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WordPress can be an incredibly useful tool for your business.
Whether you’re building a blog, an e-commerce store, or a portfolio site, this platform can provide a range of themes, plugins, and customisation options to tailor your website to your unique needs. It also offers scalability, meaning as your business grows, your website can grow along with it.
A tool like this, however, can be complex. There are numerous tools inside the tool that you’ll need to be using if you want to make the most of it, from choosing the right theme to optimising for SEO. So with this in mind, what are the ten tools that every solo WordPress pro swears by?
Elementor
The first is known as Elementor, which is a drag-and-drop page builder that allows you to create beautiful websites without needing to write a line of code. If you’re someone who wants full creative control with minimal effort, this is a perfect tool that allows you to customise everything from text and images to buttons and forms, giving you complete flexibility over how your site looks and feels.
Security
Another popular tool revolves around cybersecurity – specifically, cybersecurity that protects your WordPress site from malware and breaches. For solo WordPress pros, Sucuri is one of the best in this regard, as it offers comprehensive protection against a wide range of cyber threats, including the ones we just mentioned.
Cyber Liability
With the last point in mind, while many WordPress pros focus on the technical tools to help them build and maintain sites, there’s another popular tool that shouldn’t be overlooked: cybercrime insurance.
As a solo WordPress user, you’re going to be handling a lot of sensitive client information, including financial transactions and proprietary data. Even with top-notch security plugins like Sucuri, no website is completely invulnerable to cyberattacks, so you need to make sure the risk management for your business is comprehensive and includes all the protections possible against cybercrime.
Yoast SEO
Once you have all your cybersecurity precautions sorted, it’ll be time to think about developing your site into a key player. The best way to do this is through SEO, with Yoast SEO being one of the most popular plugins for WordPress pros around the world.
For those unaware, this is a plugin that helps optimise your content with on-page analysis, meta descriptions, sitemaps, and more. With competition in the online world growing every day, this will be a crucial tool for ensuring your content stands out and continuously reaches the right audience.
WP Rocket
Another factor that will determine how well your website and content ranks in Google search results is the performance of the site itself. This is why many WordPress pros swear by WP Rocket, which is a premium caching and performance optimization plugin designed to make your website load as fast as possible.
Google Site Kit
We mentioned before that the Yoast SEO plugin offers on-page analysis, and while this is important, it’s not the only analytical tool you should be utilising. In 2025, many WordPress pros will still use Google Site Kit, which brings together several of Google’s essential marketing and analytics tools into one clean dashboard – keeping things as simple as possible.
With this tool, you’ll be able to do everything from tracking user behaviour, monitoring how your site appears in Google search results, and A/B testing various elements to see what performs better. What’s more, you’ll be able to do it all from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.
Wordfence Security
Going back to security for a moment, if you want to be ultra-careful, another tool we need to mention is known as Wordfence Security. This is one of the most comprehensive security plugins that will protect your website from brute-force attacks, malware, and a range of other cyber threats.
The reason we mention it, however, is due to its strongest feature: the WAF. Standing for “web application firewall”, this feature can act as your site’s first line of defence, filtering and blocking malicious traffic before it even reaches your WordPress installation.
UpdraftPlus
Anyone will tell you how important it is to regularly back up your site, and UpdraftPlus is one of the most trusted backup plugins for WordPress, used by millions of pros around the world. Whether you’re a solo freelancer or managing multiple client platforms, this tool is all about ensuring your hard work is never lost due to a crash, update error, hack, or accidental deletion, helping you sleep just that little bit easier!
WPForms
When running a site, it’s likely you’ll have to create forms – whether that’s for payments, surveys, or simple registration pages – and while you would ordinarily need technical knowledge to do this, with WPForms, it can all be done for you.
This is one of the most common plugins, trusted by over 5 million websites, with its key features including a drag-and-drop builder and pre-built templates for you to choose from. Not only will this speed up workflow, but it will ensure your time can be spent on the parts of your business that truly matter – like content creation or client engagement – rather than wrestling with code!
ACF
Last but not least, if you want more control over your custom content and you need room to grow, ACF – Advanced Custom Fields – could be the key tool to unlocking the full potential of your site.
This is a plugin that allows you to create a range of custom fields for your posts, pages, or any custom post types you might have, meaning you can tailor the backend of your site to collect and display exactly the content you need in a way that suits you. As your site grows, of course, you’ll need to be able to scale your content structure with ease, and ACF is the perfect companion to keeping you as organised and efficient as possible!
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