WordPress Plugins That Are Essential in 2024

The right fusion of WordPress plugins can boost your website, add useful utility, and offer a great experience for you and your visitors. Still, with close to 60,000 plugins in the official plugin collection, it can be challenging to know which to choose.

Essential WordPress Plugins Every Website Must Have

1. A Backup And Security Plugin Like Jetpack

Security and routine backups are crucial for all websites, Eventually if your site ever gets hacked, you risk losing valuable site and customer data, which could damage your esteem and be expensive to fix. An essential step to ensure your website is secure is to use a top WordPress security plugin, like Jetpack Security.

Jetpack security delivers a complete selection of security aspects in one simple package. It’s a segment of the jetpack. It assures your website is protected from malicious logins via raw power defense and two-factor authentication.

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Key Features of Jetpack Security

• Automatic downtime monitoring and alert
  Brute force attack protection
• Web application firewall (WAF)
• Two-factor authentication
• Automatic plugin update
• Automatic malware scanning
• Automatic and on-demand backup of your files and database
• One-click restores from backups 
• Automatic spam protection

2. WP Contact Form

Contact Forms are an important addition to any WordPress website, as they let your visitors get in touch with you in a user-friendly way. WordPress doesn’t include embedded form functionality, so a tool like WP form is a must-have plugin for every WordPress site. 

Key Features of WP Contact Forms

• Pre-built templates to create a contact form
• Responsive form design 
• CAPTCHA support
• Drag and drop form builder
• Email notification after form submission
• Multi-page form (premium only)
• Survey and poll functionality
• Integration with payment provider (premium only)

3. Anti-spam plugins like Akismet

All websites are aimed at bots that creep the internet and try to send spam via comments and form submissions. All anti-spam tools like Akismet are crucial plugins for every website.

Akismet is used by millions of websites, making it one of the most popular WordPress plugins. It helps you to keep spam out of your WordPress comment section by automatically analyzing comments and filtering out ones that look like spam.

Key Features of Jetpack Akismet

• Automatically check all comments for spam
• Comments status histories for each comment
• Displays the number of improved comments for each user
• Automatically deletes to worst spam

4. An SEO Plugin Like Yoast SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital way to attract visitors to your website. SEO can be confusing, but a plugin like Yoast SEO can help analyze your content and provide guidance on improving it in line with best practices.

Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins in WordPress and provides a wide range of features to simplify optimizing your page and posts. It includes a range of templates for all your important titles and meta description, and will automatically analyze your content, for both usability and keyword usage.

Key Features of Yoast SEO

• Analyze your page and post for SEO
• Provide internal linking suggestions (Premium)
• A readability check
• Updates to maintain any changes to Google’s algorithm
• The ability to create custom page titles and meta descriptions
• Generates XML sitemaps
• Open Graph support

5. A lead generation plugin like OptinMonster

A lead generation tool is a vital plugin for most WordPress sites as it helps you turn your website visitors into email subscribers and customers.
It supports all your lead generation needs and allows you to create pop-up forms, notification bars, count-down timers, slide-in notifications, and coupon wheels using a drag-and-drop builder. You can add any information you wish to visitors, capture emails for your email marketing software, encourage people to create an account, or offer coupons.

Key Features of OptinMonster

• A wide range of styles for your campaign, including popups, timers, welcome gates, slide-in, and coupon wheels.
• The ability to set different triggers for your popups
• A/B testing which allows you to try different content and see what works (Premium only)
• Display different popups to different groups of visitors
• Responsive and mobile-friendly
• Integration with a wide range of email marketing software
• Abandoned cart and form targeting (Premium only)
• On-site targeting (Premium only)

6. A WordPress CRM like Jetpack CRM

Running an online business can sometimes feel intense, with a confusing amount of information and tasks to stay on top of. A CRM plugin, like Jetpack CRM, can help you manage your key business information, customers, and tasks so you can grow your business. You can see specific information about your contacts and customers and keep observing their touch points and steps.

Jetpack CRM is built by automatic, the team behind WordPress.com, meaning it works seamlessly with the tools you already use including WooCommerce. You can see your business information and track your progress through Jetpack CRM, which displays important information, including contact, sales funnel performance, and revenue snapshots.

Key Features of Jetpack CRM

• Support for quotes and invoices
• Client portals for your customers to pay invoices, complete tasks, and access their files
• Unlimited team members, along with user roles and permissions for each member
• Support for member templates, documents, and invoices
• A dashboard that shows you all your important sales information in one place
• Storage for multiple contacts for each company
• The ability to call clients and emails directly from your dashboard
• Customer segmentation
• Integration with a wide range of tools
• Tools to create sales and funnels

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7. An Ecommerce plugin like WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the World’s most popular, open-source eCommerce platform, and must have a WordPress plugin for anyone wanting to sell on their website.

WooCommerce turns your site into a fully functional online store, allowing you to sell anything, including digital files, memberships, and physical products. Installing WooCommerce automatically creates everything you need for your store, including the product page, shopping carts, and the checkout process.

Key Features of WooCommerce

• The ability to sell physical products, digital downloads, dropshipping items, booking, services and more
• Custom shipping solution
• Detailed payment options
• Rating and reviews
• Product sorting and filtering
• A mobile app, so you can manage your site from anywhere 

8. A legal page builder like WP AutoTerms

Websites must follow various legal and data protection requirements like GDPR and CCPA. These requirements are often confusing, but a legal page builder can quickly create your website’s policies.

WP AutoTerms is a must-have WordPress plugin, as it helps you to create legal agreements for your website, including privacy policies, terms of service, and acceptable use policies.

Key Features of WP AutoTerms

• A generator for privacy policies, cookie policies, and terms and conditions agreements
• The ability to create custom pages for your policies
• User notifications when you update your policies
• GDPR-Compliant privacy and cookie policy pages (Premium only)
• Cookie consent notices (Premium only)
• Disclaimers for affiliates (Premium only)

9. A redirect plugin like Redirection

Broken links can harm your website. Not only can they lead to your visitors experiencing 404 pages, but they can also affect your search engine rankings. A redirection plugin is an important addition to any WordPress website, as it helps you to ensure that if a visitor clicks on an out-of-date link, they’re redirected to a new location where they can continue browsing.

With this plugin, you can set global redirects, along with ones based on certain conditions, such as the visitor’s login status or role. You can use the redirection logins feature to view how often each redirection occurs on your website.

Key Features of Redirection

• Manual redirects
• Automated redirects when permalinks have changed
• Conditional redirects
• 404 error monitoring
• Redirect logging

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