WordPress is a great platform, but what sets it apart is the community. It is amazing to think that people from all over the world have written software for WordPress. When working with an open-source mindset, as with Linux or WordPress, people are more collaborative and willing to share their work to help others. Let’s take a look at the top 15 most useful WordPress plugins.
1. Hubspot
Want an easy way to grow your business? Look no further than HubSpot’s free WordPress plugin.
Add forms and live chat to pages, manage contacts, build email newsletters, and more — all from within WordPress. With this plugin, your forms will automatically sync with the HubSpot CRM so you can easily see the interactions a contact has with your website. Also included in the plugin are powerful analytics, giving you insight into which sales and marketing actions are driving the most success for your business.
2. WP Rocket
Do you want your site to be the fastest it can be? You want WP Rocket. Is this plugin useful? Absolutely. Make sure your site only loads JavaScript when it is needed. That will help your customers navigate things more easily. Access their CDN and enjoy the added speed a Content Delivery Network will give you. The CDN has servers spread out worldwide, which means your users will be able to access things much faster from a location close to them.
WP Rocket will also aid you with your site map and inform all the major search engines when you change your site. Using caching software, data is stored and then activated when you need it instead of loading it each time you try to access it. WP Rocket is useful in many different ways with all these high-tech solutions.
3. Elementor
It will be hard to find a better drag-and-drop builder that is also free when compared to Elementor. This plugin has so many templates ready to go; there is surely a layout that would work well for your business or situation.
Elementor is developer-friendly and easy to extend. Since the whole idea behind Elementor is that it should be open source, developers have been adding on with their own code to make things work better and faster. No matter what you are trying to build, from landing pages to your blog, Elementor will make it look pixel-perfect. E-commerce is better when you use Elementor to tweak your store and adjust your products and prices.
4. Spectra
Spectra is a new kid from the makers of the Astra WordPress theme. It’s a free visual website builder that works seamlessly with the default WordPress editor and adds a range of blocks, templates, and features you can use on any website.
Spectra offers a range of professionally designed web templates, predefined wireframe designs, and many readymade block patterns you can import in seconds and customize at will. There are 28 blocks, with more flexbox containers, block presets, and the ability to copy and paste styles across pages and websites.
Spectra is a superb free addition to the WordPress editor, and a new, even more powerful, Pro version is in the works.
Or end with the following if you don’t want to mention Pro:
Spectra is a superb free addition to the WordPress editor and is well worth checking out.
5. WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments
The WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin by PluginHive streamlines bookings in hotels, car rentals, and salons with flexible options and Google Calendar sync. It supports partial payments and integrates seamlessly with other WooCommerce plugins, enhancing customer satisfaction and resource management.
This plugin offers staff management tools, customizable calendars, and integrates with Dokan and WPML for multi-language support. Seamlessly integrating with the WooCommerce UPS Shipping plugin, it simplifies the shipment of bookable products, boosting customer satisfaction and resource efficiency.
6. WPVR
WPVR is currently an irreplaceable Virtual Tour Creator in WordPress. If you want your 360 panoramic images to get a lifelike view, WPVR will be an ideal plugin. Virtual tours are beneficial for realtors, showroom owners, and education industries.
WPVR lets you add unlimited virtual tours with multiple hotspots. You can use these hotspots to display multimedia content in your virtual tour.
With WPVR Pro you may add unlimited scenes & hotspots in a virtual tour, add an explainer video inside of the tour, and display all the scenes in a panoramic gallery.
Also, the pro plugin offers responsive floor plans in tours, gyroscope feature for smartphone optimization, tour background music, and many other interesting elements inside virtual tours.
7. Smush
Smush is an award-winning free WordPress image compression and optimization plugin with 1+ million downloads. Images uploaded to the WordPress Media Library are automatically compressed and optimized without loss of quality, making web pages faster to load.
Smush features advanced optimization features like bulk smush, super smush, directory smush, incorrectly-sized image detection, saved configuration settings, and more. It also processes JPEG, PNG, and GIF images on single and multisite WordPress installations, integrates with the WordPress block editor to display Smush stats in image blocks, and there are no monthly limits to the number of images you can optimize (up to 5MB per image).
Smush Pro version removes the 50 images at a time limit for bulk smushing images and lets your site automatically serve images in Next-Gen WebP format.
