WordPress is one of the most accessible, manageable and simple to use Content Management Systems (CMS). It can be the face of a blog, corporate website or a magazine. The feasibility to extend the CMS solution in a limitless way is what makes WordPress CMS so popular. With tons of themes, useful plugins and extensive support, it is hard to beat the appeal of WordPress.
The WordPress (WP) plugins are bound to turn a normal WordPress website into a versatile one. WordPress plugins are applications that aid to add new features and functionalities to websites, in exactly the same fashion as applications do for a smartphone. The official WP plugin repository includes over 54, 000 plugins and still counting. That indicates we can have plugins for almost every feature we need on our WordPress websites. However, not all WP plugins are built equal. Few of them include inert coding that can be incompatible with our theme. With this blog, we have curated a WordPress plugin’s list that can always keep your website running at its peak.
What are WordPress Plugins?
WP Plugins are software components written in the PHP language that can incorporate additional features in your WordPress sites. The plugins simplify the process of adding features to the site without compiling a single line of code. They can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be, based on your requirement. You can choose either freemium version (free version) or premium versions (paid version - include more offerings, which are restricted in free version) as per your requirements.
In addition, Plugin API provides a robust set of filters and hooks that allow developers to alter existing functionality or add new functionality with WordPress. They can use WordPress taxonomies, content types and custom files, which enables users to store various kinds of content, not just pages and posts. As an admin, you can activate or deactivate the plugins that you have installed at any time you want.
Top 10 WordPress Plugins List
We have listed the top 10 must have WordPress plugins for your WordPress Site that aid you to extend your business. So, without further ado, here is the first Plugin:
1. WPForms
Contact form is essential for every website as it is the channel for your viewers to be in touch with you. WPForm is one of the popular user-friendly WordPress contact form Plugins. It is a drag and drop online form builder and it enables the creation of contact forms, online order forms, email subscription forms, payment forms, polls, surveys and other kinds of online forms as effortlessly as possible with just a few clicks. This plugin can integrate with all leading payment and marketing platforms, and facilities you build powerful forms instantly. Key features and benefits of this plugin are:
- Pre-built templates to create contact forms
- Smart conditional logic allows you to show/hide form fields/sections on the basis of user behavior
- Multi-page forms to enhance user experience
- Geolocation option to display user’s location information
- Surveys & polls functionality to create as well as analyze user response
- Form abandonment to capture email address even though your visitors don’t finish
You can upgrade WPForms to one of its Pro plans to access an extensive assortment of form templates, payment & donation collections via PayPal and many more.
2. Yoast SEO
Search Engine Optimization plays a vital role in boosting visitors to your website. WordPress allows you to build SEO friendly Webpages and with its SEO best practices, you can increase your website traffic. Yoast SEO is reputed as the one among the leading WordPress SEO plugins. It aids you to generate sitemaps, add Meta tags, optimize your site for social media, connect your site to Google Search Console, and more. With the following features, it offers a comprehensive solution to enhance your on-page SEO:
- Powerful Redirect feature to easily build 301 directs
- Internal linking suggestion
- Optimize for keywords, synonyms, key phrases, related keywords
- Readability check
- Updates as per Google’s algorithm
- Allows to create custom Meta Header/Description
- XML News Sitemaps
Powerful Redirect feature in Yoast SEO Premium makes 301 re-directs straightforward. However, rather than upgrading, you can try the free alternative WordPress Redirection plugin to import your redirects.
3. Akismet
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that evaluates all comments to filter out the spammy comments. It offers a status history of comments to make you understand which comments Akismet marked spammy. It can also check the URLs in the comment body and eliminates the suspicious links. This WordPress Premium plugin offers an advanced security solution in addition to spam protection. With these following features, Akismet plugin ensures your WordPress Security:
- Automatically monitors all comments & filters out the spam comments
- Offers basic & advanced Spam statistics right in your WP admin area
- Display approved comments
- Ensures Privacy & GDPR Compliance
4. WP Rocket
Quick page load times are critical to every business and caching solution is the ideal effective way to accomplish this. WP Rocket is a WordPress Premium caching plugin that aids to speed up the loading time of your website. It achieves this with the cached copies of each dynamically created page and reduces the workload of your servers. It also reduces the weight of your JavaScript, HTML and CSS files via minification. Your images get loaded only if visitors scroll down the page, as such enhancing the load time of your page. Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo are some of the leading websites using this technique. The plugin includes features like:
- Enhance user-end browser caching
- Facilitate lazy loading to boost loading times
- Integrate caching solution with a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Load images on requests
- Compatible with CloudFlare
- Support Wordpress Multisite
5. UpdraftPlus
Finding a quality solution for the proper backups is among the perennial requirements for the website owners. UpdraftPlus is the world leading WordPress backup plugin. It offers scheduled as well as an automated backup solution for a broad range of storage options including Google Drive, email, and Dropbox. Its backup and restoration features make it quite simple to install, configure as well as take a backup of the WordPress site. As the backups are stored in the dashboard, you can access them later. It includes the options to delete or restore the backups. Features of the WordPress backup plugin are:
- Backs up & restores WordPress sites with one click
- Easily Clone & Migrate WordPress Site
- Backs up to a remote location
- Perform complete, manual, or scheduled backups
- Backs up non-WordPress files and databases
- Extensive remote storage option
Get incremental backups, automatic backups before migration and multiple storage destinations with UpgradePlus premium.
