Security plugin recommendations?

Caching is the single biggest performance win on cheap shared hosting.

Every build of mine starts with the same six plugins and grows from there.

Would love to hear how you all handle this.

SMTP with a transactional service fixed all my contact-form complaints.

SMTP with a transactional service fixed all my contact-form complaints.

That has been my experience as well.

My baseline list is almost identical to yours.

I disagree slightly, but I can see where you are coming from.

My baseline list is almost identical to yours.

Rank Math here too — the schema options alone are worth it.

Cloudflare plus a light cache plugin is enough for most small sites.

Good point, I had not thought of it that way.