to break, and this great little plugin helps you find them and fix them easily.
9. AddThis – is a sharing plugin for your blog. It’s necessary to have sharing options for your visitors–it’s an essential part of having a blog in the first place. There are a ton of sharing plugins to choose from, this is just the one I like to use for clients–primarily because of aesthetics…but also because it works and it’s well supported. If you like a different sharing plugin, just check to make sure it’s supported and maintained by the developer to keep your site safe, secure, and running smoothly.
10. WordPress Related Posts – this is a bonus checklist addition because I think 9 is a weird number for a checklist, and I like this plugin. That said, we don’t use it all the time for every client. I like it because you can increase your visitor’s interaction on your site by showing them other posts that might interest them at the bottom of your blog posts (if you already have a ton of plugins, you can just skip adding this one and add a link directing their attention to a related post yourself).

Hey there! Thanks for stopping by! I’d love to connect, so drop me a line here or shoot me an email at norma [at] connectinteractivellc [dot] com. If you like what you’re reading, be sure and subscribe or sign-up just below for email updates so you don’t miss a thing!

By the Way… If you like what you read today, you’ll love this post: Week in Review: The 7 Most Crazy Helpful Resource Links for Entrepreneurs!

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