One of the most beautiful things about WordPress is it’s plugin system. It’s incredibly easy to use, even for the newest users. And with thousands of developers making their own plugins available for free, it greatly reduces the time needed to add new features to a WordPress site. Below is a list of the plugins I install in almost every WordPress project I work on.

Exploit Scanner

Search the files and database of your WordPress install for signs that may indicate that it has fallen victim to malicious hackers.

WordPress SEO By Yoast

Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.

Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings -> Media) after previously uploading images or have changed to a theme with different featured post image dimensions.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

WP Minify

This plugin integrates the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

White Label CMS

The White Label CMS plugin is for developers who want to give their clients a more personalised and less confusing CMS.