Every WordPress developer has their own tried-and-tested plugin stack: the ten to twenty plugins that end up on almost every site they build, because years of use have proven they can be trusted. We are no different. The list below isn’t a “top 20 plugins” roundup pulled out of thin air — every item on it is backed by dozens of live projects. If you’re starting a WordPress site or a webshop and want to play it safe, none of these will let you down.
Security and spam protection
Wordfence
Security comes first. Wordfence protects against a wide range of attack types, from endless login attempts through vulnerable plugins to suspicious file changes. It is on every single site we run – the one item on this list that is never up for debate.
Advanced Google reCAPTCHA
Nobody likes spam, and a WordPress install can be flooded with spam comments and fake orders remarkably quickly. We mainly use this plugin to protect the comment side of a site, either with Google reCAPTCHA or with the plugin’s own built-in captcha system.
The foundations of a webshop
WooCommerce
Around 90% of the sites we build are WooCommerce shops, so this one is a given. It is one of the most widely used ecommerce engines in the world, and we pick it for exactly the same reason we pick WordPress: it is open, extensible, and doesn’t lock you into a single vendor’s ecosystem. If you’re still deciding on a platform, we went through which engine suits whom here.
BEAR Bulk Editor and Products Manager
WooCommerce’s own product editor is fine, but as soon as you have more products and want to edit them along more complex logic – say, a 10% discount on every product in the dog food category with fewer than 5 in stock – you quickly realise you need a bulk editor. We haven’t found a faster or more practical one. It has so many options that it takes a little time to learn, but it is well worth it.
HUSKY WooCommerce Products Filter Professional
A front-end filter for your catalogue. It is complex to set up because of the sheer number of settings, but once it’s done it is lightning fast, easy to use and SEO-friendly. One tip from experience: it is worth pointing your taxonomy term links here as well – that way you get one coherent filtering system instead of category pages and filters living separate lives.
Parcel points and shipping labels for WooCommerce
The most complete Hungarian parcel-point plugin – nobody on the local market needs an introduction to it. It handles couriers, pickup points and label printing in one place, and, just as importantly, it is maintained whenever a courier company reshapes its API.
Summa Viva.com payment gateway for WooCommerce
This one is ours: card payments for WooCommerce, with some of the lowest fees on the market. Our calculator works out in a few seconds what it would cost in your case.
Summa Pricing
Also our own development: a sophisticated pricing plugin for WooCommerce that lets you price by your own rules and logic as well as by your competitors’ prices – in bulk if you want. We polished it for years before it became an official WordPress plugin. You can read more about it here.
Speed: images and caching
EWWW Image Optimizer and Regenerate Thumbnails
WebP is the best thing since the internet itself was invented: good quality, tiny file size, and it supports transparency. This pair of image plugins is what brings that to your site. They compress, convert and clear out the image sizes you never needed, so they save disk space too. For images, you don’t need anything else.
WP Super Cache
Page-level caching, straight from the team behind WooCommerce. Simple, stable, and set up properly it doesn’t fight with your shop. One caveat, though: caching doesn’t fix problems, it hides them – we wrote about that in detail in our post on slow WordPress sites.
Marketing, measurement and compliance
PixelYourSite PRO
The alpha and omega of conversion tracking. If you advertise, you need it. It manages every pixel and event in one place, and it passes WooCommerce purchase events on to the ad platforms correctly.
Popup Maker
Everyone hates popups, and everyone uses them anyway, because they convert extremely well. This plugin lets you build popups that convert without making your visitors tear their hair out.
ConsentMagic Pro
Cookie consent is mandatory, but implementing it on a WordPress site would be a technically complex job because of the number of plugins involved – this simplifies it. For Google ads it is outright compulsory.
Content, languages and SEO
Rank Math SEO
No site can exist without SEO. After trying several plugins, this is the one we swear by: it gives you a huge number of settings without slowing the site down.
Loco Translate or WPML
The former if your site is single-language and you only need to translate plugin strings. The latter if you genuinely need a multilingual site. One thing to keep in mind, though: WPML needs a Redis-based object cache plugin – and a server that supports it – alongside it.
Email: Post SMTP
For your WordPress site to send email reliably, and so you never have to worry about whether messages landed in the spam folder, use SMTP. The logging and management of outgoing mail is a bonus – it lets you trace what happened to an order confirmation after the fact.
Developer tools: Query Monitor, String Locator, WP Crontrol
These three are tools for developers rather than for site owners. Query Monitor shows which plugin and which query is eating the time, String Locator searches for text inside files, and WP Crontrol makes WordPress’s scheduled tasks visible and manageable. We use all three for development, debugging and speed work.
In summary: what does everyone actually need?
Condensed into a single table, it looks something like this:
| Plugin | What it does | Who we recommend it to |
|---|---|---|
| Wordfence | Filters attacks and suspicious file changes | ✔ Everyone, no exceptions |
| Advanced Google reCAPTCHA | Against spam comments and fake orders | ✔ Everyone |
| Rank Math SEO | Search optimisation without the slowdown | ✔ Everyone |
| EWWW and Regenerate Thumbnails | Image compression, WebP, tidy image sizes | ✔ Everyone |
| WP Super Cache | Page-level caching | ✔ Everyone, but not instead of fixing things |
| Post SMTP | Reliable email delivery and logging | ✔ Everyone |
| ConsentMagic Pro | Cookie consent management | ✔ Everyone, compulsory if you advertise |
| WooCommerce | The engine of the shop | ◐ Webshops only |
| BEAR Bulk Editor | Bulk product editing | ◐ With a larger catalogue |
| HUSKY Products Filter | Front-end catalogue filter | ◐ Many products and attributes |
| Parcel points and labels | Shipping, pickup points, label printing | ◐ Hungarian webshops |
| Summa Viva.com payment gateway | Card payments | ◐ Shops taking payment online |
| Summa Pricing | Rule- and competitor-based pricing | ◐ Where price is a competitive matter |
| PixelYourSite PRO | Conversion tracking for the ad platforms | ◐ If you advertise |
| Popup Maker | Subscription and offer popups | ◐ If you have something to offer |
| Loco Translate or WPML | Translation, or full multilingual support | ◐ Depending on your language needs |
| Query Monitor, String Locator, WP Crontrol | Debugging, code search, scheduled tasks | ✖ Developer tools rather than user tools |
There is one thing to keep in mind, though: every plugin you install is code that runs on every page load. Too many plugins is problematic in many ways, but out of those fifteen carefully selected ones, each one has an important job. That’s why this list is so short for us – and why it hasn’t changed significantly in recent years.
Which plugins do you swear by? If there’s a favourite of yours we left out, let us know – we’d love to hear it. And if you’d like someone to review the plugin stack of an existing site, we’re happy to help with that too.