20 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Your Site in 2024

The WordPress plugin repository contains around 60,000 plugins. In this post, we’ll explore the most important plugins that can enhance your WordPress site by adding essential features without compromising performance.

As you’ve seen in our previous articles, we prioritize performance above all else. In this article, we’ll focus on plugins that offer key functionality while maintaining optimal speed and efficiency.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a powerful caching plugin that enhances your WordPress website’s performance. It simplifies the process of caching, a technique that would otherwise be difficult to implement manually. The plugin’s expert mode can significantly improve your site’s performance.

When using the expert mode, WP Super Cache can outperform LiteSpeed Cache in some cases, even though both offer similar functionality. LiteSpeed Cache relies on an external Apache module, leading to additional RAM usage for each request, which slightly impacts performance. You can read our guide on how to properly set up WP Super Cache to boost your PageSpeed score.

Rank Math SEO

Rank Math SEO is a feature-rich search engine optimization plugin that helps you generate Schema Markup or Structured Data in the JSON-LD format, which is the format recommended by Google for SEO.

While many SEO plugins can negatively impact website performance, including Rank Math SEO, pairing it with a caching plugin ensures your site maintains optimal speed. For a lighter alternative with fewer SEO features, Slim SEO is a good option. However, Rank Math stands out for offering a full suite of SEO tools for free. No other SEO plugin provides such comprehensive features at no cost.

Check out our article on how to properly configure Rank Math to avoid common SEO mistakes. Many users have found this guide helpful in improving their search rankings.

Contact Form 7 and Flamingo

Contact Form 7 is a popular plugin for creating forms on WordPress websites, while Flamingo stores the data collected from these forms in a database. Both plugins are developed by the same team and are available for free.

Although there are several form plugins available, such as WPForms and Forminator, Contact Form 7 stands out for its simplicity, lightweight nature, and high performance, all at no cost.

If you want to learn how to create forms on a WordPress website, you can read our article on creating a subscription form without using a plugin.

Advanced Ads

Advanced Ads is a top-tier plugin for managing advertisements on your WordPress site. Many blogs generate revenue through ads and affiliate marketing, and this plugin makes it easy to handle tasks like placing ads in the right locations, scheduling ads, and displaying them for specific durations.

Some key features include being lightweight, freemium, and only 3 MB in size. It integrates smoothly with Google AdSense, making it a great choice for monetizing your site.

Jetpack Protect

Jetpack Protect is a lightweight security plugin offering free malware scanning. Developed by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress and WP Super Cache, Jetpack Protect leverages WPScan’s extensive malware and vulnerability database, which contains over 25,000 records.

Be sure not to confuse Jetpack Protect with the Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed & Growth plugin. The latter is a bulky plugin that can slow down your website, as it combines multiple features, including Jetpack Protect. For better performance, install Jetpack Protect separately.

Key features of Jetpack Protect include being completely free, lightweight, easy to set up, and able to warn you about vulnerabilities in installed plugins and themes.

Perfecty Push Notification

Perfecty Push Notifications offers a self-hosted solution for delivering push notifications to your subscribers. As email notifications become less common, push notifications via the browser have become an effective way to keep your audience updated.

Although this plugin is no longer actively maintained by its developers, it remains fully functional. We’ve tested it with WordPress v6.4.2 and PHP 8.2, and it works without issues. An alternative to this plugin is OneSignal, the most popular push notification service. However, using OneSignal requires an account on their platform, while Perfecty Push is entirely self-hosted and doesn’t rely on third parties.

All-in-One WP Migration

The All-in-One WP Migration plugin simplifies the process of backing up your WordPress site. Regular backups are crucial to maintaining the security of your site, as unforeseen issues such as code errors, database corruption, or malware attacks can cause it to malfunction.

Read our article on the “11 Rules to Secure Your WordPress Website” to learn more about protecting your site and ensuring smooth recovery if something goes wrong.

WPCode

WPCode is a versatile plugin for adding code snippets to your WordPress site. Whether you need to insert HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or PHP, this plugin makes it easy. It also includes a library of over 80 useful PHP snippets.

Key features include its lightweight size (around 2 MB) and freemium model, which makes it accessible to both beginners and advanced users.

SVG Support

SVG Support is the go-to plugin for adding Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to your WordPress site. Since WordPress doesn’t natively support SVG uploads, this plugin is a must if you want to use this highly scalable image format. It’s lightweight, free, and even allows you to control SVG uploads based on user roles.

Limit Login Attempts Reloaded

Limit Login Attempts Reloaded is a security plugin designed to protect your site from brute force attacks. By default, WordPress allows unlimited login attempts, making your site vulnerable to attackers. This plugin limits the number of attempts, helping prevent unauthorized access while minimizing server load during an attack.

WP Reading Progress

WP Reading Progress is a simple yet effective plugin for blog sites. It adds a small reading progress bar to the top of your posts, encouraging readers to finish the article. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and a perfect addition to any content-heavy blog.

GTranslate

GTranslate enables multi-language support for your WordPress site. It’s a lightweight, freemium plugin that helps you reach a broader audience by translating your content into different languages. The plugin adds a simple language selector, improving the overall user experience.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the leading plugin for creating eCommerce sites. It provides a smooth and responsive user experience. WooCommerce integrates well with popular payment gateways like Stripe and is trusted by millions of online stores worldwide. If you’re looking to start an eCommerce website, WooCommerce is your best option.

WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway

The WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway plugin allows you to integrate Stripe, one of the most widely used payment gateways, into your WooCommerce store. This plugin ensures secure credit card payments and is a must-have for any eCommerce business using WooCommerce.

Essential Addons for Elementor

Essential Addons for Elementor is a plugin that adds must-have widgets for the Elementor page builder. While we generally recommend using the Gutenberg Builder provided by WordPress Core for its lightweight and optimized performance, if you are an Elementor user, this plugin can add useful features to your site. However, keep in mind that using Elementor and its add-ons may impact your website’s performance.

Additional Essential Plugins

• Akismet Anti-Spam: Protects your comment sections from spam.
• Contextual Related Posts: Displays related posts for articles, pages, or media in a lightweight and efficient way.
• AddToAny Share Buttons: Provides simple sharing buttons for your blog posts.
• WP Recipe Maker: A must-have for food bloggers, offering recipe schema markup for rich results in search engines.
• SQLite Object Cache: Provides persistent object caching but requires the SQLite3 module to be enabled.