As of today, you’ll find some of the best WordPress plugins to include on your website after a new installation or update. But, how best WordPress plugins are important to a new website is a question that many webmasters fail to understand. Especially, in order to fulfill the goals of a particular site.
If you’ve been using WordPress for any amount of time, you’re probably aware of the abundance of plugins available from both WordPress and third parties. You obviously can’t (or rather, shouldn’t) install them all. But, how do you know which ones are worth your time?
The very best WordPress plugins for your website will depend on your overall goals, but here is a list of WordPress plugins that are great for pretty much everyone. Not forgetting, the official plugins list contains over 42,000 plugins and counting. And obviously, there is a lot to choose from.
Nevertheless, as you would expect, to run a successful and configured WordPress page, you only need a small representation of these plugins. Just plugins that work for your needs should be picked up.
What Are WordPress Plugins?
Simply put, WordPress plugins are pieces of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress Site. In addition, they can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites.
The WordPress Plugins architecture allows users to extend the features and functionality of a website or blog. As of February 2019, WordPress.org has 54,402 plugins available. Each of which offers custom functions and features.
At the same time, WordPress plugins are apps that allow you to add new features and functionality to your WordPress website. Exactly the same way apps do for your smartphone. Often beginner users ask us what are WordPress plugins and how do they work?
Many third parties offer plugins through their designated websites, many of which are paid packages. Moreover, Website Designers and Developers who wish to develop plugins need to learn WordPress’ hook system first. And which consists of over 300 hooks divided into two categories. Including action hooks and filter hooks.
What Are The Topmost Best WordPress Plugins For Webmasters?
In other words, a WordPress Plugin is a piece of software that includes many features that can be implemented on a WordPress website. They can enhance the functionality of your WordPress websites or add new features. WordPress plugins are written initially and implemented with WordPress in the programming language of PHP.
If you are searching for a creative tool that will help you get the most from your WordPress page, then you should definitely check out the plugin below; it provides a native WordPress plugin that enables you to combine all solutions with just a few clicks. As an example, I am listening to some important and best WordPress plugins for your website. And below are some of them;
1. Yoast SEO plugin
In reality, Yoast SEO is the best plugin for SEO. This plugin will definitely not rank your website, but this plugin will help you to optimize your search engine. This plugin helps you to create XML Sitemaps by doing readability analysis in each post. Titles, Meta descriptions, etc. can also be added directly from the Add Posts menu. Not to mention, this plugin provides tools to improve your place in search engine results. This plugin lets you evaluate the content on web pages and blog posts and gives suggestions to refine your search engine.
2. AIOSEO
All-in-One SEO (AIOSEO) for WordPress is the best WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to easily optimize your WordPress website for search engines and social media platforms. There’s a free version of All in One SEO! For a hobby site, the free version will work just fine. If you need advanced features, like local SEO, it’s well worth upgrading to the paid version of All in One SEO.
3. Contact Form 7 plugin
By the same token, if you want your visitors, advertisers, or sponsors to contact you directly from your website, you can install any contact form of your choice. And in that case, create a new contact page using the Contact Form 7 plugin. To quickly create and publish contact forms without any coding on your website.
4. WP Super Cache plugin
Of course, caching a WordPress site makes it quicker and more reliable. WP Super Cache Plugin is simple to use and set up. Just download and activate the plugin, then check some boxes to configure the plugins, and your website will start caching.
5. Responsive Menu plugin
Responsive Menu Plugin is a highly customizable plugin that allows you to work from an easy-to-use interface to set up your menu with over a thousand downloads. Apart from the usual customization of colors, font, space, and button customization, you can also customize it by adding unique elements such as logos and icons.
6. Hide My WP plugin
It changes and hides WP paths against hacker bots for the best WP security. The Hide My WP plugin works as a security for WordPress websites through an obscurity solution. All routes to WordPress can be changed simultaneously with plugins and theme names (not changed to avoid massive problems).
7. Quiz and Survey Master Plugin
Quiz and Survey Master Plugin is the ultimate quiz plugin in WordPress. For your WordPress website, you can create native-looking quizzes and surveys in minutes. To customize the quiz to suit your needs, choose from a variety of options. These are some of the plugins that a WordPress website often uses to compress an image. So, let’s check out which plugins are going to be most useful for your WordPress website.
The Best WordPress Plugin For Administration
1. GDPR Cookie Consent
Show your website visitors GDPR-compliance notices and banners. Works well with WPML as well.
