Standard WordPress Plugins
WordPress is one of the best content management systems, and what makes WordPress so powerful is its stability, and the number of available plugins that can be used to boost the performance and functionality of the website. All WordPress websites must have at least the below plugins installed and properly configured before they go live.
Search Engine Optimization – Yoast SEO
This is one of the most important plugins to install in your wordpress website. It gives you the ability to edit page headers, tags, and to set focus keywords for each page and post. This plugin will also enable you to measure how well your post or page is search engine optimized.
Google XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps makes it easy for search engines like google to understand your website structure for proper crawling. It tells google how your website is connected to each other in terms of links, and more. The sitemap created will be in xml format and will be located at http://domain.com/sitemap.xml
iThemes Security
One of the most important aspects of a well designed website is its security configuration. iThemes Security should be installed early on in the design phase, but should be the last plugin to be activated and configured before the site goes live. The reason for that is the security plugin will harden the site and will make it hard to make configuration changes later. It edits the .htaccess file and changes the write permission for a lot of the wordpress files and wordpress directories.
Akismet
One of the most challenging problems for wordpress websites is the amount of spam that can accumulate on the site. Akismet eliminates most of the comment spam.
Why is Spam so bad? Basically: A lot of comment spam makes the site unreadable, it also slows down the website significantly and can downgrade the website’s security and search engine rankings.
W3 Total Cache
One of the most popular and important plugins to install on your website. Make sure that page, database and object caching is turned on.
Advanced Database Cleaner
Continuous maintenance of a website is extremely important for the health of the website. Overtime and especially during the design phase, a lot of changes, page drafts, comment drafts, old page and post versions can take up space and slow down your website. It is important to keep the database cleaned and properly optimized.
Lazy Load
Lazy Load changes the way that the website loads images and allows the website to start to render even before all the images are loaded on the client side. Lazy Load has been shown to significantly improve load times for image heavy websites.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
This plugin connects your website to google analytics and creates a graph in the home dashboard to show website visitor statistics. This plugin requires configuration on http://analytics.google.com to connect to the website.
All In One Migration
This plugin is used for 2 important purposes.
- Website Backups
- Website Migrations
This is one of the best wordpress plugins allowing the user to take a backup of the website and allowing for a full restore without database migration headaches.
Tiny MCE Advanced
A very nice little plugin to upgrade the standard wordpress typewriter. It allows the user to have control over font size, font color, font family and much much more. A very important plugin to have in any wordpress website.