Top 6 WordPress Plugins to have on your website in 2019

Which are the absolute top WordPress plugins that are behind the success of websites running on everyone’s favorite CMS platform? This is one of the most common discussions among developers and fans of the platform. The term “civilized discussion” can quickly be forgotten if two SEO specialists start the “Yoast vs. All in One Pack” talk. So instead of comparing the greats in every plugin category, we will list the essentials. The must-haves. Those plugins you install immediately after configuring your WordPress installation. Your website’s “best friends” if you will. Let’s begin.

1. Wordfence Security – Security Plugin

WordPress is susceptible to security issues. That is a well-known fact. Being a favorite target among bots and hackers, there are steps that we need to take in order to protect our website. One of the best way to ensure the security of your website is to host it on secure server. The other is to install WordFence Security. The free version of the plugin can be good-enough but if “good-enough” is not sufficient and you are serious about security, you should consider the premium version of the famous plugin.

Besides its strong firewall, what Wordfence Security does is applying certain rules to the .htaccess file that protect you against brute-force and other type of attacks that are a threat to your website. The greatest difference to other security plugins however, comes from the endpoint firewall that Wordfence Security possess. Different from the cloud firewall, it runs on the server that is protecting making it harder for threats to bypass the defense.

2. Yoast – SEO Plugin

You want your website to be successful and popular, right? If you find a way to do it without SEO, please do let us know. But for now, why not use the help of one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time. Keyword optimization, readability check and technical configuration of your website – Yoast will assist you in all these components and a lot more. This plugin also promises to analyze your pages and let you know how you can improve your Google ranking.

We all know that SEO is a big challenge for every up and coming website but plugins like Yoast can really help you speed up the process. The least this plugin will do is find the fields of improvement that your website definitely has in terms of SEO. Check out the full features of Yoast in their website and decide for yourself if this is indeed the help you need in ranking higher in Google.

3. Contact Form 7 – Contact Form Plugin

The most used method of communication between you and the visitors of your website is the contact form. There is a variety of ways for you to use a contact form – it can be a place where your visitors can ask you questions, give you feedback, sign up for newsletter or just give you valuable information you can use for your business. The “contact form market” for plugins is quite saturated. There are a lot of options but we couldn’t pick anything but our favorite Contact Form 7. To answer the question, why it is our favorite…because it is free and it does the job. Simple as that. This plugin is good for both newbies and technically advanced users of the platform. You can quickly create beautiful contact forms that will do the job for you. If you need more advanced forms for your website, you can customize it thanks to its open source software.

4. Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights – Statistics Plugin

Having an analytics tool in your dashboard is a must. Gaining valuable data about the visitors of your website has never been more important. Find out from which platforms your customers are coming from, what is their demographic and how much time they are spending on your pages. And this is just a small portion of information you can get by installing this plugin. The set up with WordPress is easy and painless.

The amount of competitive advantage you can get with this plugin is measureable…just like everything in your website. It is all about the numbers. Believe us, this tool can affect your whole marketing strategy. If you are owner of an ecommerce website than the Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking and the plugin’s integration with WooCommerce can prove invaluable for multiplying your sales.

5. W3 Total Cache – Caching & Performance Plugin

Nobody likes slow-loading websites. The amount of potential clients you lose because your pages are not loading as fast as they should, has been well documented by Google. If your pages are loading slow according to the PageSpeed Insights , don’t panic! One of the most effective things you can do is enable page caching.

What this tool does is transform the pages into static HTML, thus reducing database queries. Your visitors will look through the cached pages of your website which greatly improves your loading speed. This will benefit your SEO ranking because faster-loading pages = better user experience. Another way to ensure your website is reaching high performance levels is to choose WordPress optimized hosting.

6. Duplicate Post

How many times have you been in a situation in which you would like to clone an existing WordPress page, which you have already built? The “clone” option is a useful functionality especially if you need to make a copy of page on which you have spent hours to build with the Elementor page builder for example. Our technical team recommends “Duplicate Post” plugin. The plugin is absolutely free and with over 3 Million active installations. It gives you an easy option to create fast specific landing pages or promo pages for your new campaign, while saving time and resources. You can also restrict its use to certain roles or post types on your WordPress website. According to the plugin users and user reviews, this is one of the first plugins they add o their new WordPress installations.

While installing plugins on your WordPress website, have in mind that BGOcloud takes care for your online security, account isolation and backups. We do regular backups to secure your data and website, use special software to eliminate the “noisy neighbors” effects and monitor our web hosting environment 24/7 to ensure the quality of our WordPress hosting service!

These are our recommendations for must-have WordPress plugins. They should provide you with a starting point. A foundation on which you will build your next WordPress website masterpiece. Did we miss some big ones? Which are the first plugins you install on your dashboards and you will be happy to keep there forever? Share with us and let’s help other users to have a stunning website!