11 WordPress Plugins I put on every website I build

It’s easy to get lost in a WordPress website. With tens of thousands of plugins, how do you know which ones to use, which ones to trust, and which ones to ignore?

I am not the only WordPress developer in Evansville, but I’ve worked with the best devs in the Tri-State. After working on hundreds of websites, here’s my list of WordPress plugins that I load on every site.

Granted, not every site has e-commerce or event scheduling needs, so I put those further down the list. (Also, I didn’t link to any of them on this page. I don’t like affiliate marketing because I don’t think it’s honest. So to keep some integrity here with my opinions, you’ll have to track them down yourself.)

Google Site Kit

You need to know what your marketing is doing. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are great analytics tools to learn the truth about your website performance. That is going to be on every website I touch, no matter what. Google Site Kit makes it very easy to install the Google tools and setup the accounts in GA4 and GSC. It even makes it easy to setup your Ads or Adsense if you’re going that route.

The dashboard view for the admins is also enough of a report for most people. If you really want more, you can click through and it will take you to GA proper where you can export Excel spreadsheets and all kinds of great data analytics.

Don’t drive blind. Get some analytics going on your website.

RankMath

Wait, what about Yoast? Yep, the underdogs have to work harder and that’s the card I’m playing here with Rankmath. You have to use it like a speedometer, not the whole self-driving car. The hints and suggestions to increase your SEO on each page and post are helpful, but sometimes you just gotta drive 40 in a 35.

You don’t have to follow everything it says. However, the open blanks and helpful tips are great. They help my clients feel confident about their posts. It’s not a replacement for good SEO work, it’s one of the tools you use to DO good SEO work.

Relevanssi

You have to have a site search on your site. It’s not just great for helping people find what they’re looking for. (Especially when you have an awful navigation menu.) But it’s also a data collection center.

Yep.

Even if you only use your site search to get data collection, it’s worth it. The built-in site search for WordPress is the minimum viable product. The real deal is a plugin like Relevanssi so you can look at the stats of what words people are searching for. You can also help people find things like eggcorns when they search for acorns.

Believe me, when you get into some technical sites where the first-time visitor is WAY top of funnel, that stuff comes in handy. Note that this doesn’t help your SEO. This is search that only happens on your site.

Gravity Forms

There are a lot of lightweight and free forms out there, but you can’t go wrong with the flexibility and ease of Gravity Forms.

It integrates well with PayPal for non-profit fundraising websites.

It leaves all the entries in a nice and tidy CSV file for end of the month reporting and follow up.

It keeps folks on your site and matches your branding.

And once I train my clients on how to build forms, they quit using their 8th Grade Bake Sale Google Forms.

Bring it all in house and keep it on your website like a professional should.

Gravity SMTP and Mailgun

These next two are combos that work together.

Every time somebody on your website fills out a form or buys something, it makes what is called transactional email. That means they are going to get an email about what they did and so are you, the site owner. These plugins handle the emailing instead of making your server do the work.

Your server is doing enough already, so adding emailing onto it can slow down your emails. Have you ever requested a password reset and it didn’t show up in your inbox for 8 minutes? Ugh. That’s just now how we do things in 2025, is it?

The other advantage of using Mailgun is that you separate your email server from your website. You get emails from companies all the time with an email address that doesn’t exactly match the company you requested it from. This prevents their company website from getting flagged as a spam site. If too many customers mark your transactional emails as spam, it could hurt your web traffic. Mailgun lets you setup a proxy emailing domain to protect your main domain.

This is cyber-security for your website as a preemptive measure, not a panicked after the fact fix.

Wordfence and Sucuri

What the heck? Don’t Wordfence and Sucuri do the same things? Not really. These help get your site secure and then keep it secure. You can tweak the settings to lock down your site if you have a lot of different access levels. You can monitor who logs in and does what in case you have a lot of cooks in your WordPress kitchen.

At the same time, you can get alerted whenever one of your plugins goes bad and generally keep up with the WP security world. Both helpful plugins. Both installed at the same time.

Some kind of caching

Ok, that’s not the name of a plugin. WP Supercache, WP Rocket, etc. are caching plugins. You can read about a bunch of them over here on the WPEngine site. I don’t waste time about which one is better than another. I go with whatever the host suggests. As you can see above, I linked to WP Engine’s article because I do most of my hosting with them. Their managed hosting includes caching and it does a good job.

I also like to install Autoptimize. It will minify your CSS files and generally make your site file sizes smaller. You have to watch it so it doesn’t break any custom plugins or custom style stuff. But most of the time it only improves your site speed. That’s important for SEO and your user experience. Nobody likes to wait for a page to load when they aren’t even sure they have the right site.

Woocommerce

This is how we make people give you money. Shopify and Wix and Squarespace are all emerging as easy ways to build a website so you can sell your stuff. The thing is, there are over one million more Woocommerce users than Shopify users.

1,000,000 more users. That’s a lot.

And don’t even get me started with plugins vs Add-ons. I saw some marketing for one of those other sites that said how easy it was and how you don’t have to use a bunch of plugins. That it “Just works.”

Then I set up an online class for a client and guess what we needed for the checkout to work right? “Add-ons” So much for “Just works.”

Woocommerce is a great way to take donations, collect deposits for event registrations, or even sell stuff online. That’s why it’s my tool of choice for my e-commerce and non-profit clients.

The events Calendar

Once I train my clients on writing and publishing their own blog posts, showing them how to schedule events is easy with The Events Calendar plugin. Facebook events are great for interruption marketing, but when you want to list all of the details about an event and increase your SEO, put that event on your site.

Your visitors can see all the important details (time, location, date, cost, target audience) in one place. You’d be surprised, how many people leave those important things out of the details. Using a plugin like The Events Calendar makes sure you keep a consistent look to all of your events. Plus, your visitors can easily subscribe to your calendar via Google or Apple, so they can keep up with your events.

How do you manage all of these plugins?

WordPress website maintenance is as important as your original web design. If you work with me and I host your site, you get all of the plugins above plus MainWP. MainWP monitors site uptime, backups, theme updates, WordPress core updates, and plugin updates.

Keeping your plugins updated is as important as using secure passwords and locking the doors of your office. Since WordPress is the most used website Content Management System (CMS) in the world, you are open to a lot of attacks. But since it’s also the most popular, you have the most developers working on it every day. MainWP let’s me keep your site updated on a daily basis so any alerts from WordFence are addressed quickly.

Don’t panic about WordPress plugins

When it comes to building your WordPress site, don’t get hung up on all the plugins. Just like a house, not all features are for everybody. I still don’t have a rabbit farm in my yard in downtown Evansville. That would not be appropriate at this time.

Not all plugins are needed for your website. But add what you need and test it for best results. It’s easy to have a high-performance website that also gets the marketing work done.