it's important to know which wordpress plug-ins are useful to you

4 Plug-ins to Add to Your WordPress Website Today

There are thousands of plug-ins you can add to your WordPress website. It may be beneficial to add dozens of them in the long-run, but the process of narrowing down the most beneficial ones depends on your business and your budget. However, these four plug-ins are pretty universally helpful and don’t require a huge budget to purchase.

1. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a caching plug-in that will help speed up your website. For optimizing the speed of your website, it is one of the best plug-ins available, and the price is reasonable, starting at $49.

It includes these features:

  • Lazy loading
  • Minification of HTMl/Javascript, etc.
  • Defer Javascript loading
  • Integrations with popular content delivery networks (CDNs)
  • Database and Google Fonts Optimization

Some WordPress plug-ins are really challenging to set up, but this one is one of the more user-friendly options for caching/speed optimization. Keep in mind that if you use a host with its own caching plug-in, you won’t need WP Rocket.

2. Sucuri

Unfortunately, there are people with bad intentions who will try to break into your website. Bots are also a threat to the safety of websites. Investing in a website security platform like Sucuri is prudent in the current moment. Sucuri is a great option because it offers these features:

  • Cloud-based web application firewall that filters traffic
  • Virtual patching against security vulnerabilities
  • Malware scanning and removal
  • Blacklist monitoring
  • Mitigation against distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attacks
  • Content delivery network to reduce server load and improve page load times

Sucuri also offers a caching plugin that will speed up your website, in addition to improving its security. Sucuri offers you the option to stop anyone from logging into your website unless you have whitelisted their IP address first. This prevents a lot of potential security breaches and attempts from hackers. Sucuri’s basic plan starts at $199.99 per year.

On top of a website security platform, it’s a good idea to install the free Login No Catcha reCAPTCHA plug-in as well. This will add a Captcha box to your log-in page and can stop most brute force log-in attempts.

3. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is a back-up plug-in. It’s scary to imagine publishing content on your website for many years, only to lose it in a manner of seconds. UpdraftPlus will back up your entire website and save it on a cloud. Here are some of UpdraftPlus’s most important features:

  • Backup your database and files with ease
  • Restore your website with the click of a button
  • Send your backups to cloud platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, etc.
  • Send your backups via email, or via file transfer protocol (FTP)

Even though many hosts offer their own backup services, you should also use backup services that you control. With UpdraftPlus, you can back up your entire blog and send it to yourself via Dropbox or Google Drive. Plus, it’s free!

BlogVault is another back-up service. It’s not free but the performance is better than UpdraftPlus because their back-ups are run incrementally and they are run on BlogVault’s servers (not your server).

4. All In One SEO

When it comes to SEO, there are a plethora of options for plug-ins. Some of the most useful features of All In One SEO plug-in are:

  • Increased post-level control over SEO settings: With All In One SEO, you can create a specific, unique title for each search engine, no-index a page, and customize the meta description for every post.
  • XML Sitemap: Submit this to search engines to help get your content indexed.
  • Control how taxonomies are indexed: If it doesn’t make sense for your tags or categories to be indexed by Google, you can no-index them.
  • Image attachment page redirects: WordPress creates a new page for each image, which is not necessary. You can redirect these pages to the original post where the images were added.

You can install a free version of All In One SEO, and paid plans start at $97. Yoast SEO is another good option for adding additional SEO features to each of your posts/pages.