Every new WordPress website needs some plugins depending on the theme. Some premium themes have most of these features in their theme. However, if you are using a free theme, you should install these basic plugins on your WordPress installation. These plugins ensure that your website is safe, and is optimized for search engines.
Maintenance Mode
A website needs regular updates to adjust layout, design, and install other plugins depending on your reader’s feedback. Some of these installations can take a few seconds, while other changes to your website may need more than an hour. Making changes to a live website can cause disruption for you website visitors. Putting up an ‘Under Maintenance’ message gives a clear indication and allows you to work on your website at your own pace.
The Maintenance Mode plugin helps you put a customized message and page for your website. You can announce changes or the day your website will be launched on this page.
WordFence
Being an open source system, WordPress is constantly exposed to different types of attacks. WordFence helps you secure your website against unauthorized login attempts and monitor any malicious activity on your website. You can examine the login attempts from unfamiliar IP addresses and unauthorized login ids and block these IP addresses. Install this plugin before you start working on your website to safeguard your content and protect your website from malicious attacks.
WordPressSEO by Yoast
Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the key factors in online visibility. Most of the people search for information rather than browse for it on different directories. To ensure that your fabulous content is discovered, you need to make your website easy on the search engines. Although the algorithms used by Google and others are changing constantly, on-page SEO is essential.
The WordPresSEO plugin provides you with the right tools and asks the right questions to optimize your content for the keyword that you want. The plugin also helps you generate sitemaps that you can submit to search engines and integrates with your social media accounts.
W3 Total Cache
Website’s loading speed is not only an important signal for search engine ranking. A slow website can frustrate your readers and they might just move on to the next website if your website doesn’t load in time.
W3 Total Cache helps you cache your static pages such as Java scripts and CSS that do not change frequently. With this feature, the website then does not request this information on every page visit and reduces the website loading time for your reader.
I believe these plugins are absolutely necessary to put your WordPress website online and have it smoothly function. What other plugins do you find all WordPress websites should have?