11 February 2022
What are the essential WordPress plugins that every WordPress site needs?
If you just set up your WordPress site, that question is probably on your mind.
One of the most remarkable things about WordPress is that it gives you access to thousands of plugins to extend your site. However, with so many options to choose from, you may be unsure which plugins you actually need.
There are some plugins that are desined to your site specific needs. In that case, you’ll probably need to do a little searching to find the best options.
But there are also a lot of essential plugins for WordPress that can benefit pretty much any WordPress site, whether you have a blog, a portfolio, an eCommerce store, or anything else.
So, in this article, we’ll explore the must-have WordPress plugins that can help your site no matter what it’s about.
Let’s dive in!
1. Compatibility
Make sure the plugin is compatible with your current WordPress version and other plugins you are using to avoid conflicts.
2. Reviews and Ratings
Check user reviews and ratings on the WordPress plugin repository or other reputable sources. Higher numbers indicate that the plugin is trusted and widely used.
3. Updates and Support
Look for plugins that the developers regularly update. Active support and frequent updates indicate a well-maintained plugin.
4. Security
Look for plugins that follow best security practices and offer security features if applicable.
5. Performance Impact
Test the plugin to see if it impacts your site’s loading speed. Poorly coded plugins can slow down your website.
6. Cost
Decide if a free plugin meets your needs or if you need to invest in a premium version. Sometimes, investing in a premium plugin offers better features and support.
7. Documentation and Tutorials
Check if the plugin comes with comprehensive documentation and tutorials. This can be very helpful for setup and troubleshooting.
Here are our top picks for the essential WordPress plugins that can help any WordPress site.
Do you want an easy way to connect Google Analytics (GA) to your WordPress site? MonsterInsights is your best option.
MonsterInsights is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to set up Google Analytics and integrate it into your WordPress dashboard. A major drawback of Google Analytics is that it gives you too many options, which will leave you confused unless you truly understand data analytics.
In other words, it’s really easy to get lost in a number of useless metrics that may never help in the growth of your business.
MonsterInsights makes it easy to get actual insights from raw data, allowing you to make decisions quickly based on what works best for your audience. It’s also easy to focus on relevant metrics for different types of websites.
MonsterInsights offers a free version, but its real power is only unlocked when you switch to the premium version. The premium version starts from $99.60/year.
Contact forms are an essential component of any WordPress website since they allow users to contact you easily. Since WordPress lacks built-in form functionality, a plugin like WP Forms is a must-have.
WPForms is a popular WordPress form builder that lets you add forms to your site using a drag-and-drop editor. With just a few clicks, you can build contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, surveys, and almost any other type of online form. They have over 1,800 pre-built form templates and visually designed form themes to make your life easier.
Moreover, it works with all popular marketing and payment systems, including Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Authorize.net, allowing you to create effective forms in less than 5 minutes.
A free WPForms Lite version is available for those searching for a quick solution. You will need to upgrade to their pro version for advanced contact forms. The premium version starts from $49.50/year.
Elementor, with over 10 million active installs, is one of the coolest additions to our list of essential Plugins for WordPress. It is a visual page builder that let you to create unique designs for your pages that are independent of your existing theme.
This means you don’t need to be a web development expert to add all those wonderful effects like background overlays, hover effects, animations, and more. Everything can be done with a simple drag-and-drop. It is entirely compatible with the Gutenberg editor and the other WordPress plugins listed here.
Furthermore, Elementor is excellent for individuals looking to design a great landing page for their business. It is also an excellent option for individuals who want a custom design for portions of their website but do not have the funds to pay a developer to complete the work.
Apart from a page builder plugin, it also offers cloud hosting and AI assistance to build your dream website from a single platform.
Check out our complete Elementor review.
The Elementor lite version is available for free on the official WordPress plugins repository. However, the premium version starts from $59/year.
If you want your site’s content to appear at the top of search engine results, you must have effective on-page SEO.
While WordPress already implements many important SEO features for you, you can kick things up another notch by installing a dedicated SEO plugin.
Yoast SEO is a free plugin that helps you implement all of the important SEO metrics on your site. You can set up SEO titles and meta descriptions, add structured data/Schema markup, manage your social media share cards, and more.
It also has useful analysis tools to help you optimize your content for Google, which is very important if you’re just starting with SEO.