2. Elementor
Elementor Plugin is truly a revolutionary plugin that changes how WordPress sites are built. It really is a game-changer. It lets you build your entire site using the drag-and-drop interface, including the header and footer. The basic version is free but if you are serious about building amazing-looking websites you should go for the premium version. You can read more from A Definitive Guide to Elementor Page Builder for more details.
3. Slider Revolution
Eventually, the Slider Revolution Plugin is a very useful plugin for creating beautiful responsive homepage sliders. Easy to use and works great on all devices. (If you are using Elementor, you do not need this plugin.)
4. Ninja Forms
Ninja Forms is a free plugin that helps you to create beautiful and responsive forms for WordPress with a powerful drag-and-drop form creator. It is easy to learn, easy to use and works perfectly with most CRM tools, Marketing tools, and offers unlimited customization features with tons of add-ons. Hands down the best in its category.
5. WPML Multilingual CMS
WPML is the best multilingual WordPress plugin. It makes it easy to build multilingual sites and run them. There is a learning curve but once you are familiar with the customizations you will love WPML.
6. reSmush.it – Image Optimizer
reSmush.it Plugin is an amazing plugin that optimizes your WordPress media library based on API. It saves you space and can dramatically increase your page speed. Completely free too! Set it and forget it!
7. downML – Download Media Library
If you ever need to download all the image files on your WordPress site, downML is the plugin you need.
8. Regenerate Thumbnails
If you change your thumbnail sizes and need to regenerate all of your existing media files, you can use the Regenerate Thumbnails Plugin. Install, activate, regenerate and deactivate. Simple as that.
9. Advanced Custom Fields
Advanced Custom Fields Plugin allows you to quickly and easily add fields to posts, users, taxonomy terms, media, and even comments with only a few clicks. It is a plugin that can really take your WordPress experience to another level. PRO version allows even more field types and more functionality.
10. Data Tables Generator by Supsystic
Data Tables plugin allows you to create responsive data tables with filtering, searching, and sorting options. I believe it is the best WordPress plugin for creating data tables, it is SEO optimized, totally responsive, and, yes it is much better than TablePress.
11. Ad Inserter
If you are publishing any kind of ads on your site (Google Ads and the others), the Ad Inserter plugin can make your life much easier. It offers tons of settings and can help you insert your ads wherever you want on your WordPress site.
12. Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode by SeedProd
The Coming Soon Page or Maintenance Mode Page plugin allows you to create a simple and beautiful upcoming site page in ten seconds.
13. Akismet
The Akismet Plugin protects your comments and contact forms from spam. It is simple, free, and effective. Set and forget.
14. Classic Editor
Hate the new Gutenberg editor? You are not alone. You can switch back to the “classic editor plugin” for your WordPress. Nobody knows how long it will be around but currently, it is here to stay.
15. WP All Import Pro
Another “magical” WordPress plugin that allows you to import any kind of data to WordPress theme fields, including custom fields. from XML or CSV files.
16. All-in-One WP Migration
If you are moving from one hosting to another from DEV to real-time, this is the only tool that you will need! Works like a charm and it allows you to import or export all your WordPress content with a single click.
17. WP File Manager
This plugin allows you to manage all the files and folders in your WordPress Admin dashboard so that you don’t need an FTP client. It is really powerful and flexible.
18. WP-Optimize
This plugin is an effective way to automatically clean your WordPress database so that it runs faster.
19. ARI Adminer
ARI Adminer connects WordPress and your database management and allows you to manage your database from your WordPress admin panel. It can work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite databases.
20. Share Buttons by AddThis
This social share plugin by Addthis makes it easier for your readers to spread your content with more than 200 social channels. The styling is clean and beautiful and the plugin allows you to customize your sharing buttons, and adjust coloring and styles.
21. Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) by BestWebSoft
Google reCAPTCHA is a free and effective way to protect your WordPress site from spam. You can enable reCAPTCHA for your contact forms, login section, comments section, or your discussion forms and customize them as you wish.
22. OneSignal Push Notifications
Even though I personally don’t like push notifications, there is no denying that they are useful. OneSignal is the most popular push notification plugin. You can use OneSignal to send your website visitors targeted push notifications so they keep coming back.
