WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and it didn’t become popular by chance!
One of the main reasons for that is because WordPress is extremely user-friendly and the other important reason is because it is highly customizable and you can add almost any functionality to your website using the plugin feature.
Here is a list of some of the best plugins you can add to your WordPress website to make it more beautiful and to improve its performance:
1. All-in-one SEO
Regardless of the goal of your website, SEO is crucial for your success and this wonderful plugin is an all-in-one solution for on-page SEO optimization. More information
Best alternatives: Yoast SEO.
2. Jetpack
Jetpack is the second must-have plugin in our list that has been created by Automattic. It will reduce the loading time of your site, increase its security, gives you detailed statistics, and makes your site a lot more customizable. More information
3. WP super cache
As you may already know, the load time of your site has direct effects on its SERP ranking. Whether you look from search engine’s perspective or you care about user experience, it is absolutely necessary to increase your website page speed and WP-super-cache is a great solution for this matter. It increases the overall speed of your site by creating static HTML files. More information
Best alternatives: W3-total-cache
4. Akismet
The best way to get rid of annoying comment spams is Akismet and since there are lots of them attacking our sites everyday, it’s another must-have plugin. More information
Best alternatives: wp-spamshield
5. Duplicator
The easiest way to move or backup your entire WordPress site is by using this amazing plugin. More information
Best alternatives: updraft plus
6. Wordfence Security
This one is the most downloaded security plugin and it definitely worth using. More information
Best alternatives: better wp security, sucuri scanner, wp security scan
7. TinyMCE Advanced
There is a good chance that the default editor does not satisfy all your needs. In that case, this plugin is going to help you a lot. It adds advanced functionalities like the ability to add font families to the default editor. More information
Best alternatives: CKEditor for WordPress
(Personally, I like this one more, but since some people are having difficulties with it, I put the TinyMCE first. You can try both and see which one works best for you. )
8. Visual form builder
With Visual form builder, you can create your forms with a simple interface. One of its advantages in compared with lots of other similar plugins is the ability to choose a CSS class for each module that you create. It makes it much easier to create forms that are visually in harmony with your site design. More information
Best alternatives: Contact Form 7.
9. CMS Tree Page View
This plugin helps you to manage your posts and pages with a CMS-like tree overview of all your pages and custom posts. More information
Best alternatives: wp nested pages
10. Ultimate Social Media
This simple plugin will add social media icons to your website. More information
Best alternatives: monarch
(This alternative is a premium option and it is not free, but it has more advanced features)
11. Tweet This
Tweet This increases visitors engagement by creating tweetable content boxes and letting them to easily share pieces of your content on tweeter. More information
12. Polylang
Are you looking for an easy way to make your website multilingual? Well, if your answer is yes, the best solution is right here! Polylang is all you need and it’s very user-friendly. More information
13. AnsPress
A simple yet powerful plugin for adding questions and answers functionality to your site with a clean interface. More information
14. Ultimate Short-codes
This little plugin adds a mega pack of short-codes to your website so, you can easily create sliders, text boxes, responsive tabs, and…. More information
**The next plugin is premium and it will cost you about 34$ for a regular license. If you are looking for free options, check out its alternatives below its description.
15. Visual Composer (Premium – This one is Not Free)
With this powerful plugin, there is no limit for designing a beautiful website. It requires no coding knowledge and you can create stunning designs simply by drag and drop. More information
Best alternatives: site origin panels, beaver builder
(These alternatives both offer free and paid services. If you don’t want to pay for Visual Composer, you can take a look at them. )
I hope you found this article helpful.
There are thousands of plugins for WordPress and it was impossible for me to introduce all of theme here.
What do you think is the best plugin of this list?
Do you know a good plugin that is not mentioned in our list?
You can make us happy by sharing your opinions with our audience through the comments below 🙂
I haven’t heard of the plugin called jetpack. I remember seeing it on the plugin site, but I never looked into it. It has good reviews and I am going to try it since it says that it improves loading time to the site, which is always a definite plus. Thanks for this information! I will pass it on to my brother who is also making a website!
Go ahead and give it a shot! It is a good plugin indeed. It is a product of Automattic company (the company who created the WordPress at firs place) and it has lots of necessary features such as increasing your website speed.
It increases the speed by catching your sites images and loading them for your users from a wordpress.com global content delivery network. (It also reduces your monthly bandwidth)
Hello there, very interesting subject as I use plugins for my WordPress blog.
I already use All in one SEO and it is great.
