5 Best WordPress Plugins 2019

8 min readOct 4, 2019

Every WordPress designer or agency will have their favourite stack of WordPress plugins. All tried and tested must-haves that they install each and every time they set up a WordPress website. Here is the list of our favourite 5 WordPress plugins.

None of our picks are determined by any affiliate links. All choices are 100% genuine and honest.

Security

Every WordPress installation needs to be protected. Every site we manage gets hit with hacking attempts every single day. Therefore, we know that we need to provide layers of protection.

Our hosting comes with complex spam filters, firewalls and hefty protection from hacking and DDoS attacks. On top of that, we use Cloudflare as an extra layer of security and an extra firewall to keep out the bad guys.

At WordPress level, we use Wordfence. There are loads of excellent WordPress security plugins out there and over time I have tried and tested all of them. After much testing, I’ve come to the considered conclusion that Wordfence is the best.

From the long list of great security plugins, I strongly recommend Wordfence due to its ease of use, robust security features and how you can leave it on auto-pilot and not need to nurture it.

Wordfence, much like other plugins on this list, has a freemium model. You can install the free version or pay for the feature-richer premium version. Luckily, Wordfence is not one of those freemium plugins that offers an inadequate free plugin. The free version will provide a more than a robust option.

One feature you don’t get with Wordfence is the ability to move the WP login page. As standard, all WordPress websites have the same location for their login page. This means hackers know exactly where to go to start knocking on your site’s back door.

The approach from Wordfence is to provide such strong login protection that you won’t need to move the login page. After testing a heavy-traffic website with and without the default login page URL, I found a big drop in hacking attempts when the login page was relocated. As such, we also recommend WPS Limit Login as an additional security plugin to further protect your website.

Backup

Every website needs security and every website also needs a viable backup plugin as well.

The purpose of a backup plugin is to save a copy of your website every day, week or month (depending on how often you change content). This ensures that if anything goes wrong you can easily reinstall your WordPress website without any stress.

Whilst working with a multisite installation of WordPress, I spent weeks testing every major free backup plugin. What I found was that some offered poor choices of where you could store your backups and some plugins didn’t even work!

After much testing, I found that UpdraftPlus offers by far the best free backup plugin. Firstly, you can choose when and how often you want to create a backup. Whilst building a new site we’ll back it up daily and once it’s live move it to weekly or monthly backups.

Yes, there is a premium version. Yes, the free version works perfectly.

The choice of where you can store your backups is great. With the free UpdraftPlus plugin you can sync your backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, or email. As you can get free Dropbox and Google Drive accounts, you can easily host your site backups for free.

What’s the point, though? Doesn’t hosting provide backups? Any decent hosting account provides daily or weekly backups of your website content. So why use UpdraftPlus? In the past, I’ve had two sites needing a backup to be restored to fix a broken website. With one, I relied on my hosting account to restore files from a previous backup. This process took around an hour and was stressful whilst waiting. With another, I pressed the button to restore a site from a saved UpdraftPlus backup. 1 minute later the website was back online and working perfectly.

Page Builder

Not everyone uses a page builder, not everyone likes the idea of page builders. We exclusively use Elementor and love it.

The problem with WordPress has been that it’s never really been easy for non-techy people to build websites. Many people have profited from building WordPress websites. Many from offering WordPress training.

Over the past couple of years, the tide has turned and increasingly WordPress is awash with drag and drop page builders. Each page builder offers a chance for the average person to build their own website. Or it certainly provides the opportunity for the average person to edit and maintain their WordPress website once it’s been built with a page builder.

At the point of writing this, we have a choice of Beaver Builder, Divi, Brizy, Oxygen and WP Bakery, amongst others. The most popular page builder is, of course, Elementor.

Rest-assured I have tested all of those page builders before concluding that Elementor is by far the best. Full of features and really easy to use, Elementor is a no-brainer.

The free version will allow you to easily build websites for yourself and others. However, to be able to create more complex sites or complete themes, you will need to pay for the Pro version of Elementor.

I can’t express enough in a blog how much I love Elementor compared to other systems and platforms I’ve used before to build websites.

While Elementor comes with so many excellent features, both for free and with the inexpensive pro version, there is a growing world of add-ons and additional plugins to expand Elementor. Many free plugins offer a great many options. If you want extensive additional options, the Crocoblock suite of premium plugins helps you create dynamic, complex websites.

Image optimisation

Don’t even think of building a website without installing an image optimisation plugin before starting. I’ve spent a bit of time recently fixing slow-loading websites and the number 1 reason is people using massive, bulking images. Nothing will cripple your page loading as simple as one image!

The purpose of an image optimisation plugin is to strip out as much data from your photos or images as possible. A photo taken on an iPhone will store the location, type of phone and user in the photo’s data. Why? An image optimisation plugin will get rid of every unnecessary kilobyte of data.

That’s not all, these plugins will also ensure your photo will load at the best size. Got a photo that’s 4000 pixels by 3000 pixels? It would need to be less than half that size at most for any website.

Once again, there are loads of great image optimisation plugins out there. We use and recommend ShortPixel. While there is a cost to using ShortPixel, I have been blown away by how good it is. Not only does it compress and resize photos, but it also stores photos on their own content delivery network (CDN), thus speeding up the loading of your images. Turning on ShortPixel significantly reduces the loading time of any website.

If you don’t want to spend money on a plugin, then go for Optimole. Their plugin offers much the same options as ShortPixel and is free for up to 5000 website visitors per month.

https://www.tinybluerocket.co.uk/services/wordpress-web-design/

SEO

Increasingly, websites live and die by their search engine optimisation (SEO). A decent SEO plugin will help your site be noticed and rank well in Google. Having an SEO plugin is, again, a no-brainer.

By far the most popular free SEO plugin is Yoast. The free version of their plugin is a typical freemium plugin. It offers just enough features to work successfully, but leaves you tantalisingly close from enough features, so you feel you have to pay for the premium version.

Yoast has been our choice for a while, but we are starting to move away and towards SEOPress. The free SEOPress plugin offers more features than Yoast and also offers some features you only get in the paid version of Yoast.

Moving away from the most popular is risky because you feel like the most popular is the most popular by being the best.

Much like Yoast, SEOPress also offers a premium, paid version. The difference is that SEOPress offers all premium features for an unlimited number of website for only $39 per year.

Yoast’s premium plugin is £79 (plus VAT) per year. However, this doesn’t include local SEO or WooCommerce SEO. To add those features you’d have to pay an additional £69+VAT per year for local SEO and £49+VAT for the WooCommerce plugin. £197 plus VAT per year. All of that cost is only for one website.

While Yoast is amazing, the cost alone will leave you lagging behind the richer businesses who can already afford such premium SEO support. SEOPress seems to be offering a cheaper premium plugin with more features and for more websites.

An extra 6th plugin

If you own or manage more than one WordPress website you will know how frustrating it is to keep logging in to each website to run updates and look after them.

Instead of the hassle, we recommend ManageWP. You can manage multiple websites from one central dashboard, all for free. You can pay extra to add more features, like backups, speed monitoring or SEO support. However, you don’t need to pay for anything.

ManageWP will install their free plugin on any site you manage, and this will help you control all of your websites effortlessly.

In summary

Before you start building your next WordPress website, take the time to install your own stack of must-have plugins. I hope you enjoyed my/our list of plugins. Let’s see who makes the list in 2020!