Looking to find the best WordPress plugins to improve your website?
Plugins are written in PHP (programming) language – which is what WordPress is built on. This makes it easy to integrate and function with WordPress.
Now, think of any function that you’d like to add to your WordPress website.
Done? Now, search for a related plugin! You will definitely find that one! We will be surprised if you didn’t find a plugin for that.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins are all about its features and functionality which helps you to extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress site.
Do you know, at this time, there are 59,460 plugins in the WordPress Plugin repository?
We have created the list of best WordPress plugins, which we have used for our own and customer websites over the years.
- Event Management Plugins
- SEO Plugins
- Security Plugins
- Backup Plugins
- WordPress E-Commerce Plugins
- Plugins to Optimize Images
- Contact Form Plugins
- Social Media Plugins
- Performance plugins
- Gutenberg Block Plugins
Lets get started!
Event Management Plugins
Events are the key to empowering your business. You can easily promote your services and products to your target audience. Organizing an event can be a tiring and time-consuming task.
But, now event management plugins have made this task not hard anymore.
Having an Event management plugin in your WordPress website is an easy solution to create and manage events. Also, you can easily set recurring events and manage participants.
A good event management plugin simplifies all the tasks. Also, ensures to have a successful event.
Below is the list of 3 best WordPress event management plugins:
Simple WP Events
Simple WP Events is one of the best WordPress plugins. It is a free event management WordPress plugin. Simple WP Events helps you to create and manage events on your WordPress website easily. It is the most simple, fast, and reliable event plugin.
This scalable event management plugin allows you to manage and categorize event listings by user-friendly WordPress UI. Also, its backend interface is simple enough for the average WordPress user.
This plugin allows for recurring and multi-day event registrations, along with booking management with approvals and rejections. The widgets and shortcodes are quite versatile.
Shortcodes can be used to show event lists. Also, you can Integrate WP Event plugin with Google calendar and Mailchimp as well.
Key features of the Simple WP Events plugin are :
- Automated Email Notifications: When any user will register for an event, they will receive an automatically generated email notification including all event-related information.
- Add to Calendar: WP Events plugin provides a quick and effortless way for your users to Instantly add events to their calendars by just clicking a button without retyping the title, date, time, or location of an event. Also, it will help you to Keep track of all your reservations, by viewing the synchronized events from your Gmail inbox in Calendar.
- Add Categories: You can easily group your events by categorizing them. You can help your users with this to find the event they’re most interested in. Simply, just add and then assign that category to your event.
- Deal with Seminars and Webinars: No need to use any other plugin or put any extra effort into webinars event. WP Events plugin deals with both event types. Select the event type from the drop-down and add event details accordingly.
- User Friendly: This event management plugin provides functionality that is both easy to use and highly useful. It helps to improve the user experience and is mobile-friendly too.
- Password Protected Events: This plugin provides an easy way to hide and password-protect any event details. Users are not allowed to view the event details page or make a booking until they enter the password.
- Approve/Cancel Registrations: You can toggle this option in settings so that you can approve or cancel registrations from the entries page.
Event Organiser
Event Organiser is a combination of default custom post types and that’s why considered a suitable event management solution for the WordPress environment.
The Event Organiser WordPress plugin allows you to create events in the form of custom post types. You can choose the right custom post type for your event and manage some additional event modules as well.
It helps you to easily add additional features in order to manage any aspect of the event. You can allow website visitors to subscribe to your events or a venue or any category to stay up to date.
Key features of the Event Organiser plugin are :
- Easy to customize: You can easily customize the plugin settings according to your requirements. It also supports ‘pretty permalinks’ for event pages, event archives, event categories, and venue pages.
- Public events feed: The Event Organiser plugin allows visitors to subscribe to your events or a particular venue/category.
- Embed the venue map: You can easily embed Google maps in your event details section which will help users to find out the venue location.
- Export/import events to and from ICAL files: You can easily export and import plugins from ICAL files. It provides custom templates for shortcodes, widgets, and ICAL export.
- Custom permissions: It allows you to specify which roles have the ability to create, edit and delete events or manage venues.
EventOn
EventON is a premium-only WordPress event management plugin. It is one of the most visually appealing event calendars on the market.
EventOn WordPress plugin supports the creation of events with various configurations. This plugin serves as a decent event management program, using tools, location management, a search bar, and several social sharing buttons.
It includes featured events, recurring events, month or year-long events, and virtual events, and much more. The calendar feature of EventOn is much stronger. You can create listings with images. Also, you can add an option for Zoom or other virtual events.
Key features of the EventOn plugin are :
- Event custom timezone text: You can customize the timezone for your events. It will help the visitors to schedule their calendars.
- Gutenberg Calendar Block: The Calendar block is built in Gutenberg. You can easily manage this block.
- Ability to disable/enable JS libraries: You can find an option to enable or disable the JS libraries. You can disable the JS libraries if they cause any conflict.
- Support enabling/disabling various data fields: You can keep the required fields only. Non-required fields can be kept hidden.
- Basic Paypal API support: EventOn plugin supports basic Paypal API support as well.
Best SEO Plugins
Search engine optimization is a set of guidelines for optimizing your website. So, that your website can achieve higher rankings in search results. It is difficult for any website to enjoy some sort of success without good search engine optimization.
