What plugins do you install after installing WordPress. The following list includes some of my favourite as well as essential WordPress plugins.

Every WordPress needs to install some plugins and get them working. The following list will give an overview of some essential WordPress plugins that improve your WordPress install.

Contact Form 7

This plugin makes the essential task of creating contact forms much easier. You can customise your contact form. It installs easily. Configuration works out of the box for most installs except if you use Google mail as an SMTP server. To use Google Mail you install Postman SMTP together with the Postman Gmail API extension.

Contact Form 7 won’t work with any more complex forms such as multi-step ajax forms.

Postman SMTP

Postman SMTP solves a very important problem found with all WordPress contact forms — no OAuth 2.0. Together with the Postman Gmail API plugin, Postman SMTP allows you to use Google mail servers securely with all outgoing mail. Postman SMTPs documentation needs updating to the new Google API, thus installation was difficult.

Secure your site with the best free security plugin for WordPress. It does real time scanning of your site and can update automatically. Wordfence make a premium version available. It uses real-time distributed protection. Wordfence says this makes a difference to your sites security.

WordPress SEO

The best SEO plugin I’ve ever used. Makes checking your copy easy. It also comes with a xml sitemap and social plugins. You can post to several different social media pages and choose what you want to say on each.

Google analytics dashboard for WordPress

Adds Google analytics to your WordPress site. What sets this plugin apart from others? It adds an overview graph to your WordPress admin dashboard. The settings page allows you to change some otherwise challenging Google analytics settings.

Jetpack

I like installing WordPress Jetpack as it allows me to edit posts from my phone. It has some neat shortcodes as well. Akismet installs much easier after installing Jetpack. You can manage your site from WordPress.com and WordPress does some marketing of your blog posts.

What do you folk think of my list of plugins. Comment down below with your favourite or essential WordPress plugins. Let me know what you’re thinking. Let’s share information so we can improve our WordPress skills.