For more advanced implementations, you can pay for premium extensions that help you optimize your WooCommerce store, submit to Google News, improve local SEO, and lots more.
For a quality Yoast SEO alternative, you can also consider the Rank Math plugin. Read our complete Rank Math review.
A free version is available on WordPress.org. The premium version costs $99/year.
The most popular conversion rate optimization plugin on the market is OptinMonster. It helps you to convert website visitors who are about to leave into email subscribers and customers.
Further, you can use their hundreds of high-converting templates to create WordPress popups, slide-ins, gamified spin-a-wheel, etc.
The advanced display targeting tools in OptinMonster allow you to customize campaigns for each user, allowing you to see the right message to the right person at the right time.
It’s an excellent choice for bloggers, businesses, and e-commerce sites. Essentially, OptinMonster is required if you want to generate more money from your website traffic.
Learn more in our complete OptinMonster review.
OptinMonster lite version is available for free on the official WordPress plugins repository. However, its premium version costs $9.97/month (billed annually).
WP Rocket is the best WordPress cache plugin. It helps you speed up a WordPress site without any technical skill.
It automatically enables recommended WordPress caching settings such as gzip compression, page caching, and cache pre-loading. To optimize page load times even further, you may enable optional features like lazy loading pictures, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, minification, and others.
Most notably, WP Rocket does not wait for someone to request a page before saving it in the cache. It automatically scans and creates your website cache, resulting in a quick speed performance.
It also offers Imagify, a free image optimization service that speeds up your website even further. Read our Imagify review for more details.
They also integrate with Cloudflare API, Sucuri, and many other tools to help you better configure your website caching setup.
Learn more in our complete WP Rocket review.
WP Rocket is a premium plugin that starts from $59/year.
While there’s no exact number, experts estimate that roughly 13,000 WordPress sites are hacked on a daily basis. To put it overall, that number equals 390,000 attacks per month and 4.7 million per year.
When you consider that WordPress powers 43.4% of all websites, it’s easy to see why it’s such a popular target.
This is where our next essential WordPress plugin comes in. There are many WordPress backup plugins available, but few are as powerful and user-friendly as UpdraftPlus. It integrates with multiple cloud storage options to keep your backups. You can even automate your backups with a recurring schedule.
UpdraftPlus lite version is available for free on the WordPress plugins repository. The premium version starts from $70/year.
Security should be the most important priority for all web business owners. Sucuri is a complete website security solution protecting your sites against malware, brute force attacks, and other possible vulnerabilities.
It also protects your website from SQL Injections, XSS, and any other known security problems. Furthermore, they alert the WordPress core team, as well as third-party plugin developers, to potential security issues.
Sucuri also automatically installs a CDN layer, which significantly speeds up your site.
The Sucuri lite version is available for free on the WordPress plugins repository. Its premium version starts from $99.99/year.
EWWW Image Optimizer is the best image optimization plugin for WordPress. It’s simple to use and can optimize images you upload in real-time.
It can also bulk compress and optimize the images you’ve already uploaded.
Although your images are compressed, it will be hard to tell the difference in quality between compressed and uncompressed images.
Furthermore, the entire compression and optimization process is automated. This includes image resizing for the correct page and device size, lazy loading, and even conversion to the next-gen WebP image format.
It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins and save them in locations other than your media library directories.
The EWWW Image Optimizer lite version is available on the WordPress plugins repository. The premium version starts from $70/year.
If you run a WordPress blog, Akismet is one of the essential WordPress plugins for your website. It keeps spam out of your WordPress comment area by automatically evaluating and filtering comments that appear to be spam.
Akismet filters out 3,500,000 pieces of spam every hour on average, and it integrates easily with the WordPress comment system and a number of other tools, like Jetpack Comments.
Additionally, Akismet provides detailed statistics on the number of spam comments caught and highlights suspicious activity trends.
There is a free version available on WordPress.org. The pro plan starts from $8.33/mo (billed annually).
WooCommerce is a popular eCommerce plugin and a must-have plugin if you plan to sell anything via your WordPress site.
It turns your site into a fully functional online store, allowing you to sell physical products, digital downloads, services, and more. Then, you can accept payments via pretty much any payment processor, including PayPal, Stripe, and tons of local payment gateways.
