What is a plugin?
Plugins are small apps that can be installed directly into WordPress to improve existing features or add new ones, without the need to code. They are crucial for speeding up, securing, boosting SEO, and adding optional or essential features to your WordPress website. Hence, plugins are the building blocks of your WordPress site.
Without plugins, you would need to implement needed functionality manually, which could take time or require knowledge you might not have.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an incredible content management system (CMS) that enables you to host and build websites. WordPress has plugin architecture and a template system, that allows you to customize any website to fit your business, blog, portfolio, or online store.
What do you consider when choosing the best plugin?
Features – Examine each plugin to make sure the features offered serve the intended purpose. Additionally, confirm that they can operate on any WordPress website type.
Credibility – For paid plugins, verify the developers’ reliability to make sure they are secure to use.
Compatibility – Ensure that the plugin is compatible with recent WordPress and PHP versions.
There being tens of thousands of plugins on WordPress, this is a lot of work for you. That’s why I’ve done the work for you and after in-depth speculation, came up with the best 30 must-have plugins for WordPress.
#1 WPForms
One of the most widely used WordPress form builders is WPForms. The tool is user-friendly for beginners and makes adding forms to your WordPress website simple. You can add nearly any form field you desire in any order using the code-free drag-and-drop builder, which allows you to create forms.
The plugin’s free edition includes standard contact form components like form fields, CAPTCHA, email notifications, and more. With WPForms’ premium version, you gain even more features like connectors, the capacity to build multi-page forms, and the ability to incorporate survey capabilities.
#2 UpdraftPlus
The most popular WordPress backup plugin on the market is UpdraftPlus. It enables you to create automated backups and securely store them on various cloud services, including Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Rackspace, FTP, email, and more.
Additionally, it makes it quite simple to restore your website from a backup. Although their core plugin is free, they also offer a premium plan with more features and faster support.
Given the importance of backups, this excellent backend plugin is a requirement for every WordPress blog and website.
#3 Elementor
One of the coolest additions to this list of must-have WordPress plugins is Elementor, which has over 5 million active installs. It’s a visual page builder that enables you to create unique page designs that are relatively independent of your current theme.
This implies that adding all those beautiful effects, such as background overlays, hover effects, animations, and more can be done with only a few clicks of the mouse.
#4 MonsterInsights
The Google Analytics website tracking services are simple to add, modify, and manage with the MonsterInsights WordPress plugin. You can complete all of these tasks from your WordPress dashboard. It makes using Google Analytics to track your website much simpler. With the plugin, you can access all the fundamental data, including sessions and bounce rate.
MonsterInsights WordPress plugin can also be used to set up download tracking as well as tracking for internal and external links. Extra capabilities, such as e-commerce tracking through apps, are available if you want to pay for the premium edition. You must connect the app to your Google account after installation to use the features.
#5 Akismet
Akismet is one of the must-have plugins for WordPress to stop spam comments on your posts. Potentially spammy comments are flagged by the plugin and queued up for your review. This eliminates the need for you to manually review and remove such comments from each post.
Since misleading links are frequently included in spam comments, the plugin shows URLs in the comment body to help users spot them.
You can save disk space by having its discard feature immediately and permanently erase the worst spam messages. Alternatively, you can configure the plugin so that it temporarily holds onto spam messages in the spam folder for 15 days before deleting them.
To stop spam from being submitted through contact forms, Akismet integrates nicely with contact form plugins.
#6 WP Rocket
As a caching plugin, WP Rocket expedites the loading of your WordPress pages.
But that’s not all; it also includes other options to improve the efficiency of your site, including database optimization, deferred image loading, HTML code minification, minification and concatenation of CSS and JavaScript files, and more.
The enormous strength of the WP Rocket plugin is its simplicity of use. Without requiring any modifications, you install it, activate it, and it immediately functions.
#7 Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is unquestionably the most popular SEO tool available for WordPress, making it one of the must-have WordPress plugins. It can examine your content’s readability in addition to assisting you in enhancing your SEO. The more readable your material is, the better chance you have of keeping readers’ attention since around 79% of users merely scan through your articles and pages.
