Top 5 WordPress Plugins for Nonprofits

Ilia Jones | September 2021

wordpress-plugins

At ArcStone, we’re big fans of WordPress, and we proudly recommend it to our nonprofit clients as a flexible and affordable website option. 

One of the things we love the most about using WordPress to build websites for our nonprofit clients is the unlimited options for customization. One key player in that customization—plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

What WordPress calls plugins, your iPhone would call apps. They are basically little software programs that you can install (or plug in) on your website to perform certain functions. WordPress touts a whopping 58,900 plugins that are available on the platform today. That’s nearly 60,000 ways to insert contact forms, optimize your SEO or improve security on your website! You can also create your own plugins, if you’re so inclined. 

Top 5 WordPress Plugins 

Best Plugin for Security – Wordfence

Wordfence is our pick for the best all-around security plugin. It provides:

  • Stronger two-factor auth to protect your website
  • Firewall and security scans to keep hackers out 
  • Easy to use, no technical jargon or IT buzzwords to learn
  • Custom configurations to make it work best for your organization

Best Plugin for Custom Forms – Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a form plugin to help your organization create and manage forms. It provides:

  • A straightforward and reliable form management system
  • The ability to make simple or advanced multi-page forms
  • Users can save their progress and come back to it later
  • Standardized fields for addresses, dollar amounts or other formatted data
  • Additional plugins are available to secure the form data

Best Does-it-all Plugin – Jetpack

Jetpack is a plugin that can handle many of the things you need for your WordPress site, with additional services available in a paid subscription. It offers:

  • Built-in website stats or analytics to keep track of traffic and website activity
  • Media handling and management
  • Automatically suggests related posts to keep people reading
  • Built-in social sharing options so site visitors can easily share on social media platforms

Best Plugin for Website Performance – WP Rocket

This plugin will help you optimize your website performance so you can focus on what it says versus how it’s working. It provides:

  • Site optimization tools
  • Caching and file optimization to speed up website performance
  • Lazy loading and file compression for faster page load times
  • WordPress site maintenance

Best Plugin for SEO – YOAST Pro

There is also a basic YOAST plugin, but the Pro version offers some very useful things we recommend to our clients. It helps with:

  • Content analysis and offers recommendations
  • Robust redirects and crawler management
  • Tools to manage site maps
  • Connect to analytics tools

Want More Plugin Knowledge?

We’re just skimming the surface of how helpful plugins can be for your nonprofit website. To learn more about all of the plugins we recommend to our clients, check out our On-Demand Webinar, WordPress Plugins for Nonprofits.

In this webinar, we’ll explain:

  • Where to find quality WordPress plugins
  • How to evaluate plugins
  • Best practices for testing and maintaining your plugins

And, we’ll share our favorite plugin for Email and Social tools!

Watch the on-demand webinar to learn how to use and maintain WordPress plugins and how best to use our top WordPress plugins for nonprofits.

 

 

 

 

 

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