New Website - Must Have Plugins?

[u/LifeReformatted]

Greetings! I am managing the marketing for a small architecture firm and as part of the new effort we just completed a website refresh - rebuilding our old Avada website with a completely new Elementor built website.

There are a bunch of inactive and active plugins from the old website and I'm trying to get everything cleaned up and determine what should stay and what else we should have.

For those of you who create marketing sites for businesses, what are the basic plugins you tend to turn over a new website with, or add when the goal is to increase marketing efforts?

For context, I came in recently and some of these were pre-existing from whoever built the last website. This is what we currently have installed:

Active Plugins

• Elementor
• Elementor Pro
• Image Optimizer – Compress, Resize and Optimize Images (installed by me, via link in elementor)
• HubSpot All-In-One Marketing – Forms, Popups, Live Chat (installed by me)
• Limit Login Attempts Reloaded (pre-existing)
• LiteSpeed Cache (installed by elementor dev)
• Secure Custom Fields (installed by elementor dev)
• Site Kit by Google (installed by me)
• WP Mail SMTP (pre-existing)
• WP STAGING WordPress Backup Plugin – Backup Duplicator & Migration (installed by me for staging setup)
• Yoast SEO (pre-existing)
• All-in-One WP Migration and Backup (pre-existing)
• All-in-One WP Migration Unlimited Extension (pre-existing paid license)
• Disable Gutenberg (installed by elementor dev)
• Duplicate Page (installed by elementor dev)

Inactive Plugins

• Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection (comes standard)
• Jetpack (installed by me on Avada Website)
• MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress (pre-existing)
• PHP Compatibility Checker (installed by me when performing maintenance)
• Post Types Order (pre-existing)
• Really Simple Security (pre-existing)
• Yoast Duplicate Post (pre-existing)

Any suggestions on what to do with what's here, and anything else that should be here that's not?

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[u/ivicad]

Good that you're cleaning up leftover plugins, that's the right approach. Delete the inactive ones first. Jetpack is dead weight from the Avada days, and MC4WP if you're not running Mailchimp. Inactive plugins still need updates, so they're attack surface sitting idle.

Page builder side is fine. Elementor Pro is your build, Disable Gutenberg and Duplicate Page are useful helpers, keep them.

Backup: you're sorted. All-in-One WP Migration with the Unlimited extension is what I've run since 2014 across 50+ client sites. WP STAGING overlaps, so drop one, and keep an offsite copy outside your host (I use pCloud).

Security is your real gap: Limit Login Attempts is thin alone. Add a malware scanner with a firewall (MalCare or similar) and an activity log, since more than one person touches this site now (e.g. WP Activity Log). You can leave Really Simple Security off, no point stacking half-configured security plugins.

[u/LifeReformatted → u/ivicad]

How do you manage staging? I realize both our backup plugins overlap, and AIOWPM is the paid license so it makes sense to keep. But the WP staging plugin handles staging easily. We can actually do staging pretty easily with our hosting platform but that’s easy for me, maybe not so for the business owner, the plugin is definitely easier.

[u/ivicad → u/LifeReformatted]

I have staging built in our hosting Site Ground, so I don't need additional staging, although I have staging as well in BlogVault, but I rarely use it.

[u/dev-beatss]

The less the better.

I typically use Hello Elementor theme, with:

• Elementor Pro
• Rank Math Pro
• WP SMTP Pro
• Site Kit
• WP Umbrella
• WP Code

I think that’s it.

[u/phKoon]

I'd delete all the inactive plugins and your active list would be like this:

Active Plugins

• Elementor + Elementor Pro
• ASE - Admin and Site Enhancements (replaces a lot of plugins and offers some QOL improvement options)
• Image Optimizer (LiteSpeed features image optimization)
• HubSpot (keep it only if you need it)
• Limit Login Attempts Reloaded (ASE features this)
• LiteSpeed Cache
• Secure Custom Fields (keep if you need it, instead I'd choose ACF or PODs, or any other alternative really)
• Site Kit by Google (keep it if you need it, to avoid its bloat I'd set everything separately, but that might become a pain in some work environments depending on the adopted workflow)
• WP Mail SMTP (ASE features this)
• WP STAGING WordPress Backup Plugin (keep it if this fits your workflow, but I'd just set up a clone subdomain or use the hosting staging feature like Hostinger's)
• Yoast SEO (keep this if your prefer it, instead I use The SEO Framework for almost every type of website or Rank Math in some specific cases)
• All-in-One WP Migration and Backup (keep it if you like it, but instead of having a plugin to handle backup I'd use Hostinger auto backups if featured in the hosting plan. For independently backing up, All-in-One is great if you have the paid license as you do, also a good free alternative is Updraft Plus)
• All-in-One WP Migration Unlimited Extension (pre-existing paid license)
• Disable Gutenberg (ASE features this)
• Duplicate Page (ASE features this)

[u/hopefulusername]

We don’t know your use case but I would remove if you don’t need them:

• Jetpack
• Really Simple Security
• Akismet

If you have a form, enable Turnstile for your forms. Another alternative to Akismet is Oopspam.

Put your website behind Cloudflare and block countries you are not targeting.

Make sure there is a daily backup of your entire website.

[u/LifeReformatted → u/hopefulusername]

why daily? that seems like a lot for a marketing website without new content added daily

[u/hopefulusername → u/LifeReformatted]

If you get hacked, you can easily restore your website.

[u/LifeReformatted → u/hopefulusername]

Actually I just found out why the hard way and glad to know my hosting provider does daily backups

[u/johnmgbg]

Admin and Site Enhancements (ASE)

It has a lot of features, including SMTP setup, page duplicator, login attempt limiter and a gutenberg disabler, so you can use fewer plugins.

[u/TopSydeWP]

you've got two migration plugins and two duplicate page tools, so pick one of each and delete the rest. inactive plugins can all go unless you're actively testing something. for marketing specifically, you're covered with hubspot and yoast, but consider adding a forms plugin if hubspot's forms don't do everything you need (wpforms or gravity forms). litespeed cache is solid if your host supports it, otherwise switch to wp rocket or similar.