Yoast, which is well-known for its red, orange, and green traffic lights, enables you to improve the SEO of your website. That’s essential if you want to attempt to rank on the first page of Google’s, Bing’s, Yahoo’s, etc.
The plugin enables you to set up your content kinds, define your title and meta description elements, and produce an XML sitemap.
#8 Seedprod
Another reputable WordPress page builder plugin is called SeedProd. This plugin focuses specifically on landing pages. If you need assistance creating landing pages that are very effective and convert well, SeedProd makes it simple.
Due to its emphasis on landing pages, SeedProd provides unique page components designed to increase visitor conversion. Along with landing pages, page templates are available for webinars, product sales, thank-you pages, 404 error pages, coming soon pages, and maintenance mode. As a result, SeedProd offers features knowing that each of these is a potential conversion opportunity.
#9 iThemes Security
Websites using WordPress continue to be the primary targets of hackers, which is not surprising.
Hence your website must be secured. You can trust iThemes Security to help you with that.
With more than thirty features, this Swiss-knife plugin can shield your WordPress installation from malware, bots, and other intruders. You can, for instance, block access to the website from particular IP addresses and user agents; safeguard your website against brute force assaults, and access more than half of them right away with the free version.
List the permissions for the site’s most important files and directories. Update the secret WordPress keys that are used to strengthen site security.
#10 Redirection
We can’t reasonably overlook Redirection since we’re talking about must-have WordPress plugins. It is a WordPress redirect manager. Redirection gives you the ability to create unique 301 redirects within your website and then preserves a complete click log. It can even be used to monitor broken links on your website.
Google detests poor user experiences, as is well known. The same is facilitated by a 404 or broken page. However, especially if you have hundreds of postings, you cannot manually review every single page or post on your website. You only need to enter the URL where you want the plugin to redirect the visitor after installing the Redirection plugin, which will already display a list of 404s pages.
#11 Hubspot
Without marketing, it’s impossible to grow your company, and HubSpot makes it simple to do it. The HubSpot WordPress plugin enables you to manage contacts, follow leads, track conversions, create email newsletters, interact with site visitors via forms and chat, and more. The plugin effortlessly connects your website to HubSpot CRM.
Additionally, the dashboard and analytics enable you to assess the success of your efforts so that you may keep taking wise decisions and expanding your business.
#12 MailChimp
As one might anticipate, to share your best stories with your subscribers and expand your mailing list, you will need to obtain their email addresses. Installing registration forms on your WordPress will be necessary to accomplish this. By connecting your website to your Mailchimp account, this plugin makes it possible. Your articles, pages, widgets, etc. can display your forms once they have been built.
Another benefit of this plugin is its add-ons, which allow it to seamlessly integrate with other plugins like Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, or Easy Digital Downloads.
#13 Gravity Forms
Do you wish to effortlessly design complicated forms? Gravity Forms is the solution. You may design incredibly complex forms with complex fields using this premium plugin, which is easy to use and costs $59 for usage on one site (website, password, captcha, file download, etc.).
Also, the third-party services Paypal, Mailchimp, Stripe, and Slack can all be accessed through Gravity Forms. Additionally, you may make quizzes, purchase orders, sales forms, and in some circumstances, show and hide fields.
#14 Imagify
Typically, 50% of the weight of a web page is made up of images. When loading, they take the longest. So it’s not hard to envision that if they’re too heavy, you’ll need to optimize them and lighten them up.
I advocate the Imagify plugin as an image weight-loss diet. Images that you add to your media collection will be automatically compressed while preserving quality throughout.
#15 Optimole
Similar to imagify plugin, every image you post to WordPress is optimized by Optimole to take up less space. Additionally, it accelerates your site using a cloud-based approach. Optimole automatically identifies the screen size and resizes images to give your users a responsive, quick-loading experience.
#16 Otter
Otter is a compact WordPress plugin for expanding Gutenberg’s valuable capabilities. It is a library that includes additional blocks and Gutenberg templates.
Gutenberg is a wonderful alternative to the WordPress old editor, but it has a long way to go before it can provide first-class functionality. However, you may install Otter for more Gutenberg blocks and use it to make logical pages.
#17 Social Warfare
Users can share your content on social networks by using the very user-friendly Social Warfare plugin. Sharing buttons might increase traffic to your website even though their value is debatable.