Complete Plumbing Source is an online plumbing retailer who wants the quality, affordable plumbing supplies, and tools from leading brands. Its number one goal was to drive targeted traffic to their site. Also, to generate product sales through a seamless online buying process. Complete Plumbing Source lacked an eCommerce site for the diversification of its services. So, they sought the services of an SEO company, TKG, to help turn their idea and year-end goal into a reality. TKG’s SEO experts had to come up with the most effective strategies to make it happen.
From extensive research on keywords to management of the Complete Plumbing Source, TKG established and promote their brand online to potential customers. The outcomes of the strategic path taken by TKG were simply out of this world. Within four months, website traffic increased by 169%, conversion increased by 202%, and sales increased by 300%. And within two years, the total sales of Complete Plumbing Source’s products had amazingly increased by over 2000%.
SEO plugins can help your site to deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be appropriately indexed and displayed within search results.
Below is the list of 3 best WordPress plugins for SEO:
SEMrush
SEMrush, an SEO tool, helps you with keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy used by the competition, runs an SEO audit of the blog, looks for backlinking opportunities, and lots more.
You can track so many things using this plugin. Such as the organic position of domain or landing URL on Google’s SERPs, copies of AdWords ads, and their positions. Also, CPC ads, PPC ads competitor analysis, etc. using the SEMrush plugin.
SEMrush plugin also helps with content marketing. Great content allows you to hold on to your visitors, capture leads, sell products, and create a positive association with respect to your brand.
Features of SEMrush
- Long-tail keywords: You can analyze the long-tail keywords using SEMrush tool. SEMrush is primarily known for its Keyword Analytics feature to extract different reports for keyword research.
- On-Page SEO checker: You can optimize your existing blog posts with On-Page SEO checker. It will pull out the Optimization ideas report and suggest improvements to your overall strategy and content.
- Site Audit: You can optimize your site’s technical SEO with Site Audit. SEMrush can help you identify technical SEO issues with your site. And, highlight steps you’ll need to take to fix these issues.
- Brand outreach: Using SEMrush, you can monitor your brand outreach using a brand monitoring tool. It can help you to save plenty of time by scanning the web to find online mentions. Also, it helps you with customer reviews of your blog.
- New link building opportunities: You can find new link building opportunities with the link-building tool. SEMrush allows you to determine websites where you can reach out to acquire new potential backlinks. Also, helps to improve your search rankings.
Pros and Cons of SEMrush
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Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is WordPress’s #1 SEO plugin at the time of writing this post. It is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins. It helps you with your website optimization. This plugin is easy-to-use, flexible, and provides a good base for SEO. Until now, Yoast SEO has helped more than 9 million websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines.
Two reasons why we love Yoast are: Firstly, is an all-in-one SEO plugin. And, secondly, it is a very powerful & well-coded plugin.
Key Features of Yoast SEO :
- Indexable: You can efficiently gather information about all linked and related pages to best optimize your page. Indexable is a custom data type that represents anything that could be indexed on your site.
- Keyword Optimization: You can analyze and optimize your website pages for your focused keywords. It helps you to drive qualified traffic from search engines to your website using this plugin.
- Readability check: You can check the current readability of your website content pages. Like: transition words, paragraph length, sentence length, subheading distribution, sentence beginning and Flesch reading ease using this plugin.
- Breadcrumbs: You can enable the breadcrumbs to feature for your website using the Yoast SEO plugin. Breadcrumbs are a way to help your users better navigate your site and its structure. You can also customize the breadcrumbs title using this plugin.
- Meta Descriptions: You can tell Google exactly what your page is about adding metadata using the Yoast SEO plugin easily.
- No outdated content: You can update the old content of your website without changing its date using this plugin. Moreover, it keeps your data clean, fresh, and up-to-date.
Moreover, a free version is full of powerful features; however, if you are after more power, you can go premium to unlock more power.
Pros and Cons of Yoast SEO:
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Monster Insights
Monster Insights is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. It has almost 34 million downloads and over 3 million active installs. This plugin makes it easy for you to manage, customize, and add google analytics. Furthermore, it makes it simple and faster for you to track your website’s traffic.
Having a sense of your traffic can prove to be very beneficial for your business. Google Analytics can be a bit overwhelming to use and understand, which is why we absolutely love this plugin by Monster Insights.
Key Features of MonsterInsights
- Google analytics: You can have a quick and easy Google Analytics setup by the MonsterInsights plugin.
- Page-level analytics: You can get detailed stats for each post and page. So, you can see the most popular posts, pages, and sections of your site.
- EU compliance: You can make Google Analytics compliant with GDPR and other privacy regulations automatically using this plugin
- Tracking code: No matter you are switching themes, you can always keep your tracking code with the help of this plugin.
- Real-time stats: No need to search or find the stats, you can find it on your website dashboard. MonsterInsights plugin displays real-time stats in your WordPress dashboard.
- Popular sources: You can easily view the popular posts, pages and referral sources of your WordPress website using this plugin.
Pros and Cons of MonsterInsights
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SEO plugins allow webmasters to easily optimize certain elements of a website’s code. Also, it helps you with the structure to make it more crawlable by search engine spiders. So, make sure to install one of the best SEO plugins on your website according to your website requirements.
Best Security Plugins for WordPress
According to the 2020 Cyber-security Report by ISACA, 46% of enterprises experienced more attacks than the prior year. Your website is your business, and its security should be at the top of your priority list.
