Looking for the best WordPress plugins to take your business to the next level, or simply boost your website? If that’s the case, don’t miss this list of 52 must-have plugins (based on our experience) for all your WordPress projects!

The WordPress Plugin Bible!

Welcome 😁

In 2023, there are over 60,000 free WordPress plugins, not counting the thousands of premium plugins.

There’s so much to choose from! It can therefore be difficult to find plugins that are really useful to your business, to improve the experience of your users and the productivity of your site administrators.

Choosing the best plugins is crucial for the speed, security andergonomics of your WordPress site.

What is a good WordPress plugin and how do I choose one?

To learn how to choose the best plugins, for each project and each specific need, don’t miss this dedicated post…

EasyHoster is much more than a hosting provider

We’re one of the few hosting companies to offer genuine complementary services to WordPress users.

Many of you open tickets with our technical support team to find out which plugins are essential for your WordPress site…

• for your referencing
• for your marketing
• for backups
• to improve your site’s loading speed
• for safety, etc.

Our specialists are trained in WordPress and are themselves passionate users of this exceptional CMS.

As a result, we regularly test new plugins, both free and premium.

EasyHoster’s priority is your success and nothing else!

So it’s only natural that our customers should benefit from our experience with WordPress plugins.

Whenever possible, it’s always a pleasure for our team to advise customers on the best technical solutions for their CMS, especially for WordPress and WooCommerce 🙂

Boost your WordPress site with the best plugins!

Having the best set of WordPress plugins and tools on your site can help you grow your online business significantly.

There are probably plugins out there that would be useful to you, but that you don’t even know exist!

In this guide to our knowledge base, we share with you the best of our long experience with WordPress plugins, through a selection of the best, most useful, popular and even indispensable extensions for your online business, in 2023!

And best of all, most of these plugins are 100% free!

What are the 52 best WordPress plugins of 2023?

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the most valuable tools you can install on your site. It’s an essential plugin for all your basic SEO optimizations.

Whether you’re a blogger or an SEO professional managing sites for clients, Yoast is a powerful tool that will make your content more understandable to search engines.

Yoast SEO can be installed on any self-hosted WordPress site. It’s one of the most comprehensive WordPress plugins for SEO, or at least it’s by far the most widely used. And it’s free!

You have the option of purchasing the Yoast SEO Premium extension, to add further functionality, but the most important features for your SEO are already part of the free plugin…

Yoast lets you easily control the titles and meta descriptions of your pages and articles. It allows you to define your target keywords and track the frequency with which they appear in your content.

Yoast also helps you generate your site map (sitemap.xml) and much more!

Under each of your pages or articles, you can also define a

It goes like this:

It’s also from this discreet interface that you can set your Open Graph tag data, to boost your online presence on Facebook, Twitter or even Google Discover, the new Eldorado in terms of organic traffic from Google!

Of course, like any popular solution, Yoast SEO is regularly the victim of criticism from the WordPress community. However, because of this same popularity and because of its “standard” aspect, Yoast SEO represents for us a sure value in the long term, for the SEO optimization of your WordPress and/or WooCommerce site.

2. Akismet Spam Protection

If you have a blog that’s open to comments, you’ll probably have noticed that you’re receiving a lot of SPAM. For example, you receive comments from people named “health insurance”, telling you that you’ve written an excellent article. And of course, your new reader doesn’t forget to sign off with a link to his or her website.

These are, of course, spammers using a bot (an automatic robot), hosted on a cheap server.

You probably want to focus on the important things, like writing quality content and growing your online business?

If you don’t take action to combat this “spamco” (comment spam), you can easily find yourself moderating hundreds of fake comments posted on your blog, and this work can take hours or even days!

Allowing false comments to accumulate will considerably burden your site’s database, and may eventually render your site unusable if overloaded.

Based on the incredible WordPress.com database and a gigantic blacklist, Akismet is without doubt the best plugin to protect you from spamco.

In fact, Akismet has been developed by WordPress’ parent company (Automattic Inc), to filter comments and backlinked spam, automatically, for you.

When you install WordPress, if you go to the “Extensions” section of your dashboard, you’ll notice that Akismet is already installed, but not yet activated. It comes with all basic WordPress installations. Simply activate and configure it.

To activate Akismet, you need to register on the Automattic website and obtain your personalized API key.

Pay attention! There is indeed a free plan for Akismet.

However, Automattic’s paid plans are more prominently displayed, while the free version is hidden at the bottom of the page. To get your free key, when you’re redirected to their website, keep your eyes peeled 😉

3. Divi Builder

The Divi Builder is the ideal tool to help you create graphically superb pages. Thanks to this page builder, when you create your website, you’ll be equipped with a visual editor that’s far superior to the standard WordPress publishing editor(Gutenberg).

Divi’s Page Builder can be mastered by web design professionals as well as amateurs who have never built a website before.

This tool gives everyone the power to create spectacular designs with surprising ease and efficiency, all based on a click-and-drag system and hundreds of pre-built templates from which you’re bound to find something to your liking.

Divi was previously known as “slow to load”, but is now one of the fastest WordPress themes, since its update to version 4.10. In fact, Divi is already announcing future performance enhancements in version 5!

If you would like to use the Divi theme and Divi Builder free of charge, you can subscribe to a turnkey website creation package from EasyHoster :

• Turnkey showcase site
• Turnkey e-commerce site

Divi is the best plugin for creating landing pages (sales pages)

Combined with good copywriting and a few marketing tricks, such as “urgency marketing” (e.g. evergreen counters, temporary promotions…), Divi offers the opportunity to build sales pages with formidable effectiveness for your visitor → customer conversion rate.

Where can I learn copywriting?

If you’d like to develop your copywriting skills and build landing pages that are as effective as they are attractive, take a look at PROduNum.com’s training course.

You will receive a 45% discount with the coupon code :
CLIENT-EASYHOSTER

Bonus: Hurry Timer plugin (not listed)

To place an evergreen counter (temporary promotion) on your WordPress or WooCommerce site, we recommend the excellent free plugin :

HurryTimer – An Scarcity and Urgency Countdown Timer for WordPress & WooCommerce

If you’d like to discover other themes, don’t miss our selection of the 25 Best WordPress Themes (the most popular). This article is regularly updated and is the French reference for choosing the best WordPress and/or WooCommerce theme for your project. We also talk about Page Builders…

4. Elementor

If you’re not convinced by Divi Builder, you’ll probably want to take a look at its direct competitor: Elementor!

The Elementor page builder is a little younger than Divi on the market, since Divi was launched in November 2013. Elementor, on the other hand, was launched 3 years later, in December 2016.

The secret ofElementor ‘s growth is probably to have released a free (basic) version of its page builder, with a limited number of features. This allows beginners to start building their site, at no extra cost. Then, when the need arises for advanced functionality, the user upgrades to the premium version of Elementor, which is unfortunately much more expensive than Divi overall.

In March 2021,Elementor ‘s agency rates were multiplied by 5!

In terms of ergonomics and ease of use, Elementor uses a sidebar of options. In our opinion, this is a little less intuitive and therefore reserved for users who are more familiar with computer tools.

The configuration of blocks and modules seems to us to be significantly more difficult to get to grips with than Divi.

Divi, for its part, has a minimalist interface, transparent to the designer and therefore very welcoming.

This more “visual” editor may bother geeks, precisely because of its very user-friendly, even childlike, but nonetheless powerful side :

In terms of functionality, the 2 page builders are neck and neck. When Elementor integrates an interesting feature, Divi is quick to catch up by integrating the equivalent option. And vice versa.

In the past, purists wanted to go for Elementor and its Hello Elementor theme, rather than Divi, to get a “lighter” Page Builder, with no graphical frills and better HTML source code purity. While designers were turning to Divi to create modern, graphically appealing pages more quickly, saving time that could be devoted to the design and marketing of their pages.

Since the Divi 4.10 performance update, there have been very few reasons to choose Elementor over Divi, other than a preference for the ergonomics of the page builder.

Alternatively, there’s also our ranking of Fastest Themes & Builders for WordPress, which you should refer to if you want to create a site with The Best Web Performance possible.

5. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is the village elder, the ancestor of contact form creation plugins.

It’s used by countless developers because it’s free and offers a wealth of advanced features.

At first glance, it’s clear that it’s not the easiest contact form plugin to use, nor the most ergonomic for beginners, but it offers the greatest flexibility and is also the most widely used plugin… 5 million users can’t be wrong.

Many advanced options are compatible with CF7 (Contact Form 7), either directly or via third-party extensions. For example, CF7 is compatible with MailChimp.

One of the biggest drawbacks of this plugin, for people creating their own website, is that there’s no visual builder. This makes it difficult to create forms for anyone unfamiliar with HTML and, above all, CSS.

However, a basic form is already created when the plugin is installed. You can then create additional forms based on the pre-configured example.

You will find a very complete documentation on how this plugin works, directly on the official website :
https://contactform7.com/docs/

6. WooCommerce

WooCommerce isn’t just another e-commerce plugin…

WooCommerce is the benchmark e-commerce plugin, powered by Automattic, the company behind WordPress!

It’s a universal solution with which you can sell anything: physical products as well as virtual ones; or services, or events…

Look no further… This is the essential plugin for setting up an e-commerce engine on WordPress!

From the outset, it simplifies the creation and management of an online store enormously, with a high degree of flexibility and a host of essential functions: inventory management, tax management, shipping and, of course, secure invoicing and payments. In fact, WooCommerce is compatible with the largest number of payment processors in the world. In other words, you won’t just be limited to the classics Stripe and PayPal, but will have access to all their competitors.

Is WooCommerce really free?

The cost of WooCommerce extensions is probably a major factor in your choice of WordPress plugin?

E-commerce plugins range from free to several thousand euros per year, but this price difference is not necessarily linked to the plugin’s power.

The first reason you should choose WooCommerce is that, in addition to being very powerful, it’s free. And free also means free and open!

