The Essential Plugins for Every WordPress Website

Searching on Google for terms like ‘essential WordPress plugins’ and ‘WordPress plugins for every website’ would suggest that this has been done to death already. What I’ve found in many of the articles that I’ve read on the subject, though, is that some are just a big list of plugins that the writer thinks are great, while others are lists of 20 or more plugins that are ‘essential’ for every WordPress website – which I think is overkill.

What I wanted to do instead was to come up with a list of plugins that I install on every WordPress website I build for a client, not just some and not others.

There are, of course, hundreds of brilliant plugins that can add specific functionality that might be required on some websites and not others. The plugins listed below, however, are those that I currently user on every WordPress project.

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO replaced All In One SEO Pack as my SEO plugin of choice earlier this year. The list of features is huge and much of what this plugin covers can be found in Yoast’s Definitive Guide to WordPress SEO.

Perhaps the most impressive feature is the review that the plugin does of each post/page based on a supplied keyword and the advice it gives on how the content can be improved, based on things like keyword density, ease of reading and title tags.

Another great feature is the way the plugin allows the customisation of titles and meta descriptions. Displaying these exactly how they will appear in a Google search is a great feature for users who perhaps aren’t experts but who do want their website to be optimised.

Plugin Directory: WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

WP Minify

It’s important for the performance of a website to be as good as it can be – both from a visitors point of view and now also from a SEO perspective – as this article from SEOmoz describes.

Having a large number of HTML, CSS and Javascript files with lots of white space and comments can dramatically affect the performance of a website. The WP Minify plugin compresses all HTML, CSS and Javascript on a website into single files and runs them through a minify engine to remove unnecessary white space and comments.

Header references to CSS and Javascript are then replaced where necessary.

Plugin Directory: WP Minify

Google Analytics Dashboard

The Google Analytics Dashboard plugin allows data from Google Analytics to be shown in the dashboard area of the admin console.

This is great for providing analytics data to website owers without that having to access Google Analytics itself. Information such as top pages, top searches and top referrers is displayed.

It’s also possible to see a further breakdown of analytics data for posts and pages on the ‘All Posts’ and ‘All Pages’ areas of the admin console.

Plugin Directory: Google Analytics Dashboard

Hyper Cache

The Hyper Cache plugin generates static HTML files from a dynamic WordPress website.

When someone visits a website, the webserver will serve the static HTML rather than the heavier and slower WordPress PHP scripts. On smaller websites the difference here might not be too noticeable, but on more complex websites it can make a huge difference.

There are plenty of options for controlling how often cached pages remain valid and excluding pages from caching altogether – sometimes useful for a constantly changing home page.

On one particularly large WordPress website I worked on, I noticed a huge improvement in performance from using this plugin.

Plugin Directory: Hyper Cache

Custom Permalinks

It can be annoying at times when WordPress won’t let you have absolute control over your permalinks.

This lightweight plugin allows you to set permalinks on a per-page, per-post, per-category or per-tag basis.

For example, your .htaccess file defines your permalink structure to be ‘/category/postname’ but, in an one-off case, you want to drop the ‘category’ part. You wouldn’t usually be able to do this directly through WordPress, but this plugin makes it possible.

Plugin Directory: Custom Permalinks

WP DB Backup

Pretty straightforward – this plugin backs up your WordPress database and can be run manually or scheduled to run hourly, daily or weekly. The backup file can then be sent to an email address.

Plugin Directory: WP-DB-Backup