Lydia Swanson is a fashion blogger and owner of many websites. One of her websites, ChicandModish.com, was experiencing a security issue. The attack was not only impacted revenue but also put the future of her brand at risk. After having a short maternity leave, she observed that her site got hacked. In a panic, she called her hosting provider, who quickly transferred her to their website security partner, SiteLock.
Based on her site and unique needs, Lydia Swanson was recommended the SiteLock SecureGrowth cybersecurity package, which is designed exclusively for informational sites with light lead generation activity like Chicandmodish.com.
With SecureGrowth in place, Lydia Swanson has confidence in knowing her website is protected and she has the freedom to focus on her business. It prevents Lydia Swanson’s site from top threats, allows only legitimate visitors through to her site, ensures content loads almost immediately, and increased her site speed by an average of 50%.
You cannot eliminate the risk fully but you must do your best to minimize the risk of your website being hacked. A hacked site can cause you a lot of hassle, money, and time.
Below is the list of the 3 best WordPress Security plugins:
Sucuri
Sucuri is a website security company that deals with many content management systems. It automatically checks your WordPress files and alerts you if any files have been added, modified, or removed. It offers a set of security features, each of them designed to have a positive effect on the security posture.
They specialize in WordPress security, their plugins create an additional proxy (cloud) firewall which filters all of your traffic before it reaches your website. This ensures that you only receive legitimate traffic.
Key Features of Sucuri
- WordPress Hardening: You can increase security in areas of your website that could become avenues for attack. You can do this by adding a set of rules to the website .htaccess file and verifying secure configurations.
- Email Alerts: You can customize the email and recipients for any alerts generated by the plugin. These alerts will keep you informed of any suspicious activity observed on your website.
- Malware Scanning: You can protect your website from malware. SiteCheck remote scanners are constantly updated to address the spread of malicious content, blacklisted status, website errors and out-of-date software.
- Core Integrity Check: You can check the integrity of the core WordPress files like PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and other files. These files come with your original WordPress version.
- Post-Hack: Sucuri plugin also plugin offers measures for when your site has been compromised. It helps you for removing malware, spam, and other hacks from your WordPress site.
Pros and Cons of Sucuri
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Wordfence Security
The Wordfence WordPress security plugin provides free enterprise-class WordPress security, protecting your website from hacks and malware. It Firewall identifies and blocks malicious traffic. Built and maintained by a large team focused 100% on WordPress security.
Wordfence plugin protects your site at the endpoint, enabling deep integration with WordPress. Unlike cloud alternatives, it does not break encryption, cannot be bypassed, and cannot leak data.
Key Features of Wordfence
- Login Security: You can get Two Factor Authentication to improve login security. If somebody guessed your password and tried to log in, the second step of authentication will be asked which will be sent to your cellphone.
- WordPress firewall: By identifying malicious traffic, this plugin protects your site from hacking. If an attack is detected by this plugin, the firewall of the Wordfence plugin will block the attacker even before they can access your website
- Security scanning: This scan will include plugins, themes, and other files of your website for version checks and vulnerability.
- Blocks the attacker: Wordfence plugin gives real-time protection to your site. This plugin not only blocks the attacker but also provides an option to block the user who is trying to break your predefined security rules.
Pros and Cons of Wordfence
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iThemes Security
iTheme is one of the biggest names in WordPress themes. Formerly known as the Better WP Security plugin was taken over by iThemes for maintenance. They rebranded it, along with launching its premium version.
The plugin helps you secure and protect your WordPress site from all security threats and provides you with peace of mind. It’s simple and user-friendly; you can use it easily even if you’re a beginner.
Key Features of iThemes
- WordPress salts & security keys: You can easily update WordPress keys and salts for websites using the iThemes Security plugin.
- Malware scan scheduling: Your site scanned for malware automatically each day. If an issue is found, an email is sent with the details.
- Password security: You can generate strong passwords right from your profile screen. Set a maximum password age and force users to choose a new password.
- Google reCAPTCHA: Using Google Recaptcha functionality you can protect your site against spammers. You can also track when users edit content, login, or logout.
- Online file comparison: When a file change is detected it will scan the origin of the files to determine if the change was malicious or not. Currently works only in WordPress core but plugins and themes are coming.
Pros and Cons of iThemes
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According to the survey, the average website is attacked 44 times every day. Being the owner of a website, security measures should be at the top of your priorities. So, using a security tool on your WordPress site is essential to having a successful business online.
Pro Tip
Sucuri Security plugin is the best pick for you. Sucuri comes with all the best features that you’ll need to protect your websites like website scanning, DNS-level firewalls, their own cloud-based server, CDN network, and many more.
Best Backup Plugins for WordPress
Being a website owner, It’s really hard to even imagine that your website is hacked and you lose all the data. It isn’t a fun experience. Do you know, 20% of small to medium-sized businesses will suffer a major disaster causing loss of critical data every 5 years.
It’s very important to keep regular backups of your website. There are countless benefits of taking website backup like enhanced security protocols, speedy site recovery, saving costs and time, and many more.
You can take a backup of your WordPress site in two ways i-e: manual backup or automated backup. For taking a manual backup of your website, you can see How to take Backup WordPress Manually. For having automated backups, you can use any WordPress plugin.
Below is the list of the 3 best WordPress website backup plugins:
VaultPress
Vaultpress is one of the best WordPress plugins to take backups. It provides a real-time backup and security scanning service. It has become the all-in-one WordPress maintenance plugin. As its functions range from backup and security to site performance optimization & theme customization.