Like WordPress, WooCommerce includes a rich set of features that can be extended with the addition of third-party plugins. WooCommerce is at the heart of a vast ecosystem of additional plugins. That’s where its power lies!

Some WooCommerce extensions are available for a fee on the official WooCommerce.com marketplace. However, these are third-party extensions that you will rarely need in a traditional e-commerce context. These ultra-premium plugins are best suited to large online stores. Not to mention the hundreds of free WooCommerce extensions available directly from WordPress.org. Not to mention the many inexpensive extensions available by searching for “WooCommerce” on a site like CodeCanyon.
You’ll discover many of them by carefully reading this ranking of the best WordPress (and WooCommerce) plugins, as a whole 😉

WooCommerce is an e-commerce engine that will keep pace with your life as an online merchant. It’s easy to start out with a small store and end up with one generating tens of thousands of euros a month. There are no limits with WooCommerce!

It is for this reason that it is still, to this day, the most widely used eCommerce engine in the world!

7. WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips

Every e-commerce store is obliged to send PDF invoices, issued in the correct format.

The WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips plugin is a must-have for your WooCommerce store. It automatically adds an invoice in PDF format to order confirmation e-mails sent to your customers, as well as to their member area. It includes a basic invoice template, which you can modify. You can also create your own invoice templates. What’s more, it lets you download and print invoices and delivery notes from your WordPress dashboard.

The free version of this plugin should be more than enough to get your store up and running, as the paid options are more of an accessory: sending invoices to Dropbox, creating invoice credit notes (for refunds), etc.

8. WPML

WPML is a plugin for making your WordPress site multilingual. It also allows you to optimize your site for SEO, in several languages!

You have total control over the appearance of your site’s URLs in different languages. In conjunction with Yoast SEO, you can define SEO meta-information for each translation.

Although WPML’s settings page can look like a gas factory, integrating translated content is quick and easy.

What’s the best free alternative to WPML?

The best free alternative to WPML is the Polylang plugin (+600,000 active installations).

However, WPML remains the benchmark, as it is the most widely used translation plugin for WordPress and the one offering the best compatibility with other extensions in the WordPress ecosystem.

WPML is once again, in our opinion, a safe bet for making your site multilingual!

As an EasyHoster customer, please do not hesitate to contact our support team about WPML.

9. Really Simple SSL

Almost everyone is familiar with the (green) padlock icon that appears next to the site URL in the Internet browser.

This icon, yes…

You can verify that a website uses SSL if its URL begins with HTTPS instead of HTTP. But the best way to ensure that the connection is fully secure is to check the padlock next to the URL in the address bar. It indicates that the website you are visiting has activated the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol to secure communication between client and server.

The Really Simple SSL plugin is particularly useful for managing the redirection of your HTTP site, to HTTPS if you haven’t already set it up in HTTPS.

Unfortunately, this plugin is becoming less and less useful, as since version 5.7, thanks to its basic “single-click HTTP to HTTPS migration”, WordPress handles the switchover to HTTPS much better.

10. SSL Insecure Content Fixer

Why SSL and HTTPS?

Nowadays, it’s recommended (or even mandatory for production sites) to use the HTTPS protocol!

Since July 2018, the Google Chrome browser (among others) marks all non-HTTP sites as “not secure”.

You can easily imagine the impact such a message can have on your sales if you offer credit card payment directly on your e-commerce site.

HTTPS protocol adds an extra layer of security around data transferred from your users’ local connection to your website. This is particularly useful for users using the shared connection of a bar, cybercafé or hotel.

Today, search engines like Google require you to have an SSL (HTTPS) certificate on your website, as they make it a criterion for ranking in their results.

Today, the best Web hosts offer unlimited SSL certificates free of charge, for all theirWeb hosting plans. This is of course the case with EasyHoster, and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank the Sectigo and Let’s Encrypt certification bodies, who generously offer us their services.

If your host doesn’t yet offer a free SSL certificate, you can get one with Let’s Encrypt and the WP Encryption plugin, provided your host uses Linux, OpenSSL, CURL and allow_url_fopen.

My browser indicates that the connection to my site is not secure. What should I do?

If you have correctly configured your site for HTTPS, you should see a green (or gray) padlock icon next to your website URL in the browser address bar:

However, if your HTTPS / SSL are not properly configured or if your site contains errors, you will see a warning or a broken padlock icon in your browser’s address bar:

This type of message would indicate that, Even if your website uses HTTPS and an SSL certificate, some of its content is still delivered from non-HTTPS URLs. This may be the case for an image whose URL has been copied incorrectly, a CSS file or a .js script reached from its URL at http://. This type of error is called mixed-content and can deprive you of the pretty padlock.

Patatras!

You can say goodbye to Google’s reassuring green warning right next to your site address 🙂

Rest assured…

Mixed Content is easily corrected automatically.

Today, more and more modern browsers automatically correct mixed content errors for you. This is particularly true of the latest version of Google Chrome. You can verify this by taking a stroll through mixedcontentexamples.com, whose pages have become secure overnight, as if by magic, thanks to Google Chrome.

The browser’s intention was good: to protect Internet users!

Before serving the desired content to the visitor, Google Chrome will scan the page’s HTML code and replace all occurrences of HTTP with HTTPS. As for the user, he’ll see nothing of it, since he’ll be served a mixed-content-free, SSL-secured page.

That’s all very nice and generous of Google. This does pose a concern for you, however, because as a webmaster using Google Chrome, you’ll no longer be alerted to your own mixed content errors.

To counter this, you can use online mixed-content detection services such as :

• https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/
• https://www.missingpadlock.com

Do they detect mixed content in your home?

How to fix mixed-content errors on WordPress?

The best way to correct mixed-content is surely to search/replace your database using a plugin such as Better Search Replace. But sometimes, mixed content isn’t hidden in the database, but in the theme or plugins.

Which WordPress plugin automatically corrects mixed-content errors?

Installing the SSL Insecure Content Fixer plugin will solve all your mixed content problems quickly and easily. Please note, however, that this plugin is only useful if you’ve made a mistake in configuring your site. For example, by integrating a resource based on its URL beginning with http://.

11. Classic Editor

Classic Editor is a plugin that allows those who don’t want to use Gutenberg to return to the classic version of the WordPress editor.

WordPress is the most popular CMS for creating your own website. This CMS really began its rise in 2008, and since then it has undergone many changes. But these changes weren’t as significant as the recent update that was made to their text editor, 10 years later (in December 2018), when Gutenberg was launched.

Gutenberg is WordPress’ brand new text editor (or rather, block editor). This new editor reflects the direction in which WordPress is currently heading. The WordPress community long ago realized that WordPress was no longer just for publishing blog posts.

Gutenberg is therefore a block editor.

It lies between the classic WordPress text editor and page builders such as Divi Builder or Elementor, both of which are cited in this ranking.

Based on TinyMCE, the old classic WordPress editor was very simple compared to Gutenberg. Its interface resembled a simplified version of Microsoft Word (or TextEdit, for those of you in the know).

Since the release of Gutenberg, WordPress users have had mixed feelings about it. Some like it, some don’t… The only way to find out if you’re in the first or second category is to spend a few hours testing Gutenberg 😉

In any case, for the time being, if you already have a page builder such as Divi or Elementor, we recommend that you activate the Classic Editor, so as not to interfere with the functionality of your current Page Builder.

12. Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan

Wordfence is an excellent security plugin, thanks in particular to its vulnerability scanner and anti-malware detection system. With it, you can quickly check whether or not your WordPress site has been hacked.

This plugin includes the following security options:

• Security alerts :
  Wordfence analyzes your site every day. If he discovers something that represents a risk, he’ll send you an e-mail about it. It may be that a plugin is obsolete or that WordPress needs updating. It’s also possible that files have changed in one of your site’s plugins, and that you need to go and check that this is a voluntary modification on your part, and not the action of an ill-intentioned individual.
• Firewall and security :
  Wordfence automatically prevents many hackers from accessing your site. It protects your site against known attack patterns. It also protects your site against brute force attacks (massive attempts to connect to your WordPress dashboard).
• Attack notifications :
  You can set Wordfence to send you (or not) several types of e-mail notification. For example, Wordfence can alert you to an increased attack rate. This is a simple notification. Nothing to worry about. EasyHoster’s monitoring services are also there to ensure your site’s security.
• File comparison :
  Wordfence checks the files on your site against those in the official WordPress repository. This allows you to see, at a glance, what illegal changes have been made to a file, compared to the original file hosted on WordPress.org. Sometimes, the modifications detected can be harmless, especially if your developer has clumsily hardcoded a plugin or your theme, without using a child-theme. In most cases, however, it’s a hack.
  In this case, Wordfence will allow you to restore the original (and therefore clean) code directly from the official WordPress servers, with a single click.
• Maintenance tips :
  Wordfence has a very useful feature that will alert you if one of your plugins requires a recent update;
  if a plugin has not been updated for many months or years;
  and even warn you if a plugin has been abandoned by its developer, whether or not it has been removed from the official repository.
  This is an indispensable feature for detecting old, dangerous plugins that no longer receive updates.
• Activity reports :
  You can choose to receive daily, weekly or monthly reports summarizing all the activity recorded by Wordfence, concerning the various points mentioned above: file scans, attacks, etc.
  It also sends you a list of the main IP addresses blocked and the main failed connection attempts. You can therefore easily choose to block certain IP addresses, directly, at the root of your site (via Wordfence or via cPanel for example), in order to save the resources of your web hosting account and allow legitimate traffic to surf faster to your site.

In conclusion, in addition to being an indispensable plugin for auditing security and securing your WordPress site. As you can see, Wordfence is also a great ally when it comes to cleaning up WordPress sites infected by malicious code. Which makes it one of the champions of this ranking!

13. Sucuri Security

Sucuri is a leading company in the website security sector since 2010.

