This collection of plugins focuses on engaging site visitors and monitoring your website.

Embedding Forms: Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a fantastic plugin because it’s simple and powerful. The drag-and-drop builder is easy to use. Conditional logic lets you set up complex forms. Notification routing is great for forwarding submissions to different people. And a large collection of addons make it a go-to solution for advanced users and developers.

Tip: Creating a simple contact form? Add a dropdown field to choose a topic/department (e.g. Support, Billing, Sales, General Inquiry). Use Notification Routing to forward the message to the right team reps.

Visitor Profiling: Leadin

When someone submits a form, Leadin will send along a notification. The notification tells you what the person has been doing on your site, and what information is available about them on the web.

This is a useful tool for sales and support teams, as it provides context for every message that comes in. Your marketing team will love it, too. They can use Leadin to build your email list, and see what content on your site is most effective at driving conversions.

Site Stats: Google Analytics by Yoast

You’re driving blind if you’re running a website without using analytics. Without question, Google Analytics is the standard. And the Google Analytics by Yoast plugin makes setup a breeze.

Once activated, you’ll be able to view high-level stats within your WordPress dashboard. This will save you from having to log into the Google Analytics app.

Security: Wordfence

Wordfence is my go-to solution for security. Its features fall into four categories:

• Blocking attackers and malicious code.
• Securing user logins.
• Scanning your site for vulnerabilities.
• Monitoring your site performance (web traffic and system status).

Wordfence is the most downloaded WordPress security plugin. It boasts impeccable reviews: 4.9/5 stars, with 95% of reviewers leaving a 5-star rating.

Speed: WP Super Cache

The #1 thing you can do to speed up your website is by using a reliable host that handles caching. If that’s not an option, try WP Super Cache from Automattic. This plugin is extremely easy to set up, especially when you compare it to other caching plugins.

Scheduled Backups: UpdraftPlus

If your site does go down for whatever reason, it’s good to have scheduled backups at the ready. UpdraftPlus takes care of that. Some of my favourite features:

• Choose which parts of the site to back up.
• Store your backups on a remote service (like Amazon S3 or Google Drive).
• Split large backups into separate archives.
• And much more.

As with Wordfence, UpdraftPlus tops the charts for WordPress plugins. It’s the most-downloaded backup plugin and has an impressive track record of reviews.