VaultPress is open-source software. The positive side of installing a plugin that offers such a wide variety of functions is that they don’t conflict with each other. Because if you install two or three different plugins they might conflict with one and another.
Key Features of VaultPress
- Website backups: You can take automated backups for your WordPress website using the VaultPress plugin—automated backups stored in an offsite digital vault in real-time.
- Site migration: You can easily migrate your website from an unreliable, expensive, or slow host to a good one. You can also duplicate your website using this plugin.
- File scanning: Using the VaultPress plugin, you can automatically detect and eliminate viruses, malware, and other exploitable security problems that may be lurking on your website.
- Automated file repair: You can fix detected viruses, malware, and other dangerous threats with a single click.
- Restores: If anything ever happens to your site, you can quickly restore your website using this plugin. It also protects your SEO, readers, and brand reputation by automatically blocking all spammers.
Pros and Cons of VaultPress
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Updraft Plus
UpdraftPlus is one of the most recommended and popular free WordPress backup plugins, with over three million active installations. You can set up automatic backup schedules. It is also useful to restore and migrate websites.
The positive side of installing a plugin that offers such a wide variety of functions is that they don’t conflict with each other. Because if you install two-three different plugins they might conflict with one and another and cause even bigger problems.
Key Features of UpdraftPlus
- Backup: You can perform complete, manual, or even scheduled backups quickly and easily.
- Website migration: You can easily migrate your WordPress site with the Migrator addon of this plugin. It performs a direct site-to-site migration and has several useful functions that you’ll need during a site migration, including search and replace.
- Remote location: You can secure your data from server-wide risks using this plugin. This plugin is best known for a remote backup option rather than merely storing your backups on your website hosting.
- Restore backup: You can quickly restore your WordPress site with the Importer addon of this plugin. It helps you restore your website from any other backup plugins.
- Incremental backups: This plugin also allows you to only back up changes to your files (such as a new image) that have been made to your site since the last backup.
Pros and Cons of UpdraftPlus
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Backup Buddy
BackupBuddy handles WordPress backup and restores like a champ. You can install this plugin on any self-hosted WordPress site very easily. When BackupBuddy runs a backup of your site, you can download a zip file of the entire site. So, your backups files are always yours.
This plugin has been around since 2010. And, has managed to stay on the top of the list of backup plugins. It allows you to backup your database to remote locations from your dashboard. Moreover, it helps in scheduling backups along with easy restoration procedures.
Key Features of Backup Buddy
- Scheduled and automated backups: You can set up backup schedules to automatically run on customizable schedules.
- Backup profiles and directory exclusions: You can customize the type of backup BackupBuddy runs (database only, complete, files only)
- Store your backups safely offsite: You can store your backups safely offsite. BackupBuddy includes support for Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud Files, and BackupBuddy Stash (our own remote storage destination).
- Real-time sync: You can get continuous updates on backup files to reflect the most recent changes and updates.
- Storage capacity: The ability to store large amounts of data or scale capacity to fit storage needs.
Pros and Cons of Backup Buddy
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It is necessary to take regular backups of your website because the hacking of the websites is common. 93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately.
Pro tip
UpdraftPlus plugin is the best pick for you If you run a small to medium size website. It is a complete backup solution with all the essential features. Your website’s data can be lost in just a flash without reliable frequent backups – so choose it wisely!
Best WordPress E-Commerce Plugins
No doubt, WordPress is the most popular online content management platform. It has a 60.8% market share in the CMS market. There are many WordPress eCommerce plugins available that help your website to boost your sales and marketing. And, also reduce customer efforts.
You can convert your WordPress website into an online store with the help of these e-commerce plugins.
Below is the list of the 3 best WordPress e-commerce plugins
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the best WordPress plugins. It is a free, flexible, and most popular open-source eCommerce solution. WooCommerce is a very powerful open-source plugin that can make your website into an online store. It is also called the king of WordPress eCommerce plugins.
WooCommerce plugin helps to add eCommerce functionality to your WordPress website. It powers over 70 million eCommerce shops on WordPress, and 37% of the top 1 million sites using eCommerce technologies.
Key Features of WooCommerce
- Customizable: You can modify and customize anything. Also, you can add unlimited products and users, and take unlimited orders using this plugin.
- Countless themes: Pick the theme that works for you. WooCommerce is designed to work seamlessly with themes you know. Also, it includes each year’s default WordPress themes and many popular themes from around the web.
- Built-in blogging: You can publish great content and build a strong brand. Use WooCommerce to integrate eCommerce with the world’s most popular content publishing platform.
- Unlimited variations: You can have an unlimited number of variations. Like color, size, and so on. Also, for a product with the option to set prices, stock, and images for each variation.
- Order management: You can add customer notes and edit stock manually. Also, can mark items you shipped, and manage the fulfillment process using this single plugin.
Pros and Cons of WooCommerce
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Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads, a popular eCommerce plugin, is used to help website owners to sale digital products. Like: eBooks, music, graphic designs, and more. It has a vast number of plugins that are available to add functionality. It’s an incredibly flexible product. A feature-rich and powerful plugin has obtained the best rating from WordPress users.
By using this plugin, you can upload any type of digital file to be sold on your website. A shortcode is also provided to help you to insert your products into posts and pages. If you only sell digital products, the EDD plugin will be your best option. It is also very easy for a developer to make changes to the codebase. Easy Digital Downloads has more than 60,000 active installations.
Key Features of Easy Digital Downloads
- Intuitive: You will not find any difficulty in adding products and viewing them. It is very easy to use even for beginners.
