15 of the best WordPress plugins for your website (free and paid)

With tens of thousands of free and premium WordPress plugins available, it can be hard to know which ones to use on your website. You might also be wondering which ones you actually need since there’s a plugin for everything (as well as for tons of scenarios and functionality you might never have imagined). 

The best free and premium WordPress plugins for your website

A WordPress plugin enables you to add new functionality or features to a website without having to write any code. Whether we’re talking backend capabilities like securing the login screen or frontend features like contact forms, there are certain WordPress plugins we can’t live without. 

Below are 15 of the best WordPress plugins for your website’s most crucial functions:

1. Elementor Pro: best WordPress page builder plugin

Elementor replaces the outdated WordPress classic editor and the (arguably) clunky Gutenberg block editor with a drag-and-drop visual editor. If you or your clients have struggled to make your creative vision a reality with WordPress out of the box or even other page builders, then Elementor is what you’re looking for. 

That’s just the free version of the plugin. Elementor Pro is where things get even more exciting. 

With the premium plugin, you’ll get access to a huge template library, which makes designing pages so much easier. So too does the Global colors, fonts, and buttons tool.

The Theme Builder is another huge perk. It enables you to customize every piece of your website or shop, as well as to make your own page and component templates for faster designing. 

You’ll also get more widgets, so you don’t have to rely on so many plugins to do things like add image carousels, create contact forms, and more. Being able to build these kinds of common website features with the same plugin will also bring greater consistency to your designs, which is huge.

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  10 Reasons You Should Upgrade to Elementor Pro

  

  Suzanne Scacca

  18 May 2022

2. Yoast SEO: best WordPress SEO plugin

Although other SEO plugins have entered the fray in recent years, Yoast remains the reigning champion in this space. 

Yoast does more than provide you with a space to fill in metadata for each page. This plugin helps you improve SEO on your WordPress site in a number of ways: 

• Generate XML sitemaps.
• Perform SEO and readability analyses on all pages, posts, and custom post types.
• Configure metadata templates for different page types.
• Choose which kinds of content should be indexed by search engines.
• Enable certain types of schema markup.

For those of you who are serious about search engine optimization, the premium version of Yoast SEO is worth looking at. The plugin includes advanced features like premium SEO analysis, internal link building, WooCommerce SEO, and more. 

But, really, the free plugin should suffice for many of you. With easy to use on-page optimization tools and helpful tips within the plugin, you can accomplish a lot with regards to your SEO goals.

3. UpdraftPlus: best WordPress backup plugin

Website backups are a crucial part of WordPress maintenance. While it’s important to automate backups to ensure you always have a saved copy of our intact and up-to-date website, it’s just as important to have a tool that allows you to capture backups and do restores on your own.

That’s where UpdraftPlus comes into play. With this free WordPress backup plugin, you can do the following: 

• Do an immediate backup of your site (like before performing high-risk actions).
• Restore a recently saved version of your website with one click.
• Delete old backups you don’t need.
• Automate backups on a schedule that works for you (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly).
• Deliver backups to the cloud file storage of your choosing.

When something goes wrong with your website — be it human error, a plugin conflict, or a hacked website — you want a fast and simple solution to get it back online. And UpdraftPlus’s intuitive interface and tools allow you to do that.

By the way, if you’re also looking for a cloning and/or migration plugin for WordPress, UpdraftPlus has premium addons for this.

4. WP-Optimize: best WordPress performance plugin

Consumers don’t want to wait around for websites that take too long to load, especially when they know there are much larger websites that can do it with no issue. As a result, web page performance (i.e. speed) matters a lot these days. 

There are lots of great WordPress performance optimization plugins to choose from. Some are built for caching while others are built specifically for image compression and optimization. WP-Optimize, however, does it all so you won’t need to install multiple plugins to accomplish the same goal. 

