1. Antispam Bee

Antispam Bee blocks spam comments and trackbacks effectively, without captchas and without sending personal information to third party services. It is free of charge, ad-free and 100% GDPR compliant.

2. Autoptimize

Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. You can optimize and lazy-load images (with support for WebP and AVIF formats), optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more. As such it can improve your site’s performance even when already on HTTP/2! There is extensive API available to enable you to tailor Autoptimize to each and every site’s specific needs.

3. iThemes Security 

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.

Most WordPress admins don’t know they’re vulnerable, but iThemes Security works to lock down WordPress, fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. With advanced features for experienced users, our WordPress security plugin can help harden WordPress.

4. Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth

Security, performance, marketing, and design tools — Jetpack is made by the WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic.

5. Rank Math – SEO Plugin for WordPress

SEO might be the best and most consistent source of traffic for one’s website, but it’s not without its quirks. The constant process of optimizing your posts can sometimes take more time than actually writing the content. If you always feel that you can do more on the SEO front for your website but don’t have the time, then Rank Math is what you’re looking for.

Its host of intelligent features brings top SEO capabilities in your hands that were previously out of reach. The smart automation features give you the power of an entire SEO team with just a few clicks. A well thought out design, powerful features, and years of development by the MyThemeShop squad make Rank Math a game-changing SEO plugin that will level the SEO playing field in your favor to help increase traffic.

6. Site Kit by Google

Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free.

7. Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images

Optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress & improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!

And whether you spell it ‘optimise’ or ‘optimize’, Smush will compress images without a visible drop in quality.

8. WordPress Website Tools Plugin – AddThis

Drive new traffic, engage your audience, and increase conversions with a powerful suite of customizable, self-service marketing tools.

Install the free AddThis plugin to activate:

• Share Buttons: Make it easy to spread your content around the web
• Link Promotion: Increase conversions and turn visitors into customers
• List Building: Generate leads and build your email subscriber list
• Follow Buttons: Grow your social media following and online community
• Related Posts: Recommend relevant content to boost visitor engagement

9. All-in-One WP Migration

This plugin exports your WordPress website including the database, media files, plugins and themes with no technical knowledge required.
Upload your site to a different location with a drag and drop in to WordPress.
There is an option to apply an unlimited number of find and replace operations on your database during the export process. The plugin will also fix any serialisation problems that occur during the find/replace operation.

Besides migration, I also use this plugin to backup my websites.

10. Post Views Counter

Post Views Counter allows you to display how many times a post, page, or custom post type had been viewed with this simple, fast, and easy to use the plugin.

What is in your list of must-have WordPress Plugins? Please share in the comments below.