- Discount coupons: EDD plugin used different formulas to offer discounts on digital products and that is really surprising. This feature will also help you to convert leads into sales.
- Themes compatibility: Easy digital downloads have themes built specifically for the plugin. It works with almost all WordPress themes.
- Regular updates: The developers of EDD plugin keep it continuously updated to ensure compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress. So, it enjoys an excellent reputation and credibility.
- Reporting system: You can keep the track of customers’ purchase history. Also, can show your earnings, sales, and analytics of your e-commerce store to them. The integrated system displays graphs, statistics, and data tables.
Pros and Cons of Easy Digital Downloads
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BigCommerce
BigCommerce, a leading cloud-based e-commerce platform, allows you to create an online store. It is one of the largest managed eCommerce platforms in the world today. Everything you need to operate a profitable eCommerce shop is included in this plugin, no additional extensions are necessary.
By using BigCommerce built-in features and apps, you can sell physical and SaaS products. Moreover, list them on Amazon, eBay, and Facebook. You can customize your website, manage shipping and payments in the frontend easily, BigCommerce plugin process the backend part.
Key Features of BigCommerce
- Website Customization: The BigCommerce Stencil upgrade framework allows customers to enhance fast-loading templates to their specific business needs. No need to be an expert coder to build a beautiful and functional e-store. Stencil also allows developers to customize shopping cart templates for added control.
- SEO & Analytics Optimization: You can increase the organic exposure of your businesses by using built-in SEO features of BigCommerce plugin. Its analytics dashboard offers customer insights and visibility into the page and product-level performance.
- Application Integrations: BigCommerce integrates with tested and approved third-party apps. The active app developer community and a well-stocked app marketplace help businesses to find custom elements. Also, desired features that can improve their sites.
- Complex product catalogs: You can build broad catalogs and manage a great number of orders. There are over 250 options of how you can create a completely customized product catalog using different currencies and languages.
- Access to plugin files: You can modify all elements in your website using this plugin. Like: including products and shopping cart information, and others . The unlimited access to the plugin files ensures that your changes are safe and won’t disappear after new updates.
Pros and Cons of BigCommerce
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Pro Tip
BigCommerce is the best option for you, If you don’t want to manage the technical stuff. It allows you to use a SaaS eCommerce platform. Do you know, All PCI Compliance is handled by BigCommerce.
Best Plugins to Optimize Images
Do you know, Images are the most common reason behind slow sites. It is really difficult for slow sites to get traffic from Google! 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load.
Optimizing images of your website helps in improving page load speed, boosts websites’ SEO ranking, and improves user experience. You must optimize your images for the web before adding them to your website using one of the plugins to optimize images.
Below is the list of the 3 best plugins to optimize images for your website:
TinyPNG: Compress JPEG & PNG images
You can automatically optimize your images & compresses them through TinyJPG and TinyPNG plugin. TinyPNG makes your website faster and saves bandwidth.
This plugin optimizes your images by 50-80% while preserving full transparency. TinyPNG is a tool in the Image Processing and Management category. It is an open-source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks.
Key Features of TinyPNG
- Preserve metadata: You can preserve copyright information, the location, or date of creation while compressing JPEG images. While for PNG images, only the copyright information can be preserved.
- Perfect image resizing: You can also resize your images as well. You only have to upload the original once and then generate the image sizes you need.
- Area of interest detection: You can take an advantage of smart cropping to create thumbnails with different aspect ratios.
- Multisite support: You can support multisite with a single API key. It also supports the compression of animated PNG. Easy bulk optimization of your existing media library.
- RGB conversion: You can convert CMYK to RGB to save more space and add compatibility. Color profiles are automatically translated to standard RGB color.
Pros and Cons of TinyPNG
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WP Smush
WP Smush optimizes your WordPress website images for faster loading pages and a better user experience without losing quality. With over 1+ million active installations, Smush has optimized billions of images. It can optimize up to 50 images at once.
WP Smush can seamlessly compress all your images automatically. It also works on your old photos by squeezing them to reasonable and optimal sizes. Also, this plugin helps to fine-tune them for your site.
Key Features of WP Smush
- Lossless compression: You can strip unused data without affecting image quality. Smush plugin helps for lossless compression of images for your website.
- Incorrect size image detection: You don’t need to detect wrong size images manually. Smush quickly locate images that are slowing down your site, automatically.
- Image resizing: You can set a max-width, height, and large images will scale down as they are being compressed.
- Process all image types: Smush plugin process all types of images like PNG, JPEG and GIF for optimum results.
- Multisite compatible: You can have both global and individual multisite settings in this plugin.
Pros and Cons of WP Smush
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reSmush.it
reSmush.it plugin reduces image size following several advanced algorithms. It is a FREE API that provides image optimization. Also, reSmush.it has been implemented on the most common CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, or Magento.
It allows us to reduce until 70-80% the size of uploaded pictures. You can replace your existing solutions that were running under Smush.it with that reSmush.it. The web service is fully compatible with Yahoo’s distribution, and it will return more information about your conversion.
Key Features of reSmush.it
- Library used: It allows reductions to 80% by using different algorithms and provides a FREE optimization of pictures
- EXIF data: EXIF data are by default removed from pictures. It can be preserved if needed.
- Image style effect: This module optimizes only the image styles. Moreover, it will never touch your original images and gives plenty of statistical and debugging information.
