Best WordPress Plugins

Updated on 14 May 2024 15 min Read
Best WordPress Plugins

Are you willing to take your business to the next level? Well, it is not possible without a website! And the best software to build a website is WordPress (WP). It is one of the leading CMS (Content Management Software) to build websites. The best part about WP is, users do not have to set foot in the programming domain and get free WordPress themes with different functionalities. We all know web development tasks are a bit technical and many of us are unaware of coding or UI/UX. Therefore, WordPress offers Best WordPress Plugins to build a compelling website.

WordPress plugins are essential to make websites functional. Different plugins have different functionalities. If you will add them to your business website, no one can stop your online scalability. We have figured out some 30+ top WordPress plugins that you should install to make your website robust and effective.

Most Popular WordPress Plugins

1. Yoast SEO

This plugin helps optimize your website for search engines and includes features such as keyword analysis, readability check, and XML sitemap generation. If you are an SEO person, installing this plugin will give you different analytical insights. Keyword density, SEO optimized titles, content’s readability, or internal/ external links are available in your blog or not.

yoast seo

2. Jetpack

This plugin offers a variety of features, including website performance optimization, security, backups, and traffic growth tools. It protects your website so you can manage it or your business. Jetpack plugin offers simple, all-encompassing security for WordPress websites, including automatic real-time backups, malware scanning, and spam protection. Free features include downtime/uptime monitoring and brute force defense.

Your website will automatically be backed up in real time, and you may quickly restore it to any point. Your backup has unrestricted storage. fantastic for eCommerce stores, particularly Woo.

Related: 5 Easy Steps to Download and Install WordPress

You may quickly duplicate websites, create whole databases, manage migration to a new host, and move theme and plugin files to a new database. backups. Create duplicates of your current WordPress website to easily set up a test website, restore broken websites by restoring earlier backups, or clone websites.

3. Contact Form 7

This plugin allows you to create customizable contact forms on your website, helping you to manage customer inquiries and requests.

Contact Form 7

Pick A Managed WordPress Hosting Backed By 24×7 Support!

4. WooCommerce

If you’re running an online store, this plugin is a must-have. It adds e-commerce functionality to your WordPress website, including product management, payment processing, and shipping options. WooCommerce plugin is a favourite for online stores domain. It is open source, adaptable, and strengthened by a large worldwide community. You always retain complete ownership of the data and content in your shop thanks to open-source freedom.

Use WooCommerce to create a store that effectively combines content and commerce, whether you’re starting a business, moving brick-and-mortar retail online, or creating websites for clients.

5. Elementor

This page builder plugin provides a drag-and-drop interface for creating custom page designs without needing to know any code. If you want a perfect design for your website, this plugin is a perfect match for you.

You can easily build a highly engaging website with a better UI/UX. Users who are unaware of the coding expertise can opt for this plugin. It has all you need to build any type of website, whether you want to achieve pixel-perfect designs, scale and speed your website production process, or enhance lead generation.

6. Gravity Forms

The next name in the form development plugin is Gravity Forms. This plugin allows you to create custom forms and surveys and comes with a range of features such as conditional logic, file uploads, and notifications. Some of the prominent features are

  • Posts are assigned to a custom post type.
  • Posts are assigned to a custom taxonomy (via Drop Down, Multi-select, Radio Button, or Checkbox field)
  • Posts can be assigned to multiple taxonomies.
  • It supports visual hierarchies in hierarchical taxonomies (Drop Down field only)
  • Fill a Drop Down with posts

7. WP Super Cache

Caching of the website is a major concern This caching plugin helps to improve the performance of your website by generating static HTML files from dynamic pages, reducing the load on your server.

WP Super Cache has an independent plugin system. This code is loaded when WP Super Cache is loaded and can be used to modify the caching process. Because this is before the majority of WordPress loads, some functionality will be unavailable.

WP Super Cache

8. All in One WP Security and Firewall

Data breaches and web security loopholes affect businesses on a larger scale. Therefore, this plugin will provide comprehensive security for your website, including features such as two-factor authentication, firewall protection, and security scans.

Any kind of sensitive information will not be at the risk. In this plugin a security layer called Web Application Firewall (WAF) is the first line of defense for your website, monitoring traffic and blocking malicious requests. You will get a range of basic to intermediate to advanced protection features. All-In-One Security provides comprehensive, immediate protection.

9. UpdraftPlus

This plugin provides backup and restoration functionality for your website, allowing you to keep your data safe and restore it in case of a problem. For good reason, UpdraftPlus is the most highly rated and popular backup plugin available. It is not only feature-rich, but it is also simple to use. Because of its large user base, it has been tried and tested in a wide variety of scenarios.

10. Slider Revolution

This plugin provides a powerful slider creation tool for your website, allowing you to create custom slideshows with animated effects and more. You can now wow your clients with stunning responsive designs that look great on any device. There is no need for coding.

Exceed even the most unrealistic expectations with spectacular special effects, animations, and designs. Everything is at your fingertips with this drag-and-drop editor. There are logical option categories in the new UI. You will always be aware of where to get everything you need, making it simple for you to put your creative ideas into action.

