900,000.

Some of these websites are top government websites, business coaching websites, and news media outlets who keep their presence online and powered through WordPress.

In my previous post, I gave you the reasons why I suggest WordPress to my clients and why I use itself to power my websites.

Here, I’m going to build on that and tell you exactly what Plugins to use and why they should be on your WordPress powered website.

At the end, you’ll know what plugins to keep on your website checklist, so that when you work with your website designer, they know exactly which ones you want and can also suggest others that will be helpful to you generating leads from your website.

There is no shortage of plugins to use in WordPress. Once your inside the Dashboard, you’ll have so many to choose from, it may feel more like analysis paralysis than it being a great platform.

So, here are the WordPress plugins I recommend most small business websites start with. Get these installed first, before you add any others.

Sucuri

Purpose: Protection. This plugin helps keep hackers out of your website and does a really good job at it! According to WordPress and the company itself, “It is a security suite meant to complement your existing security posture.“

I came across this gem after my own website was hacked. I need a stronger solution than what I had been using and that’s when I encountered Sucuri. I tested it out for a month and never looked back.

Yoast

Purpose: SEO. Every small business owner and entrepreneur knows that search is the marrow of your online business, because search warms up leads, introduces new audiences to you, and gets eyeballs on your business.

Yoast makes sure that your content is reaching the people that you want it to and also that it’s connecting with them in the right way. Their straightforward plugin helps guide you through the SEO process for each of your blog posts as well as your website’s pages.

Contact Form

Purpose: Connection. CF, as it’s affectionately known, is the basic form that most WordPress websites use. Why? because it’s easy to tweak and easy to install.

Plus, it’s very customization and has options for integrating it with most mailing list software. Another perk is that it is *very* documentation heavy. So, if you’re not sure if something is setup the right way with it, they step-by-step instructions help you check to make sure that the steps in the setup were done in the correct order.

Social Share

Purpose: Promotion. Social Share Floating Icons allows for people to share your posts–and pages, where enabled–across a number of social media platforms.

The great this with this plugin is that it’s very easy to setup. So, if you’re going to make your website yourself, then you’ll be able to easily plug in the information they’ll ask for (like your usernames) and allow people to get to sharin’ your content!

Updraft

Purpose: Backups! Now that your website is done, lookin’ fancy, and has all these great plugins installed, you need this one so that you won’t loose all of your hard work.

Updraft helps you easily create backups of your website that you can send to Dropbox, google Drive, or even your email, so that you don’t loose the content and work you’ve created. You can also time the backups and select how many at a time to keep.

What I Recommend: Bookmark this blog post. Once you’re ready to do your website, come back to this blog post so that you know exactly which plugins to begin with for your WordPress website.