- Security: The original image is sent to reSmush.it using POST requests. Optimized images are not publicly accessible. Above all. reSmush.it does not need to be able to download the images from your site.
- Quality: Improves overall site quality measurable using tools such as Webpagetest.org, Yellowlab.tools, or Google Pagespeed.
Pros and Cons of reSmush.it
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Pro Tip
Go ahead with TinyPNG option if you want to use lossy compression. But if you want to use lossless compression, then Smush is the best option for you.
Best Contact Form Plugins
Have you ever wondered, why you need a contact form for your website? When you can simply add your contact details like email and phone no? There are countless reasons: like to get more leads, make yourself reachable, be convenient and clear for your users. Moreover, to get to know your audience.
You always want to keep your contact forms easy to find, and easy for visitors to use. Using a contact form is a great way to collect their information and ask to add them to your email list.
Below is the list of the 3 best contact form plugins.
WP Forms
WPForms is the most friendly WordPress contact form plugin. You can create smart online forms with just a few clicks. With their pre-built form templates and drag & drop builder, you can create a new form in less than 2 minutes. Even, without writing a single line of code.
Using WPForms, you can use conditional logic also, to create advanced, organized, delicate, and user-friendly forms. Moreover, to save your time the form builder has a series of free and paid templates.
Key Features of WP Forms
- Form Templates: You can use your pre-built templates to create forms, which will save you time.
- Mobile-Friendly: You can get a 100% responsive form. No need to add extra code to make your form responsive.
- Form Notification: You will get instant notification after the form submission and for any form related query.
- Form Confirmation: You can add a custom success message or redirect to a custom thank you page after form submission.
- Spam Protection: By using WP Forms plugin, you can also get spam protection. Because it utilizes CAPTCHA and Honeypot method to protect your website from spam form submissions.
Pros and Cons of WP Forms
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Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a very popular plugin used to create a simple contact form, with simple drag & drop options. It is quite flexible and a full-stack WordPress form builder. Moreover, it allows you to build multi-page forms which are great for surveys. The other functions include limiting user entries, scheduling forms, and many more.
Advanced conditional logic can make your forms more intuitive by showing or hiding certain fields. It is a must-have functionality when you need full control over what information your users enter in your forms.
Key Features of Gravity Forms
- Email notifications: Gravity forms include email auto-responders so you will be notified whenever a form is submitted.
- File uploads: By just adding file upload fields to your form and you save the files to your server. Your users can easily submit documents
- Limit & schedule forms: You can limit the number of entries a form can receive and schedule forms. So, you control how and when you capture data.
- Responsive design: Gravity forms has build-in mobile friendly styling. Forms are designed to display properly in a variety of mobile devices.
- Security: With Google reCaptcha, simple Captcha and Akismet options, you can get rid of spam emails. Also, you can receive secured data too.
Pros and Cons of Gravity forms:
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Ninja Forms
Ninja Forms is the WordPress form builder that will let you choose just the features you need. You can build professional and beautiful WordPress forms without being a developer or web designer in minutes, no code required!
Ninja Forms is a 100% beginner friendly WordPress form builder. Using conditional logic you create complex forms and publish your form using shortcodes or add your form as a widget. The builder also comes with an army of prebuilt templates.
keys Features of Ninja Forms
- Conditional logic: You can build dynamic forms that can change as a user fills out the form. Like: show and hide fields, send certain emails, redirect to one of many pages, etc.
- Multi-Step forms: You can give form submissions a boost on any longer form by making it a multi-page form. Like: drag and drop fields, by adding breadcrumb navigation, progress bar etc.
- Layout and styles: You can add drag and drop fields into columns and rows. Also, you can resize them, add backgrounds, adjust borders, and more.
- File uploads: By just adding file upload fields to your form and you save the files to your server. Your users can easily submit documents, images, media, and more.
- Mailchimp: You can bring new life to your lists with upgraded Mailchimp signup forms for WordPress! Easy to build and customize with no code required. Link to lists and interest groups!
Pros and Cons of Ninja Forms
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Social Media Plugins For WordPress
Adding social media icons to your website is a good way to make connections with your customers via social networks. Also, you can get their feedback in an informal way, and involve them in your company’s life.
By adding Social share buttons on your website makes it easy for your users to share your content. Like, you can share on various social platforms. Moreover, you can improve link building, your ranking in search results, and stay visible to the audience.
Below is the list of the 3 best social media plugins.
Sassy Social Share is one of the best social sharing plugins. Your website users can share the content over multiple social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. It includes over 100 more social sharing and bookmarking services. You can enable social sharing at WooCommerce products.
It is fully optimized and has great looking icons. It is also compatible with BuddyPress, BBPress, WooCommerce. You can also enable or disable social sharing on default custom post types and individual pages/posts. Also, you can do this individual social share count(s). Moreover, you have options to specify sharing icon size minimum of 16 pixels. Moreover, no need to add an upper limit and to specify sharing icon background color and logo color.
- Free icon customization: Your website icons can be customized in thousands of ways. Moreover, you can use the options available within the plugin for free.
- Mobile responsiveness: Your website icons can be adjusted according to the width of the mobile device using the plugin options. No need to do extra struggle for mobile responsiveness.
- SVG icons: Social share icons are Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Moreover, these will load fast, scalable to any size, and are stunning on High-PPI screens.
- Optimal Loading time: Average loading time of social sharing icons is optimal. And, if you compare it with other plugins, you will find it less than that of all those plugins.