Here are some of the things you can do with this caching plugin: 

• Enable caching
• Enable Gzip compression
• Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Optimize fonts
• Prioritize critical resources
• Clear the cache
• Bulk compress images
• Lazy load images
• Automate database cleanups

Another reason why WP-Optimize is a must-have WordPress plugin is because it’s built by the same team who created UpdraftPlus. Because of this, WP-Optimize allows you to automatically back up your website prior to doing risky tasks like cleaning up the database.

5. Security Optimizer: best WordPress plugin for security

If your website deals with user data — even if it’s just collecting email addresses through a subscription form — you need to secure it. There are different ways to harden the security of a WordPress website with numerous security plugins to help. 

While the Security Optimizer plugin might not be as popular as some other options, it’s become my favorite in recent years. 

Built and managed by SiteGround (and, no, you don’t need to be a SiteGround user to use it), this plugin provides protection on all sorts of levels. For instance, you can do the following:

• Enable two-factor authentication at the login screen.
• Set login attempt limits. 
• Refuse to let users set common usernames. 
• Create a custom login page URL. 
• Hide your WordPress version. 
• Disable the theme and plugin editor.
• Lock your system folders.
• Enable XSS protection.
• Track recent login activity. 

The plugin also has a few post-hack actions that may come in handy. For example, with one click, you can instantly force out anyone who is currently logged into the website. You can also force a password reset for all users.

6. WPForms: best WordPress plugin for contact forms

There are a variety of ways to create contact forms for your website: 

• Create the form using HTML5.
• Create the form in PHP.
• Create the form with your page builder.
• Use a WordPress contact form plugin.

If you prefer the plugin option, then WPForms is a good choice.

The Lite version of the plugin will help you create simple contact forms with a drag-and-drop editor and intuitive interface. It looks great on mobile devices, so there’s little you’ll have to do there, too. 

If you need something more complex than a contact or blog subscriber form, WPForms Pro is a must. It comes with more than 1,900 pre-built templates to save you time in building out common functionality and fields for your forms. 

What’s more, you can create complex, conditional, and multi-step forms for a variety of purposes — running surveys, collecting donations, performing calculations, and more. 

WPForms also integrates with popular payment processors, CRMs, file storage systems, email marketing software, and so on. So you’ll be able to automate the process of moving data from your contact forms to other integral business systems.

7. Ajax Search Pro: best WordPress plugin for website search

For websites with hundreds of pages or more, the navigation isn’t always the most efficient way for visitors to get around the site or discover new content. That’s why a search bar conveniently placed in the header is a must.

Unfortunately, the WordPress search bar widget leaves little to be desired. So, too, do the search widgets included in many page builders. 

That’s because search forms need to be responsive, fast, accurate, and smart. And, by smart, I mean they need to come with predictive and autosuggest capabilities.

Ajax Search Pro has everything you need to provide this high-quality search experience and more. 

This fully customizable plugin integrates with all of WordPress’s most popular page builders. In addition to creating beautiful search forms, it will also give you the ability to enable fuzzy matches, apply a variety of filters, and choose from different layouts for your search results. 

You can see how much you can do with this plugin in this Ajax Search Pro tutorial. 

8. MonsterInsights: best WordPress plugin for Google Analytics

You technically don’t need a WordPress plugin to connect your website to Google Analytics. You can manually add the Google tag to your header or you can do it with a plugin like Elementor Pro. 

However, MonsterInsights isn’t just a helpful tool for quickly connecting your site to Google and without the need for code. Once installed, you can: 

• View basic insights about your web traffic from your WordPress dashboard.
• Track events, file downloads, and affiliate links in your data.
• Enable advanced tracking for ecommerce, cross-domain activity, and more. 

The free plugin is helpful enough and makes viewing Google Analytics data much easier. However, you might also want to consider upgrading if trust building and conversion rate optimization are important to you. 

The Pro version of the plugin includes a cookie consent notice, forms conversion tracking, video engagement data, scroll tracking, and more. A lot of these things you’d need additional WordPress plugins or tools for, so it’s super convenient to have them all available within this plugin.