This company, now owned by GoDaddy, specializes in the commissioning of powerful firewalls and the security of a multitude of CMS, including WordPress.

We’ll tell you more about their firewall below. But first, let’s talk WordPress!

Once installed, Sucuri’s WordPress plugin protects your website against hackers; malware; brute force / DDoS attacks; and any suspicious behavior such as accessing sensitive files on your WordPress installation. It also gives you the option of blocking access to certain IP addresses, and checks that your site isn’t on any public blacklists, such as those from Google (Safe Browsing), McAfee Antivirus, PhishTank, etc.

A bit like Wordfence, Sucuri features an integrity scanner that alerts you to changes in files from the WordPress core, your plugins or your theme. It shows you a complete history of activity on your site, such as the users who have tried to connect to your dashboard, along with a list of the actions they have carried out, with their IP addresses of course.

Sucuri will also give you some safety recommendations to apply manually, or automatically with their help. Sucuri allows you to harden your site, making it much more difficult to hack. At EasyHoster, we love this feature!

See for yourself…

With just a few clicks of a button, you can considerably enhance the security of your site.

Sucuri also offers a host of extremely useful options in the event of infection. Like being able to restore an original copy of a plugin from the official WordPress repository. And we love that too!

Combined with Wordfence, you really don’t need anything else to strengthen the security of your WordPress site.

However…

Sucuri’s plugin also gives you the option of activating their cloud-based firewall for $19.98/month.

However, as anEasyHoster customer, we already offer you (at no extra cost) an equivalent firewall protection called Imunify360.

This premium firewall layer offered by EasyHoster blocks a wide range of attacks and intrusion attempts, in real time! All without affecting legitimate traffic.

And let’s not forget Imunify360’s automatic anti-malware protection, which continuously scans all new files appearing on your site, protecting your hosting account from viruses and other malicious files.

As you can see, with EasyHoster, there’s no need for customers to incur additional costs for a firewall. We take care of everything, and security is included in all our accommodation plans.

14. Change wp-admin login

Here’s another must-have plugin to improve security and reduce resource consumption on your WordPress hosting!

When you install a WP site, one of the first actions you should perform is to change the default address of your dashboard login page /wp-login.php, to another URL of your choice.

The Change wp-admin login plugin is the ideal solution for moving your login page.

Simply install it and define your own login URL, which will replace /wp-login.php and /wp-admin.

For example, like this:
https://www.example.com /ecrire01
It’s a good idea to use a URL in French, as pirate robots won’t think of trying this vocabulary to break into your site, since English is much more widely used.

Move your login page, really!

This quick action will protect your WordPress site from numerous intrusion attempts. The notorious Brute Force attacks that every web host can observe. These robots type compulsively on the login pages of WordPress users, all day long…

Alternatively, if you weren’t convinced by Change wp-admin login, you could go for Rename wp-login.php.

This is a plugin that works almost identically to Change wp-admin. However, although Rename wp-login is still fully functional, it no longer seems to be updated by its team… for the time being. Too bad.

A second alternative is the fremium Protect WP Admin plugin. It is less popular than the solutions mentioned above. On the other hand, it is still being maintained, and the number of users continues to grow.

15. reCaptcha by BestWebSoft

In addition to moving your WordPress login page using a plugin like Change wp-admin login, a good practice is to add a captcha to sensitive areas of your site.

The captcha is an online test designed to prove that you are a human being and not a robot trying to spam or automatically exploit a website’s security holes.

The most popular, ergonomic and reliable captcha system today is reCaptcha!

You know him well…

Everyone has already had the pleasure of selecting images of store fronts, buses and crosswalks 🙂

reCaptcha is once again a Google service!

After reading our explanation, we’re sure you’re burning with anticipation to find out the best plugin for integrating a captcha into all your WordPress sites!

We recommend the reCaptcha by BestWebSoft plugin!

With a minimal configuration that can be completed in less than 5 minutes, it will integrate reCaptcha on :

• the comment form below the articles
• contact forms from popular plugins (CF7, etc.)
• WordPress login page
• the password reset page
• sign-up pages for your WordPress site or WooCommerce customer space
• and many other places

This will greatly reduce the amount of work involved in moderating unwanted comments and registrations.

16. Disable XML-RPC-API

WordPress’ XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) functionality has become a gateway for anyone trying to exploit a WordPress installation.

The number 1 CMS is extremely user-friendly and accessible to all types of profiles. Nevertheless, it remains open source software hosted on a Web server, and can be the target of dangerous Web criminals. We advise you to improve your WordPress site’s security points as much as possible, with a few minor but vital additional adjustments.

XMLRPC.php is a WordPress API file that lets you communicate and manipulate your site from the outside.

In fact, this core WordPress feature is not only very little used by current users, it’s also completely obsolete!

Nevertheless, the XMLRPC protocol remains active by default on millions of WordPress installations worldwide, much to the dismay of web hosts who are doing their utmost to block attacks on this file.

In fact, this old PHP script systematically finds itself among the most resource-hungry files, even though it’s really only used by -1% of WP sites, because these days, external services communicate with WordPress thanks to a new API called REST (available since WordPress version 4.4, dating from December 2015).

To secure your site and lighten the load on your hosting, it’s essential to disable the XMLRPC file. This can be achieved by means of a plugin, the well-known Disable XML-RPC. Or its little brother Disable XML-RPC-API, whose recent updates are more regular.

If you don’t want to clutter up your WordPress site with an additional plugin, you can block access to the xmlrpc.php file manually, by adding these lines of code to the very top of the .htaccess file at the root of your site:
# Block WP xmlrpc.php requests
<Files xmlrpc.php>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Files>

Don’t worry, just make a copy of your original .htaccess file and you’ll be fine.

17. WP Custom Admin Login

WP Custom Admin Login is a premium plugin that lets you customize the visual appearance of your WP login page. The plugin offers you more than 25 pre-designed login page templates, but also a wide range of customization options.

Without any Web development skills or knowledge of programming languages, you’ll be able to create an outstanding login page in no time at all. The plugin supports both image and video backgrounds. It features Google reCaptcha integration, connection via social network profiles, etc.

Here’s something for your customers (if you’re a service provider) or your users (if your site is open to customers or contributors).

18. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin

UpdraftPlus is the most popular scheduled backup extension, with over three million active installations. It lets you back up your files and databases on demand or automatically at intervals of your choosing. In the event of a problem, you’ll be able to easily restore your WordPress site in just a few clicks.

The biggest advantage of UpdraftPlus is the ability to connect the plugin to a large number of cloud hosts, such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon, so that they can secure your remote backups. A must!

Don’t store your backups locally! For a backup to be considered reliable, it must be stored at a great distance.

In addition to being useless in the event of hardware failure, these local backups would consume unnecessary disk space.

For more information, please read our local backups policy. It contains many tips for more secure and resource-friendly backups of your shared hosting.

A better backup solution than Updraft Plus?

At EasyHoster, we offer an optional backup service called Codeguard.

Codeguard automatically performs daily backups of your files and data, without consuming the resources of your hosting account. It gradually and incrementally sucks in your files via FTP/SFTP. This avoids overloading your resources and lowering the performance of your hosting throughout the backup phase.

Updraft Plus, on the other hand, can be very resource-hungry when compressing files and sending them to the cloud.

19. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache was developed by Automattic (the company behind the WordPress CMS). In a way, it’s the official WordPress caching system. Its aim is to reduce your Web hosting’s consumption of server resources, as well as the loading time of your pages. So improve your Web performance and your PageSpeed Insights score .

This plugin enables WordPress to mechanically generate static HTML files, based on the content present in your MySQL database. All your Web server has to do is serve these files very quickly to your website visitors, without having to use CPU power to build pages on the fly.

Indeed, the Cache System is a much faster alternative to database queries (MySQL) and the processing of WordPress PHP scripts, which can be very costly in terms of server resources.

The result for you and your visitors is pages that load in less than 2 seconds, whereas loading times could have reached 10 seconds in the worst case, without a cache system. This is even more useful during peak periods, when dozens of visitors are making simultaneous requests to your site.

When it comes to web hosting, this is a real must, and we at EasyHoster know all about it. A client using no caching system consumes on average 6 times more server resources than a WordPress site with WP Super Cache enabled.

WP Super Cache has 2 methods for serving cached files:

• The “Simple” method is suitable for all sites (including those not using WordPress permalinks) and all users (even beginners). Just activate it!
• The “Expert” method offers slightly faster performance, but may require Apache users to write a piece of code in their .htaccess file. In principle, this is done automatically and transparently. The plugin takes care of everything.
  Users of NGINX servers, on the other hand, will have to place this piece of code themselves, manually.

Rest assured, as an EasyHoster customer, you are on an Apache server😉

In addition to these few options, WP Super Cache has a small panel of parameters that allow you to fine-tune the way WP Super Cache works. For example, you’ll have the option of serving compressed pages as a .zip (faster); and the option, or not, of serving these static pages, also for users connected to WordPress (or WooCommerce customers connected to your store).

The official WordPress cache plugin can also synchronize with your content delivery network (CDN), if you have one.

Because WP Super Cache is so simple, lightweight and easy to configure, it’s perfect for those who are new to WordPress and want to save money on an all-in-one performance plugin.

In addition to WP Super Cache, we recommend that you also discover the presentation of these plugins:

• Autoptimize
• WP-Optimize
• Heartbeat Control

20. Autoptimize

Autoptimize is a rather unusual performance plugin. It focuses mainly on optimizing your site’s code and static files. In other words, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.

For example, it manages the minification and concatenation of this type of file.

What does all this mean?

• Minification is the removal of unnecessary content from code to reduce its weight, without altering its functionality. For example, remove white spaces or comments that are unnecessary for the proper functioning of the site.
• Fileaggregation / concatenation is the combination / compression of several static files, such as a set of CSS or JavaScript files, into a single file, to reduce the number of HTTP requests slowing down page loading.

