Michiel Heijmans Michiel is a partner at Yoast and our COO. Internet veteran. His main goal with most of his articles is to kick-start your site optimization. So much to do!

WordPress in itself is a decent system but plugins can really take it to the next level. Adding top WordPress plugins can make WordPress into the Swiss Army Knife of websites: just pull out whatever functionality you need for your specific site!

Top WordPress plugins

Many people have asked us for our list of top WordPress plugins. Of course, we’ve written quite a few WordPress plugins ourselves, but the list of great WordPress plugins is much larger than that. In the article below, we list the top WordPress plugins we use ourselves, on this site or other sites we build, analyze & optimize. This list changes over time; this is probably not the last time we updated it. Note: we listed the plugins in random order.

Let’s go.

WP Rocket

It makes the sites you build perform to your expectations, instead of slowly crawling. And yes, I think every site should be cached to get the maximum performance for each and every user, not just when you start hitting social sites. We recommend using WP Rocket for that.

On a side note: we really like WP Rocket, but if your site is hosted by a great company like SiteGround (like ours is) caching and more speed optimization is taken care of. This eliminates the need for a caching plugin.

Google Analytics by Monster Insights

Since we sold our Google Analytics for WordPress plugin to Monster Insights, they have actively developed and improved what we feel is the best plugin for adding and analyzing Google Analytics data right in your WordPress dashboard. Please check out Google Analytics by Monster Insights for yourself.

Nested Pages

If your site grows larger and larger, you might start to feel the need to move around some pages. A decent site structure helps Google to crawl your site in the most efficient way. Nested Pages uses a nice drag-and-drop interface to maintain that site structure.

AMP

We predict a vast increase in the number of sites that are built solely in AMP as a replacement for your regular website. It probably takes some years, but bottom line is that AMP makes your website more user-focused and faster. Prepare your website with this plugins: AMP.

BlogVault

Not having a backup isn’t an option if you rely on your website for your business. You can rely on Blogvault to create backups of your site, so you have one less thing to worry about. BlogVault creates incremental backups, so your site won’t be overloaded.

Sucuri WAF

It’s no secret that we really like Sucuri’s security solutions for WordPress. Awesome security monitoring and great service. At least install their Sucuri Scanner plugin. But I recommend checking Sucuri WAF and other products and decide what works best for you.

WP Google Authenticator

I wouldn’t even overthink adding this plugin to your WordPress site. It’s no hassle and will add an extra layer of security to your website. An alternative could be Rublon, which works in a similar manner, but we usually use WP Google Authenticator.

Login Lockdown

For an extra layer of security, we recommend installing a plugin like Login Lockdown, that prevents automated login requests from firing a gazillion login attempts. If some IP range does a surplus of attempts, the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. For more details, check Login Lockdown in the plugin repo.

Any image compression plugin

Yes, I would like to name just one. But the truth is that it depends on your website what plugin works best. We have used Smush, tried EWWW. Kraken.io has a plugin and ShortPixel has one. And has anyone tried the premium Imagify? I would really like to see a comparison for these plugins from an independent, image-heavy website. For now: pick one and use it.

Ninja Forms or Gravity Forms

Both are great plugins to create drag-and-drop forms. Both provide an option for conditional logic and are really easy to use. If you have a form on your website, and any website that has a contact page should have a form, I recommend using Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms.

Better Search Replace

Sometimes you need to do a search and replace in your database in order to make things work right, like after a domain migration. There are more plugins that can help you do a search and replace in your database, but we have used Better Search Replace and found it very helpful. As database actions shouldn’t be taken lightly, I recommend always performing a so-called dry run before doing the actual replacement. This plugin allows for that dry run.

No, we’re not leaving our own main plugin out here. Simply because you really need it.

Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress

We believe this is the best SEO plugin out there, in our own humble opinion of course. Install it on all your websites, simply because it takes care of all the SEO hassle and guides your editors into better writing.

To date, this is the only SEO plugin that is developed by SEO experts, where all the others are made by friendly people that are first and foremost software developers. We stay on top of any changes in SEO and make sure these changes are implemented in the way we optimize your website. That is why we feel our Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin should definitely be in this list of top WordPress plugins.

Read more: 5 handy WordPress plugins for your blog »