9. WMPL: best WordPress plugin for multilingual websites

Have a website that you need to translate into another language or a bunch of languages? You could go the manual route of hiring translators and uploading the content to multilingual pages of your site. 

Or you could use WPML. This plugin gives you flexible options for translating the content on your website. On top of the DIY route, you can also use one of WPML’s approved translation services to do it for you. Another and much faster option is to let the plugin automatically translate your content. 

Whichever route you choose, WPML makes it easy to translate every piece of your website. This includes your blog posts, contact forms, checkout pages, taxonomy, custom post types, and more.

In addition, WPML will ensure that your SEO metadata and URLs get translated. So if ranking in multilingual searches matters to you, then this plugin will be useful.

10. Slider Revolution: best WordPress plugin for sliders

I’m reluctant to call Slider Revolution a WordPress slider plugin because it does so much more than that. However, the basic building blocks of everything you create with Slider Revolution are technically modules or sliders, even if the end result doesn’t look that way.

For example, you can use this plugin to create: 

• Hero images
• Carousels
• Horizontal scrolling content
• Vertical scrolling content
• Split screen sections
• Photo galleries
• Entire web pages
• Single-page websites
• Custom navigations
• Complex layers
• Advanced animations

That’s the real beauty of this plugin. While you might design your content within a seemingly simple slide-based canvas, you can create incredibly advanced and interactive user experiences from within it.

So while Slider Revolution might not be useful for every website, it’s a must if you’re looking to achieve out of this world results.

11. WooCommerce: best WordPress ecommerce plugin

If you’re building an online shop with WordPress, WooCommerce is the way to go. With this plugin, you can sell a variety of things. For example: 

• Physical goods
• Digital products
• Single products
• Bundled products
• Variable products
• Subscriptions
• Memberships
• Appointments

Because WooCommerce is a product of Automattic, it was built specifically to work with WordPress. Unlike most plugins made by other contributors, there’s a seamless transition from the regular WordPress interface to WooCommerce, which makes getting started with ecommerce quite easy.

What’s also nice about WooCommerce is how well it integrates with so many things. For starters, it’s compatible with more than 100 payment gateways, so you can sell your goods through whichever channel best suits you. 

Also, WooCommerce integrates with the most popular plugins, so you don’t have to worry about conflicts throwing your website or store out of whack.

12. Bookly Pro: best WordPress plugin for bookings

WooCommerce is a great solution for selling products. However, it’s not always the ideal solution for booking appointments, reservations, or events. 

Whether you’re offering something for free (like a webinar or product demo) or something paid (like a massage session or hotel room), you need a robust booking solution like Bookly Pro. 

What’s so great about this plugin is how much work it streamlines in an otherwise tedious process to manage. For instance, you can do the following with it: 

• Create multi-step and fully detailed booking forms.
• Add unlimited services and categorize them.
• Include all your staff members and create unique availability and prices for each.
• Sync your booking form to your Google Calendar, so users see real-time availability.
• Manage details about your customers.
• Configure custom emails and text messages to ensure customers show up.
• Integrate with WooCommerce as well as various payment systems. 
• Translate your booking form in up to nine languages.
• Review booking analytics from within the plugin. 

The end result looks great, too. Your booking form is fully customizable and will work great on screens big and small. 

Get tips for setting up and using Bookly Pro.

13. Paid Memberships Pro: best WordPress plugin for memberships

If you’re looking for a WooCommerce alternative that will allow you to sell memberships or subscriptions, check out Paid Memberships Pro. 

This plugin makes it very easy to create a variety of membership types for your users. For example, start by choosing the membership type or level: 

• Free
• Monthly
• Annual
• One Time
• Lifetime
• Trial
• Gifted membership

Then customize each membership as much as you need to. You’re able to determine which of your content is gated off behind the paywall and for which membership types. 

