More often than not, if you’re looking to add a feature or function to wordpress, the heavy lifting has been done for you.

Here are a few plugins that have saved us time, money, and countless headaches on virtually every WordPress install we work with.

1) Wordfence

Wordfence is security plugin, and a must have for any WordPress install.  It provides an unmatched toolset for keeping your site safe & secure – everything from security scans, pro-active monitoring, suspicious IP blocking, to repairing a compromised site .  There are too many features to go over in this post (visit wordfence’s website for a full list).  We cannot stress the importance of adding Wordfence to your site enough, especially if you’re on a shared hosting plan.   While the free version is great, if your site is more than just a hobby, the premium version is a worthy investment.

2) WordPress Move

WordPress Move is a lifesaver for anyone  looking to move their site to a new server, or changing a site’s domain name.   The plugin is particularly useful for those who works with wordpress for clients, as you’ll typically need to move a site under development from your test/development environment to the live domain.

The WordPress Move plugin takes a task that previously required hours of work, and manual editing of database entries, into a 10 minute process that even the least tech-saavy amongst us can accomplish.

3) Search & Replace

Search & Replace is a simple, effective plugin that saves a ton of time.  If you’re looking to make a wholesale change to a string of text (particularly useful if replacing a URL, or image path across an entire site), this plugin is for you.  No more hunting for every instance of that link or image that needs to be replaced, or trying to edit your database directly.

4) AdRotate

AdRotate is a fantastic plugin for managing banner advertising on your WordPress site.  It’s a free plugin that provides all the functionality of big (and expensive) ad serving platforms.  With AdRotate you can manage your site’s ad inventory with ease, and provide reporting to your advertisers. Key features include ad scheduling, setting impression & click limits, weighted ad rotating, geo-targeting,  and much more.

5) UpDraft Plus

With Updraft Plus you can set up automatic backups of your site (including media & database) to cloud based storage such as Google Drive, S3, Dropbox, or to good old-fashioned FTP and email.  Restoring a backup takes only a click or two.

6) Yoast

Yoast is a fantastic suite of must-have SEO tools.  We recommend Yoast for users of all levels of SEO experience.  The tool set can help you nail down basic on-page SEO factors, and also more advanced SEO requirements.

7) Simple 301 Redirects

The Simple 301 Redirects plugin does exactly what it says.  The plugin allows you to specify search engine friendly redirection rules.  This is particularly useful for those who recently moved to wordpress or created a new site, and want to make sure that traffic going to old (dead) URLS are redirected to the appropriate content on your new site.

We hope you’ll find these plugins as useful as we have over the years!