10 WordPress Plugins for Starting a Website: Advantages, Disadvantages and Plugin Tips for New Websites

WordPress already comes with a lot of useful features, so you can start a blog without additional WordPress plugins.

However, you will quickly want certain functions or optimizations or want to perform certain tasks more easily and conveniently. This is where WordPress plugins come into play, of which there are thousands.

In this article, I will present the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress plugins, talk about possible dangers, and list 10 plugin tips for new blogs.

What are the advantages of WordPress plugins?

As already mentioned, WordPress itself already has many useful functions and the number of WordPress features has increased significantly in recent years. While plugins were previously required for certain tasks, WordPress now does this itself.

However, this only affects core functions that are useful for a large number of bloggers. Many people already think that WordPress is too overloaded and therefore too slow, and the developers probably think so too, as some WordPress functions have already been removed or outsourced to plugins.

However, there are many functions that only some bloggers need and that is why the plugins were developed. If you need a specific function, simply look for a suitable plugin in the official plugin directory and install it on your blog.

And there are a large number of WordPress plugins. There are currently around 60,000 plugins listed and you can browse the directory using the search function.

This allows professional bloggers, for example, to optimally align their blogs to earn money and to carry out SEO optimizations. Some of these adjustments could be made manually and you wouldn’t need a plugin for it, but with a plugin, it is usually much more convenient, and not everyone has the know-how to tinker with the theme’s code or write PHP code.

WordPress plugins offer the opportunity to not only expand your blog with many useful functions but also to gain advantages over the competition in the areas of SEO, social networks, community building, monetization, etc.

Dangers of WordPress Plugins

After I have listed the advantages of plugins, I would also like to mention the other side of the coin, because there can be disadvantages.

By using plugins you accept certain risks. Not all plugins are programmed by professionals. It can happen that a plugin suddenly stops working and that is of course annoying. If, for example, the advertisements are suddenly no longer displayed, this can cost money and the trust of advertisers.

However, it is even worse when security gaps in the plugins lead to your blog being hacked. This also happens from time to time and can be particularly damaging to a professional blog.

Therefore, you should follow the following advice:

The fewer plugins you use, the lower the risk potential on average. That’s why you should only use the plugins that you need.

You should only use plugins from trustworthy sources. The official WordPress plugin directory is not 100% safe either, as there is no official review of all plugins and updates. However, the popularity of this platform and the rating options make it easy to see whether a plugin is used by many people and how they rate it.

You should make sure that a plugin is as up-to-date as possible and is updated regularly. You can also find information about this in the official WordPress directory. There is now the option for automatic plugin updates.

Of course, you should always keep your eyes and ears open. If you follow well-known blogs about WordPress, you will quickly notice if there are problems with certain plugins.

You should not test new plugins live. You should first install them on a test blog (eg a local blog) and only when you are sure should you install this plugin on your real blog.

If you follow this advice you are not 100% safe, but you have significantly reduced the risk.

Plugins and loading time

Another point to consider in connection with plugins is the performance, i.e. the loading time of the blog. Most plugins access the database, for example, and cause more or less frequent accesses. This naturally slows down the loading time of the blog.

Therefore, you should use as few plugins as possible and pay attention to what influence a plugin has on performance.

In my 13-week project, I optimized my blog and, among other things, significantly reduced the number of database calls. I managed this by deactivating and deleting some plugins that I didn’t need.

Secondly, I identified 2 plugins that had generated disproportionately high database accesses. But I didn’t want to do without these plugins. So I looked at these plugins and found that a large proportion of the database accesses were generated by collecting statistics and not necessary functions. So I deactivated the statistics functions of the plugins.

Another plugin was only intended for the admin but was also executed in the front end. I changed that with 2 lines of code. Optimizing the 3 plugins alone saved me around 50 database accesses, which of course brought about a significant performance improvement.

Therefore, when using new plugins, you should always pay attention to what influence they have on loading times.

10 Plugin Tips for New Websites

1. AAWP

AAWP is a paid plugin, but I can highly recommend it. It makes it very easy and convenient to add Amazon affiliate program product boxes, bestseller lists, comparison tables, and more. It is very easy to use and the professional presentation helps me to generate more income with affiliate marketing on many blogs ., but I can highly recommend it. It makes it very easy and convenient to add Amazon affiliate program product boxes, bestseller lists, comparison tables, and more. It is very easy to use and the professional presentation helps me to generate more income with affiliate marketing on many blogs.

