Top 7 Best WordPress Plugins for a Brand-New WordPress Website

With over 50,000 WordPress plugins available in the repository, it’s easy to ask yourself, “which are the best WordPress plugins for a new website?” No matter what your site is about or what industry you’re in, there are several great, popular plugins that are worth a look. You can have form plugins, SEO plugins and much more, but no one ever really covers the plugins you should install if your site has just launched on the web.

So what are the best WordPress plugins for a brand new website? Let’s take a closer look:

Best WordPress Security Plugin: Sucuri

What’s the first thing you do when you get a new computer? You install an antivirus and anti-malware program to protect yourself. The same applies for your WordPress website, and there’s perhaps no better WordPress plugin against hacking than Sucuri.

Sucuri scans your website thoroughly and efficiently in the background, preventing a wide range of attacks and hardening your WordPress website against common scripting and other vulnerabilities. That alone should make it the first plugin to install once you’ve launched your WordPress site.

Best WordPress Backup Plugin: UpdraftPlus

The second most important plugin to install after you’ve got your anti-malware/hacking/virus bases covered is a backup plugin. Most WordPress backup plugins only backup part of the files and store it on your site. If you get hacked, or something happens with your web host, you won’t be able to retrieve your files, which is why UpdraftPlus is such a valuable WordPress backup plugin.

Save your WordPress backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, email, hard drive and many other locations so you never have to worry about if your site is protected and archived.

Best WordPress Caching Plugin: WP Super Cache

After you’ve squared away your security and your backup, the next thing you’ll want to concentrate on is speed, and there’s no better (and FREE) plugin to speed up your site than the highly popular WP Super Cache.

Without disturbing the integrity or beauty of your site, WP Super Cache makes it load faster by optimizing many different systems, so that you enjoy a noticeable increase in page speed. And pages that load faster keep visitors engaged longer, which can result in better clicks and conversions.

Best WordPress Plugin for Analytics: MonsterInsights

Most websites rely on Google Analytics for details about their traffic and users. But by default, Google Analytics isn’t the most user-friendly option out there. Enter MonsterInsights. Designed to make Google Analytics much easier to understand, as well as deliver intuitive and actionable details and insights that make it easy for you to understand where your traffic is coming from, what visitors are interacting with, and much more.

The Lite version of MonsterInsights is free, but if you want even more features, there’s a premium upgraded version that delivers much more than the Lite one, so it’s definitely worth investing in if you want to learn more about your traffic.

Best WordPress Plugin for SEO: Yoast SEO

Well known and installed on millions of websites, Yoast is a great and powerful plugin that “bolts on” to your posts and tells you how to best optimize them. You first choose a focus keyword (whatever keyword you want to target), and Yoast goes to work, analyzing the post for things like readability, search engine “crawlability”, optimized title and meta tags and much more. It’s a great, well-rounded plugin that is a must-have for every WordPress website owner.

Even if you don’t know much about SEO, this plugin will walk you through the basics to ensuring that every post is well-optimized.

Best WordPress Plugin for Making Customizations to Your CSS: SiteOrigin CSS

Ever wished you could make changes to things like font colors, link colors, spacing and other design features of your site without having to call on your developer every time you need a change? SiteOrigin CSS is here to save you! This versatile plugin lets you make changes to the CSS code of your website (responsible for the design and layout of your pages), but you don’t have to touch a single line of code.

Plus, you can see exactly how your changes impact your site before you save the results, so you can be sure it’s exactly what you want!

Best WordPress Plugin to Make Simple Changes: Insert Headers and Footers

In addition to making edits to your own CSS, have you ever wanted to make simple changes to the headers and footers of your WordPress theme, to insert code for things like the Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics? Don’t call your developer! Just install this plugin and you can instantly copy and paste relevant code right into the perfect spot where it needs to be to start tracking ad performance, analytics and more.

Insert Headers and Footers makes updates to your code for you, without you having to try and find it or deal with overwriting it by accident and breaking the layout. Don’t risk it! Install this plugin and add your own code easily and efficiently.

Choosing the Best Plugins for Your WordPress Website

The bottom line is that when it comes to installing plugins for WordPress, more is not necessarily better. Sites can quickly become bloated with all kinds of plugins that can in turn cause conflicts with each other and within the core code itself, which makes for a much slower loading website.

And while there are plenty of WordPress plugins for every conceivable thing you want to create with the site (including galleries, live chat, email marketing and more), when you’re just starting out with WordPress, the last thing you want is to be overwhelmed. By installing these plugins, you’ll have a solid starting place to build upon your WordPress site without worrying about security hacks, complicated coding, backup issues and more.

If you’re looking for a great way to maintain your site as well as consistently improve the speed and more efficiently manage your WordPress website, there’s no better choice than to work with WP Dandy. Using best-in-class optimization techniques, a robust maintenance control panel and intuitive simplicity, we make WordPress maintenance easy and hassle-free.

WP Dandy can help you maintain a WordPress blog easily and effectively while keeping all of your tasks organized and making sure your blog performs at its peak!