Autoptimize is used in particular to defer code, because by default, sites tend to wait for less source code to load, before displaying the site’s actual content to the surfer.

For example, the default behavior of a site would be to load all Google Analytics tags, the Facebook pixel, Google Ads tracking codes, etc. Not to mention the many other types of requests, such as Google Fonts or the default WordPress emojis
Only then, after loading all these external resources and uploading all the page images, can the site begin to be presented to the user.

Autoptimize solves this problem by moving certain scripts to the bottom of the page, loading certain resources only when useful, after presenting the page to the visitor! All this, of course, without damaging the functionality of your WordPress site.

Best lazyload plugin for images

Autoptimize has a very popular feature for optimizing performance and speeding up the loading of pages containing lots of images… the Lazy Load!
As the name suggests, Lazy Load will delay the moment when images are downloaded and displayed to the reader, without interfering with the reading of your site. The expected loading time savings are enormous!

• The plugin Smush (1 million installations) is also an excellent alternative to Autoptimize for image lazyloading.
• The free minimalist plugin Lazy Load by WP Rocket may also be a good option (100,000 active installations).

21. WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache

All the data you save on your WordPress site is stored in your database. Over time, this database can become heavy, very heavy, too heavy. This can lead first to slowdowns and then to a serious overload of your hosting account resources. Congestion can sometimes make it impossible to work on your site.

WP-Optimize is an optimization plugin designed to help you clean up your WordPress database by optimizing your MySQL tables or deleting data no longer needed, in order to improve the responsiveness of your SQL server.

The plugin defragments MySQL tables in the same way as PhpMyAdmin’s Optimize Table function. It can also delete unnecessary data of your choice, such as pings, unwanted comments, content in the WordPress recycle garbage can, etc. transients (temporary data cached by WordPress) and, above all, the numerous article revisions (automatic registrations) that can literally make your database unnecessarily fat.

The plugin offers excellent control over the different areas of your database, which you can choose to optimize or not. You can also run automatic, scheduled clean-ups of your site’s database at regular intervals.

Finally, WP-Optimize has its own cache system that competes with WP Super Cache:

• If you choose to activate WP-Optimize’s cache, you can simply uninstall WP Super Cache.
• On the other hand, if you’ve set your sights on the official WordPress caching system, you’ll need to disable WP-Optimize’s cache.

22. Heartbeat Control

WordPress’ Heartbeat API enables your browser to communicate with your web server using (very) regular AJAX calls, made when you’re logged into WordPress and browsing your dashboard.

• This allows WordPress, for example, to show authors that an article is being modified by another user.
• This verifies that you are still connected to your dashboard, and invites you to reconnect if necessary.
• This allows you to regularly save drafts of your articles as they are being written.
• Etcetera.

It all sounds great, but WordPress heartbeats are all too frequent. All these requests, made at 15-second intervals, can add up to a huge drain on your hosting resources, the whole time you’re browsing your WordPress dashboard.

There’s no cache on WP admin!

As your hosting account resources skyrocket, you’ll be leaving fewer resources for visitors to the public area of your site, at the same time as you’re preparing new content for them.

To set this up, simply adjust the WordPress heartbeat frequency.

Here is the setting we recommend to limit the frequency of this API, with the Heartbeat Control plugin:

“45 seconds” seems to us to be a more than reasonable timeframe, to combine saving resources with the comfort of a WordPress that regularly backs up your work, to prevent you from any clumsy loss.

Unless you’re a frantic user of the CTRL + S keyboard shortcut (that key combination you enjoy spamming every 5 words), we recommend you ask your WordPress site to calm down, by setting its heart rate to one beat every 45 seconds, thanks to Heartbeat Control, a plugin now maintained by the teams at WP Rocket .

WP Rocket

We’re reserving a special place here for WP Rocket, listed here as unranked, because it’s an all-in-one plugin that can simply replace the 4 plugins listed above, namely :

• WP Super Cache
• Autoptimize
• WP-Optimize
• Heartbeat Control

Yes, you read that right!

WP Rocket enables :

• Caching your pages
• Code optimization (CSS, JS…)
• Optimizing your database
• WordPress heartbeat optimization…

By and large, the performance gain should be equivalent between WP Rocket and these 4 solutions solutions. Where WP Rocket saves you a lot of time, however, is on your own time! Time spent optimizing your performance, because in WP Rocket, all these functions are grouped together in one place, with no possible conflicts.

The development team behind this optimization plugin (a French team) has already selected the most interesting options for you to activate by default. Then, to go further, it’s up to you to activate the advanced options (minification, concatenation, etc.), one after the other, while checking your site’s hot spots, in parallel with your optimizations.

If you have the means and if your project justifies it, WP Rocket is certainly worth the investment; to improve the loading speed of your pages and consequently, your Google ranking; the user experience on your site; or the customer experience of your online store. But above all, to simplify your life, just as EasyHoster aims to simplify its customers’ lives by being much more than just a hosting provider!

Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster

This plugin may be listed here as “unranked”, but it’s still a rare gem for experienced users who want to optimize the loading speed of their pages, to the nearest thousandth of a second!

Asset CleanUp lets you selectively deactivate the plugins of your choice, on the pages and posts of your choice.

In other words, you can, for example, deactivate the Contact Form 7 plugin on all the pages of your site that don’t include a contact form.

Optimizing each page to manually deactivate non-essential plugins is a painstaking task. But if you have a lot of plugins installed on your WordPress site, the performance gain can be enormous!

23. TinyPNG – JPEG & PNG image compression

TinPNG.com is an excellent online service, but also a WordPress plugin allowing you to Optimize your images and reduce their size so that they are lighter and without loss of quality, as you can see on this capture…

We’ve tested many tools to evaluate the level of compression of PNGs and JPGs. In our opinion, TinyPNG is second to none when it comes to the quality of the images it produces.

To transfer your images to TinyPNG, you can do so manually, before uploading them to your WordPress Library, simply by visiting tinypng. com (maximum 20 images of 5 Mb at a time). Uploading is done via a .zip file, so there’s no limit to what you can do!

You can also make your life easier by installing their WordPress plugin. It allows you to compress 500 images per month, 100% free of charge; or 250 compressed and resized images!
It easily replaces an image resizing plugin like Imsanity.

TinyPNG’s optimizations will reduce your page load times, and your visitors will thank you for it.

The only drawback of TinyPNG is that it currently only supports PNG and JPEG, and doesn’t yet support WebP…

For WebPs, EWWW Image Optimizer is another challenger in the jungle of image compression plugins.

In fact, EWWW is the most popular plugin in its sector, with over 800,000 active installations. However, according to our tests, we’ve had better results with TinyPNG. This is the plugin we recommend to our customers, and therefore the one officially selected for this ranking. However, EWWW Image Optimizer will be useful if you’re working with images in WebP format, just as Imagify can be…

Imagify – Optimize your Images & Convert WebP

Imagify is a bonus.

If you’d like to compress a small number of images into WebP format free of charge, Imagify might be just the plugin for the job.

Like the TinyPNG plugin, Imagify is a WordPress plugin for reducing image size. The innovative thing about Imagify is that you can not only compress your images, but also convert them to WebP format.

WebP is a modern image format reserved for the Web. It offers superior compression without loss of image quality. By using WebP, webmasters and developers can create images that are even lighter than traditional JPEG and PNG, so that they don’t slow down their website.

Imagify is a plugin developed by the same team as WP Rocket… a sure bet!?
It’s also one of the most advanced plugins for optimizing your images and/or converting them to WebP. Once activated, all your images, including thumbnails, will be automatically optimized when uploaded to your WordPress library.

The free version of the Imagify plugin gives you access to 20 MB of image compression per month, or around 10 images.

24. Imsanity

Two common problems for beginner bloggers are…

1. storage of oversized images that take up all disk space
2. integration of images that are too heavy for the website and for browsing from a mobile connection

Indeed, beginners in website creation often make the mistake of sending HD photos or large illustrations, without thinking to resize them to a reasonable resolution beforehand.

If you think you or one of your users may have made this mistake, look no further… Imsanity is here to save the day!

In our opinion, Imsanity is the best free plugin for automatically resizing oversized images uploaded to the WordPress library.

Here you can set the ideal maximum dimensions best suited to your blog or WordPress site. For example, 1800px wide and 9999px high should be sufficient.

Of course, the plugin allows you to retroactively resize previously uploaded images thanks to its bulk resize function, but that’s not all!

Thanks to Imsanity, your contributors will no longer be able to overload your Web hosting with images that exceed the size configured in the plugin settings.

In fact, when sending images, Imsanity will automatically resize them on the fly, without the user having to use any image-editing software beforehand.

You and the users of your WordPress site won’t have to worry about manually resizing images… Imsanity will do all the work for you!

25. Broken Link Checker

The Broken Link Checker plugin is a WordPress plugin that helps site owners identify and fix “broken links” that may be present throughout their WordPress site.

This plugin is one of the must-haves in terms of SEO. As you know, a large number of “dead links” can have a negative impact on your site’s SEO, not to mention the user experience.

Broken Link Checker is 100% free and scans all WordPress pages, posts, comments and custom fields for broken links or missing images. It then informs the WordPress site administrator of each “broken link” found via an email and a notification on the WP dashboard. A lot of information about links is highlighted, such as the presence of dofollow/nofollow attributes, as well as the text used as “link text” or “link anchor”. Not to mention the presence of a search engine that will save you a considerable amount of time.

The plugin is easy to install and configure. After installation, it automatically starts searching for broken links and provides an initial report within a few minutes.

It runs in the background and offers a few configuration options so as not to slow down website performance in the event of server overload.

When the plugin finds a broken link or a missing image, it will then be necessary for the administrator to correct the problem manually. However, Broken Link Checker makes this task easier and faster, thanks to an ergonomic interface designed for the massive correction of broken links.

In addition to analyzing internal links, the plugin also analyzes external links and reports external links whose pages no longer exist, are redirected, or return an error. So you can quickly fix all your outbound links too.

