I know the “what plugins should I use” question comes up too often, but typically the responses lead a lengthy showcase to cover various scenarios and use-cases. If I wanted to keep my plugins count as few as possible and I had a WordPress site that’s focused on a blog, what’s the recommended stack of reliable and stable plugins you’d recommend?
Ideally I’m thinking something cover SEO (rankmath), security (wordfence), image compression/lazy-load (smush).
Apart from security, SEO, and website speed, without specific needs or problems:
Backup: All in One
Redirect if you rebuilding/restructuring: 301 Redirects
Google Captcha: Advanced Google reCAPTCHA
Google Analytics: Monster Insights
Cookie consent: Complianz
It depends a lot on your host provider.
https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/security/
https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/performance/optimization/
https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/security/backup/
And you probably wouldn’t need any plugin.
Performant theme, proven plugins, properly scaled, compressed and format images (webp), wise use of fonts (always localy), offload videos and you’re OK.
If you need extra caching: WPSuperCache+Debloat.
SEO: One of best documents: https://ahrefs.com/seo and small helper: https://www.protoolseo.com/meta-tag-generator. I use TheSEOFramework.