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The top WordPress plugins are… a little sad? by Chris Coyier (chriscoyier.net)

This is a little negative-nancy-ish, so if you aren’t feeling that right now — just close this tab 😜. It struck me recently how this list of plugins I saw in the 2023 Annual WordPress Survey wasn’t full of fun and interesting plugins that do interesting and unique things, they mostly just fix boring problems […]

In November 2023, Chris Coyier published his thoughts on the 20 most popular WordPress plugins as of July 2023. I run two WordPress sites: this one and The New Leaf Journal. Between the two, I use a good number of plugins. Surely I must have thoughts on the list! Well first, let’s see the plugins:

  • Yoast SEO
  • Monsterinsights Google Analytics
  • WordPress Importer
  • All-in-One-WP-Migration
  • Wordfence
  • Contact Form by WPForums
  • Elementor Website Builder
  • Duplicate Page
  • Akismet Spam Protection
  • Contact Form 7
  • WooCommerce
  • Classic Editor
  • Google Site Kit
  • Yoast Duplicate Post
  • Really Simple SSL
  • WP Mail SMTP
  • All-in-One SEO
  • UpdraftPlus
  • Jetpack
  • LiteSpeed Cache

I only use two of these plugins. I use UpdraftPlus on both this site and NLJ (see my post on using it for migrating to a new host). I use the Classic Editor plugin on this site but not on The New Leaf Journal.

There are a few that I used a long time ago. I used Yoast SEO from summer 2020 through the end of 2021 before switching to the lighter, more performant, and less annoying The SEO Framework in 2022 (see my post on its humane site maps). I shamefully used Monsterinsights Google Analytics four about two months in 2020 (before I knew better) before switching to the local and privacy-friendly Koko Analytics in 2020. I discuss my Koko Analytics stats in every edition of our weekly newsletter and in The New Leaf Journal’s year-end article rankings (see 2023). I accept an invitation from another post to give it my high recommendation. I briefly used Wordfence in 2020 before quickly moving away from all-in-one security suites. I will note separately that neither Monsterinsights nor Wordfence cleaned up after themselves well, leaving a ton of options behind. I believe I also used Realy Simple SSL for a time early on before figuring out how to set the requisite headers in my site’s .htaccess file (hat tip to Jeff Starr and his myriad free resources at Perishable Press). I never tried the other plugins. I will note with regard to caching that I have used WP Super Cache since late June 2020 and have been consistently impressed by it.