11. WPForms

This plugin makes it easy to create custom forms for your website, including contact forms, surveys, and payment forms. You can easily create beautiful contact forms, feedback forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your website with the help of this WordPress plugin.

The user experience is a top priority. WPForms is the most user-friendly contact form plugin in the market, thanks to these pre-built form templates and workflows. Although using this WordPress form builder is quite simple, we also developed clever workflows to help you save even more time.

You don’t ever have to start from scratch unless you want to because WPForms includes pre-built WordPress form layouts that are simple to alter.

Related: Excellent eCommerce Plugins For WordPress

12. OptimizePress

To create a website that generates more leads and revenue, stop cobbling together solutions and start utilizing the one platform created for artists, entrepreneurs, and digital marketers. This plugin provides a suite of tools for creating custom landing pages, sales pages, and other marketing materials. With just a few clicks, you can quickly design the ideal page for your new offer or marketing campaign using this extensive library of page templates.

To get compelling digital marketing results, this plugin’s features will add value to your website. Moreover, get more website traffic and take your SEO optimization measures to the next level by getting optimized page structures with this plugin.

OptimizePress

13. Autoptimize

This plugin helps to optimize your website’ front-end performance by minifying and combining CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files. With Autoptimize, you can easily optimize your website. Further, it may relocate and delay scripts to the footer, aggregate, minify, cache, and inject CSS by default in the page head, but also inline important CSS and delay the aggregated full CSS, and minify HTML.

With support for WebP and AVIF formats, you may optimize pictures, Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, WordPress core emoji cruft, and more. As a result, even if you are already using HTTP/2, your website can still perform better! Because Autoptimize offers a rich API, you can customize it to fit every website need.

14. OptinMonster

It is an optimization plugin that allows users to enhance the conversion rate on a website. With this plugin, you can easily customize the website and design layouts with no coding.  Using this feature, you can show a custom popup for specific pages or sections of your website, show a custom popup based on users’; geolocation and show a custom popup when users click a specific link.

It is even possible to display custom popups based on past behaviour, such as if the user clicked on an existing marketing popup, viewed another popup campaign, closed a marketing popup, viewed X number of pages, etc.

OptinMonster

15. WP Fastest Cache

Some might even call WordPress caching boring or complicated. Such a complex technology might take a whole book to explain. We can resolve this caching problem by installing the WP Fastest Cache plugin. This caching plugin helps to speed up your website by creating and serving static HTML files, reducing the load on your server.

A cache plugin can also improve your SEO ranking if it improves your page load time, which is factored into Google’s search ranking algorithm. It is very easy it is to set up this plugin. The. The .htaccess file does not need to be modified. Automatically, it will be modified.

16. TablePress

This plugin provides an easy way to create and manage tables on your website, including the ability to sort and filter data, and import and export tables in various formats. Without any code, table data may be modified via a spreadsheet-like interface.

Tables can contain any type of data, including mathematical formulas for assessment. With additional capabilities such as sorting, pagination, and filtering, the table data can be easily interacted with. Tables can be imported and exported from Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON files.

TablePress

17. Table of Contents Plus

This plugin creates a table of contents for your posts and pages, making it easier for your visitors to find what they’re looking for. Another major benefit of this plugin is it lists website map output across your website.

Other features include customization of settings for display position, where the number of headings before an index appears, and other appearances through the administration options panel.

18. Better WordPress Security (iThemes Security)

This and another WordPress security plugin helps to secure your website by implementing various security measures, such as hiding your login page, monitoring for malicious code, and blocking known malicious IP addresses. iThemes is a comprehensive security plugin for all styles of WordPress websites since it has a major emphasis on identifying plugin vulnerabilities, out-of-date software, and weak passwords.

19. Social Media Auto Publish

Use this plugin to make your social media marketing measures effective. This plugin allows you to automatically share your posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

If you want to automate your social media posts, none other than this plugin is suitable to automate them. Publish posts on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and LinkedIn posts can be filtered based on custom post types and categories with this plugin.

Social Media Auto Publish

20. WP Mail SMTP

This plugin helps to improve the reliability of your website’ email delivery by using a different SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) provider. When sending emails, WP Mail SMTP configures WordPress to use a proper SMTP provider. With its easy-to-use Setup Wizard and detailed documentation, you can get started quickly.

WP Mail SMTP offers a setup wizard that guides you through each step of connecting your SMTP provider with WordPress so that configuring your settings is simple. You can enter your SMTP server details and login credentials manually, use OAuth2 (available for Gmail accounts), or another built-in SMTP mail provider integration.

Related: Top 20 WordPress Plugin for SEO

21. Broken Link Checker

Broken links matter a lot in your SEO optimization measures. If any internal or external link is broken, it can affect SEO rankings. This plugin scans your website for broken links and missing images, helping you to keep your website running smoothly. Here are some features included in the post.

  • Your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and custom fields are monitored for external links and internal links.
  • A link that doesn’t work, an image that doesn’t exist, or a redirect is detected.
  • A dashboard is available that sends email notifications for broken links.