If you’re looking for an easy way to manage all the dead links on your site, with a view to restoring your Google ranking, Broken Link Checker should be on your list of must-have plugins!

26. Redirection

After a while, as your blog or website grows, you may want to move a page from one place to another, merge several pages for better Google ranking, or simply delete an obsolete or low-quality page…

A redirect is a useful and easy way of sending a short message to your visitors’ browsers, informing them that the content they wish to consult has been moved. Their browser can then automatically redirect them to the new location, or to another page that’s just as suitable. This makes it possible to transfer all the traffic from the moved or deleted page to a new destination without any loss. But it also transfers all the “juice” from your links to the new content.

Yes, we’re talking about SEO and 301 or permanent redirection.

Imagine you’re the creator of a brand called, say, “France Telecom”. Then, because you love this color, you decide to rename your brand “Orange”. You’ll need to change the address of your FranceTelecom.com website to Orange.com. But you wouldn’t want to lose those hard-won Google positions, would you?

This is where this type of redirect comes in handy, allowing you to recover (almost) all the good positions you acquired with your old domain name.

Well, it’s the same for the pages on your WordPress site.

The Redirection plugin is, in our opinion (and that of 2 million users), the best option for fine-tuning all your redirects. But it’s also highly effective in tracking down any 404 errors that visitors to your site may encounter.

27. Mailchimp for WooCommerce

When it comes to digital communication, e-mail is not only one of the most important tools, but also one of the oldest. It has remained popular and vital for Internet users, despite the rise of social media, instant messaging and chat applications. E-mail is a communication method that has proved its worth time and time again. E-mail simply doesn’t age, or only slightly…

Every entrepreneur should invest in e-mail marketing.

Mailchimp for WooCommerce is one of the most popular tools to help you harness the power of e-mail marketing from your WooCommerce store. After all, it’s the official plugin developed by Mailchimp, the number 1 in e-mailing!

Mailchimp, on the other hand, is the most popular e-mailing service for many reasons. It’s user-friendly, full of useful features that let you collect e-mails (in exchange for a gift, for example); plan your e-mail campaigns; schedule automatic sequences; get read/open reports for your campaigns… and it’s free up to 2000 subscribers, in a version that includes most of the useful features.

MailChimp is simply brilliant and very easy to use, as soon as you know where you’re going. You can create a classic or graphic newsletter using a visual editor. You can choose from a wide range of templates that can be customized intuitively. Statistical reports are highly detailed and tracking is powerful.

If you’d like advanced support from EasyHoster, for your Mailchimp use, we highly recommend discovering our turnkey WordPress sales tunnel creation offer: EasyHoster Tunnel.

A solution like Mailchimp, 100% dedicated to sending e-mail campaigns, is particularly well-suited to help you comply with current legislation (RGPD…) and avoid your e-mails being classified as spam, or even worse, rejected outright by the recipient’s server.

Decentralizing your mass-mailing campaigns will also enable you to save the daily e-mail quota of your web hosting; for routine e-mails sent manually; e-mails from your contact form; or transactional e-mails from your e-commerce store (invoices, delivery notifications, etc.).

If you have a WooCommerce online store, you’ll find that Mailchimp for WooCommerce connects very easily with your e-commerce customer base. You’ll be able to see which subscribers have placed orders on your e-commerce site, so you can track the revenue generated by specific e-mail campaigns.

If you’re an e-tailer, this solution will quickly become a must-have for you!

The icing on the cake is Mailchimp’s compatibility with Contact Form 7 and most major plugins.

MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress

Indeed, we have the MC4WP plugin to thank (over 2 million active installations). It synchronizes Mailchimp with many popular extensions such as :

• BuddyPress
• CF7
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Events Manager
• Give
• Gravity Forms
• The default WordPress user registration form
• The default WordPress comment form
• MemberPress
• Ninja Forms 3
• UltimateMember
• WPForms
• WooCommerce (of course)

If your needs go beyond simply synchronizing WooCommerce with Mailchimp, take a look at MC4WP.

28. Convert Plus

Convert Plus is a premium plugin for creating marketing visuals:

1. Collecting your visitors’ e-mail addresses;
   via countless automatic pop-up formats…
2. Highlighting a product ;
   highlighting a specific page ;
   via attractively designed marketing inserts;
   in other words, genuine professional Call to Action

This excellent plugin lets you turn your website into a real lead collector! Convert Plus will give you a real boost in building your contact list and improving your sales over the long term. You can create stunning pop-ups in minutes and start converting your website visitors into subscribers or customers. Thanks to him, your conversion rate visitors → subscribers → customers will be explosive.

Convert Plus offers over 10 contextual display positions; over 12 ways to trigger visuals (pop-ups, etc.); and several filters to detect visitor behavior. For example: display the popup when the visitor has read 60% of the article; or when he hasn’t moved his mouse for 20 seconds; or when he tries to leave the page (exit intent).

It has a library of over 100 beautifully designed, ready-to-use templates, guaranteeing a high conversion rate.
Best of all, it features a visual builder that lets you create custom pop-ups and marketing inserts!

In our opinion, it’s the best marketing plugin in its category for harnessing the power of e-mailing and persuasive call-to-actions, while keeping your budget in check, since it’s very reasonably priced for the website publisher in you.

29. Duplicate Page

The Duplicate Page plugin fulfills an indispensable role for any self-respecting WordPress editor, so much so that this functionality should be native to WordPress.

With just one click, you can duplicate any content: pages, articles, specific content, etc.

This plugin will be extremely useful if you don’t want to waste time recreating every page from scratch when building your site.

Indeed, it’s often very useful to start from an existing base, where many elements have already been designed or pre-designed.

It’s all about getting better organized to save time…

• You could, for example, prepare a Draft with your typical writing plan (in “copywriting expert” mode), to save considerable time when writing your articles.
• You could also create a standard sales page containing a common structure for all future landing pages you wish to promote on your site.
  Then all you have to do is duplicate the model to get off to a good start every time.

Time-saving!

30. Site Reviews

From your WordPress site, Site Reviews lets your visitors submit reviews of your products or services, with a rating from 1 to 5 stars.

You’ll be able to pin your best reviews so they’re always displayed first; require approval before publishing new reviews; require visitors to be logged in to write a review; receive personalized notifications when a new review is submitted and much more!

Site Reviews can also be useful if you want to collect authentic customer reviews deposited on platforms such as Facebook or Google Maps 😉

You’ll be able to integrate these reviews directly into your WordPress site, thanks to a powerful, flexible and easily configurable shortcode. The Site Reviews shortcode features numerous parameters where you can enter variables to give you exactly the result you want: maximum number of reviews to display; whether or not to display a pagination (page 1, page 2…); integration of Google tags to display enriched results, etc.

To get an idea of what you can achieve with Site Reviews, we invite you to take a look at our home page; our main internal pages; and especially the EasyHoster reviews page!

31. SeedProd – Coming Soon Page, Maintenance Mode & Landing Pages

There’s nothing like putting your WordPress site in “Maintenance Mode”, to invite your visitors to come back a little later… when you’ve finished mopping the floor and it’s dry 😉

SeedProd Coming Soon is the most popular plugin for creating maintenance pages. It features powerful yet easy-to-use options for creating a “Site under construction” page that will leave a lasting impression on your visitors, and even allow them, if you wish, to leave their e-mail address to be notified when your website is officially launched.

On your Coming Soon pages, you can integrate :

• a countdown
• an e-mail sensor connected to MailChimp
• a contact form
• social network icons
• and much more…

Best of all, in addition to being a highly reliable plugin, SeedProd Coming Soon is one of the quickest solutions to set up. This is what we call a Set & Forget plugin! In other words, you set it and forget about it!
With just a few clicks, you can create a maintenance page that’s unique both in its design and in the message you integrate into it, without the slightest technical knowledge of HTML or anything else. SeedProd features a real-time page builder (like the Divi theme and its Divi Builder).
This simple, minimalist page builder gives you access to over 500,000 free images!
Of course, SeedProd’s templates are adapted to navigation on mobiles and tablets, thanks to responsive design.

Very Simple Password

For some years, our team used to recommend the excellent Very Simple Password plugin to its customers.

This minimalist, lightweight and easy-to-use plugin blocked the home page of the WordPress site under construction, while development work was in progress. It also worked well to prevent Google from indexing the pages of the site “under construction”, since it was necessary to enter a small password in order to access the site’s content.

Today, the Very Simple Password plugin hasn’t been updated in 4 years!

This plugin has really had its day.

It was so practical…
Worst of all, the plugin is still perfectly functional and free of security flaws. All its developer would need to do is send a modest cosmetic update to get it back up in the WordPress.org search engine results and, consequently, get the ball rolling again. Not to mention that the developer is still active on WordPress.org.

100% free plugin vs. freemium plugin

The purpose of the Very Simple Password anecdote was to immerse you in the world of free / open source / libre… and freemium WordPress plugins.

As you can see, we’ve stopped recommending Very Simple Password to our customers, in favor of SeedProd Coming Soon, a more robust solution that’s just as easy to set up, but more complete and well maintained.

How reliable is SeedProd over the long term?

→ Its business model!

SeedProd develops fremium. In other words, free, comprehensive plugins that also come in a more complete, paid version. And it’s often this famous business model that determines whether or not a WordPress plugin or theme will hold up over time.

Everyone needs to be able to fill their refrigerator and pay their rent at the end of the month.

32. Loco Translate

Loco Translate is a free WordPress plugin that lets you edit the translation files of your theme or plugins.

Don’t confuse with WPML!

Loco Translate can’t transform your WordPress site into a multilingual one.

It is, on the other hand, very useful for translating small areas that developers may not have had time to translate in your plugins or theme, for certain languages.

