Building a website is indeed a lot of work. There are a hundred things that need your attention to build a properly functioning website. Installation of plugins, themes, and other third-party tools are an integral part of it, especially if you are building your website on the WordPress platform. Your choice of these tools could have a huge effect on your website’s performance. Hence, from this article, you will learn about a bunch of the best WordPress plugins that are a must-have for your website for ensuring its smooth functioning.

WordFence WordFence is a popular security plugin you can install on your WordPress website to ensure the overall security of your website. This plugin comes with two very advanced features including endpoint firewall (which identifies and blocks malicious traffic) and a malware scanner (blocks requests if it contains any malicious code or content) to help you keep your website safe. Unlike its cloud alternatives, WordFence doesn’t break the encryption, or it can’t be bypassed and can’t leak data. Its powerful threat defense feed keeps it updated regarding all the new firewall rules, malware signatures, malicious addresses, etc to provide better protection for your website. Its additional features include leaked password protection, live traffic(monitors visits and hack attempts), advanced manual blocking, country blocking, two-factor authentication, etc.

UpdraftPlus UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular backup plugins out there that help you keep the backup of your WordPress website’s data. As you know websites are always under the threat of losing their data to various issues including server crash, hacks, malware attack, deleted files, by running bad commands, or even by a simple user error, etc. Hence, it would be a huge risk if you are running your website without any proper measure to keep a backup in it. UpdraftPlus plugin will make a great choice for a great backup plugin on your WordPress website. Its easy-to-use interface has a huge role to play in making it the most popular backup plugin among the rest. Security of your website’s data is of top concern for this plugin and that’s why it allows you to encrypt the backup of the data and send it over to cloud storage. Backup scheduling is another cool feature offered by this plugin. With this feature, you will be able to backup and restore your website’s data on an appropriate schedule with just a single click. Scheduled backup can be fixed for every 4, 8, 12 hours or on a daily, weekly, and fortnight basis. Besides these features, UpdraftPlus also performs cloning, backup, and incremental backup ( A feature that lets you back up the changes to your files that have been made since the previous backup) as well.

GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin With the emergence of the GDPR law, it has been made compulsory for all websites serving EU citizens to comply with the cookie law. Cookie compliance is a major part of it as well. And it is one of the best GDPR plugins available to help you with the cookie compliance of your WordPress website. This plugin is available in both its free and premium versions. It helps you meet every criterion put forward by GDPR for cookie compliance such as definite user consent, cookie categorization, consent audit log, consent withdrawal, etc. Customizable cookie banners are one of the best features of this plugin which lets you create amazing cookie banners that match your website’s style. Cookie category management, Granular cookie opt-in settings, Location-based exclusion of cookie notice, etc are awesome features included in its premium version that enable smooth cookie compliance of your website.

Yoast SEO Yoast SEO is a must-have plugin for your website if you want your website to have great results in google ranking. This plugin will take care of everything related to the search engine optimization of your site’s content. Even its free version is a huge help in managing your site’s SEO as it comes with powerful features including the option to add a meta description, focus keyword, option to preview how your content appears on both mobile & desktop screens, your content’s readability and SEO analysis, etc. Its premium version is even more powerful with additional features including the option to add multiple keywords on your article so that your content is more visible during a keyword search. Content insights feature is a powerful one that lists 5 words or phrases you use the most on your page, to check if they’re a match with your chosen keywords. With Yoast, you never have to worry about your website’s visitors ending up on a 404 page as it would be taken care of by the Redirect manager.

Google Analytics by Monster Insights Adding a Google Analytics plugin to your website is very useful in keeping track of your website’s performance. It is the easiest way to connect Google Analytics with your website which, in turn, helps you hugely in improving your site’s performance gradually. Although you can connect Google Analytics to your site manually it takes days to weeks for its set up. With the plugin, you can do the same in minutes and view the reports inside WordPress. With this plugin, you get to know precisely how people find your website, what keywords they search for, what did they click on your site, how long they stayed on your site, and more. Real-time statistics are another great feature this plugin offers you that allows you to have greater insight into your website. Monster insights let you know exactly which content of your website/blog gets more visitors so you can improve it further for higher conversion rates. This plugin is a superb tracking machine that performs the tracking of your site’s inbound & outbound links, demographics & interests of your audience, popular sections (posts, pages) of your website, forms, referrals, Ads, file download, etc., to provide you with some valuable reports. Hence, Google Analytics is indeed a must-have plugin for your WordPress website if you want it to perform well.

Nextend Social Login Nextend Social login plugin is the simplest way to employ social logging on your WordPress website. These days social login has become a popular way to log in/register to a website as it doesn’t require you to fill up a long registration form or to remember a username & password combination. This plugin supports all popular social login providers including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, VKontakte, PayPal, Disqus, etc. It is packed with many more powerful features including request E-mail feature (an option to request your users for their email addresses since it may not be accessible from all the social providers), and customizable login layout & style to give your site’s login buttons the exact look you need. With Nextend you will give your users/visitors an easy way to log in and share their opinion. This will help you in getting more comments on your website. You can also restrict social login for specific user roles ie; you can force admins to log in with their password. All these above features make Nextend social login the best choice for a social login plugin.