Using WordPress as a platform for business is easy thanks to the tens of thousands of plugins now available online. Plugins are what give the platform its functionality beyond just basic blogging. For business owners, the key is knowing which plugins are necessary and which ones can be ignored. Below is our list of the top five most essential WordPress plugins that every business should be using. If you are not using these, you should at least look into them.

1. Updraft Plus Backup and Restoration

Perhaps the only thing that rivals security in terms of importance for website owners is creating regular backups of the website. Living without a backup is akin to playing Russian roulette. One crash of your site or database could destroy years of work. Updraft Plus Backup and Restoration provides an easy and effective way to create backups on a regular schedule. You can save your backups locally or in the cloud – the plugin supports popular services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, and more.

2. Wordfence Security

Site security is now more important than ever, and no security plugin for WordPress boasts as many users as Wordfence Security. More than one million WordPress users trust this plugin to protect their sites from hacking. It is a free and open-source solution that also offers a premium upgrade for users who want professional support and a few extra features. The free version is incredibly powerful by itself.

3. Yoast SEO

WordPress is already fairly SEO-friendly, but Yoast SEO goes the extra mile by helping users actually produce better content. The plugin offers both free and paid versions, with paid subscribers getting professional support and some additional features. Yoast SEO helps website owners with page analysis, meta-tags, links, XML sitemaps, and more. It even teaches users how to produce better content that will improve search engine performance.

4. WP-SpamShield by Scott Allen

Allowing comments on your WordPress website can improve SEO performance, but only if those comments are properly managed. WP-SpamShield is a plugin that helps you do just that. It prevents your WordPress site from being hammered from spambots as well as human spammers. It works on any kind of form – including comments, contact forms, and registration forms. If your site is being hit with spam comments, you need this plugin.

5. TablePress by TobiasBg

WordPress does a lot of things well right out of the box. Inserting tables is not one of them. If you need tables on your site, and most businesses do, TablePress is a plugin you absolutely must have. This plugin makes designing and deploying tables as easy as possible. Tables are created on a separate page and then added to your website simply by cutting and pasting shortcode. TablePress offers both free and paid versions; the free version is adequate for most businesses.

Plugins are what give WordPress its tremendous functionality. Using the right ones could make a real difference to your business site.