10 Plugins to Install on every WordPress Site

At the time of writing this all of these plugins are free, though some have a premium version. Many plugin developers rely on donations to support and advance their work. If you find a plugin really useful I’d definitely recommend saying thank you with a small donation.

1. Wordfence Security

   Essential. Wordfence is the most popular WordPress firewall and security scanner for a good reason. You’ll be amazed by how many attacks this plugin blocks. WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, which makes it a target, so make sure you protect your site.

2. Akismet Anti-Spam

   If you’re running a blog Akismet will check your comments and contact form submissions against a global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious or unwanted content.

3. Contact 7

   Build multiple contact forms and customise them with an array of handy features and settings.

4. Enable Media Replace

   When I first started using WordPress I was surprised that this functionality wasn’t built-in as standard, but it’s a quick fix with this plugin. Enable Media Replace allows you to replace an image or file in your media library by uploading a new file in its place. Simple, lightweight and effective.

5. Show IDs

   Simply activate this plugin and IDs will be displayed on all admin pages. Comes in really useful as a theme developer by making it easy to find the IDs of posts, pages, categories and so on.

6. Regenerate Thumbnails

   At some point you might want to change the default image sizes in WordPress, or add some of your own if you’re a theme developer. To change all of your preexisting images to match your new image sizes look no further than the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin by Alex Mills.

7. Post Expirator

   The Post Expirator plugin allows you to set expiration dates for both posts and pages. It’s a must if you need to display things like job vacancies.

8. WP Category Permalink

   If you have posts that are in multiple categories, but want to specify a primary category to use in your hyperlinks, then WP Category Permalinks can help you out. This plugin allows you to select a main category (or taxonomy) for your posts for nicer permalinks and SEO.

9. WP Media Category Management

   Want to organise your media library into categories to make things easier to find? This plugin eases the management of media categories and includes bulk actions.

10. Google XML Sitemaps

    Improve SEO on your website by creating XML sitemaps, which help search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to better index your site.

We hope you find this list of plugins useful. If you do, let us know in the comment below! If you have some recommendations of your own let us know what they are and how they’ve helped you.