10 Must-have WordPress Plugins for Your Organization

  • Best Practices
  • Tech & Code

Plugins are a great way to customize and improve your website. They allow you to easily add all the features you need to run your organization’s site successfully. But with almost 60,000 plugins to choose from, it can be confusing to know which ones are the best for your WordPress site.

Adding a sign-up form, improving security, optimizing your SEO, or building a social community can all be achieved easily with WordPress plugins. 

Here’s a list of our go-to plugins for improving your website experience.

jetpack's plugin logo with text "safer. faster. more traffic" and a cellphone with icons.

Jetpack

Built by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack is a versatile plugin that has a variety of different tools in one. It offers website security, performance improvements, and growth tools. It’s installed on over 5 million sites and it’s considered one of the top five most popular WordPress plugins to date. 

Among its various features, it can manage website backups, security protection, automated social sharing, in-site search capabilities, as well as lead generation. And if all that sounds too bulky, you can choose to only install the tools that fit your needs.

Overall, Jetpack is a great option for organizations of all sizes, and with a free version available, it can fit all budgets.

polylang's plugin featuring red parrot logo

Polylang Pro

Polylang is a translation plugin that allows you to feature multiple languages on your website without compromising performance. Over 90 predefined languages are available with the possibility of adding more. 

Polylang provides translations of posts, URL slugs, categories, menus, widgets, and more. Plus to save you time and optimize your workflow, it integrates content duplication for all languages.

We do usually recommend Polylang Pro as it has additional features including more translations and the ability to duplicate posts to another language, but they also have a free version if needed.

gravity forms header featuring an ipad

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms help you securely capture user data using digital signatures, polls, surveys, and field validation. You can rest assured knowing your users and site admins will benefit from a seamless user experience.

A powerful tool for custom forms, this plugin lets you create forms, manage payment transactions, add file upload fields, and more. Even with no coding experience, you can easily create forms with their drag-and-drop feature.

This plugin is known as a fan favourite for developers. With well-documented code and the ability to build custom actions, developers can create something tailored to your needs.

WordPress backend with SEO score with text "the swiss army knife of WordPress SEO"

Rank Math

Rank Math is one of the most popular SEO plugins on the market with over 1 million users. It ensures your site is SEO-friendly so you can rank higher on search engines. 

With Rank Math, you can optimize your posts, perform content audits, keep track of keyword rankings, and manage internal links. Even if you’re not familiar with SEO terms, their personal AI assistant will give you easy-to-follow suggestions to walk you through them. 

We prefer Rank Math over other SEO plugins because it requires less code and memory and doesn’t affect your page speed. We also love how user-friendly it is as it doesn’t require you to have any coding knowledge to use.

A person sitting at desk successfully comments through Akismet machine checker and a spammer failing at commenting.

Akismet Spam Protection

One of the most highly rated anti-spam plugins, Akismet is also an Automattic creation. It’s automated to search and filter out suspicious-looking entries from your comments and contact forms to keep your site safe from spam.

It also shares status history so you can check which comments were marked as spam and adjust their status if needed. 

Overall, Akismet is easy to install, keeps your site safe, and saves you time to focus on your users.

memberpress logo on blue background

MemberPress

If you’re looking to build an online community, MemberPress is a membership plugin that can let you create subscription plans and restrict content based on user levels. 

It can be integrated with the most popular email platforms including MailChimp and Constant Contact.  It’s also a great option for creating online courses through its drip content, certification, and course management features. 

With minimal coding experience, you can build your perfect online community while ensuring monetization.

safe redirect manager logo of shield and two arrows crossing on a black to red gradient background

Safe Redirect Manager

When it comes to your user experience, the last thing you want is to lead users to a dead link. The Safe Redirect Manager plugin allows you to safely and easily redirect users from any 404 error or migrated pages. 

This plugin is extremely helpful during website migrations or major updates to avoid any negative impact on your SEO. And it makes it easy to set up any 301 or 302 redirects. 

Safe Redirect Manager is the perfect redirection solution to manage enterprise-level traffic without all the unnecessary options.

custom field form with a sunset and mountain background

Advanced Custom Fields

The Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin lets you edit content screens and custom field data to add information about your content. While this plugin is marketed toward web developers, anyone can learn how to apply it without too much coding experience.

We apply this plugin to all of our new client websites as we have found it’s the best tool to add custom fields for images, call-to-actions, text, quotes, basically anything! You can customize your CMS in an endless amount of ways.

ACF is a powerful plugin to simplify your backend and give you more flexibility when editing or adding pages.

WordPress logo with text "document your wordpress site, using the writing tool you already know and love" (WordPress, obviously)"

WP Help

WP Help is a fantastic option if you are outsourcing your web development or if you want to avoid explaining how to use your site to every contributor. 

Site operators can easily create detailed documentation of content entry guidelines, accessibility standards, and even how to use WordPress plugins, saving you time and simplifying your workflow.

WP Help is one of the plugins that we like to install for all of our clients to provide simple inline help.

cylinder with arrows for import and export icons, a cvs file for bulk edit icon, and site pages for migrate icon

WP All Import/All Export

If you’re more comfortable managing your data with Excel or Google Sheets, WP All Import/Export is for you. This plugin can upload large data files to create custom pages and publications. It also features scheduled imports that are great for managing inventory and orders. 

It has a drag-and-drop interface, making even the most complicated imports/exports quick and easy. By far one of the best things about WP All Import/Export is their highly responsive customer support and extensive tutorials to walk you through any issues.

Bring Your WordPress Site to the Next Level

Creating a WordPress website will usually require at least some plugins to create the user experience that you want. The great thing is that no matter which features you need, from e-commerce integrations to block editors, there’s a plugin for that!

While these are some of the plugins that we recommend, if you’re looking for certain functionality that we didn’t cover, please reach out, we would be happy to provide you with some recommendations.