Because of how complex membership sites can be to set up, Paid Memberships Pro gives you a list of pages needed before you launch. If you don’t want to or don’t have the time to create all of them, you can automatically generate and then tweak them with the plugin.

Similar to how WooCommerce has pre-written email templates to send to customers, Paid memberships Pro does, too. And they cover tons of bases, including expiring credit card reminders, refund requests, and auto-renewal cancellations. These types of settings will help you retain as much recurring revenue as possible.

14. Rocket LMS: best WordPress plugin for LMS

Another way to monetize your site is by creating a learning management system (LMS). Similar to other kinds of ecommerce sites, LMS can be difficult to set up. This is especially the case since the WordPress editor and popular page builders like Elementor aren’t equipped with the features needed to create a great online learning experience.

The Rocket LMS plugin is chock full of the features you need to create your own WordPress-based LMS. 

To start, you can monetize different types of educational content, like video courses, text-based courses, webinars, and articles. You can also sell tutoring or private lessons and coaching. Another option is to sell subscriptions either for self-paced learning or a course marketplace site like Udemy.

You’ll also have access to tools that empower your students to complete the course work and to do well. Things like quizzes, badges, and certifications.

Also, because of the nature of an LMS, you’re going to need tons of server space to host all your video content. While you could pay your web hosting company extra, you don’t need to do that with this plugin as it comes with S3 storage services.

15. Envato Elements: best WordPress plugin for photos and templates

For those of you who are Envato Elements subscribers, this is a must-have WordPress plugin. 

With the Envato Elements plugin, you won’t need to switch back and forth between the creative marketplace and WordPress anymore. You’ll find over a million royalty-free photos and thousands of Elementor templates, all ready for you to use inside your CMS. 

If you’re not a subscriber, there are plenty of free website and block templates as well. Just click to import the content you want to use. Then add them to your pages. 

How to decide which WordPress plugins to use

When deciding which of the must-have WordPress plugins to use from the above list, start with a couple and add more as needed. Because, while plugins can do things like streamline your workflows, simplify complex processes, and optimize outcomes, the wrong plugins or too many of them can pose risks to security and loading speeds.

Here are some things to consider before you install any new plugins on your website:

• Cost: Some plugins are well-thought-out with a sensible collection of features while other plugins are overloaded with features you’ll never use. Compare the plugins you’re interested in and choose the one that’s the most cost-effective.
• Ease of Use: Things move fast in our world today. Plugins should be easy to use and customize, even for those with no coding knowledge. 
• Customization: You should be able to make your website reflect your design sensibility by using simple editing tools.  
• Responsiveness: Not all visitors to your website use Google Chrome or iPhones. See what the plugin seller says about responsiveness on the frontend. See what existing customers say about this too in the reviews.
• Security: You’re responsible for the personal and financial data that is stored in your databases. Make note of how system vulnerabilities are addressed. 
• Speed: You want a plugin that is optimized for speed and won’t slow down your website. Check to see if this is addressed in the plugin’s sales pitch.
• Updates: Choose a plugin with a track record of ongoing updates and maintenance. Regular updates solve security vulnerabilities.  
• Ratings and Reviews: What other users are saying is a good indicator of the quality of the plugin and the trustworthiness of the provider. 
• Downloads: The number of downloads is proof that the plugin is popular among users. It shows they trust the provider. 
• Support: You may run into some issues. Make sure that the seller offers support. See what other users say about the quality of support from the provider.

Conclusion

There are endless possibilities when it comes to WordPress plugins. But the best WordPress plugins are in a class of their own! 

These must-have plugins for WordPress equip your site with all the functionality and features you need to succeed. Security, speed, and SEO are at the top of that list. Well-built ecommerce solutions are also crucial. 

Some of our top WordPress plugins don’t fall so neatly into these categories. However, they all support greater usability of the WordPress backend. In addition, they ensure that your users receive a top-notch experience when they interact with key features on your site.