Sneaker Interactive’s Top Ten List of Recommended Plugins for WordPress Admins

Every company that works with WordPress has a set of favorite plugins they use constantly on every website they touch. From the way they work, what they accomplish and how often they are updates to name a few of the attributes we admire.

Here are the ones we have fallen in love with, both FREE and PAID plugins in no particular order.

1. WordFence:  https://www.wordfence.com
   Free plugin with Paid Professional version available. Accomplishes a lot to protect sites from normal security issues but also has an amazing LIVE traffic view that lets you block attacking IPs manually if needed.
2. iThemes Security:  https://ithemes.com/security/
   Free plugin with Paid Professional version available. Likely the best security plugin we have ever seen. With a few clicks you are protected from a ton of issues.
3. All In One SEO:  https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
   Free plugin with available extensions to enhance as needed. Most may favor Yoast SEO – but we find it has many reoccurring compatibility issues with other plugins. All In One SEO is consistently compatible and accomplishes the same goals in a clear manner.
4. Google Analytics Dashboard:  https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-dashboard-for-wp/
   Free plugin that allows WordPress users to clearly see trends and traffic on the dashboard at login. Clean appearance and helpful information.
5. Gravity Forms:  https://www.gravityforms.com/
   Paid plugin that accomplishes amazing form creation with security features built right in. Works with other plugins to function as the form side of some e-commerce plugins like Cart66.
6. Woo Commerce: https://woocommerce.com/
   Free plugin with paid extensions, most common features are free. This is a simple e-commerce plugin that can be modified, styled and extended in many amazing ways. It works best with themes that have styles built for it from the start. The default look is a bit clunky.
7. Cart66:  https://cart66.com/
   Paid plugin with a simple features that enable sale of products, downloadable content, and shipping items with ease.
8. Bad Bots:  https://wordpress.org/plugins/stopbadbots/
   Free plugin that protects your site from resource hogging bots, scrapers. leachers and more. This is a recent entry to our list but with new bots hitting some of our clients all the time and waisting our bandwidth, we had to find a solution. Bad bots blocks the known bad bots like ahrefs.com yandex and more that tend to ignore robots.txt and slow your site down. It still lets trustworthy bots like Google, Bing, and Yahoo without issue.
9. MailPoet:  https://www.mailpoet.com/
   Free plugin with a lot of functionality. This is a newsletter plugin that lets you make custom subscription lists, can be automated or manually sent, and it handles subscriptions and unsubscribes automatically.
10. Audit Logger: https://www.wpsecurityauditlog.com/
    This is a free plugin with a paid pro version. Simply said, it tracks logins, log outs, and attempts, as well as most activity within a website. This is great when something is changed on a website and issues arise to know what was changed, when, and what user clicked the button. WordPress sometimes also pushes updates in the background and if a plugin or feature of a website breaks this lets us know as well. We love this one!

There you have it, the Top Ten list of our favorite paid and free plugins for WordPress. If you have a small website or run a Fortune 500 website built with WordPress – it pays to know the software that you should use, and that come recommended from techies like us.

Who uses these plugins? We tend to install most of these on a ton of the websites we handle. From companies in the Oil and Gas Industry, Real Estate, Law Firms, Schools, Government Websites, and more.

These plugins help keep the website stable, secure, and reliable. We have used many others and in some cases have made changes to the list based on the client needs, without fail this list has always been our first pick.