The Best WordPress Plugins For Security And Performance
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best WordPress performance plugin. It allows you to manage to cache and a wide variety of tweaks to speed up your WordPress site, like Minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, Concatenate your CSS and JavaScript files, Add lazy loading for images and videos, Optimize your database Make tons of smaller tweaks, like removing query strings, disabling emojis, and more.
2. CDN Enabler by KeyCDN
CDN Enabler plugin integrates a CDN in WordPress site and allows you to link your content to the CDN URLs and link assets to load from a CDN. You can also define exclusions and enable/disable HTTPS. I use and recommend KeyCDN.
3. Lazy Load
This plugin lazy loads images to improve page speed. (If you use WP Rocket, you don’t need this plugin)
4. Sucuri Security
Sucuri Security WordPress plugin is a free plugin that increases your website security. It offers Security Activity Auditing, File Integrity Monitoring, Remote Malware Scanning, Blacklist Monitoring, Effective Security Hardening, Post-Hack Security Actions, Security Notifications, and a Website Firewall.
5. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is an effective plugin that automatically cleans your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency. It removes all unnecessary data like post versions, comments, unused data, pingbacks, trackbacks, and expired data. You can also schedule automatic weekly or monthly database cleanups.
6. UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration for WordPress
UpdraftPlus allows you to back up your files and database into the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3’O, OneDrive, FTP, and much more) or local drive and restore with a single click! You can perform backups manually or you can schedule automatic backups.
7. Limit Login Attempts Reloaded
As the name implies, this plugin limits the login attempts on your WordPress login page and makes a brute-force attack basically impossible.
8. Google Authenticator
This plugin gives enables two-factor authentication for WordPress plugins using the Google Authenticator app for smartphones making your WordPress Admin much more secure.
Bonus: Instant Page – This is not really a plugin per se but it is a JavaScript library that dramatically speeds up your WordPress site, making navigation effectively instant in most cases.
Go to your Admin Dashboard > Appearance > Editor and on the right menu-open ‘Footer‘. Then drop the snippet of code below.
<script src=”//instant.page/1.2.2″ type=”module” integrity=”sha384-2xV8M5griQmzyiY3CDqh1dn4z3llDVqZDqzjzcY+jCBCk/a5fXJmuZ/40JJAPeoU”></script>
The Best WordPress Plugins For Digital Online Marketing
As can be seen, Yoast SEO Premium – Yoast SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin by far. Whereby, it has tons of features, such as;
- Creating XML Sitemaps and Index rules.
- Optimize for keywords, keyphrases and synonyms, and related keywords and all word forms
- Internal linking suggestions
- Snippet Editor and a preview of your post on Google, Facebook, and Twitter
- Creating meta description templates for different posts and page types (can literally save you tons of hours)
- Readability check
- Creating and managing Breadcrumbs
- Content insights – Premium only
- Redirect manager – manage your 301 and 404 re-directions
Secondly, it is frequently updated and the team always provides good support as well. If you are using WordPress, you should be using Yoast. Period.
1. MailChimp for WordPress
MailChimp for WordPress plugin allows you to design, send, and track e-mail newsletters to your subscribers. Another must-have plugin for every WordPress site.
2. Broken Link Checker
In general, this plugin monitors your blog (your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields) looking for broken links, missing images, and redirects, and lets you know if any are found. Super useful for broken link building.
3. Redirection
Notably, redirection plugins help you to manage all 301 redirects as well as monitor 404 errors. (If you are using the premium version of Yoast, you do not need this plugin as Yoast Premium also handles the redirections.)
4. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
By all means, this plugin by MonsterInsights allows you to connect your site with Google Analytics and track your Google Analytics reports on your WordPress dashboard. It is useful, visually beautiful, and saves you time.
5. Facebook Pixel
Important to realize, that it’s the official Facebook plugin to install Facebook Pixel to your website. Integrates with your Facebook Ads account and works fine with most of the Contact Forms (including Ninja Forms)
Conclusion:
Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas to help narrow down your selection of WordPress Plugins and Themes for your Websites Design and Development Process. What’s great about WordPress is if you do decide to change themes down the road. You’ll have the flexibility to do so. Looking for more on selecting the right WordPress theme?
Well, you can check out a library list of resources on Torque. And also, if you are looking for a WordPress Website Building Partner, the jmexclusives team of Web Tech Experts Taskforce is always ready for you. But, you can Contact Us for more services & solutions support too. Or even share additional information and thoughts in the Comments Box below.