Admittedly, without it, the manipulations involved in translating small character strings (here and there) are quite complex, natively, with WordPress. This requires a thorough understanding of the architecture of translation files for WordPress plugins and themes. In addition, it is necessary to use third-party software called Poedit, as the translation files cannot be understood by a conventional text editor.
And even if Poedit is a very good program… we’d rather do without it! 🙂 That’s why Loco Translate deserves its rightful place at the top of this ranking of the best WordPress plugins.

33. Duplicator – WordPress Migration Plugin

In our opinion, Duplicator is the most effective WordPress migration plugin. In any case, it’s the most popular after All-in-One WP Migration, with 1 million active installations, compared with 3 million for the latter. Another (young) competitor, WP Clone, also gets good reviews from WordPress users. Competition rages on.

These migration plugins are used to move your WordPress site from one location to another.

For example, for…

• upload / online a website developed locally / offline
• change domain name
• clone a WordPress site to a subdomain
• make a manual backup of your site
• or change web host…

The only downside is that these migration plugins may not work in their free version, especially if :

• your WordPress site is too heavy (several gigas)
• your web host severely limits your hosting server resources

Timeout! Hosting interrupts assembly!

Ouch!

In this case, the solution is obvious. The business model of these migration plugins is to offer you a premium version, which allows you to migrate any site!

On the other hand, these professional versions are quite expensive.

That’s why we at EasyHoster have a preference for Duplicator, especially for the way its migration process works, since it allows us to migrate a large percentage of large sites, 100% free of charge.

You’re about to find out…

Impossible to migrate a large site with Duplicator or All-in-One WP Migration

Let’s say we wanted to migrate a WordPress site from another hosting provider to EasyHoster’s servers.

With Duplicator, all we need to do is automatically create a “package” which will contain, in a .zip archive :

• all our plugins
• our themes
• our database
• and all our content (our images, our PDF files…) if and only if the site weighs ~ less than 500 Mo

Beyond 500 MB, Duplicator and, above all, All-in-One WP Migration, might gently encourage us to get a higher-performance version of their plugin. The paid version 😉

How to migrate any large WordPress site for free, with the free version of Duplicator?

The advantage of Duplicator is that it allows us to get around the 500 MB limit, provided we’re resourceful.

Duplicator allows us to migrate most of our WordPress site. That is, only…

• heart files
• plugins
• the themes
• and above all, the database!

All the while enjoying all the benefits of a WordPress migration carried out to the highest standards. In other words, avoiding corruption of serialized data. Serialized data are MySQL records that can’t be migrated in the conventional way, i.e. with a simple phpMyAdmin find/replace. This would corrupt the entire site!

Is that all? What about our WordPress images?

We’ve just seen. With Duplicator, the WordPress core, plugins, theme and database can be migrated seamlessly, even for a large site weighing over 500 MB. To do this, simply simply exclude certain large folders from Duplicator package creation .

Directories such as these :

• /wp-content/cache/ – contains many files that need not be migrated
• /wp-content/uploads/ – contains all our images, .pdf files, etc.

Without too much difficulty, these large folders can then be migrated manually, using our file manager (cPanel or other), by creating a simple .zip archive which can then be uploaded or wgeted to the new location or Web server.

So there’s no need to spend a fortune on the pro version of a migration plugin like All-in-One WP Migration.

Don’t have a file manager like cPanel at EasyHoster?

Here’s a short command line rsync to be run from your new professional hosting (EasyHoster or other) with an SSH Terminal, to retrieve the desired files from the remote server remote.examplehost.com:

rsync -chazP -e "ssh -p $portNumber" $user@remote.examplehost.com: /dossier/a/copier /repertoire/local

What advantage does Duplicator have over All-in-One WP Migration?

With Duplicator, there’s no need to pre-install WordPress on the new location. The package created by Duplicator already contains all the site’s files, including those of the WordPress core, as well as the PHP scripts that will easily manage the site’s reinstallation for you. This saves you a lot of time compared with a migration using the All-in-One WP Migration plugin, where you would first need to pre-install a copy of WordPress on the new location, before being able to re-import your data into the new WordPress installation.

Is WP Migrate DB reliable for migrating a simple database?

For a long time, we’ve been recommending the WP Migrate DB plugin, for cleanly exporting WordPress databases.

However, we have disqualified this plugin, following data losses like this one: 😜

Yes ! 🤪 If the site’s editor had integrated emojis into its content, these were lost and replaced by ??? during migration. This is not acceptable in 2023, a time when users are abundantly integrating emojis into their content.

Imagine if Twitter and Facebook changed servers and lost all emojis.

A data migration plugin that loses data, that’s the last straw, isn’t it? We reported this bug to the WP Migrate DB team, but never received a reply. We do not recommend this plugin.

External database migration script (without plugin)

For experts who don’t (or can’t) use a plugin for their WordPress migration, there’s also the well-known external script ” Search Replace DB version 4 by interconnect/it “.

It’s a complex solution that shouldn’t be put in everyone’s hands, and should only be used if you know exactly what you’re doing. What’s more, the script was created a very long time ago, and although it seems to be still maintained on Github, there’s no guarantee that it’s perfectly optimal, in every scenario (every charset, every DBMS, and emojis…?).

Even so, we wanted to mention this popular alternative, as it may well get some readers out of tricky situations… That is, helping you migrate, in the event that database export isn’t possible with Duplicator or All-in-One WP Migration.

Which web host offers a free migration service?

Don’t you understand anything about migration?

Don’t worry! EasyHoster offers a free website migration service in most cases. If you have any questions on this subject, please do not hesitate to contact our sales support team.

34. Better Search Replace

As its name suggests, Better Search Replace lets you perform a Search/Replace on your MySQL database. But not just any Search/Replace! It has been designed to ensure replacements in WordPress serialized data. These serialized data are structured in such a way that a search/replace performed directly on your database (with phpMyAdmin for example) would cause major damage to the content of your site.

This plugin is very useful in many situations.

• When you migrate your WordPress site to a new domain name or hosting provider, you may need to run a search/replace on your database to get everything working properly. This will be the case if you’ve neglected to use a migration script such as Duplicator, a plugin that takes care of converting the URLs and File Path of your entire WordPress site.
• There may be times when you want to replace a character string on a massive scale across your entire site. For example, you could replace a color code #FDB931 by #80B8FFthrough all the CSS zones in your Themes Options or change the name of a class CSS that you’ve used all over the place; or replace an old phone number that appears on many pages and articles. The possibilities are endless.

Fortunately, there’s Better Search Replace, so you don’t have to perform this task manually. It replaces everything in a matter of seconds.

Better Search Replace allows :

• support serialization for all tables in your database
• search/replace with or without case-sensitivity (uppercase/lowercase differentiation)
• search/replace in specific MySQL tables, to speed up processing or avoid replacing data that should remain as is
• run a “test run” to find out how many fields/tables will be updated during the actual search/replace operation
• search and replace, even on low-cost, low-resource hosting

35. Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed

If your business is very active on Instagram, you might want to post your photo feed directly on your site?

Then you need Smash Balloon Photo Feed!

Are you a Facebook fan? Don’t worry, just turn to its little brother, Smash Balloon Post Feed, to display your latest Facebook posts directly on your site.

These solutions are relatively simple to integrate (read the instructions carefully), but also highly configurable, for example in terms of visual appearance or the number of publications to display.

In just a few moments, you’ll be able to give your Instagram or Facebook profiles greater visibility, while giving your site a more design-led, dynamic and “social” feel.

36. CookieYes | GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice (CCPA Ready)

Every entrepreneur has had to adapt to new European legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or, earlier, the European Cookie Directive of May 2011. As you know, these laws have been put in place to improve consumers’ rights to their data and privacy.

As an entrepreneur, are all these laws giving you a headache?

Don’t worry! The CookieYes GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice plugin will make your life easier. It will help you make your website RGPD compliant in just a few clicks. Not forgetting that you can also make your site compliant with the integration of cookies on your site, in accordance with the law enforced by the CNIL. Respecting the law on cookies was even CookieYes’ basic objective. Incredible, isn’t it?

This plugin is one of the best RGPD compliance plugins. It offers a host of useful features and unrivalled ease of use. In particular, you’ll be able to highlight a link to your privacy policy, including your full contact details and your policy on the retention of user data. Of course, the plugin allows you to set up a discreet banner containing a notice about the use of WordPress cookies, with the options “Learn more”, “Accept”, “Set”, “Decline”, something like this:

Alternatively, if CookieYes doesn’t give you complete satisfaction, you can turn to its first cousin :
Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR / CCPA

The 2 solutions are similar in terms of popularity and reliability, so take your pick!

37. TablePress

TablePress is a plugin that makes it easy to create and manage beautiful data tables. And he’s by far the best in his field!

You can integrate these tables into articles, pages, text widgets or anywhere else with a simple copy-and-paste shortcode:
[monbeautableau id=36]

Data tables can be edited in a spreadsheet-like interface (such as Google Sheet or Microsoft Excel). No programming language skills are required. Tables can contain any type of data, even mathematical formulas as in Excel.

An additional JavaScript library adds features such as sorting, pagination, filtering… all designed to enhance the experience of your site’s readers.

Tables can also be imported and exported to/from Excel, CSV, HTML and JSON files.

We love TablePress so much that we’ve chosen it for our web hosting features table.

Feel free to take a look and make up your own mind about TablePress.

38. WP-PageNavi

You know what pagination is: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3…

If your WordPress theme doesn’t embed a valid pagination system for your blog posts; and you’re not satisfied with WordPress’ default links: Previous posts, Next posts; WP-PageNavi is for you!

With just a few technical manipulations, it will allow you to have a real ergonomic and SEO-optimized pagination system, with different styles, like these for example :

There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking 10 times to finally get to page 11, is there? Well, thanks to WP-PageNavi, this is now a thing of the past.

39. Head, Footer and Post Injections

Again, this is a plugin that we’ve been using on most of our sites for many years.