In terms of plugin compatibility and performance, Smush integrates with all WordPress themes, page builders, and media library plugins, uses a fast and reliable API to smush images with no slowdown, and recently introduced parallel processing to compress images even faster.
8. Forminator
Forminator is a free and easy-to-use custom form building plugin for WordPress that lets you build forms from scratch or using a template.
Use Forminator’s drag-and-drop visual builder and built-in wizards to set up and create all kinds of forms for your website – contact forms with Google reCaptcha, order forms, custom login forms, payment forms, and custom registration forms with payment options including PayPal and Stripe, multi-step forms, “save and continue” forms, front-end submission forms, email forms, plus feedback widgets, interactive polls with real-time results, BuzzFeed-style quizzes, service estimators, and more.
Forminator also includes advanced form customization features like custom fields, multi-file upload fields, advanced field restrictions, drag and drop form blocks, built-in calculators, query strings to pre-fill visitor information and deliver forms to specific teams with email routing, auto-response, and conditions, dynamic polling options, and integration with 1,000+ apps. The plugin is GDPR-ready, and developers can take advantage of Forminator’s developer API with included hooks and filters and build their own integrations or custom apps.
With the Pro version of the plugin, you can also set up forms on your website to collect eSignatures.
9. BlogVault
Are you ever concerned that hackers might break into your site and ruin all of your hard work? BlogVault is the solution you need. They are going to back up your site at regular intervals. You won’t need to worry about keeping a schedule and doing all the backups independently. Simply set up the schedule once and then feel confident because the system will take care of it automatically.
Backups can be done in increments so that only things that change are saved to the cloud. This cuts down on spending a lot of resources cloning a site over and over when only a few areas on the page have changed. BlogVault also makes it easy to access your backups and then trigger them. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can move your site backward to a point before you installed that faulty plugin or had somebody breach your security. We consider this plugin very useful.
10. EWWW Image Optimizer
When you want your images to load fast on your web page, you will need help. With this plugin, you will get image optimization that uses algorithms to compress your images and help make sure customers can see your site as fast as possible.
Image optimization has many different levels to it. Do you want your image to be more glossy or lossy? Not every graphic or picture needs to be high definition, and it is important to think clearly about what your customers need to see compared to loading times. This plugin will help you make those tough decisions and optimize things automatically.
11. Superb Social Share
Social Media is more important than ever. If you want to promote your social media, you want to try out this plugin. With Social Share from Superb Themes, you are going to easily increase your traffic while still remaining compliant with GDPR. The buttons for social media are very lightweight and will help send more followers and likes to your Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
This plugin also works well with E-commerce stores. Once you get the customer on your site, you want to keep them there. If a customer doesn’t buy from you right away, you still want them to get in contact with you and start to follow you. Perhaps you can convince them down the line to buy from you after you show them a discount code on Twitter or use Instagram to inform people about a big sale.
The social icons are easy to see and very identifiable. Insert the buttons using Gutenberg blocks, now WordPress’s default editor. The buttons also will not hurt your SEO since they will load quickly instead of causing high load times that will damage your ranking.
12. iThemes Security
Want to keep your site safe? Use iThemes. It will protect you from hackers and bad updates that can wipe out your data. This security plugin will ensure you are aware when people are scanning your sites for openings and also enforces good password-protected passwords on your system. Check out this plugin to stay safe online.
13. All in One WP Migration
Need an easy way to migrate your site over to a new host? Move everything without technical knowledge, including content, media, and plugins. This plugin makes any migration easy and retains each aspect of your WordPress site that makes it special. Before you switch hosting, test out this plugin to see what it can do.
14. MetaSlider
Need a quick way to make a slideshow? Your site will look better with a carousel displaying high-quality images. MetaSlider makes all this easy without any coding. Choose from a variety of different slideshow types.
MetaSlider can easily connect to web pages with free images, making it easy to import a gallery of different pictures that users can scroll through. Forget about working with complicated code and trying to insert it into your page. Just get MetaSlider, and then the plugin will generate code for you. It is easy to copy and paste the code into your WordPress site.
15. WP Sticky
Exceptional design is a long journey, and making sticky elements on your website sooner or later becomes necessary. The customizations include social icons chat buttons, sidebars, menus, and banners. However, setting them up isn’t the easiest task, especially if you’re a beginner and coding isn’t one of your stronger sides. That’s where WP Sticky jumps in and saves the day!