- Lightweight code: It includes the best coding practices to ensure efficient loading and performance. The plugin runs totally on your website server without any communication with our servers.
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Social Warfare
Social Warfare is a social share plugin that is both light & attractive. Using this plugin, you can add Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Mix & many more icons to your WordPress Website. This plugin makes it really simple for your users to share your content easily on social media.
By simply selecting the available placement options or by manually placing the buttons into your posts/ pages yourself using shortcodes. You can position your buttons almost anywhere you want on your site/page.
Key Features of Social Warfare
- Developer friendly: This plugin allows for third-party developers to build upon and extend the functionality. Moreover, you can this plugin in the form of an add-on.
- Counts: You can display the share buttons with share counts hidden. But, this is possible, until a minimum number of shares (or social proof) has been reached.
- Share recovery: It allows the recovery of social share counts when switching permalink structures. Also, even if you are going from HTTP to HTTPS protocol.
- Responsive: No matter what size screen your website is viewed on. These share buttons will always fit perfectly and look great.
- Analytics integration: It automatically adds UTM tracking to every shared link. So, you can track how your social shares are performing via analytics.
Pros and Cons of Social Warfare
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Monarch by Elegant Themes
Monarch, a Social Sharing and Social Following plugin, built to get you more shares and more followers on social networks. Such as Facebook and Twitter. Also, it helps you to grab followers on social networks by making it easy to link with your social profiles. Moreover, you can display your social follower count.
Monarch excels by giving your more effective social sharing methods, and by giving you in-depth design customization options and statistics. By encouraging your visitors to share, and making it easy for them to share. Monarch can greatly increase the social sharing activity on your website.
Key Features of Monarch
- Several triggers: There are several triggers for revealing the pop-up and fly-in buttons. You can set up a time delay LIKE after a specific amount of inactivity OR after commenting etc
- Custom widget: There is a custom widget to help you show the social buttons in any location on your site. You can customize the icon, shape, color, and other styling options for the widget.
- Stats: You can easily track the shares and follows you are getting from the visitors. It is possible to filter the data by various time duration and networks.
- Fully responsive: Monarch features a fully responsive layout. It means both the sharing and follows buttons will work correctly on all screen sizes and resolutions.
- Built-in shortcode generator: You can control all the styles for the shortcode. The integrated shortcode generator will come in handy for displaying social sharing and follow buttons on other locations.
Pros and Cons of Monarch
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Best performance plugins
There’s no doubt that having a fast-loading, high-performance website is crucial to your business. According to the latest survey, 1 second delay in website loading can reduce page views by 11%, decreases customer satisfaction by 16%, and even eats away 7% of the coveted conversion rate. A better website performance leads to increased conversion rates.
Do you know, page speed is a ranking factor, and it does affect SEO. 70% of customers say site speed impacts their purchasing decisions which means One-Second delay results in a 7% drop in conversions. Make sure your website page speed is less than 3s or in the green zone.
WordPress plugins are designed to increase the load speed of your page through a variety of mechanisms. Which one you need depends greatly on the structure, design, and reach of your page. There are plugins for extremely high traffic sites, plugins for image-heavy sites, and every need you might have in between.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the best WordPress caching plugins. It helps to speed up your WordPress website, drag more traffic, and increase conversions. It is the most user-friendly caching plugin around, with the most straightforward setup. Also, WP Rocket’s code is developed according to WordPress best practices. It is clean, commented, and has loads of hooks so developers can easily make advanced customizations
Its goal is to improve its loading times. With no technical knowledge and very little effort required, WP Rocket is definitely worth investing in. Simply activate WP Rocket on your site, and you should start seeing improved loading times. WP Rocket immediately applies 80% of the performance optimizations best practices.
keys Features of WP Rocket
- Reduce loading time: You can reduce the HTTPS requests to reduce the loading time of your website using this plugin.
- Bandwidth: You can decrease the bandwidth with GZIP compression.
- Cache: You can have to cache all the pages for quick viewing for all logged-in users. Moreover, you can review this for mobile visitors too.
- Static files compression: WP Rocket reduces the weight of your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files through minification. Lighter files mean faster load time!
- Other features: Database optimization, DNS prefetch, CDN integration, Minification and concatenation of JS and CSS files, and many more.
Pros and Cons of WP Rocket
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Litespeed-cache
Litespeed-cache is a free and open-source WordPress plugin. It is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin, coming up with a server-level cache and many optimization features. It helps to improve WordPress site performance by taking advantage of the LiteSpeed web server’s built-in page cache.
Its automatic page caching can greatly improve site performance. Also, it automatically generates critical CSS. Litespeed-cache has an attractive and easy-to-understand interface. It provides WebP image format support and also excludes from the cache by URI, category, tag, cookie, user agent. Litespeed-cache has a smart preload crawler with support for an SEO-friendly sitemap.
keys Features of Litespeed-cache
- Image optimization: You can reduce the file size of your website images as much as possible without sacrificing quality. It helps your web page to load fastly. Also, you can also compress images using this plugin.
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: To minify CSS, JS, and HTML involves removing any unnecessary characters from a file. Also, it helps to reduce its size and thus make it load faster. You can perform this section easily by using the LiteSpeed-cache plugin.
- Lazyload images/iframes: You can improve your frontend performance by enabling lazyload images/iframes.