You will also get tools for managing orders and customer information. And if you need help with payment processing, shipping rates, tax calculations, and other tasks, there are several services available.
Furthermore, you can enhance your store’s functionality with hundreds of free and paid extensions from the official WooCommerce Marketplace, all of which have been verified by the WooCommerce team.
Basically, no matter what you’re selling, WooCommerce can help you get the job done.
WooCommerce lite version is available for free on the official WordPress plugins repository. However, the premium extension starts from $79.
Smash Balloon is one of the best social media feeds plugin for WordPress. It is a collection of 6 WordPress plugins. Each of these plugins makes it simple for you to generate and display social network feeds on your website.
Even without hiring a WordPress developer, you can use Smash Balloon to add custom Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and review feeds to your WordPress site.
The best thing about these plugins is you don’t need to be a WordPress pro to use them.
All of the plugins look outstanding right out of the box, and you can show your social media feeds in about 5 minutes. If you want to customize them, all you have to do is check or uncheck the choices. No coding is needed.
The Smash Balloon lite version is available on the WordPress plugins repository. However, the premium version starts from $49/year.
With Schema Pro, you can add rich snippets to your website, allowing it to stand out in search results.
Rich snippets make your site stand out in search results by showing star ratings below reviews, pricing below products, an image or video next to the description, and so on.
Top WordPress SEO plugins, such as All in One SEO (AIOSEO), already include structured, rich snippets of data. However, if you need additional schema types or want to improve the functionality of your existing WordPress SEO plugin, Schema Pro is the way to go.
You may also use Schema Pro in conjunction with an existing WordPress SEO plugin by mapping plugin data to Schema Pro fields.
Schema Pro is a premium plugin that starts from $79/year.
TranslatePress is a must-have plugin for creating a multilingual WordPress website. It allows you to translate all of your WordPress content into multiple languages.
You can add all of your translations from scratch. Alternatively, you can use machine translation technology like Google Translate or DeepL to automatically translate all of your content. In any case, you’ll be able to manage your translations using a visual, point-and-click interface.
TranslatePress additionally creates a static page for each translation and connects them using hreflang tags. This is crucial as it means Google can index each translation, and your site will benefit from multilingual SEO.
Visitors will also be able to select their preferred languages using a frontend language switcher.
A free version is available on the WordPress.org. The premium version starts from €8.25/mo (billed annually).
When exploring the essential WordPress plugins, CookieYes deserves a prominent mention. As a comprehensive GDPR cookie consent solution, CookieYes ensures your website complies with the latest privacy regulations.
This plugin is user-friendly, allowing you to manage cookie consent effortlessly, display cookie banners, and customize cookie notices to match your website’s design.
With features like automatic cookie scanning and categorization, CookieYes helps maintain transparency with your visitors, boosting trust and credibility.
Its seamless integration with WordPress makes it a must-have for website owners aiming to uphold data privacy standards and enhance user experience.
A free version is available that is good for blogs and personal websites. The premium plan starts at $10/mo/domain.
Since we’re talking about essential plugins for WordPress, we can’t leave out Redirection. It is a WordPress redirect manager. Redirection allows you to create custom 301 redirects within your website and keeps a detailed log of clicks. You can also use it to track out broken URLs on your website.
We all know that Google and other search engines hate bad user experiences. A 404 or broken page led to the same. However, you cannot manually examine every post or page on your website, especially when you have hundreds of them.
Simply installing the Redirection plugin will provide a list of 404 URLs, and all you have to do is enter the URL to which you want the plugin to redirect the visitor.
Redirection is a 100% free essential plugin for WordPress users.
Have you ever attempted to log in to your online banking account and mistakenly entered the incorrect password? When you do this, your bank will often display a notification such as “One failed login attempt.” You have two more tries until your account is temporarily locked, correct?
Banks implement this functionality because it protects against something called a brute force attack.
A brute force attack occurs when a hacker just guesses a number of different username and password combinations until they find one that works. Banks can protect themselves against brute force attacks by limiting login attempts, as hackers will be blocked after a set number of failed attempts.
As the name suggests, Limit Login Attempts Reloaded allows you to apply the same level of security to your WordPress site.
You can select how many unsuccessful attempts are permitted, as well as the temporary lockout time if that number is done. To avoid mistakenly locking yourself out, put your IP address on a safelist.
