A new theme gives you the design. It rarely gives you everything the site actually needs to run well once real content, real traffic, and real visitors show up. After years of setting up and customizing ThemeForest themes for clients, here’s the short list of plugins we reach for almost every time — and why.
1. A proper SEO foundation
Most ThemeForest themes handle basic on-page structure fine, but none of them manage titles, meta descriptions, sitemaps, or schema markup the way a dedicated SEO plugin does. Rank Math (or Yoast, if you’re already used to it) should go in before you publish anything, not after. Retrofitting SEO settings across dozens of pages later is a much bigger job than setting the defaults correctly on day one.
2. Something to catch broken links before your visitors do
This one gets skipped constantly, and it’s the one that causes the most quiet damage. As a site grows past its first few months — new posts, updated product links, external references that move or disappear — broken links pile up without anyone noticing until traffic or rankings take a hit.
We’ve been using Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO on larger sites for this. Its cloud-based scanning means it doesn’t crawl your server directly (unlike the older, server-side version), so it won’t slow down a site that’s already carrying a decent amount of content. Worth setting up right after launch, before the link rot even starts.
3. A contact form that actually delivers mail
Most ThemeForest themes include a basic contact form out of the box, styled to match the design. What they don’t handle is the part that actually matters: making sure the email reaches the inbox. Shared hosting environments in particular tend to break form delivery silently — the form submits fine, shows a success message, and the email just never shows up.
Contact Form 7 remains the most common fix for this because of how much documentation exists around its delivery issues. We put together a rundown of the most common Contact Form 7 problems and fixes — mail delivery being the big one, alongside spam filtering and validation quirks. Worth testing an actual form submission right after launch, not just checking that the form visually renders.
4. An image optimizer, before you upload anything
Theme demo content is usually already compressed. Your own product photos, blog images, and portfolio shots almost never are. Running everything through an optimizer (Smush, ShortPixel, or similar) at upload time saves you from a slow, bloated site three months in — and it’s a five-minute setup you’ll never think about again once it’s on.
5. A backup plugin that runs on a schedule, not just before updates
This isn’t glamorous, but it’s the one that actually matters when something goes wrong. UpdraftPlus or a similar scheduled backup plugin, configured to run automatically and store copies off-server, is non-negotiable for anything beyond a personal hobby site. Manually remembering to back up before every plugin update isn’t a real strategy.
None of these are theme-specific — they’re the gaps that show up on almost every new WordPress install, regardless of which ThemeForest theme you picked. Get them in place early, and you’ll spend a lot less time firefighting later.
Need help getting a new theme properly set up, customized, or migrated? Get a free estimate and we’ll take it from there.