Head, Footer and Post Injections is a plugin that lets you add HTML, CSS or JavaScript tags to various areas of your site:

• the header (head)
• the body of the site (body, at the beginning or end)
• footer
• on home page only
• on “articles” and/or “pages” only
• article excerpts (excerpt)
• and much more

This is very useful, for example, for integrating several tags (Google Analytics, Facebook pixel, Google Ads tracking) in a single stride. You could even use it to install a new Google Font or icon font like Font Awesome. And for more experienced users, Head, Footer & Post Injections will be very useful for integrating jQuery code into the site footer (Document Ready), to cleanly modify the user experience in different areas of their site. Once again, the possibilities are endless!

40 Head & Footer Code

The Head & Footer Code plugin also lets you add custom code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript/jQuery) to your site’s <head>, <body> and footer tags, with one difference compared to Head, Footer and Post Injections, the plugin presented just above…

The advantage of Head & Footer Code is that you can integrate personal, individual code, specific to an article, a page or any other type of content. Individually. Yes, yes!

This is particularly useful for integrating a piece of CSS or jQuery that will be used to modify the design or behavior ofan element specific to a particular page. In other words, an element that can only be found on one page, and nowhere else.

Even better! This plugin lets you add tracking codes (Google Ads, Facebook…) to certain key pages of your site.
Let’s say you redirect all the contacts who have submitted your form CF7to a thank-you page example.com/thank you. Add a conversion code (Google Ads tracking) on your “thank you” page, using Head & Footer Code, will enable you to count the number of new contacts received since your advertising campaign on Google. Head & Footer Code lets you track visitor → contact conversions, free of charge. Whereas many paid plugins offer less functionality than this.

Custom code assigned to posts, and that’s it?

No. Of course, the team has also provided for the possibility of integrating global code throughout the WordPress site, but for this type of use, we prefer Head, Footer and Post Injections. Like us, you can choose to use Head, Footer and Post Injections in conjunction with Head & Footer Code. Or choose to limit the number of plugins. Which is great for keeping your WordPress site minimalist!

AddFunc Head & Footer Code (alternative)

AddFunc Head & Footer Code was a plugin that had been around since 2014 and performed exactly the same functions as the 2 plugins mentioned above. We’ve used it on hundreds of sites! Sadly, however, AddFunc seems to have abandoned its development. The company has been totally inactive on WordPress.org for over 2 years. It’s another anecdote that reminds us all to choose solutions that appear to be sustainable: freemium model (as opposed to volunteering); large team of developers (as opposed to individual developers); and so on. The best alternative to AddFunc Head & Footer Code, for integrating custom codes on each individual page, is Head & Footer Code!

41. bbPress

How do I create a forum with WordPress?

bbPress is the reference plugin for adding a discussion forum to WordPress.

You can choose to create an entire site, consisting exclusively of a forum. Or you can integrate a forum section into an existing website, through a sub-category linked to your site’s menu.

bbPress is a minimalist solution that won’t slow down your site.

The entire ecosystem that revolves around bbPress and WordPress makes it a highly flexible and scalable solution. Being open source and free, bbPress easily rivals major solutions (some of which are paid for) such as vBulletin, phpBB, FluxBB, Simple Machines Forum, xenForo, Vanilla Forums, MyBB, Flarum, Invision Power Board, or NodeBB.

As you know, these days, social networks and blogs are very popular with brands and major companies. Social networks seem to be the ideal place to connect with customers and let them express themselves through comments, while gaining visibility on the Internet to reach more users.
But creating a thematic forum also offers many advantages. Even more than getting engagement from your audience, via your forum you’re building your own community! Your customers will develop a strong relationship with your brand and other users, like a family!

Of course, getting your community to connect regularly to your forum is no easy task. But if you manage to achieve your goal, you’ll be rewarded with close-knit relationships that benefit your business.

The apotheosis would be to encourage your users to help each other.

Creating a forum is also a great advantage for the SEO of your WordPress site, since you can choose to have the content of your forum indexed publicly on Google.

It can also be very interesting, for example, to offer responsive technical support through a discussion forum. In this way, questions asked and resolved also benefit your other users.

Remember, your discussion forum is yours from start to finish. This means you can customize your colors and add advertising banners for your own products, rather than those of others, as is the case on Facebook groups.

A few tips to keep your forum busy…

A good way of directing your visitors to your forum could be to create a link, below each article, inviting your readers to react to your publication directly on your forum. This would be like replacing the comment area for your articles with a discussion forum.

Some apps might also let you propose the creation of a shortcut icon, on the home screens of your customers’ Android and iOS smartphones. Some ideas for plugins: Add to home screen WP Plugin, Super Progressive Web Apps, or PWA Plugin Contributors (an official Google plugin).

A final tip to help your forum grow and compete with the charm of social networks. You could offer registration and login to your forum, thanks to a WordPress Social Login plugin like Nextend Social Login and Register, Super Socializer or Miled WordPress Social Login.
Once again, the idea is to make access to your forum quick and easy.

In any case, keep in mind that launching a successful forum is no easy task. This would therefore be reserved for contractors who already have a very large audience, or a company that already has a large number of customers requiring technical support. Users are already over-connected. They’re used to joining Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn by simply swiping their finger across their smartphone screen. To compete, put yourself on their level!

42. Simple Lightbox

On the Web, a Lightbox is a widget that runs when you click on a photo thumbnail. Its purpose is to enlarge the photo, via an elegant pop-up window that appears on top of the website.

Some themes and page builders (such as Divi Builder) natively integrate a Lightbox system. But perhaps you’re using a theme that doesn’t have this advantage?

In this case, we recommend installing the Simple Lightbox! plugin.

It lets you configure your photos to open in a modern pop-up window, like this one :

As you can see from this preview image, Simple Lightbox is also a great way to open a photo gallery or launch an autoplay slideshow.

43. User switching

Your WordPress site is open to contributors, you have a discussion forum, a WooCommerce store open to customers, or you deliver sites whose customers only have a Publisher account? In short, is your site multi-user?

If that’s the case, this plugin could save you a lot of headaches!

From your dashboard, User Switching lets you switch from one user account to another with a single click, without having to ask them for their password.

With User Switching, you’ll be instantly reconnected with the identity of the desired user, and you’ll be able to browse your entire site (backend and frontend) as that user. Finally, as soon as you’ve completed the desired intervention or checks, a simple click will return you to your administrator role.

User Switching will come in handy…

• to check that your blog contributors have all the options they need
• to ensure that your members have access to your private forum
• to check that your e-commerce customers have received their PDF invoice or downloadable virtual product
• to put yourself in the shoes of the customers to whom you have delivered a site, as a Webdesigner (useful if you have only delivered an Editor account, to avoid the customer clumsily breaking something with the Administrator account)

44. Admin Columns

Have you ever searched for information in the columns of your WordPress dashboard without finding it?

Frustrating, isn’t it!?

The growth of your content on WordPress and of your products and customers on WooCommerce can make managing your WordPress site quite complex. The Admin Columns plugin helps you manage this mass of elements, giving you more information (and options) in different areas of your dashboard. It allows you to view more comprehensive previews of information, for example by allowing you to add thumbnails to your lists, check it out!

Admin Columns lets you fully customize your list of items/products, right from your WordPress dashboard. In the preview columns, you can add any elements you consider important, so you can find them at a glance.

In Admin Columns, everything is done via drag & drop from your dashboard columns. No programming language skills are required.

If required, the Pro version lets you easily sort, filter and modify data columns, for export and import, in CSV format.

In our opinion, this is an indispensable plugin for improving the productivity of those administering a large WordPress site. Whether in bulk or over time, the daily time savings for you could be considerable!

In this example, we’ve added the size and weight of each image to the media library and image listing. This information was not present in WordPress :

45. Relevanssi – A Better Search

WordPress is the ultimate CMS. However, when it comes to its basic internal search engine, we can do better. Making it as easy as possible for your visitors to find the content that interests them is an effective way of increasing your website’s engagement rate.

It’s easy to add a basic search widget to WordPress, in the sidebar or another area of your theme. However, the problem lies in the quality and relevance of the results returned by the search engine. In short, you’ll be presented with the latest publications including your keyword; sorted by date; with no relevance criteria whatsoever.

Ouch! You had the perfect article to present to your reader, but missed it because it was buried at the bottom of Page 2…

If you don’t present your readers with sufficiently relevant content when they’re searching, you’re missing an opportunity to establish a better connection with them! But there is a way to improve your WordPress search engine experience.

The Relevanssi plugin has been developed to replace the default WordPress search tool. The main advantages of Relevanssi are as follows:

• sorts results by relevance, not by date
• it can include related results, if the exact keyword is not present in the content
• allows searches with AND/OR operators
• allows you to search for exact expressions enclosed in quotation marks
• it doesn’t present the introduction to the results, but rather the content extract where the search terms were found
• allows you to fine-tune the relevance weighting Title vs. Content…, according to your preferences
• search in comments, categories, etc.

In a nutshell, with Relevanssi, your WordPress site will look like Google’s search engine!

Although this version of the plugin is free, there’s also a premium version that includes many advanced features: spellchecker, search in Word-type documents for example, advanced relevance settings (weight in % for articles, vs. weight in % for pages and other content), ability to give a bonus to recent articles, etc. The free version, however, includes a host of powerful features to dramatically improve your users’ search experience.

46. Display Posts

As its name suggests, Display Posts Shortcode lets you display posts using a shortcode.

But it’s not as simple as that, as it allows you to, for example, :

• create a complete sitemap of your site using a shortcode,
• display your most recent or oldest articles
• display only items in a certain category
• create a slightly stylized grid of publications,
• display articles with the most comments
• display a specific number of publications
• display only content of the type of your choice (articles, pages, or custom content)
• and all this, wherever you want, whether on a page, in a sidebar widget or in your footer!

Display Posts is a powerful plugin for advanced users (or adventurers). It’s based on a highly configurable shortcode, with numerous flexible filters.

