Last Updated on April 26, 2022 by Learn Digital Marketing
As of now, WordPress plugins directory have total 42,429 plugins with 1,151,609,961 downloads across the globe. All this plugin is used to add new functionality in your WordPress. We will list essential WordPress plugins in this article.
So why plugins are so important for WordPress?
WordPress Plugins are used for expanding the features and functionality of your WordPress blogs. So one does not have to manually code the function inside the WordPress. There are lots of WordPress plugins, but I will showcase some best and essential WordPress plugins which will power and boost the performance of your WordPress blogs by adding extra functionalities.
Here is the full list of best WordPress plugins as per your requirements. I am sharing these WordPress plugins to you because you don’t have to research and waste your quality time, which you can concentrate on building your blog or website.
All of the plugins listed in the article are used by professional bloggers around the world. So you can trust all of the plugins mentioned in the article.
I have categorized my plugins, so you will get a complete idea which plugins to use. So if you need a plugin to stop spam comments on your blog. You can use Akismet anti-spam plugin. If you need to migrate your blog, you can use duplicator plugin.
So let us check how you can use the following plugins to add important functionalities to your WordPress blog.
Table of Content:
- Best Contact Form Plugins for WordPress
- Best WordPress Plugins for Email Subscription
- Best WordPress Plugins for Blog Migration
- Best WordPress Plugins for Social Media Sharing
- Best Free WordPress Plugin for SEO
- Best Auto Post WordPress to Social Network
- Best WordPress Pricing Table Plugins
- Best WordPress Plugins to Generate XML sitemaps
- Best Anti-Spam Plugins for WordPress
- Best Free Security Plugins for WordPress
- Best WordPress Cache Plugins
- Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins
- Best WordPress plugins to check broken links
Best Contact Form Plugins for WordPress Free
Well if content is king for any blog, the contact form is heart of any website. Because contact page is the most important section of any website as it drives conversions for your business.
So the easiest way to have a contact form any page of your website. You can simply install the contact form 7 on WordPress. You don’t have code anything, just use drag and drop the fields on working area and your form is ready.
Learn how to configure the contact form 7 here.
Ninja Forms have multiple functions such as you can create subscription forms, order forms and payment forms as well. You can setup email notifications if someone fill up the forms.
Drag and drop fields make your work easier. A person without any html and css knowledge can easily create new form.
Ninja forms can be easily integrated with payment gateways such as PayPal and stripe.
Learn how to configure Ninja Forms
Gravity forms is premium WordPress plugin. You have to pay one time. But it has lots of features such as integrating with salesforce. So whoever fills the form on your WordPress page, the data is directly transferred to your salesforce account
One of the best contact form to build using drag and drop options. You don’t need worry about coding. It easily adds fields by just dragging and dropping it.
Gravity forms also support MailChimp and salesforce by installing add-on for salesforce web to lead. All the contact form is also stored in the database which is directly accessible from WordPress dashboard.
Learn how to configure gravity forms with salesforce in WordPress.
Best WordPress Plugins for Email Subscription Free
Sending recent updates to your loyal audience of your blog is the best way for building permanent traffic on your blog. So for doing that you need to start collecting emails list. You can send email blast with latest announcements, discounts, services, blog post updates to your audience.
OptinMonster is one of the best lead generation plugin for WordPress, which allows visitors into subscribers into a prospect.
OptinMonster is basically a popup where visitors can subscriber by their email id. You have settings whether you want an exit popup or fly in popup.
One of the best features of optinmonster is that you can create a/b split testing to check which design options work best for you.
Learn how to create your first optinmonster form
Bloom email opt-in WordPress plugin comes with 40+ different layouts. You can check the opt-in analytics right from the plugin dashboard. Total impressions and conversions will give you exact idea how your opt-in forms are performing on your blog.
There are total 6 types of opt-in such as pop up, fly in, below post, inline, locked content and widget.
Bloom opt-in can be integrated with top email providers such as mailchimp, aweber, mail poet, salesforce, hubspot, get response etc.
Learn how to configure bloom plugin
Sumome is free opt-in wordpress plugin. It helps you to increase your email subscribers list and can be easily integrated with Aweber, MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor.