22. Simple Custom CSS

This plugin allows you to add custom CSS to your website without having to modify your theme files, making it easier to make small design changes. This plugin now prints the styles straight into the head> element rather than enquiring them in a “pseudo-file.” This makes it possible for AMP plugins to handle data and improve caching.

  • Built-in simplicity of the WordPress UI
  • Almost no effect on the performance of the website
  • There are no complex database queries
  • Complete documentation

23. Wordfence Security 

A team of committed analysts is needed to continuously monitor the most recent malware variants and WordPress exploits, turn those findings into firewall rules and malware signatures and distribute those to clients in real time. This plugin provides a comprehensive security solution for your website, including real-time threat protection, firewall protection, and security scans.

An endpoint firewall, a malware scanner, strong login security features, live traffic views, and other features are all included in Wordfence Security. Wordfence receives the most recent firewall rules, malware signatures, and malicious IP addresses from this Threat Defense Feed, ensuring the security of your website.

Wordfence Security

24. Smart Slider 3

This plugin provides a powerful slider creation tool for your website, allowing you to create custom slides with animations, effects, and more. It will give your website a more elegant look with different elements like text, videos, images, and sliders. Another good part of this plugin is that is easy to optimize for mobiles, tablets, and desktops.

Simple Social Media Share Buttons – This plugin adds social media share buttons to your website, making it easier for your visitors to share your content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Key features to ponder over

  • Use animations to position the social share buttons on the left, right, etc.
  • On mobile devices, conceal the Social Share buttons.
  • Show Total Share totals
  • Color customization options – Apply social sharing buttons to particular custom post types

25. Visual Composer

This page builder plugin provides a drag-and-drop interface for creating custom page designs, making it easier to build complex layouts without needing to know any code. With the all-in-one plugin Visual Composer, you can create stunning websites with headers, footers, archive pages, and 404 pages. By using code-free custom post, page, and archive layouts, you can replace themes.

26. W3 Total Cache

This caching plugin helps to improve your website’s performance by optimizing the loading of images, CSS, JavaScript, and more. For more than a decade, millions of publishers, web developers, and web hosts around the world have trusted W3TC as the only web host independent Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress. It is the complete performance solution for WordPress website optimization.

27. Timely All-in-One Events Calendar

This plugin allows you to create and manage events on your website, including the ability to display events in a calendar format and manage recurring events. Timely All-in-One Event Calendar is designed for independent contractors and bootstrapped business owners who need a free yet effective event calendar to launch or grow their event-related ventures.

If you are an event manager or planner for a small, medium, or large business and you require a more advanced event management tool, you should consider it.

28. Google XML sitemaps

This plugin generates an XML sitemap for your website, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website. With such a website map, crawlers can more easily view your website’s entire structure and obtain it more quickly. Both custom URLs and other WordPress-generated pages are supported by the plugin. Additionally, every time you make a post regarding new information, it alerts all significant search engines.

29. WordPress Ad Manager

This WordPress ad manager plugin is simple to install and use, and it provides an appealing array of advertising sales, management, and display options.

  • Ads Pro features include Admin and Frontend User Panels capable of managing large numbers of ads.
  • A Frontend ad sales and management order Form.
  • 25+ ad templates that can be customized, 20+ ad display options, 3 billing methods, 4 payment methods, and click fraud and ad block protection.

30. Essential Grid

Essential Grid is the best WordPress grid plugin for making a gallery that is the focus of your website rather than being treated as just another page. Essential Grid can assist you in accomplishing this.

  • 50+ grid templates that can be customized
  • stunning grid layout options include boxed and full-width layouts, full-screen layouts, and customizable rows, columns, and spacing.
  • Social media content from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, and Vimeo can also be accepted by Essential Grid galleries.

31. Amelia

Amazing things happen when you add Amelia WordPress booking plugin functionality to a WordPress website design. The website visitor is now the proud owner of an automated booking system that manages an infinite number of appointment bookings for an infinite number of business clients, at multiple locations, and from a single platform and dashboard.

  • Amelia is an excellent choice for client-facing businesses.
  • Clients can book appointments online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • Reminders can be sent to clients via email and SMS notifications, or they can be contacted via WhatsApp messaging.
  • Amelia can manage events, group bookings, coupons, and packages.
  • Booking forms can be customized to match the branding of a company.
  • The Amelia plugin accepts payments via WooCommerce, PayPal, Stripe, Mollie, and Razor.

Wrapping it Up

You now have an understanding of the best free WordPress plugins for your website. We hope this list helps you improve your website and achieve your business objectives. Whether it is form creation, SEO measures or others, or event management through calendars, these are some useful plugins mentioned in the post. So, what are you holding out for? Begin using the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today.

The Author

I am an experienced Marketing Manager at MilesWeb UK, a leading web hosting company in the UK. With extensive knowledge in web hosting, WordPress, digital marketing, and web development, I'm committed to helping businesses succeed online. His expertise and enthusiasm for the digital world make him a valuable asset in the constantly changing field of online marketing.