- HTTP/2 support: You can make your website optimized using this plugin. It helps to make your website load much faster, without any extra effort from your side. Once you set up HTTP2, there’s no need for such optimizations as minification, combination, and other hacks
- Multiple CDN support: You can spread a website’s static content across the servers of multiple CDN providers. It further increases the global presence.
Pros and Cons of Litespeed-cache
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WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is a WordPress caching plugin that is known for its simplicity and ease of use. It has a fairly simple interface in comparison. WP Fastest Cache includes built-in image optimization.
The premium plugin only requires a one-time fee and offers a wide range of tools. These are not provided in the free version of the WP Fastest Cache plugin. Moreover, the free version of this plugin has desktop caching, minification of HTML, and combination options for JavaScript and CSS.
Key Features of WP Fastest Cache
- SSL support: You can protect your sensitive information such as credit card information, usernames, passwords, etc. And also can keep the data secure between servers and increase your Google Rankings.
- CDN support: Using this plugin, you can spread a website’s static content across the servers of multiple CDN providers. Moreover, it further increases global presence.
- Authority: Admin can delete all cached files, minified css and js file from the options page
- Cache option: You can handle cache option manually. You can enable/disable cache option for mobile devices and for logged-in users.
- Block cache: You can block cache for specific page or post with a shortcode. All cache files are deleted when a post or page is published
Pros and Cons of WP Fastest Cache
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Gutenberg Block Plugins
Gutenberg blocks are actually the editor blocks. These are used to create content layouts in the new WordPress block editor. Gutenberg morphed into the WordPress Block Editor. People are using it to build content on their websites.
Now, the Gutenberg block editor is becoming more and more popular. Gutenberg Blocks Plugins is getting control over the whole site. Even, the plugin developers are using Gutenberg to give more features and control of site editing to the users.
Below, we have listed the best Gutenberg Blocks Plugins that can help you to enhance your website’s functionality.
WP Minds Growth block plugin
WP Minds Growth block plugin is one the best WordPress plugins that provide a lightweight addition to your website with minimal impact on performance. It provides a lot of flexibility and control to your site.
This plugin is compatible with the latest version of WordPress, and they always keep it updated. It offers 7 new blocks for you to play with and customize to your website.
List of blocks:
- FAQ Block
- Header Section Block
- Lead Generator Section
- Plan Section Block
- Price Choices Block
- Testimonials Block
- Value Stack Layout Block
Genesis Blocks Plugin
Genesis Blocks plugin is a collection of page-building blocks for the Gutenberg block editor. It gives you more control to quickly create and launch any kind of site you want.
Genesis Blocks plugin provides everything from customizable buttons to beautifully designed pages. Installing the customizable Genesis Blocks plugin adds a collection of beautiful, site-building blocks. They help you to customize page layouts, increase engagement, and get results for your business.
List of blocks:
- Section & Layout Block
- Advanced Columns Block
- Newsletter Block
- Pricing Block
- Post Grid Block
- Container Block
- Testimonial Block
And many more.
CoBlocks
CoBlocks is a Gutenberg block extension plugin developed by the well-known hosting company GoDaddy. It is the most innovative collection of page-building WordPress blocks for the new Gutenberg WordPress block editor.
The CoBlocks plugin is highly customizable. You can set margins and padding, pick colors, fonts, font sizes and weights, transformations, and more.
CoBlocks plugin is powerful and lightweight. It helps you to add functionality to the WordPress editor without the bloat. This plugin has everything you need to make beautiful web pages.
List of blocks:
- Accordion Block
- Alert Block
- Author Profile Block
- Carousel Gallery Block
- Click to Tweet Block
- Collage Gallery Block
- Counter Block (New!)
And many more.
Conclusion:
Hopefully, these handpicked best WordPress plugins will help you choose the right plugins for your website’s success.
It is easy to install the plugin. But difficult to have only those plugins, which you need for your website to perform at its best.
Before you decide to install any plugin, make sure to r
There are thousands of plugins out there. But from experience, we have learned that when it comes to plugins you need to be very careful. As bad or conflicting plugins can harm your website in multiple & often dreadful ways.
Also, feel free to email us if you need any WP support.
Want to Learn More? Here is the list of few other guides that will help you master WordPress.
- How to Build a Website – Start With Why
- What is WordPress? All You Need to Know
- How to Build a WordPress Website From Scratch
- How to Decide the Best Hosting for WordPress
- What is WordPress Management? All You Need to Know
- 11 Steps to Secure WordPress Website from Security Threats
- 15 Best WordPress Themes for Blogs, Business & Ecommerce
- 65 Types of WordPress Help Requests
- WordPress Website Launch Checklist – Updated 2020
- How to Conduct a WordPress Site Audit – A Compete Guide
FAQ’s
There is a limited plugins option if you are on the WordPress.com (limited version of WordPress) website. Third-party plugins are a no-go for you unless you upgrade to their business plan.
The better option out of this would be that you move to WordPress.org. Feel free to contact us if you need help doing so.
There is no such thing as too many plugins. There are just good plugins and bad ones. So, while adding plugins you should keep in mind that it’s better to use only quality plugins, which you need.
The more plugins you use, the more chances are that they conflict with one another. This has proven to be one of the most common reasons to cause errors in websites.
You can do the following due diligence to ensure that you use good plugins only:
1. Review the reputation of its developers
2. Read the plugin’s reviews
3. And lastly, check when was it last updated
4. Technical support is on hand.
A plugin that is developed by a reputable developer, whose reviews are good, was recently updated, and the support is good – are all signs that the plugin is safe to use.