We often get asked, “What plugins do you recommend for ensuring that your WordPress site can scale?” In this post, we’ll cover some of the best plugins available that we personally recommend for our clients.
Here’s the full list:
- Wordfence
- WP Rocket
- W3 Total Cache
- Gravity Forms
- Yoast
- RankMath
- Redirection
- LifterLMS
- UpdraftPlus
- WP Mail SMTP
- Kadence Blocks
A Preliminary Note: Plugins Aren’t Enough to Ensure Scalability
Before we dive into the plugins, however, it is important to note that while plugins do help your WooCommerce site scale, they aren’t enough by themselves. To truly ensure reliable scalability, you need a host that can handle it. The best plugins won’t matter if your site is hosted on a $5/month shared hosting plan.
So, it’s really important that you choose a WooCommerce host that can scale – like Convesio.
Plugins That We Recommend
Now let’s take a look at the plugins.
Wordfence
Wordfence is a comprehensive cybersecurity plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce websites. Indeed, it’s so popular, that for many users, it is the security plugin for WordPress.
It’s designed to protect sites from a variety of online threats and offers a range of features, including firewall protection, malware scanning, and login security. The firewall component of Wordfence is a web application firewall (WAF) that helps block malicious traffic from reaching your site. It also includes a threat defense feed that keeps the firewall rules up-to-date with the latest security threats.
Wordfence’s malware scanner is capable of scanning files, themes, and plugins for known vulnerabilities and malicious code, providing you with detailed reports and options for removal. Additionally, it offers login security features like two-factor authentication and the ability to block brute force attacks, enhancing the security of your website’s login process.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a powerful caching plugin designed to enhance the performance and speed of WordPress websites, especially when scaling to handle high levels of traffic. This plugin offers a range of features geared towards optimizing site loading times (including Core Web Vitals) and improving user experiences during traffic spikes.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is another plugin that helps improve the SEO, Core Web Vitals and overall user experience of your site. It does this via a CDN and other caching practices.
Gravity Forms
If you need to add a form to your site, you’ve probably used Gravity Forms. This plugin is the most powerful and reliable tool available for creating forms and then using that form data for useful business purposes.
Yoast
Yoast SEO is a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) plugin for WordPress websites. Some of its key features are on-page SEO optimization, which includes real-time analysis and suggestions for improving SEO elements such as titles, meta descriptions, headings, and keyword usage; and XML sitemaps.
Rank Math
Another great option for SEO plugins is Rank Math. It is a little more expensive than Yoast, but comes with significant more details and features.
Redirection
Redirection is a popular tool for WordPress websites that helps manage web page redirects. It’s useful for fixing broken links, improving your site’s performance, and making sure your website ranks well on search engines.
Redirection also lets you create more advanced redirects using something called regular expressions. This means you can match and redirect multiple URLs at once. It can even keep an eye on changes to your web page addresses and automatically create redirects when they’re updated.
LifterLMS
Building a LMS site? Then you’ll want to check out LifterLMS, one of the best ways to do so. It has everything you need to create, launch, and scale courses directly from within WordPress.
Tip: Also, check out our guide to scaling your LMS site.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is a popular WordPress plugin that simplifies website backup and restoration. Some key features include backup creation, automated backups, easy restoration of backups, cloning and migration, and robust security + encryption features.
WP Mail SMTP
WP Mail SMTP is a WordPress plugin that helps improve the reliability of email delivery from your WordPress website. It ensures that emails sent from your site reach their intended recipients and don’t end up in spam folders.
WP Mail SMTP allows you to configure your WordPress site to use a third-party SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service to send emails. SMTP is a more reliable method compared to the default WordPress email function. By connecting your site to an SMTP service, your emails are less likely to be flagged as spam.
Kadence Blocks
Kadence Blocks is a no-code page builder plugin that makes it super easy to create beautiful WordPress websites. You can customize layouts, colors, fonts, typography, and more.
