Plugins are WordPress’s greatest strength. They are also the most common source of incidents. Those two statements do not conflict — the problem is not plugins, it is the number of neglected ones.
Installing one brings along a set of companions: code you now have to update, assets that load on every page, a chance of conflicting with something else, and the risk that development stops one day. You gain a feature and take on a liability.
The five you actually need
Opening a business site really needs five categories. Pick exactly one plugin per category.
One rule deserves emphasis: run exactly one SEO plugin. Two active at once emit duplicate canonical tags, sitemaps and structured data, and indexing gets worse rather than better. It is the classic case of two good plugins ruining each other.
The mail delivery plugin may look out of place. Installing a form feels like enough, but a server’s default mail often lands in spam or never arrives at all. If your business runs on enquiries, this is not optional.
What can wait
Some categories cause more trouble than they solve when installed on day one.
Caching plugins deserve particular caution. If the server already caches pages, adding a plugin cache puts two layers on the same response with different invalidation timing, producing states like “the admin sees the new page, visitors see the old one”. That class of problem is remarkably hard to trace.
A three-minute check before installing
Before adding anything, look at three things: updated within six months, a healthy number of active installs, and its vulnerability history. That single habit filters out most of the trouble in advance.
The relationship between plugin count and maintenance load is covered further in the Themes & plugins archive, and if you are already past twenty, cleanup is part of the diagnostic in our optimization program.
Next part
With the tooling in place, content is next. The following part covers your first five pages — and what question each one has to answer.