Must Have Plugins for a WordPress Website
A great amount of WordPress plugins is there. Some are free, some are paid, some work just basic, some are outstandingly advanced, some are very popular, some are under the shadow of popular ones. We are going to tell you about the best WordPress plugins, which are free, advanced, very popular, and are utmost useful for WordPress powered websites.
Here at TemplateToaster WordPress website builder software and WordPress theme builder, check out the best WordPress plugins!
Yoast SEO – for search engine optimization
Yoast SEO helps optimizing a website to gain better search engine ranking. In fact, this is a top-notch SEO plugin, which you can download for free from the WordPress plugin directory. In fact, it enables the user to write meta title, meta description and meta robot tags (index/no-index, follow/no-follow) for the blog posts, pages, categories, tags, and archives of the website, which is a good SEO practice. Moreover, it also helps the user to set the search engine friendly permalinks for the website. In addition, additional important feature of Yoast is automatic Page Analysis. Therefore, the Yoast analyses the page and tells the user what improvements are required to do for streamlining the page.
Make sure you set up the SEO today and start optimizing the pages and posts right away. This is a great way of keep your content SEO-friendly and rank higher on the search engines.
Active Installs: 1+millions
User rating : 4.5
W3 Total Cache – for caching
W3 Total Cache is used for improving the performance of the website by caching it. In fact, there are several cache plugins that do the same job, but the W3Total Cache is the most advanced out of them. This plugin provides several options to control different aspects of website caching, like, browser caching, page caching, object caching, database caching. And, also provides the support for various content delivery networks. If you are not having great knowledge about caching techniques, you can go with the default settings of this plugin. Otherwise, you can custom configure each aspect of the web caching.
Active Installs: 1+million
User rating: 4.3
Wordfence Security – for website security
In one of our earlier blog posts, we have discussed about 5 best WordPress plugins for website security. Wordfence is on the top of those security plugins. Moreover, it works exceptionally for providing protection from hackers and malware attacks to a website. Furthermore, the most appreciated feature of Wordfence is real time blocking. The real time blocking ensures that a hacker will be automatically blocked for all the Wordfence secured websites. You will also find the firewall settings for keeping fake Google bots and malicious scan off your website. Therefore, the administrator can see real time traffic on the website for staying informed about user activity and whether the user is a human or a robot.
Active Installs: 1+ million
User rating: 4.9
Akismet – for comment spam security
Comment Spam is a very common problem encountered by blogs. The WordPress has its own mechanism to provide protection to your blog, but that’s not enough. The Akismet has advanced mechanism to protect blogs and websites from Spam. The interesting thing is that, WordPress users never have to download and install this plugin manually, but it comes already installed with the WordPress package.
Keep that in mind that some spam comments could look like genuine and still end up clogging your site up. Therefore, having this plugin prevents the risk of losing readers and potentially damaging your brand.
Active Installs: 1+ millions
User rating: 4.8
WooCommerce – for eCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the best WordPress plugins for e-Commerce. You can easily make an online store using WordPress and WooCommerce combination. And, extend the store anytime with the help of add-ons. The WooCommerce allows you to implement tax rules of any country, manage coupons and discounts, see the sales report on the dashboard itself, add multiple payment gateways, cross-sell and up-sell the products, enable multiple shipment methods, leverage the shipment tracking, and do many more things.
Active Installs: 1+million
User rating: 4.5
UpdraftPlus – for backup and restoration
UpdraftPlus is a backup plugin. It creates and save the backup of your website on your preferred location, as per the schedule you set. You can save the backup on your computer as well as on cloud. It allows to separately run the backup schedule for database and files. It also works as a site duplicator, so you can copy the site and move to other location.
Active Installs: 500,000+
User rating: 4.9
Tiny MCE Advanced – for advanced editing
The editing option provided by the WordPress are very limited. The Tiny MCE Advanced plugin adds more editing and formatting options in the default WordPress editor, thereby, enriches the default WordPress editor for faster and better editing. TinyMCE advanced enables to use custom font families and font sizes, create and edit tables in the posts, search and replace the words, use subscript and superscript, use letters for lists, insert date and time in one click, and more.
Active Installs: 1+million
User Rating: 4.5
Contact Form 7 – for adding a contact form
The contact form 7 is a well liked plugin for adding a contact form in WordPress websites. You can easily create multiple and multi-type contact forms with its user friendly interface. By multi-type, we mean that you can create query form, quotation form, lead-capture form, or a feed back form with the Contact Form 7. Features Ajax powered submission, the contact form 7 even supports CAPTCHA and Akismet Spam filtering.
Moreover, this plugin is incredibly user-friendly and yet powerful in features. Furthermore, the drag and drop building makes it exceptionally easy to implement. In fact, you can add the fields you like message, phone number, etc.
Active Installs: 1+millions
User rating : 4.6
Image Widget – for displaying an image in widget area
Adding an image in a WordPress post and a page is very simple. But, adding an image in the sidebar, header, and footer is not very simple. One needs to write the HTML for this. In such a case the Image Widget comes into its own. It allows to add an image in any widget area with ease. It allows the user to set the title, alt text and a caption, alignment and a link on the image. Also, image widget allows to select the size of image.
Active Installs: 400,000+
User rating: 4.9
Share Buttons by AddToAny – for social media sharing
This Share button by addtoany plugin is on top of the best WordPress plugins to add social media share and follow buttons in a website. It has support for more than 100 social websites. It also gives an option to show the share and follow counts with the icons. Plus, you have the option of floating buttons. Not only share and follow, but, it even allows to save and email your posts and pages. Above all, it doesn’t hinder the loading of website by loading asynchronously with the web pages.