I am very interested in the WP super cache and I have read their summary on WordPress org.There are a lot of positive reviews but I want to ask you if you have used it yourself.I have already 10 plugins installed, wonder how it can reduce my load times.
And as concerns the backup plugin I use one called WP BacKUp with which I send the files to my DropBox but I have noticed that a lot of times the procedure fails.Is this Duplicator a reliable one?
Thank you for this list, good job.
First of all, I should warn you about plugins like WP Super Cache: Sometimes, when you turn them off, your website does not work again. So, before turning them on and off, backing up your entire website is crucial and if you find them helpful, it is safer to keep using them and never turn them off. (Most active contributor of WP Super Cache is Automattic so, in this category, I think this one should be one of the safest)
You should also check out Jetpack. It has many features and it might do the work of some of your other plugins so, you can remove them. It also has feature to cache your website images and load them from wordpress.com content delivery network that has a usually significant impact on your page-load.
About the WP Backup: I checked it and see that the last update of this plugin was about 6 months ago! For me, this is a red flag because WordPress is being updated fast and if plugins do not keep themselves updated, they probably are not going to work properly in the future.
I’ve used Duplicator with many websites and I’ve never had a single problem. This is also a great plugin for moving a WordPress website from one server to another.
The only thing you should consider when using a complete backup solution like Duplicator is that: You should have access to your website database and you should use FTP for uploading the backup files manually.
Hope it helps 🙂
Thanks a lot for this website. I will apply as much as possible to my website indeed. You not only gave us the plugins name, but also the benefits of them. I appreciate that. The first I would apply to my site is the visual composer, but not now being that one has to purchase it. Will read some more reviews about it first. What I will download for free is the AnsPress plugin and see how that works out for me.
Thanks again, the website is a blessing, especially for website builder.
I’m happy that you liked this article. Like you, I do a lot of research before investing on a product even when the price is low. Visual Composer does a good job, but you should definitely check and see if it is a good choice for you or not. Good luck with AnsPress and other plugins your are going to try out 🙂
Greetings. It’s no surprise plugins such All-in-one are few which everyone is familiar. That explains why it is so popular as it’s commonly heard.
Talk about common, I’m thinking of getting ‘Tweet This’ as I do post a fair amount of posts on Twitter weekly.
Polylang? That’s another one as I am English is my second language. My relative told me that it boosts my site if there’s more than one language.
SEO optimization is an important aspect of any website, indeed and it’s not a surprise that WordPress SEO plugins are so popular.
Tweet This and Polylang are both awesome plugins and you can use them to improve your website functionality. I’m happy you want to try them and I hope they help your business 🙂
This is a good list of WordPress plugins. I think I might want to try out TinyMCE. I used it once on one of my freelance websites and would probably be easier to use with WordPress. I should also add a Social Media plugin and maybe the CMS Tree Page View. Thanks for all of these suggestions!
Awesome! I’m glad that you found this article helpful. On thing that makes WordPress so powerful is the huge community behind it and thousands of plugins developed by them.
Hey there,
These seem like awesome plugins, in your opinion which is the best SEO plugin to use between yoast and All in one SEO?
I am particularly interested in speeding up my site, I just noticed that it kinda loads slowly, I will have to try that plugin, I hope it’s free 🙂
Thanks so much for sharing.
Cheers
Joseph
There are many debates about All-in-on SEO and Yoast but, in short, both are great plugins and it is up to you to choose one. Personally, I have used both of them in different projects.
All speed plugins that I have introduced in this article include free plans. Hope it helps 🙂
Cheers,
Okay! I was told you should not have more that five total plugins on your website, and that having more than that would affect your site’s performance.
But, if you limit the number of plugins to five, your site is going to have very limited capability and look just plain and boring. What is your take on this issue?
Well, you are correct!
Page speed is important and installing too many plugins will slow down your sites.
In general, You should always try to keep the number of running plugins on your site as low as possible.
On the other hand you need to install some necessary plugins to add important functionalities to your website. (Usually, the number of plugins easily exceed 5.)
So, What should you do?
Every time you install a new plugin, it is good to check the speed of your site.
If the plugin has significant impact on it, you should consider replacing it with another plugin or another solution.
Different plugins have different impacts on your website page speed and if they are well-coded there won’t be a problem even if you active many of them.
Excellent article! I thought I had all the best plugins already for my site but you showed me several I never knew about. I think I’m going to try Polylang and Jetpack. I’ll give them a try and let you know how well they work out. Thank you very much for the useful tips!
I am glad that you found it helpful. Polylang and Jetpack are both great plugins for their usage. Wish you luck.