6 WordPress Plugins We Use for All Our Websites
Our team has been proudly building websites for over a decade. In that time, we’ve developed a strong list of our favorite time-tested plugins. Here are the six that we use on almost every single website we build – for ourselves and for clients!
WP Rocket for Speed and Caching
It’s important to us that every site we launch is running at peak performance. WP Rocket is our favorite choice for that goal. In the past few years we’ve experimented with a few alternatives and found conflicts, glitches, and bugs. Especially when it comes to caching. WP Rocket has been reliable for every site we’ve used it on. It’s helped us get sites from a 60% to 98% performance score on PageSpeed Insights.
We love WP Rocket because it’s:
- Reliable
- Effective
- Easy to set up
- Great for small sites, or scaled ones
Yoast SEO for Deep Optimization Power
On every site we build, we aim for at least bare minimum best SEO practices, custom meta titles and descriptions. And for sites that we manage via SEOProGeeks.io, it’s essential that the site is optimized in every single way possible.
Yoast allows us to do just that. It scales with us so that no matter the size of the site, we can optimize it the way we need to. Especially with Pro features, we can have immense control over even the most technical optimizations.
We love Yoast SEO because it’s:
- Highly visual
- Easy for clients to update
- Free to start with
- Worth it to update to Pro when more technical changes are needed
Akismet to Manage Spam
As the internet becomes more and more ingrained in our society, and as bots and AI get smarter, spam becomes more and more dangerous. Many of our sites have blogs that encourage people to join the conversation in a comment.
We need to ensure that spam comments never cause an issue. Akismet allows us to do that automatically. Once we set it up to remove spam comments automatically, we basically never have to look at it again.
We love Akismet because it’s:
- Quick and easy to set up
- Effective and fast
- Great for peace of mind
WP Mail SMTP to Keep Emails Running
E-mail is one of the more frustrating things about WordPress websites. It can be complicated, confusing, and hard to troubleshoot. WP Mail SMTP is a fantastic, free plugin that helps prevent issues with emails before they appear. It helps fix email issues by reconfiguring WordPress to use a proper SMTP – meaning you don’t have to!
We love WP Mail SMTP because:
- It’s free to get started
- The steps for set up are clear
- The documentation is extremely helpful
- We almost never experience an issue once it’s set up
Download WP Mail SMTP for free
ManageWP/WP Umbrella for Management
We cheated a little and combined these two into one. Our site maintenance stack consists mainly of ManageWP and WP Umbrella. We use them for different purposes and love them both. You can learn all about what we like about these tools in our site management tool comparison post.
But as for the plugins themselves: you set them up once, connect them to the tool with a few clicks, and walk away! They just exist to connect your site to the tool, and as a result they are tiny (592 KB and 962 KB respectively). Compared to a robust plugin like Yoast, they barely take up any additional space.
We love the ManageWP and WP Umbrella plugins because:
- They are small and lean
- They’re basically a one-click connection to our favorite tools
- They’re updated pretty frequently, indicating that their support teams are on their game!
WebP Enforcer to Keep Images Optimized
This is a special one, because it was developed in-house! We wanted a way to make sure that all the images on a site were in WebP format before being uploaded to the media library. That way it wasn’t necessary to compress them after the fact.
One of our developers – Zeeshan Mujtaba – created this simple and sweet plugin that prevents someone from uploading an image media file to the library that isn’t WebP. It gives you a friendly reminder to optimize first, then come back and upload. Great for clients who don’t have these technical considerations top of mind.
We love WebP Enforcer because:
- It was created to solve a specific problem we had
- It’s very simple, requiring no configuration or settings
- It serves a very powerful purpose in a very small package
What are your favorite WordPress plugins that you can’t launch without?