6. Migrate Guru
Migrate Guru is a specialized fully automated WordPress migration plugin that provides the easiest, fastest and reliable way to migrate any WordPress sites. This WP plugin runs on BlogVault’s servers, an external server. As such, it doesn’t overload WordPress sites and enables you to transfer large sites even around 200 GB without any issues. During the migration process, there are options to omit the unnecessary files and save the migration setting, which enables you to repeat the migration in the future with a single click. The following features make this WP Plugin as the most preferred choice for WordPress migration:
- True one-click migration
- Easy to use
- No overload on site
- No add-ons
- Built for large sites
- No storage space required
- Fully automatic, built-in search & replace
7. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a WordPress e-commerce plugin that allows selling anything, seamlessly. With a plethora of extensions and customization features in place, this plugin makes selling on the WordPress site simple than ever before. With its abundances of themes along with unrestricted customization options, ability to sell digital, affiliate and physical products and countless conversion optimization tools, it stands unique in the WordPress Plugins list in terms of usability. WooCommerce comes with features like:
- Sell anything, anywhere
- Ship wherever you like
- Extensive payment options
- Embed products, checkout & more on any page
- Product ratings and reviews
- Product sorting and filtering
- Unlimited images and galleries
- Unlimited products
8. Redirection
Redirection is the most popular WordPress redirect plugin that aids you in 301 redirections and 404-error monitoring. It is the go-to plugin for tracking broken links and orphan pages. It enables you to auto-track viewers of all kinds of URLs or manually embed 302/307 redirects. This WordPress redirection plugin is simple to install and provides greater speed & performance. Redirection Plugin tracks and logs 404 errors presenting you with - Which WordPress pages that viewers have visited that don’t truly exist. As such, you can create 301 redirects to redirect the future visitors of those pages to the appropriate pages. This tool comprises the following features:
- AUTOMATED-redirect to the nearest match
- Redirect per source or devices
- Redirect Logs
- Redirect by the user logged in or not
- Manual redirect rules, with all standard-redirect options
9. MonsterInsights
Website analytics plays a vital role in business growth. With the MonsterInsights WordPress plugin, you can set up Google Analytics to your Website with a few clicks and observe how well your site is performing. This plugin makes it easy to understand complicated analytics like audience behavior and traffic sources.
With these details, you can realize where you are wasting your time and exclude them while creating a data-driven strategy, which increases your number of audiences. In addition, MonsterInsights tracks eCommerce and provides you important metrics like conversion rate, total revenue, top referral sources, and top products. Key features of this Google Analytics tool are as follows:
- Real-time stats
- Quick & easy setup
- Google Analytics dashboard
- Universal tracking
- Ads tracking
- File download tracking
- Enhanced link attribution
Know exactly how visitors find & use your website and increase your sales & traffic with MonsterInsights.
10. Wordfence Security
According to the research of WpWhiteSecurity.com, around 73.2% of the popular WordPress powered websites are vulnerable to security attacks. If you don’t want to encounter unnecessary security complications or at least if you want to reduce potential dangers, then it is mandatory to install the Wordfence Plugin on your WordPress site. The Wordfence plugin is dedicatedly designed to keep your site secure. It puts a firewall in place on the website to defend it from malicious traffic. It checks core files, plugins, and themes for bad URLs, malware, SERP spam, backdoors, code injections, and malicious redirects. In addition, it offers a secure login system and scans for malware to block suspicious external attempts. You will get alerts every time when something unusual happens in terms of security on your website. With the following features, Wordfence ensures real-time protection to your website:
- Leaked password protection
- Advanced manual blocking
- Country blocking
- Repair files
- Two-factor authentication
All the above plugins sure have made it to the list of the bests. However, we are not done yet. We have a bonus plugin for you. This is the latest addition and we are sure you will benefit from it just like the above ones.
11. WP Legal Pages
WP Legal Pages is an easy privacy policy generator WordPress plugin with 25+ policy page templates required for GDPR and CCPA compliance
With just a few clicks, this plugin lets you create various pages, including eCommerce Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions, Disclaimer, Amazon Affiliate Policy, return policy eCommerce, and many more.
The plugin is extremely powerful yet simple. This plugin also offers you an easy shortcodes option, amongst others. The wizard feature guides you step-by-step through each section of a legal document. That way you can make a policy page that’s customized for your website. Some of it's amazing features are mentioned below:
- Lightweight and easy to install
- 25+ Pre-built editable templates
- GDPR, CCPA and COPPA compliant
- Easy shortcodes
- Multi-lingual support
If you can’t afford the SEO impact, reputation challenges of getting hacked, then hire WordPress developer and empower your mission critical website with real-time protection through WordfencePremium. Upgrade your Wordfence plugin to enable features like Real-time IP Blacklist, Real-time Firewall Rule Updates, and Real-time Malware Signature Updates.
Plugins are the best things to obtain the most out of the WordPress CMS. No matter what kind of website you are running, there are inevitable plugins that are worth installing. There is an extensive list of Useful plugins that we didn’t cover in our WordPress plugins list, but these are a few which can surely aid your business growth. All the plugins listed here are great in terms of building a perfect WordPress website. Most of them are compatible with other WP Plugins. Hence, Go ahead & try them out!