Best WordPress Plugins for Blog Migration Free
Whether you want to move your website to different hosting or create a clone of your WordPress blog or website. You need to have trusted person to do the migration smoothly. But it would charge heavily, if you get the migration done from the WordPress expert developers.
So quick and free solution to clone any website or blog within few seconds. You can install Duplicator plugin in WordPress.
You just have to follow the wizard to clone your website.
How to clone or migrate your website
All-in-One WP Migration [Free]
This plugin works with all hosting provider. With All-in-one WP migration you can export plugins, theme, database and images in one installer file. Though there is limit of 512 mb for uploading the files.
But you can import your assets partly. But following some tricks you can remove the limitations of 512 mb.
Tutorial on how to migrate WordPress blog using WP migration
There are bad times when your WordPress blog gets hacked or due to some technical issues your website broke. It does not matter if your hosting provider does not backup your files.
For your personal backup, you can install vault press plugin. Once you activate this plugin, it will automatically take full backup of your WordPress setup.
Best WordPress Plugins for Social Media Sharing Free
Monarch by Elegant themes [Paid]
Monarch is the one of the best social media sharing plugins. You need to pay for this plugin. But you get hell of the options to customize the sharing widgets.
You can add this sharing button in 5 different locations such as floating sidebar, above or below content, on images and videos, automatic pop-up, automatic flyin.
You can also setup triggers to social sharing which includes timed delay, bottom of post, after commenting, upon scroll and after inactivity on the page.
Monarch plugin can be easily customized in shape and colour according your blog theme. This plugin is responsive so no issue with any devices.
Dashboard will show the conversion statistics, where other competitive plugins offering in this segment lacks such options.
A Compete overview about monarch plugin
Jetpack is a single plugin with powerful features built in. From Photon CDN, publicize, related posts, sharing, subscriptions, protect, vaultpress, contact form etc. This plugin is all in one with major features.
Best Free WordPress Plugin for SEO
No one will visit your blog if you have not optimized your content for search engines. Yoast SEO plugin is highly recommended by top professional bloggers around the world.
Even if you don’t have knowledge about SEO. Yoast SEO score will help you with the score of your blog post. By suggesting you to add focus keywords, SEO title and meta description.
You have to complete SEO checklist and keep improving your article unless your SEO score shows green color. So your article is bang on for the search engines.
I will recommend All in one SEO plugin as an alternative if you are not happy with Yoast SEO performance or you have some issues with your theme and the compatibility of Yoast SEO plugin.
All in one SEO is the another popular plugin for optimizing your content for SEO. Some of the features are advanced canonical URLs, redirect attachment pages, auto generates meta tags, support for custom post types.
How to configure All in one SEO plugin
Best Auto Post WordPress to Social Network
Hootsuite is social media management tool. You can handle all your social accounts from one dashboard. You can post update at same time on your multiple social media accounts. The best feature is to schedule your post from Hootsuite according to your best social media posting time as per your time zones.
Best WordPress Pricing Table Plugins
You must have seen glamourous and flashy pricing tables on hosting service provider website. Pricing tables is the best solution to show comparison of pricing for your services. In short if you have pricing labelled as Gold, Platinum and Silver.
You can opt of normal text with pricing or use pricing tables which ad more glamour to your design and also it is very easy to understand the pricing.
I have listed top 3 best pricing table plugins which are responsive and work with any themes. You can easily customize the colours, layout of pricing tables by adding custom css.
Responsive Pricing Table [Free]
Easy Pricing Tables Lite by Fatcat Apps [Free]
Pricing Table by Supsystic [Free]
Best WordPress Plugins to Generate XML sitemaps
Everyone knows the importance of sitemap as it makes easy for search engines to crawl your WordPress blogs or website easily as per your frequencies set for your post.
It is very important to have a sitemap of your blog, so without xml your blog won’t be indexed properly.
This plugin generates XML sitemaps for your blog. You can adjust the settings for pages, post from the configuration. Also, you can set the frequency from daily, weekly and monthly.