Active Installs: 200,000+
User rating: 4.7
Gallery – for making photo galleries and portfolio
This Gallery plugin is used for making interactive image galleries and albums. It is useful for creating portfolio and photography websites. You can create standard as well as Instagram galleries with this plugin. To let you prevent your images from being stolen or used anonymously, It also provides the option set the watermarks or advertisement on the images.
Active Installs: 200,000+
User rating: 4.5
WordPress Popular Posts – for showing popular posts
Want to display your popular posts with thumbnails? This is a go to WordPress popular posts plugin for doing that. You can display your popular posts in any widget area of your site. The popular posts can be filtered according to number of comments or according to the views. Plus, view count and comment count can also be shown with the posts. Also, you can opt to display post excerpt.
Active Installs: 200,000+
User rating: 4.3
Newsletter – for email subscription on the website
A WordPress blog always requires a functionality to send newsletters to the subscribed users. This Newsletter plugin helps the user to automatically send out emails with SMTP support. It features unlimited subscriptions and emails with tracking. With single or double opt-in feature, you can display subscription form in any widget area. It allows to upload your logo and configure social media profiles in the emails. Also, it offers some customizable email templates for helping you in designing the interactive newsletters/emails. It lets you customize subscriber preferences so that you can better run your email campaign.
Active Installs: 100,000+
User Rating: 4.8
Relevanssi – for providing search facility
This is a go to plugin for giving the search facility to the site visitors. This plugin allows to make custom settings like, order of search results, exclusion of specific categories and tags from search results, search terms highlighting in results, synonym searching etc. Apart from these, the Relevanssi features “fuzzy matching”. Here you can know about Relevanssi and other best WordPress plugins for search.
Active Installs: 80,000+
User rating: 4.7
WP Google Maps – for adding the Google map
You can easily add a responsive WP Google map in your website with this plugin. It supports Google map streetview and allows to include polylines/routes in map too. More features include store locater functionality with country filter, ability to add polygons, auto-complete, transport layer, weather layer, etc. Apart from these features, it allows to determine the look and feel of the map from the 6 inbuilt options of map theme.
Active Installs: 200,000+
User rating: 4.3
Theme Check – for testing the performance of theme
The WordPress codex defines some guidelines and rules for developing themes. A theme must follow those guidelines and rules to get submitted in WordPress.org. This Theme check plugin is used by the developers for making sure that their themes follow standards of WordPress codex.
Active Installs: 90,000+
User rating: 4.8
Wrapping it Up
A lot goes into website design and maintenance and we have covered every aspect of a website to put the best WordPress plugins for you. We started with the plugin, which is needed immediately as the development of the website gets completed, i.e. search engine optimization. Then, we covered the security, comment spam protection, backup and restoration, social media connectivity, e Commerce, subscriptions, editing and formatting of posts/pages, map, search functionality, sidebar/widget-area of the website. Do tell us if you use any of these plugins for your blog or website. We hope to receive sought after feedback of yours. You can also suggest us yours favorite plugins, which you missed in our list. You can create your own website with TemplateToaster. Check out our free WordPress themes.
We hope that this article helps you. It is something you need t do manually and it would take you an enormous amount of time.
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Out of the plugins listed, WooCommerce is by far the best plugin here for any website wanting to setup an Ecommerce shop. While you might have to purchase a few premium addons to full customize the shop like you want it, most of the time the free version will do just about everything out of the box.
You are right, simplicity is the reason it is going so popular
Good read. Thanks for sharing. I’ll use some for my site uniquenewss.com
For two-factor authentication, I suggest using the Rublon Account Security plugin.
Welcome Michal. Yes two factor authorization comes in handy for the sites which are under continuous Brute Force attack. Modsecurity is also good for keeping trolls at the bay: https://www.modsecurity.org/
Thanks for the reply! Two-factor authentication is indeed an important security measure against brute force attacks. I do believe though that its biggest value lies in protecting your website against all kinds of password-based attacks that you might have to deal with if you have employees logging into your administration dashboard. You have no control over their passwords (they might use simple ones, write them down or reuse them with other services that might leak). Why take the risk? If you implement 2FA for all your employees, then your company’s website will be safer. This also means that you should enable 2FA anywhere your employees also log in (VPN, CRM, ERP etc.).
Since we are going to spam/advertise for our own plugins… then i would use my support account and post a link to our plugins too:
https://profiles.wordpress.org/wpsecureops/#content-plugins
We’d developed some small plugins that you can simply install and protect your site from tons of potential vector attacks + a plugin that will let you simply protect your site as described by the WordPress’s Guide lines, without needing to write a single line of code.
Security, for humans!
Anyone looking for a WordPress index plugin, there’s a new one called EasyIndex. Disclosure: it was developed for me but it’s great for any blog with multiple taxonomies. https://wordpress.org/plugins/easyindex/. Premium plugin comes with live formatting.
Welcome Maureen, thanks for sharing.
If you want to publish your blog posts to Social Media, I alway use Blog2Social: https://wordpress.org/plugins/blog2social/.
Thanks for sharing Dennis, here are some more WordPress Blog to Social Media auto publish plugins; https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/social-media-auto-publish
Thank you. That’s great!
Awesome post! Talking about plugins
I think this is a good post. from WORDPRESS user .
Your mentioned plugins are very helpful for me.
You can add Blog Designer Pro WordPress plugin in your list. It is suitable for any kind of blogging site. You can say that is one type of boon for bloggers. It has 35+ unique impactful blog templates and more than 100 element variations to hold your users effortlessly. You can create incredible post in just few clicks.