The following are my default Plugins when working on pretty much any WordPress project. They cover most of the needs for a personal blog or any other small website.

For the small websites that I have worked on, the budget is very low, so it helps to use ‘free’ plugins and themes. But, the WordPress environment is built on the Freemium model, so it becomes a challenge to find a truly free plugin.

The workaround I have found is to look for Open Source plugins. Searching for ‘free’ plugins is a nightmare, the results are always full of fremium stuff, which usually only has half the features enabled for free.

Here is the list of plugins that I use on pretty much any project, because they are open source and do the job very well.

JetPack

This plugin is a must-have as it covers most of the needs for a small website. Jetpack is a comprehensive WordPress plugin that offers a suite of features to enhance website functionality and security.

Jetpack also uses the Freemium model, but the free version covers most needs of a small site or a personal blog.

For bigger sites, you could replace Jetpack with more specialized plugins. There are also some

JetPack Boost

Jetpack Boost is designed to improve website performance and user experience. It offers critical features like image and resource optimization, enhancing page load times.

Super-Cache

To further improve your PageSpeed Insights score, you need Super Cache, which works in tandem with Jetpack Boost to really boost your score.

Super Cache is a WordPress plugin focused on caching to accelerate website loading times. It generates static HTML files from dynamic WordPress sites, reducing server load and enhancing performance.

Activity Pub

From their site: Activity Pub is a WordPress plugin that enables decentralized social networking by implementing the ActivityPub protocol. It allows users to interact and share content across different platforms that support the same protocol.

SiteKit

While Jetpack does have statistics, they are not as detailed as those from Google Analytics. That’s where SiteKit comes in. It offers insights from Google Analytics, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and AdSense directly within the WordPress dashboard.

It also makes it easy to integrate with Google Search Console so that you can submit the site for search indexing.

With JetPack, you will get entry level functionality, which is okay for a small website. If you need more functionality, there are other expert plugins that will offer that, but probably at a cost. Some are free, like SiteKit.

On this blog, I run these plugins and the Yoast plugin only. I am still to find an open source plugin, but whe I do, I will update this post.

Just noticed that all these plugins (except SiteKit) are by Automattic