I am sure WordPress doesn’t need any introduction, and a lot of you must have used it once, either it’s for your personal blog, subscription to your favorite websites, business, or simply a landing page.
In my experience, what makes WordPress mostly win over other platforms is a huge availability of plugins that absolutely simplify your tasks.
WordPress is one of the most famous site-building platforms, and it can be buildable by adding plugins.
Plugins are great tools that make your WordPress richer with functionalities basically of any type possible.
By using different plugins you can create a top-notch website for your business, both in terms of functionality and design which can result in an extremely good user experience for your users.
The types of plugins you add to your WordPress mostly depend on the type of business you have and the particular industry.
However, there are some plugins that are general and every type of business can benefit from having them.
For example, some of those plugins are for SEO, site speed, security, clearing cache, etc. Regardless of the industry, having this is recommended.
But even having them specified by use, the choice can be quite hard to make because there are a lot of plugins available out there and thinking which one best suits your needs can be quite . overwhelming.
The official plugin repository offers more than 55.000 WordPress plugins and this number is constantly increasing as new plugins are added.
There are free plugins and premium plugins. Which ones are more beneficial? Which of them are worth investing in?
In this post, I will choose the 15 best WordPress plugins that have helped me personally with my blogging journey.
1. Yoast SEO
There’s a reason why every good list of top plugins includes the Yoast SEO plugin. Mine is not any different.
It’s not a surprise that search engines send the most traffic to your website. Knowing this, having your blog highly optimized should be very high on your priority list.
Having Yoast SEO plugin added to your WordPress makes SEO much easier and defined.
The plugin lets you know how your content will work with search engines by adding green, yellow, and red lights to certain areas of your content.
Green means that your content is highly optimized, yellow means that it needs more optimization, and red means the content is not optimized in the right way.
Some of the things that Yoast points out are keyword density, meta title, and description length, use of passive voice, readability, and much more, and it lets you know how to improve those things.
Yoast SEO is free, but it also has a premium version that you can get for $89 per year for one site.
Relevant: You would also like to check the best 20 SEO tools here
2. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is questionably the best plugin for eCommerce selling through your website.
For anybody that wants to create an online store, WooCommerce makes the experience quite easy and smooth.
There are a lot of features offered with the plugin that grants your buyers a nice purchasing experience that from your side is not too complicated to set up.
The best thing about WooCommerce is the fact that the plugin itself has a huge extension library making it quite versatile.
You can add almost anything you can think of that your online shop needs like live chatting, automating sales taxes, currency converters, and whatnot!
It offers a lot of different paying options, extensions for things like payments, shipping, etc, affiliate products, subscriptions, refunds, stock tracking, email templates- you name it, WooCommerce has it.
There is a free version of WooCommerce, but not all of the extra extensions are free.
Also read how to set up eCommerce from scratch
3. Polylang
Polylang is a plugin that allows you to create a bilingual or multilingual website which can be extremely beneficial according to the type of audience you receive.
As you create content as usual you have an option to define the language and then add translation which is optional.
There is no limit on how many languages you can add to your website. The WordPress language packs are downloaded and updated automatically.
You can translate literally everything on your website from pages, posts, media, to tags, menus widgets, categories, etc.
Also, you can translate any custom post types, custom taxonomies, navigation menus, and even URLs.
It is quite easy to use, and what’s most important it’s very SEO-friendly.
Polylang is free as a plugin, but there are premium options like Polylang Pro and Polylang for WooCommerce and they are starting at 99 euros each.
4. Akismet
Akismet is a great plugin for blogs that come with comments and user submission forms. It is basically a plugin that regulates the spam from users in those sections.
It goes through the comments left on your comments or the form submissions and prevents potential spam and unintentionally sharing malicious content.
There is a feature that blocks out automatically the comments that show the worst types of scams, which in return leads to faster page loading for other users.
Akismet is a free plugin for personal sites and blogs, but for commercial sites, there are monthly plans that you can look through.
Some of the more expensive premium plans include advanced security aside from the spam protection.
Also read: How to start a blog for beginners
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5. Google Analytics for WordPress
Another extremely important part of having a successful website is following and analyzing the analytics that come from that website.
One of the best analytics tools out there is Google Analytics, and there is a plugin with which you can connect your Google Analytics with your WordPress.
This plugin will let you know how your website is performing with real-time metrics directly from your WP dashboard.
You’ll see traffic numbers, sources, bounce rates, organic search stats, geolocation, and many, many other metrics that will let you get familiar with your visitors and their behavior on your blog.
The plugin is free to use and it’s compatible with WooCommerce and can be easily installed with MonsterInsight.
6. WordFence Security
Having a website is not a one-time effort, and it requires vigilance round the clock. If you want to make your website more secure, WordFence Security is a possible plugin for you.
It creates an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that is specifically tailored to protect websites built on WordPress.
The WordFence Security plugin can recognize and block online threats, malware, malicious traffic, and harmful content.
It is free, but for additional security, you can purchase the premium option for $99 per year.