The main benefits of Social Warfare are its performance, its versatility, and the ability to upload photographs in the appropriate format for each social network.
#18 TablePress
If you are familiar with HTML code, you are aware of how time-consuming it is to create a complex table and how simple it is to become lost in the maze of tags. Use TablePress on WordPress to accomplish this quickly and simply.
This plugin has a 5-star rating and nearly no negative comments. The reputation it has is well-deserved.
You only need to fill in the columns with your elements in the interface, which resembles an Excel sheet. You can import data from Excel, add links and images, and save time by doing so.
After finishing your work, simply insert a shortcode wherever you’d want.
#19 Duplicator
Your files and database are copied by Duplicator, which then moves them to the location of your choice.
When opposed to manual migration, the plugin automates the process and saves you a ton of time.
It can even be used as a one-time backup tool.
# 20 All in One SEO
WordPress users frequently use the All in One SEO (AIO SEO) plugin to manage full on-site SEO and perform adjustments that will help a site rank highly in search results.
You may run site-wide audits using AIO SEO to assess the health of your present site and determine where to make adjustments. You have the option to edit many elements on each page, including title tags, meta descriptions, and more.
#21 Jetpack plugin for WordPress
Consider Jetpack to be the all-inclusive toolkit for your WordPress website. You can use its tools to create your website, monitor data, boost social sharing, and shield against threats. These essential features are also all free.
With one of their straightforward and inexpensive plans, you also have the choice of adding sophisticated services like spam protection, regular backups, and SEO tools.
#22 W3 Total Cache
The W3 Total Cache caching plugin is another of the top free WordPress plugins. You must concentrate on increasing your site speed in any manner you can if you want to improve ranks, site traffic, and conversion rates because it is one of the most crucial SEO ranking elements.
#23 Smush
Your photos are automatically optimized and compressed using this plugin. With it, you may use a lot of images on your sites and posts while maintaining speedy load times.
#24 Borderless
Borderless is a plugin by Visualmodo for multi-page builders. It gives your preferred page builder access to exclusive and distinctive elements and widgets so you can design your page with additional features and choices. Among the options available with Borderless are testimonials, sliders, custom icon uploaders, custom post kinds, and linked articles. This WordPress plugin is free. Additionally, it includes unique widgets for your websites, such as contact and social media icon widgets for the sidebar or footer.
#25 Weglot
Weglot is one of the must-have WordPress plugins since it does automatic website translation into more than 100 languages. It also provides post-editing options, enabling you to correct the translations as necessary.
To assist in translating URLs and information, it has translation software that adheres to multilingual SEO best practices. Additionally, Weglot automatically sends visitors to the appropriate website language based on their browser settings.
#26 WP Sticky
Finally, you may have any sticky element on your site with WP Sticky. With the help of this simple plugin, you can quickly and without any coding experience make any element sticky. With this plugin, you may use the picker tool to swiftly and effortlessly stick every element on your website. You may easily drag and drop your menu, header, or any other element on your website.
#27 Monarch Plugin for WordPress
Monarch is one of the must-have social sharing plugins for WordPress. This plugin includes cutting-edge social sharing buttons that you can thoughtfully position on your website pages to entice visitors to swiftly click and share your material on their social network feeds.
#28 XML Sitemaps
A sitemap file aids in the correct crawl and indexing of your website by search engines. With the help of this plugin, your WordPress website can have a dynamic sitemap that is acceptable to Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Search engines can be notified when your sitemap updates thanks to Google XML Sitemaps.
#29 WP Notification Bar Pro
One of the finest methods to draw visitors’ attention is a well-designed notification bar. You may build a text link, buttons, or countdowns with WP Notification Bar Pro to display any exclusive deals on your website.
#30 DragDropr
With this plugin, you can easily drag and drop the items you want on each page to build pages for your website. There are more than 200 customizable and pre-designed content blocks available. This will make it possible for you to build a professional website which is cheaper than hiring a developer.
Conclusion
There are several WordPress plugins available for download and installation, both free and paid. Free plugins are available in the official WordPress directory as well as via the Dashboard of your website under the Plugins > Add New menu.