10 WordPress Plugins That Your Website Can't Live Without

Top 10 Must Have WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without

For every single website we create using WordPress we have a set suite of plugins that we always use. Since we started developing with WordPress over 3 years ago there have been lots of plugins that we tested and used in our site and our client’s sites. Over the past three years we have continued to hone our plugin selections down the very best of the best which we now always use in EVERY WordPress website we build.

These are the 10 WordPress Plugins Your Website MUST Have

WordPress SEO – hands down THE BEST search engine optimization plugin around for WordPress
Askimet – the standard for spam protection for your blog and an absolute must if you are allowing comments on your blog
Admin Menu Editor – allows us to customize the admin dashboard interface for our clients projects based on what works best for them
Better Internal Link Search – make the default WordPress search actually useful by searching everything and not just post titles
Dynamic Widgets – Need to customize where your sidebar widgets display? This is the best plugin for that.
Google Analytics Dashboard – Puts your website traffic stats directly on your WordPress website dashboard
Simple WordPress Back Up – Provides regular complete database backups of your WordPress website
Login Lockdown – Keeps the riff-raff out of your dashboard
Gravity Forms – Hands down the #1 forms plugin for WordPress and worth every penny for a developer license
WP-Optimize – Keep your WordPress site running smooth and quick with this handy plugin

Now there are lots of other plugins out there. As of today, there 21,098 plugins in the wordpress.org plugins directory. There is a lot of great stuff out there to help make your WordPress website really pop and do lots of fun and exciting things. We hope you find the list we have provided useful to help make your WordPress site more secure and run more smoothly. If you are looking for help with your WordPress website please give us a call at 603-924-1978 or fill out our website development request form and we can get started helping you improve your website today!

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Steve Poppe says:

August 31, 2012 at 1:24 pm

Hey Fresh Tracks. Do you have a comment engine you like to use on WordPress? I’m using Echo by JS-Kit and it’s being discontinued in October. If I do nothing will my blog reveert back to the WP comment system?

MatthewTNelson says:

August 31, 2012 at 1:43 pm

Hi Steve. We just use the out of the box commenting system that comes with WordPress….we have tried a few others over the past few years like Disqus: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disqus-comment-system/ works pretty well and gives you the ability to login to comment with social media connections which is nice. We might go back to something like that when we finally get around to redoing our website later this fall I hope. For what particular reason were you using Echo by JS-Kit for your comments?

August 31, 2012 at 1:52 pm

Hey Matthew. Echo just seemed like a cool system with nice features. Kinda like Disqus, which I have downloaded and used when commenting on other’s sites. Thanks for the link and the heads up; maybe I’ll just cut over to Disqus…Steve

August 31, 2012 at 3:29 pm

You are very welcome Steve. Good luck with your plugin search for a new comment system.

Jenish Patel says:

September 7, 2012 at 6:58 am

Great list of WordPress Plugins. It can we helpful to any wordpress developers. BTW I always like to use All in One SEO Plugin for SEO related tasks. What you say about that. And do you have any plugin which can post on facebook page and twitter profile as soon as we post on wordpress blog?

September 7, 2012 at 7:51 am

Hello Jenish. Thanks for the comment. Me website SEO tool of choice is WordPress SEO by Yoast (see link above in my post) it makes the All in One SEO Plugin looks like a baby’s toy and it works awesome and it helps you to become a more effective writer when optimizing your content. For Facebook publishing I would recommend the official Facebook plugin for WordPress because it direct connects to your business page. Works like a charm and removes a step entirely. Very cool stuff.

Make Online Payment Easy with WordPress, Stripe and Gravity Forms! says:

October 23, 2012 at 8:31 am

[...] WordPress website projects that require online forms (which is all of them) we use a fantastic WordPress plugin called Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms makes is SUPER simple to create quick basic forms but is also [...]

E. Gasçon says:

April 16, 2013 at 6:58 pm

Great list. I would add “Redirection” to the list of WordPress plugins if you’re an affiliate marketer. This is just a simple plugin that cloaks your affiliate links and tracks clicks on them as well. This is a good thing to do to prevent from a lot of naked affiliate links being out there on your site. It will clean them up and it will look to Google a little bit less suspect. And, at the same time, it’s going to allow you to create a lot of different affiliate links for different posts on your site, different positions on different posts, so that you know always which link is being clicked, which product is being bought and which piece of content and which link is actually doing the selling.