7. Jetpack
Jetpack is another great and well-known plugin for WP that is used for generating more traffic to your website through combining performance, website management tools, and security.
It’s a plugin that overall improves the performance of your site. If you choose the free version, you will find 35 modules with different functions that you can use and combine.
The module’s functionalities range from those for infinite scroll, contact forms, custom CSS, or additional functionalities.
It has a built-in SEO with which it analyzes the performance of your website and offers protection through code scanning.
Additional features are advanced commenting, social sharing, designing contact forms, etc.
Basic Jetpack is free as most of them are, and it has a premium version that offers quite a lot of additional features for a price starting at $39 per year.
8. WP Rocket
When you have a blog or any type of website in general, the speed of the site is of extreme importance.
Users are much more likely to leave the page if it loads more than a few seconds and that can be very bad for your business in general.
WP Rocket is a plugin that will make your WordPress website load faster, improve search engine optimization, and overall increase conversions.
It is recognized as one of the most powerful caching plugins on WordPress by many users.
The plugin additionally reduces the weight of HTML JavaScript and CSS files by minificating them.
WP Rocket is developed specifically for WordPress and there will be more updates in the upcoming year.
Relevant: Read my guide on increasing your website speed here
9. NextGen Gallery
NextGen Gallery is for websites that require smooth visuals in a modern design to support their content or products.
This plugin can create galleries with a lot of functionalities like photo effects, multiple album creation, editing of thumbnails, and more.
There are some templates that are ready to use so you can just do that to take your visuals to the next level.
There is a free version of the plugin that gets you some limited functionalities like three gallery designs, and two album styles, both highly customizable.
For the full power of the plugin, you will need the premium version which starts from $99 and offers vast opportunities for gallery creation.
10. VaultPress
You shouldn’t forget to backup your website because if you don’t, there can be some real consequences.
This plugin allows you to do optimized backups on a regular basis which will allow you to restore the website with just one click.
With some subscriptions, you can do this on a single dashboard for multiple websites.
Additionally, VaultPress scans and detects some dangerous files, allows you to review and manage suspicious codes and solve any issues.
There is also spam protection, and the subscriptions are bundled with Jetpack so you get the ultimate protection for your website.
There is a free limited version, and premium plans starting at $20 per month.
11. Sumo
Sumo is a plugin for email marketing that will increase your site’s conversion rates and sales.
You can use this plugin to send bulk emails about whatever it is you need like updates, promotions, launches, etc.
Sumo allows you to create popups for email subscriptions, add share buttons on the site, collect emails, and more.
Of course, it has a free version and a pro version that starts with a $39 monthly subscription.
12. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker plugin will go and check internal and external broken links on your website and let you know by telling you the HTTP status code and the source link.
With that information, you can easily find and fix any broken links that your website might have.
This plugin will run all the time in the background and check from broken links, alerting you any time it finds any.
When there are broken links, you can easily fix them in bulk with a few clicks. It will also suggest replacement links.
13. W3 Total Cache
Another plugin that has a very positive effect on the speed of your website which is of extreme importance.
It’s considered one of the best plugins when it comes to increasing the speed of the site, and it does that by saving the static content into the browsers of the visitors.
So when the visitors come again, the site will load quicker since the browsers don’t need to re-download all the tiles.
W3 Total Cache employs AMP, clears cached files via WP-CLI, saves up to 80% bandwidth by compressing and minifying files, and much more.
The plugin is free to use, but of course, it has premium options from $99 per year with additional functionalities.
Also learn about website rank and rent here
14. Elementor
Elementor is another plugin that is extremely well-known and used by millions of users that have WordPress websites.
The purpose of Elementor is to create very stylish designs on your pages through a very easy drag and drop interface.
In 2020, Elementor was updated and made even more customizable than before offering more templates and tools to enrich the visuals of your website.
Additionally, there is a built-in Maintenance mode and a Coming Soon feature that can be quite useful when the website is expecting to experience changes.
15. Visual Composer
This is another drag and drop editor that will help you to build a good-looking website very easily.
The coding part is eliminated completely and everyone can use it to create beautiful web pages.
In the free version, you can find more than 40 elements and different templates that you can use in whoever way you’d want.
There is additionally an option to make adjustments through local and global CSS/JavaScript editors.
Visual Composer is a free plugin, but of course, there is a premium version that gives a lot more functionalities and templates for $59 per year.
To sum up
There are truly a lot of good, high-quality, extremely helpful plugins for WordPress out there for any problem or function you can think of.
All of them can’t be fit into a single article, so I chose the ones from my personal experience which is find really helpful and effective.
Some of them are absolutely necessary like cache plugin, SEO plugin, and security plugin, others connected to design and images are totally up to you.
Do you have any experience with these plugins? Which plugin works wonders for you that’s not on this list?
Let me know in the comments below.
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Hello dear,
Thanks for this unique post, which adds 2-4 plugins to my knowledge.
You can try the Blog Designer PRO WordPress plugin also. It is an excellent plugin to build a better layout. It comes with 50+ different layout, which makes your unique blog design and customize the look of your blog as you want.
https://bit.ly/3imtW65