9 Must-Have Plugins For New WordPress Installs. Over 400 million people read WordPress sites and view over 20 billion pages every month.
One of the most popular questions is which plugins to use for a fresh WordPress installation. Most site owners want their site to look unique or different from other sites. But there are some plugins that should be included with every new WordPress installation to help you get your site up and running from the beginning.
1. Yoast SEO
The most popular SEO plugin installed by most WordPress site owners is Yoast SEO. This plugin makes it easy to understand critical SEO issues on your site. It just serves as a guide, so it doesn’t guarantee your site will get more traffic.
Yoast can provide the best meta descriptions, meta tags, and other SEO basics. The plugin is ready to work for most WordPress sites and you don’t need to connect it to the Google Search Console.
The plugin also has red, orange, and green markers that serve as guidelines for your SEO and content optimization The focus should not be on mindless hunting for green arrows, but on keyword strategy, content strategy, and site structure.
In the free version of the plugin, you only get one keyword or keyword phrase per page. In addition, you will not receive real-time internal link suggestions or alerts for outdated pages that need to be updated.
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The Yoast Premium version is ad-free, offers real-time suggestions for internal links, and social media page previews. It also helps prevent and fix dead links with a redirect manager, among other benefits.
2. UpdraftPlus
It’s important to have backups of your WordPress site that you can manage.
While you can use your hosting provider’s backups, you can’t save your site if something bad happens, like a security breach or a hack.
UpdraftPlus is a great backup plugin for any WordPress installation. The plugin is available in free and paid versions, and you can connect it to a cloud storage service like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3.
3. Akismet
Nobody likes to receive spam on their websites, but this is one of the problems of website management. In fact, once your WordPress site is up and running, there will be spam comments created by countless automated bots or just people who use your site to promote their sites.
However, you don’t have to deal with spam comments if you install the Akismet plugin. Akismet is the official WordPress anti-spam plugin that floods your site and prevents your readers from browsing your site and content.
Akismet does not let in spam comments that could potentially damage your brand’s reputation or drastically reduce your readership. You can use the free version of the plugin or upgrade to the premium version for more features.
4. WPForms
Feedback is an important part of any website. Not only does it help you engage with your readers, but it also gives you more ideas on what to write about next, or areas that need improvement.
If you want your readers to be able to reach you easily, it’s better to add a contact form to your site than just provide an email address on the contact page. You can also create a newsletter subscription form to add subscribers and expand your mailing list.
WPForms plugin offers a simple and easy way to add contact forms to your site. The plugin also allows you to add fields for name, email, phone number (optional) and a place where the reader can enter their request or message for you.
You can get the Lite or Pro version to create contact forms for your site from the ready-made templates available.
5. Grow by Mediavine
Most website owners have social media pages for their businesses or brands on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and others. If you want your visitors to share your content with others, the Grow by Mediavine plugin gives them the ability to do so.
Once you install and activate Grow by Mediavine on your website, your readers will see all social media icons on your posts and pages, making it easier to share your content.
The Grow by Mediavine plugin offers you two options for choosing where to place your social media post buttons: a floating sidebar or inline content.
The social sharing plugin has free and paid versions. In most cases, the free version works great, especially for a fresh WordPress installation, except that it doesn’t have buttons for WhatsApp and Telegram.
6. Social sharing without texts
The Script Free Social Sharing plugin allows your readers to easily share your content on their social networks. It’s easy to use and won’t slow down your site.
The plugin adds social media post buttons to your posts and pages with a set of simple sharing links.
You can choose what types of content share buttons should have, which buttons to add, and where the buttons should go (before or after the content). You can also choose the order of the buttons and specify whether you want to use the plugin styles or not.
The difference between Script-Free Social Sharing and Mediavine’s Grow is that the former is free and offers more social sharing buttons including WhatsApp and Telegram.
Also, social sharing without scripts does not take into account the number of posts on social media, which is known to slow down website loading.
7. Wordfence security
Wordfence Security helps fight malware and hackers. Your new WordPress installation, like all other WordPress sites, is a target of hackers, so you need to keep your site secure.
Wordfence Security ensures the security of your new WordPress installation with malware scanner, endpoint firewall, blocking, login security, real-time traffic analysis, and more. Plus, it gets the latest malware signatures, firewall rules and malicious IPs. -Addresses from your threat defense channel to keep your site safe.
The plugin is available in free and premium versions. The premium version has more advanced features such as real-time IP blacklisting, malware signatures, firewall rules, country blocking, more frequent scans, premium support, spam ads, and spam checks.
8. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
One of the main reasons for slow website speed is large and / or full-size images. To solve this problem, it is best to have a plugin that can reduce the image file size to 100KB or less.
ShortPixel is one of the best image optimization plugins for WordPress. This ensures your site loads quickly no matter how many images you upload.
For a fresh WordPress installation, you can download ShortPixel for free and get 100 image credits per month. This allows for about 10 images to be uploaded per month because more thumbnails are generated for each uploaded image.
Another way to avoid paying for ShortPixel is to use free compression tools Just run the images using the compression tools and then upload the compressed images to your WordPress site.
ShortPixel also has its own image compression tool. If you need more image credits, you can buy them for as little as $ 4.99 for 5,000 image credits.
9. WP Rocket
A slow site degrades user experience, frustrates visitors, and lowers conversions. One way to reduce the download time of a new WordPress installation is to add a caching plugin.
The cache temporarily stores data by taking a snapshot of a page on your site. It cuts load times, improves SEO, and increases conversions.
WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that speeds up your website. Once you install and enable the plugin, it will immediately activate page caching
In addition, the plugin improves the indexing of your site by search engines, reduces the weight of your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, and only loads images when visitors scroll down your pages. This reduces page load times and reduces the load on the webserver.
Get your site up and running
There is a misconception that you shouldn’t use too many WordPress plugins. However, your WordPress site doesn’t depend on the number of plugins, it depends on what they do with and for your site. There are other WordPress plugins out there, but these 9 are enough to get you started.
We have other WordPress guides to help you manually set up WordPress on a domain and remove all traces of the plugin when you no longer need them.
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