A free version is available on WordPress.org. The premium plan starts at ₹469.99/mo.
Get Limit Login Attempts Reloaded
If you want to improve the usability of your content, adding a table of contents is a great place to start. Visitors can immediately know what to expect from an article and, if they’re in a hurry, can go straight to the right section.
While you can create a table of contents manually, a more convenient alternative is to use a plugin that generates a table of contents based on the headings in the article.
Easy Table of Contents is a popular plugin that allows you to add a table of contents to your blog articles, landing pages, sidebar, and custom post types.
The plugin is easy to use and creates a list based on the content of the article’s headings. It’s compatible with the WordPress block editor, Divi, Elementor page builders, and more.
Additionally, you will also get customization options to change font size, adjust the width of the table, and decide the number of headings to use when creating a table of contents.
A free version is available on WordPress.org. The pro version starts from $49.
BuddyPress allows you to turn your WordPress site into a social community with features such as user profile pages, friend requests, user groups, private messaging, and more.
You can use BuddyPress to create a standalone social community. Or, use it to enhance your existing membership site, online course, forum, and so on.
For example, if you use LearnDash to create your own online courses, you can add BuddyPress to the mix to create a social community where your students can more easily engage with one another.
BuddyPress is a 100% free WordPress plugin.
Tables are an excellent way to present huge data sets in an easy-to-read format. They can be used to share original data, provide pricing comparisons, create directory sites, and much more.
WordPress has a default functionality that allows you to add tables to posts and pages, but it’s limited and lacks design options.
Ninja Tables is an excellent WordPress table plugin that allows you to easily and quickly build stunning tables. This plugin has various features that make customizing easy.
You can choose one of 13 different color schemes or make your own to match the look of your website.
You may also choose how your table will appear on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
A free version available. The premium version starts at $55/year or $247 lifetime for one domain.
WordPress’s default pagination feature offers two options: Previous and Next.
That is better than nothing, but you can see how it makes navigating difficult for your readers, especially if you have lots of blog posts on your blog. This is also not good for your SEO.
WP-Paginate allows you to create navigation using page numbers. This open-source plugin gives a number of pagination styles and color options, as well as the ability to apply custom CSS for pagination links using the Custom CSS tab in WP-Paginate Settings.
Additionally, the plugin also allows pagination for post comments. As a result, readers will not feel overwhelmed when reading comments or submitting their own responses.
WP-Paginate is a 100% free must-have plugin for WordPress.
By default, WordPress sends emails via the PHP mail function. The problem is that WordPress hosting companies either do not properly configure this feature or disable it to avoid abuse.
This simply means that you and your users may not get essential email alerts from your WordPress site.
WP Mail SMTP fixes this problem by delivering WordPress emails over a standard SMTP mail server. It is also one of the most effective WordPress SMTP plugins on the market.
The plugin allows you to improve your email deliverability by connecting your website to SMTP service providers such as Brevo, SendLayer, and AWS.
In most cases, you’ll only need your mailer account’s API key to connect it with WP Mail SMTP. If you opt for the Google / Gmail mailer, you can even enjoy a one-click setup process that makes life a whole lot easier!
A free version is available, and the pro version starts from $49/year.
Adding social share buttons is a great tactic to encourage visitors to share your content on social media. Share buttons don’t just encourage visitors to share, but they also make it easy for them to do so with just a few clicks.
That’s why you’ll see social share buttons on pretty much every website nowadays.
Shared Counts allows you to add beautiful social sharing buttons on your website easily. These include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.
It also shows share counts, which helps you add social proof to your website.
SharedCount is a 100% free WordPress plugin.
While maintaining your WordPress site, you may sometimes need to add custom code snippets to your WordPress header or footer for verification.
WPCode allows you to add code snippets to your WordPress site without editing your theme’s function.php file.
In addition to header and footer scripts, WPCode allows you to add custom PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and text code snippets.
Furthermore, it has a code snippet library where you can find the most common WordPress code snippets and insert them in one click.
A free version is available, and the pro version starts from $49/year.
WordPress plugins are one of the best things about using WordPress to build your site.
You can find a plugin for almost everything, from adding a basic contact form to your site to making it a fully functional multilingual website, WooCommerce store, and/or social network.
Install any of these must-have WordPress plugins today to improve your WordPress site with plenty of new features.
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