No single line of code is required, so setting up a sticky element will take less than a minute, and all elements can be picked right from the screen. It’s compatible with all themes and plugins, so there won’t be any interference. It’s mobile responsive, so mobile users won’t have any issues while scrolling through your site. Simple, elegant, and irreplaceable in your repository!
16. OptinMonster
This plugin is proven to get you more leads. In the past, it was not feasible for the average person to build a form that others could fill out to get a free ebook or see case studies. When OptinMonster hit the scene, it made it easy to start building up your email list with clever offers and thoughtful information using forms. Also, it works great together with different cookie consent solutions for WordPress
17. TH Advance Search Plugin
TH advance Search plugin is designed to provide the user with ultra-fast results. You don’t have to wait too long for the search results. It has a Fast search which improves users a better shopping experience. TH Advance, Product Search plugin, is a powerful AJAX-based search plugin that will display results for Products, posts, and Pages. This plugin is specially developed for WooCommerce.
18. Ninja Forms
Similar to OptinMonster, this drag-and-drop builder makes it very easy to construct forms and increase leads. Build all sorts of different forms, including registration for conventions, free ebooks, and even surveys to gauge interest in new products. We think that Ninja Forms is great value-for-money.
19. Superb Tables
Need a quick way to show information in a responsive table? Get Superb Tables. The tables will be done in pure HTML and also give you shortcodes so you can easily insert a table at any place on your site. Working with tables has never been this easy.
20. WP Reset
Do you consider installing a plugin/theme, but you’re afraid that it might cause havoc on your website? Do you want to clean out your repository and/or give your website a fresh start? Then shift your attention towards the tool that’ll be your love on the first click – meet WP Reset. With this handy plugin, you’ll be able to test out anything on your website without the risk of causing any damage through the snapshots that enable you to restore your environment with a few simple clicks.
It’s the ultimate tool for both regular users and developers since its functionality spans speeding up your deployment and testing tasks, cleaning out your environment through bulk removal of themes and plugins, and recovering them. If you want everything on your website gone or just a few selected aspects, handle the errors, and always have a safety net to make sure that everything is under your control, WP Reset is a must-have in your plugin arsenal.
21. Contact Form 7
We love to see plugins like this that are powered by the community and open-source. Ready to do more with your forms and protect yourself from spam? Check out Contact Form 7, which integrates very well with other services from Google and Akismet.
22. Regenerate Thumbnails
Thumbnails are very important to a website, and it is wise to manage them. Using this plugin, you can free up space by deleting thumbnails that were taking up room and that you don’t need anymore. You also can manipulate the size of thumbnails as well—a great product.
23. Loco Translate
Reviews call this plugin the best translation plugin out there. Reviewers that wanted to translate a whole website had difficulty in the past because they had to search through files for hours and manually replace strings. All of that is over now that we have Loco Translate, which is very convenient and simple to figure out. You can easily translate plugins, so it won’t matter if the original plugin is in your native language. Expand what your site can do on a global level with this plugin.
24. Superb Blocks
It seems like everything is moving over to blocks now. The new WordPress editor makes it easy to manipulate things on the page, and everything will look cohesive and professional.
We think that the amazing developers have done a great job with this plugin. It is light, which means it won’t bog down the system or become a resource hog. It is also responsive and GDPR compliant for countries where that is the law. We should not be saving information on users that is not needed.
They are always actively working on this and creating new blocks to add to existing ones. Right now, you have the About the Author Block, which makes it easy to create a block that includes all the needed information on an author, plus a picture of them. There is also a Table of Contents block and a Rating block. Ratings are perfect for when you are reviewing products or services.
25. WP 301 Redirects
You’re giving your website a new look, remodeling, struck a new sponsorship deal, or moving to a different domain for any other reason? That’s a cause to celebrate, but the fresh start poses a serious threat – you’re losing SEO, traffic, users, and conversions. When moving to a different domain, those are the aspects that you definitely want to preserve, and with a plugin like WP 301 Redirects, that process will be a walk in the park.
This plugin allows you to set up redirections within minutes, with all of the traffic and users being passed on to the new domain. In addition, your old links and content, and even typos, get polished, so you’re left with nothing but freshness as this handy little tool does the job for you. In addition, it blocks that bad traffic, so the bots stay outside, and with the simple built-in charts, you’ll always have precious insights within clicking range.
Beautiful plugins, thank you