2. Advanced Ads

This banner plugin is very flexible and allows you to add advertising banners and ads anywhere on your blog. The free version allows you to make many settings, so this is usually sufficient. I even used it to build myself an AdSense copy.

3. Antispam Bee

The best anti-spam plugin I know. It reliably filters out spam comments and ensures that your blog is not filled with junk.

4. Autoptimize

Loading times are very important today and with this plugin, the code of your website is perfectly optimized. This means that your blog loads faster, which is very good and important for positively influencing Google’s Core Web Vitals values, for example.

5. BackWPup

Security is also important for blogs. With this plugin, you can make automatic backups that can then be restored later if necessary. Nothing is worse than losing months of work and not having a backup.

6. Pretty Link Lite

I use the Pretty Link Lite plugin primarily to manage affiliate links. This means you only have to make link changes in one place, saving you a lot of maintenance work.

7. Simple CSS

This allows you to add CSS commands to customize the look of your blog. And you don’t have to change the files of your WordPress theme.

8. Statify

Of course, you want to know how many visitors your blog has. With the free plugin Statify you can record the number of page views very well and reliably. This allows you to see, among other things, which articles are the most popular.

An alternative is Koko Analytics. Both plugins comply with data protection regulations.

9. WP Fastest Cache

I now almost exclusively use the caching plugin WP Fastest Cache on my blogs and websites, as it works perfectly with every theme. This plugin ensures that articles and pages that have been generated are cached for a few hours, which takes a lot of load off the server and makes the website much faster.

10. Yoast SEO

With this plugin, on-page search engine optimization of a WordPress blog is very easy. Most of the default settings are already very good, but you can of course adjust them flexibly. You also get tips and advice on optimizing the SEO factors of an article while you write.

This means that a new blog should have a very good plugin base. Of course, I use other WordPress plugins on my various blogs, for example, business plugins for WordPress, which I need for specific features. But you shouldn’t rush into this; instead, you should first find out which additional features you need.

You should take a look at the cookie plugins, which ensure that no unnecessary cookies are set on your computer. This is important from a data protection perspective.

You can find more information and plugin presentations in the Top 20 best WordPress plugins for freelancers on the web.

How to install plugins

Installing a plugin is quite simple. There are 2 basic ways to install a plugin.

Install from the WordPress directory

If the desired plugin is in the official plugin directory (this applies to the plugins just presented except for the AAWP plugin), you can install it very easily.

In your blog, go to the menu item “Plugins” and click on the button “Install” at the top.

In the search field that is now displayed on the right, enter the name of the plugin or a search term if you are looking for a suitable plugin. Suitable plugins are automatically displayed.

From the list of plugins found, select the plugin you want and click on the “Install now” button. Before doing so, you can and should take a closer look at the reviews and, ideally, the plugin’s details page.

If you have saved your FTP data in the WordPress config file, the installation should now run automatically and at the end, you will see a success message and the question of whether you want to activate the plugin. We want to do that, otherwise,e we won’t be able to use it.

If you have not saved the FTP data in the config file, you will be asked to enter the FTP data. After that, the installation will proceed in the same way.

Uploading a plugin

If you have purchased a paid plugin (e.g. AAWP) or downloaded a plugin from a normal website/blog (you should be very careful here!), then you usually have a zip file.

Now go to the “Plugins” menu and then click on “Install”. But now click on the “Upload Plugin” link at the top.

A small dialog box will appear, allowing you to select the zip file of the plugin from your hard drive. Then click on “Install now”.

From now on, the installation will proceed as described above.

Keep WordPress plugins up to date!

Once you have expanded your blog with useful WordPress plugins, the work is not done forever. You have to keep the plugins up to date!

WordPress shows in the plugin list in your admin when there are new versions of the plugins contained in the WordPress directory. You should install these updates as quickly as possible. It makes sense to install the update on a small blog first and if there are no problems, you can do the same on the larger blogs. It is also always worth taking a look at the plugin’s support forum. If there are problems with the new version of the plugin, you can usually find something about it there.

For plugins that come from outside the WordPress directory, you should regularly visit the developer’s website or, for example, subscribe to their newsletter to stay up to date with updates. However, many paid plugins now also have automatic update information and this can be done with just one click.

If you don’t keep your plugins up to date, you risk security gaps and the problems that come with them. The same applies to WordPress itself, of course.