Which WordPress plug-ins should I install?

Wordpress plugins are both the greatest strength and weakness of Wordpress itself. At the time of writing, it's estimated that over 27% of the web is driven by Wordpress. As a result of it's popularity, there are over 50,000 separate plugins, each doing something different, giving you instant access to a very rich repository of features at little or no cost. However, because these plugins are often written by other developers, they aren't necessarily as secure as they need to be. There are often many plugins that do very similar things to others making all of this a bit of a minefield for Wordpress website owners to navigate.

As part of our managed Wordpress hosting service, we carefully test and vet every plugin we make available, ensuring that none of these leave your website vulnerable to attack.

SEO Wordpress Plugins

There are a few good plugins we can recommend here: Wordpress SEO by Yoast is a nice all-in-one SEO 'Swiss army knife' that not only allows you to set titles and meta tags of pages, but also includes nice tools for testing and measuring content keyword densities, links and solving other simple SEO issues such as non-canonical redirects and sitemaps. Google XML Sitemaps is also a nice plugin which includes a whole host of  configurable options.

Caching and Performance Wordpress Plugins

Our network is already running optimised caching so you don't need any additional caching plugins, in fact they will actually slow your site down with us! If we spot any, they will be removed. Caching can dramatically speed up the time it takes for pages to load so we bake it in for you.

Jetpack by Wordpress is another great optimising tool which includes a suite of powerful features such as enhanced security, improved performance and visitor engagement features.

Contact Forms

One of the better contact form plugins for Wordpress is Contact Form 7, this plugin is extremely flexible, allowing you to create a whole range of contact forms with different appearances and for different purposes. It comes with anti spam support for Google Captcha and Akismet with advanced filtering options to help limit spam. There are newer and more friendly ones out there, however this is the original and still seen to be the best.

Anti Spam

Akismet is a fairly well established, and extremely effective spam-killer. This plugin will help avoid content spam from comments on your blog posts, and prevent many of those pesky spambot registrations and enquiries you may be getting from contact forms.

There are literally tens of thousands of other Wordpress plugins out there - do you feel there are any we've missed off this list? What are your favourites?

Simplepage hosting have a rigorous vetting procedure for plugins: we're careful to fully test and check each before we make it available through our websites, meaning you can be confident your website is both feature rich and safe.

We also have a list of banned plugins upon our network - contact support if you have any questions.

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