Three WordPress Plugins I Actually Pay For (and Two I Quietly Dropped)

People keep asking me what plugins I’ve got running on this site. Every time I see one of those “50 must-have WordPress plugins of 2026” articles I get annoyed — who actually crams 50 plugins into a site without it falling over. I’m cheap and I hate fuss, so the things I actually pay for, and am happy to keep paying for, come down to three. Plus two I quietly uninstalled.

The two and a half I pay for

UpdraftPlus Premium. The free version backs up locally, but I insist on paying a bit so it auto-syncs to Google Drive. The reason is embarrassingly mundane: I white-screened my own site once by editing theme source, and since then I don’t trust “I’ll do a manual backup later” — that’s a promise I break. With backups, paying for “I’m certain it exists” beats everything else.

WP Mail SMTP. This one finally got my site’s email actually delivering. Before, using the default PHP mailer, confirmation emails kept landing in spam, and I couldn’t even receive my own. Hooking up a proper sending service cleared the whole mess up. Half-paid, since the free tier covers what I need.

One code-snippet plugin. I don’t like hard-coding bits into functions.php where a theme update might wipe them. A little tool that manages snippets keeps me sane. I won’t name it — this isn’t an ad.

The two I quietly dropped

One was a “do-everything SEO” behemoth. After installing it my admin noticeably slowed down, and I only ever used a tenth of it. I swapped it for something far lighter. The other was a page builder I installed with grand ambitions, couldn’t figure out after two tries, and uninstalled because it was just taking up space.

Bottom line

My standard for a plugin is dead simple: does it make me worry about one less thing. Yes, keep it, even if it costs. No, off it goes, no matter how famous. If you’re just building a site, don’t install from one of those long checklists in one go — think first about what you actually want it to do for you. This is just my biased take after some scars. Take it or leave it.