Best Anti-Spam Plugins for WordPress
Once you have setup WordPress blog, by default you will see Akismet plugin installed in the plugin section. Akismet plugin is used by 90% of the bloggers, this plugin is a comment spam filtering which keeps your blog protected by Autobots and pingback spam comments.
How to activate Akismet plugin?
From the plugin section just click on activate and your plugin will be activated. Now in the second step you need to configure this plugin with the API key to start this plugin actually working. It is straight forward by clicking Plugins > Akismet > Configuration, it will take to you Akismet website. Now click on the button “GET A WORDPRESS KEY”. Select a personal plan and sign up, enter the contact info. You can see pricing slider; you have to drag that slider to complete right side so that you will see a free worth of the plugin.
Just enter continue button and it will show you Akismet API key. Now come back to WordPress plugin configuration and enter the key. That’s done! Your plugin is fully configured. So say good bye to spam
Best Free Security Plugins for WordPress
WordPress is best content management system [CMS] used by 90% of professionals, whether they are professional bloggers, business owner’s brands websites. Because of WordPress growing popularity in the world. Some insane hackers are always trying to hack WordPress blogs and websites.
So many great developers have developed WordPress plugins which protects your blogs from SQL injects and code hacking from forms etc.
BulletProof security plugin is the one of the best and reliable plugin. It gives you notifications if someone is trying to login in your blog as well. It keeps your blog from brute force attack.
It is also recommended to everyone you should always host your blog with reliable hosting companies which takes care of everything.
How to configure BulletProof Security Plugin
Vaultpress is subscription based security and backup services for your blog. It backup your blog data in real time. So you don’t have to worry about the security of your site.
Whenever someone access your website, they actually request for lot of information from your hosting provider. So before loading your blog completely, it has to request CSS, images, java script and also retrieve content from your SQL database.
So all this process affects your website loading speed. So if your blog is loading very slow, your visitor will tend to exit from your website. Either you have to upgrade RAM on you VPS.
But if you are using shared hosting from best managed WordPress hosting, this will help you well to reduce the load time of website.
But another way to do it with cache plugins. When you install and configure W3 Total Cache plugin, it will server your visitors with static pages. It will also make your blog load faster and good experience for your users.
We recommend below plugins which are best and used by professional bloggers around the world.
W3 total cache plugin is the one of the best and reliable cache plugin used by professional bloggers. WordPress is php written application, so whenever WordPress blog is executed from the browser all php scripts are run to fetch the page and fetch the content of the blog
Slow website speed affects yours google rankings and performance of your blogs. By enabling W3 Total Cache plugin this will compressed your pages and increased the speed of your WordPress blog.
You can also integrate W3 Total Cache plugin with the CDN advanced features.
How to Configure W3 Total Cache
Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins
Do you want to convert your WordPress blog or sell products online, WooCommerce is the great solution to add ecommerce features on your WordPress.
WooCommerce comes with quite great number of extension to increase functionality of your WordPress. Systeme.io is one of the best eCommerce platform.
Best WordPress plugins to check broken links
Broken link checker is a very essential plugin. It shows if you have any 404 or any dead links on the website which is very bad for the SEO. Once it finds the broken URL, it will give you suggestion on fixing them.
Conclusion
I have researched a lot before i published this article on best WordPress plugins. I contacted many professional bloggers and got their feedback on best plugins. So don’t hesitate to install this plugins on your WordPress blog and websites. If i have missed any plugins, you can mention in the comments sections. Also i would be glad to get your feedback in the comment section.
Hi there Dumaji,
You really mentioned the most important plugins for wordpress blogs, why I think so?
Because about 80% of this list I use on my websites, or I’ve used. Just shared the article, keep up the good work.
Cheers,
Clay Smith
Thanks Clay, For sharing the article. All of this plugins are used by professional bloggers. So recommended to everyone who love WordPress and Blogging.
Thanks Clay, For sharing the article. All of this plugins are used by professional bloggers. So recommended to everyone who love WordPress and Blogging.
Thanks clay, The information you have shared in this article is really interesting and useful. I am really enjoying while reading this kind of amazing blog post and I hope that you continue posting such more this kind of valuable post.
Great job, Thank you for an informative blog. Keep rocking and let bring more articles.