Have you stepped into the world of blogging recently and chosen WordPress as your Content management system? Well, I appreciate you for making an amazing choice as WordPress is one of the best platforms for publishing web content.
It gives you better security, themes, customizations, and has a huge library of plugins that makes it easier for you to publish content on the world wide web easily. While starting a new site, it necessary to have some plugins to make the site ready for submitting to the Google search console and for indexing.
Some essential plugins include that of SEO, backup plugins, gdpr cookie consent plugin, and more. So, we have decided to list down 5 must have plugins for your fresh WordPresssite. However, you might need more than 5 plugins for various purposes according to your requirements, but the ones we will be listing down are necessary.
Table of Contents
List of 5 Necessary plugins for a fresh WordPress site
Really Simple SSL
Whenever I create a fresh site, this is the first plugin I install to reload the site on HTTPS:// secured connection. It is important to have an SSL certificate for your site, as Google suggests to do so. It also helps in improving your overall ranking as SSL is one of the Google’s ranking factor and ensures your visitor that they are on a safe site.
The main purpose of the plugin is to safely reload your site and its pages on https and also fixes the mixed content issue. There is also a pro version of the plugin which offers features like:
- Mix content scan which guides on fixing content with no SSL lock.
- Advanced security headers
- Reminders about expiry of your SSL certificate via email
- Premium support on issues.
Yoast SEO
One of my favorite plugins from the list is Yoast SEO which simplifies the way we can optimize our site for Google. It can help in marking unnecessary pages as no index, help you to fix readability issues in your content and also guides for on-page SEO.
You can add a meta description to your posts, canonical URLs, slugs, SEO title and mark the most important content as cornerstone.
It has a paid version also, but I don’t think it is necessary at all because the free version does it all. However, if you wish to try your hands on the premium version, I would suggest you to go for Rank math which is the best alternative for Yoast and the best part is it comes for free.
The pro version of Yoast offers the following features:
- Automatic internal linking suggestions
- Recognized keywords from key phrases
- Optimization of the article for synonyms and key phrases
- Social previews
Updraft Plus
Imagine you are done setting up your site, added the necessary pages, categories, customized the theme, published 30 pieces of content and suddenly lost everything due to an error or database corruption.
Well, in that case it is necessary to install a backup plugin that takes a complete backup of your WordPress site and upload it your cloud storage remotely. One of the best backup plugins in the market is none other than Updraft plus itself offering daily backups with remote storage feature.
It offers features like:
- Manual and automatic scheduled backups
- Database backup
- Uploading database on cloud storage like drop box, Gdrive and more.
- Restore site from the backup.
It also has a premium version which has more features and provides premium support to the users.
Imagify
Another necessary plugin one should definitely have is imagify. Its function is to compress the media files without compromising with the quality. The plugin comes with 25mb free trial, and you will have to purchase plans according to your requirement.
I suggest you to choose one-time plans if your site isn’t as big as Forbes or a news site. The plans are affordable and Imagify will compress the pictures as soon as you upload in the WordPress directory. Moreover, there is also a backup of the original images, in case something goes wrong.
You can also convert the images into WEBP version so that they load faster and save your server resources also improving your GTmetrix and Google page speed score. You can select the compression rate and bulk compress images too.
Alternatives for the plugin:
- Smush
- Tinypng
- ShortPixel
Cookiebot
This is one of the most important service if you receive traffic from European countries. It is necessary for you to display a cookie consent bar and let the visitor decide if it wants to let the cookies store in its device.
The best part about this service is that it is not a plugin and requires only a small code to be added into the header section of the pages where you want to display the cookie consent banner. Cookiebot also scans your site for the third-party cookies that are being stored on the user’s device, marking them according to the function of the cookie.
It is free for up to 100 pages, if you have a micro niche site, you don’t have to purchase a premium plan but if your site is huge with more than 100 pages, I would suggest you to opt-in for the premium plan as it is worth it.
Bonus Suggestion
Cookiebot is not a plugin, therefore it leaves room for one more suggestion that is surely the best one for you.
It is important for a WordPress site to load faster on every device. Slower sites are often ignored by Google and struggles to rank on the first page. Google is also working on the Core web vitals algorithm update which is about the user experience your site offers to the visitor. Therefore, it is important for you to optimize your site and make it load faster.
Wp Rocket
One of the best plugins when it comes to optimize your site to load faster. It is basically a caching plugin that can set preload rules, lazy load images, cache the pages, integrate with Cloudflare and make your site load faster than before.
Features:
- Cache your website
- Enable browser caching and Gzipcompression
- Integrate with CDN
Wrapping Up
So here comes and end to our list of essential WordPress plugins for a fresh site. However, there are various other important plugins also that makes your work easier and helps in optimizing the site. In this list, we focused on the must have plugins, there are free and paid alternatives available for all the plugins in the list.