To get an idea of the possibilities offered by Display Posts, we encourage you to take a look at their official documentation, starting with :

• Display Posts parameters
• Display Posts filters

Some examples of how to use the Display Posts shortcode

Display all product content :
[display-posts post_type="product"]
By default, the shortcode is designed to display blog posts, but it’s compatible with Pages and all types of content.

Display all posts by a specific author whose username is “edouard” :
[display-posts author="edouard"]
You can also select one or more authors by their digital ID.

Display all posts in 2 selected categories via their slug “Hebergement”, “WordPress” :
[display-posts category="Hebergement, WordPress"]
You can also select one or more categories, tags… by their numerical ID.

Display all items except those with ID 1, 3 or 6:
[display-posts exclude="1, 3, 6"]
Useful for manually excluding content that should not be highlighted for one reason or another.

Displays all articles in the current category, with the exception of the article currently being read:
[display-posts exclude_current="true" taxonomy="category" tax_term="current"]
Useful for displaying all related articles at the bottom of a publication.

Display of the last 5 articles published or recently updated:
[display-posts posts_per_page="5" orderby="modified"]
It’s useful to add a widget showing recent articles to all your pages, to encourage Google to quickly index your new content or updates.

We bet these examples have given you a few ideas for spicing up your WordPress site 😉

47. Recent Posts Widget Extended

Recent Posts Widget Extended, unlike Display Posts, is not based on a shortcode. It is based on a widget. If you’re not a computer programmer, you’ll find it easier to handle.

Of course, via Recent Posts Widget, you can define the number of posts to be displayed, their display order, what information to display or not, and a whole host of other preferences.

This plugin lets you intelligently display a list of the most recent articles, with a pretty thumbnail, an excerpt and a choice of publication dates. It’s very effective, for example, for creating a side menu highlighting the latest published content, on all the pages and articles of your site. It works very well in conjunction with a plugin such as Widget Options (see below), which allows you to display only certain widgets in a specific location. For example, certain widgets are only displayed on one or two specific pages.

48. Widget Options

By default on WordPress, the widget system for “footer”, “sidebar”, etc., only allows you to integrate global widgets. Which will be displayed throughout the site. In concrete terms, if you add a small menu of ten or so links in your footer, this menu will be the same throughout the site, regardless of the category of the site you’re in.

The Widget Options plugin lets you easily control the visibility of your widgets.

For example, you can restrict certain widgets to certain pages or categories, display fewer widgets on mobile devices without affecting the computer version, etc.

This is particularly useful, for example, if your site has several very distinct themes. For example, you could choose to display a specific menu on your Web Hosting category and other more relevant menu links on your Website Design category. In fact, this technique can be very useful for your Google ranking, when implementing a silo structure. You could set up a structure comparable to that of the big e-commerce sites, such as Cdiscount, which avoids mixing links to Televisions with links to gardening equipment, for example.

Of course, the possibilities of Widget Options are unlimited and not restricted to the display of specific menus. You could, for example, create advertising images for some of your products and display these advertising inserts only on the appropriate categories, et cetera, et cetera…

49. 404page – your personalized 404 error page

When you decide to set up an online business, there comes a time when you have to face the facts: generating traffic to your website is a complex business. It’s true! It takes time and effort to encourage every visitor to visit your site. So every visitor is important! His visit is an opportunity to convert him into a prospect and eventually into a customer. You can’t afford to lose any visitors because of an error. Yet this is exactly what happens every second on the Internet, when a surfer lands on the default 404 error of the website he’s trying to reach.

Admit it, you’ve already come across this type of page…

This is exactly what’s likely to happen to your visitors if you forget to customize your 404 error page.

In technical language, 404 is the error number returned when a visitor tries to access a page that doesn’t exist, or no longer exists, on your website. The most common reasons for a visitor to receive a 404 error are :

• They followed a badly written link
• They followed a link to a page that no longer exists on your site
• They mistyped the Web address (URL) of the page they were trying to reach

Alas, WordPress’ default 404 error page isn’t much better:

Not so good, is it?

Fortunately, with a plugin like 404pages you can create a customized 404 page to suit your tastes and needs.

Once this page is in place, the ugly default 404 page will be replaced by your custom creation.

For example, here is the 404 page of the site you are visiting:

You’ll notice that, in addition to integrating a few design elements consistent with our graphic charter, we’ve put forward a few navigation links (calls to action) to help lost web surfers find their way back, or get help.

A good idea would also be to integrate, at this location, an engine via which users can search for specific content they may have lost.

The 404page plugin makes it all possible!

Of course, before you set your sights on this plugin, check that your theme or Page Builder doesn’t already allow you to customize your 404 error page. For example, the Divi theme already allows you to create a modern page like EasyHoster’s, as you can see, thanks to its Theme Builder :

50. ThirstyAffiliates

ThirstyAffiliates is an affiliate link management plugin.

It lets you register, list, manage and intelligently insert affiliate links into publications or pages. ThirstyAffiliates also enables you to automatically insert your affiliate links in nofollow mode to avoid penalizing your site’s Google ranking.

What’s interesting about ThirstyAffiliates is that it lets you create custom URLs for your links, in complete discretion. If you participate in affiliate programs like EasyHoster’s, you know that affiliate URLs can look like this:
https://example.com/ index.php?productid=123 &affiliateid=456
Using ThirstAffiliate, you can use a link composed of your own domain name and the URI of your choice, all seamlessly redirecting your readers to the affiliate link for which you are commissioned.
For example, you could convert the previous long affiliate link like this:
https://example.com /go/easyhoster
It’s not just shorter or prettier. It’s easier to remember and will encourage clicks on your links, as the reader can’t guess the real URL behind it. This increases your chances of receiving commissions.

With a simple click of a button, you can add all your listed (pre-registered) links anywhere in your content, without having to find your affiliate link in any interface.

51. Clean Image Filenames

Inadvertently or through lack of experience, we may send images or files to our WordPress site whose names contain spaces, accents or special characters, which can cause major problems later on in the life of the website.

For example, when you want to migrate a WordPress site from one system to another, all images and files containing a special character in their title may no longer be displayed due to broken links.

In concrete terms, imagine you have hundreds of files named like this:

• example.com/Éléments à intégrer dans le design.png
• example.com/Capture d’écran 2021-06-18 à 14.05.png

As long as you don’t touch anything, everything’s fine!
But one day you decide to change servers and here’s how these images were renamed during migration:

• example.com/ÉlĂ©ments %20Ă%20intĂ©grer %20dans%20le %20design.png
• example.com/Capture %20d’eĚ %20cran%202021-06-18 %20aĚ€20%14.05.png

It’s full of weird characters… You can barely recognize the previous URLs! However, if you’d stuck to authorized characters, everything would have been fine:

• example.com/img/elements-a-integrer-dans-le-design.png
• example.com/img/capture-d-ecran-2021-06-18-a-14.05.51.png

The Clean Image Filenames plugin solves these problematic situations upstream, replacing for you any unauthorized characters that may have been clumsily omitted from file names. It removes accents, replaces spaces with dashes, etc.

The plugin intervenes during the file upload process. So it will not modify filenames that were already present on your site before you activated the plugin. If you have big ambitions for your website and you’re worried that one of your users might make a blunder, it might be better to take the initiative and install this plugin right from the start.

Clean Image Filenames supports a large number of international characters, including, but not limited to, Belarusian, Cyrillic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian and some other special characters such as №, @, $, etc., all of which are supported by Clean Image Filenames.

This plugin is the reference in its field, and should perhaps be included in your list of must-have plugins for WordPress.

52. Trustpilot Reviews

Trustpilot is the leading platform for collecting customer reviews free of charge.

Trustpilot offers consumers a place to share and discover business reviews, while giving every company the tools it needs to turn consumer feedback into business advantage.

A good online reputation is a major marketing tool for converting prospects into customers.

Trustpilot offers a WordPress plugin that connects very well to WooCommerce stores. The plugin will automatically request reviews from your customers a few days after their purchase. This will enable you to quickly create a nice Trustpilot profile, filled with positive reviews from your customers.

In fact, this is one of the marketing strategies of EasyHoster, which uses Trustpilot invitations to publicize the quality of its private technical support.
Or to put it briefly: word-of-mouth.

Check out our public profile! 🙂

Let us know how you liked the tips in this top 52 best WordPress plugins by rating us on Trustpilot! Thank you so much for your support.

What can we learn from this ranking of must-have WordPress plugins?

As you may have read in this top 52 must-have plugins for your WordPress site, we’ve taken the trouble to list extensions that allow you to :

• improve your site’s security
• improve performance
• improve organic ranking
• improve marketing
• perform advanced technical operations
• make your own backups
• improve your productivity
• etc.

Now you’re armed with the best possible tools to boost your online business in 2023!

Now all you have to do is shop around for the best plugins– the ones you really need!

You don’t want a gas factory, but a high-performance site for your business.

Each additional accessory, widget or gadget added to your site means more source code to load; more slowdowns; and potentially more risks for your site’s security. Be a minimalist!

In this article, we’d like to introduce you to the plugins we like and use on a regular basis; plugins that are indispensable in many cases.

EasyHoster is much more than a web host…

Our technical support staff are familiar with these extensions.

As a customer, if you encounter any difficulties with one of these plugins, please do not hesitate to contact our technical support team. It will be our pleasure to help you by answering any questions you may have.

Our priority is your success and nothing else!

Frequently asked questions about the best WordPress plugins

What is the maximum number of plugins that can be installed on a WordPress site?

The fewer plugins you install (for example, less than 20), the better your WordPress site will perform. Remember to uninstall unnecessary plugins.

Should I opt for free or paid plugins?

We prefer paid themes, but plugins are free! The sum of all the licenses can be expensive every year.

Continue reading with the best WordPress themes!

If you enjoyed the 52 best WordPress plugins, you’ll love the 25 best themes! Don’t miss this new article 😉