WordPress Tips
best wordpress plugins

The Top WordPress Plugins for 2022

By Joe Youngblood

The top 112 plugins every WordPress website should consider using in 2022 and why.

We’ve got over eighteen years of experience building and optimizing amazing WordPress websites that perform great in search engines, engage users, and drive conversions. This list contains the best paid and free WordPress plugins available on the market today. We scoured the WordPress Plugin repository, Code Canyon, and other websites where WordPress plugins are marketed – and used our extensive knowledge and hands-on experience with thousands of plugins to help build this list for you. We’ve also listed the price or price range, the last known updated for the plugin, and approximately how many websites might be using the plugin based on data from WordPress, Code Canyon, or Built With.

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WordPress now powers 39.5% of all websites on the internet, that’s more than any other technology including websites only built with HTML. The open source CMS has grown over the past decade as the preferred option for many small businesses and even larger companies. The combination of the price of WordPress being free, the platform’s constantly updated and improved core, and the plugins created by third-party developers makes WordPress an incredibly attractive option for nearly every website project that doesn’t have to be a stand-alone app or that doesn’t require a free platform such as Wix or Weebly or a tailor made platform like Shopify.

While the core WordPress offers quite a bit; there are still a lot of features, functions, and elements not available in the CMS that you may want to add to your website. These are often added in by plugins created by third-party developers. Finding plugins to enhance your existing WordPress website can be taxing with over 88,950 free plugins listed on the WordPress repository, over 7,400 listed on the Code Canyon marketplace, and thousands listed elsewhere. Today there are also websites that rank highly in search engines designed to funnel you towards their own paid plugins. This all makes finding a selection of plugins and comparing them to each other very difficult and time consuming.

The Best WordPress Plugins

We took our 17+ years of experience working with WordPress and combined it with hundreds of hours of research to hand select the best WordPress plugins to use on your website this year across 12 different categories; Page Builders, Design Elements, Lead Generation and Forms, Page Speed and Image Optimization, File Management / Media Library Enhancement, Booking & Appointment Scheduling, Website Features, Automation, WooCommerce Upgrades, Search Engine Optimization, Security & Backups, and Core Enhancements. We selected plugins after examining a variety of factors including their popularity, how frequently they are updated, recent major risk factors, the quality of design and development, and our own experiences.

Some of the plugins you’ll find below are freely available, others are paid, and some have both free and paid options. If a plugin is found free on the WordPress repository we’ll identify approximately when it was last updated and how many active installations the plugin has. If a plugin is found on a paid marketplace we will list how many total sales it has and the last date it was updated, if that information is available.

We test all of these plugins at least at the time they are recommend and most in an on-going fashion. However, given the nature of WordPress it is possible a plugin may not work with your website, may break the functionality of other plugins, or may break your website. Always backup your website before adding and testing a new plugin to the live site. Another best practice is to test new plugins on a staging server first.

The Best Page Builders for WordPress

Page builders make it easier to make visually stunning pages without a lot of experience by offering a combination of a visuals, drag and drop capabilities, and pre-built feature experiences such as templates. Most WordPress themes today come bundled with a page builder.

These are the best page builders (and their enchancement packages) you should consider trying this year.

WPBakery (formerly Visual Composer)
Used by a large number of theme developers today, WPBakery is a strong page builder that comes packed with a lot of features built in. WPBakery allows theme developers to install it for free, which has helped them grow to power over 2,000,000 websites with over 390,000 sales. Anyone can quickly learn how to use this system for building great page layouts with animation, efffects, and rich features without knowing any programming.

There are a few downsides to WPBakery, to be aware of. The largest issue is that it requires a yearly license for each website, making it a bad option if you plan on launching several websites or if you’re a design agency that also manages websites after you launch them. WPBakery also uses short codes to display content which can often appear in search engine meta descriptions if no other description is available.

Ultimate Addons for WPBakery
If you’re going to use WPBakery, you should get the most out of it possible. Made by one of the top plugin developers on Code Canyon, this Addon plugin gives your WPBakery builder more functions including a counter, countdown timer, parallax backgrounds, modals, ribbon text highlights, information circles, Google Trends charts, image hotspots, interactive photo tiles and banners, advanced buttons, and more.

Elementor
One of the newer page builders on the market, Elementor has seen a surge in popularity the past few years largely because it is free to use on an unlimited number of websites. What started as a simple drag and drop page builder has turned into a well-rounded page builder with 4 different licensing tiers and a growing fanbase of theme developers and SEOs alike. It comes with tools serious website builders will find useful including a popup builder and integrations with a wide variety of marketing tools and platforms.

Because Elementor’s base version has a free license it makes a great option for theme developers, networks of websites, and agencies that also manage their client’s WordPress installations and licenses. Editing with Elementor can feel a bit clumsy sometimes, but has consistently improved over time.

  • Price: Free to $199 / year
  • Total Active Installs: 5,000,000
  • Last Updated: November 28th, 2021
  • Link: https://elementor.com/

Divi
Technically Divi is not a page builder, but is a theme with a baked in drag and drop page builder independent of any other page builder plugin – though you can get the page builder as a stand alone plugin too. Created by one of the top WordPress theme development teams, Elegant Themes, Divi has strong code support and is consistently upgraded. One incredibly attractive feature is that Elegant Themes offers Divi and other WordPress tools with a lifetime license for a one-time fee of $249. This combination makes it an attractive offering for a website designer that wants to keep things simple instead of pairing a plugin and a theme together while keeping costs low over the long-term. Unfortunately Divi does have a lot of the advanced features found in either WPBakery or Elementor’s paid tiers which can make it harder to build the website with the features a website might need. Elegant Themes does offer a third-party plugin marketplace though that helps to fill in the gap of the missing features.

YellowPencil
This builder focuses on giving designers the ability to visually edit a website’s stylesheets while also providing a page builder experience. While it lacks the widgets and elements other page builders have, this plugin provides a great alternative for designers wanting to build more using CSS. Build your page layouts using wireframes, add animations to a page, or edit a page for a specific screen size.

Design Elements

Design Elements are plugins that allow WordPress websites to add a unique design function to their website independent of their theme or page builder. Most design elements are created by independent developers and offer an easy way to add an aesthetically pleasing element to any WordPress website.

Slider Revolution
If you see a WordPress website or theme with a large hero image with animation, CTA buttons, or a slider display, there’s a good chance that site is using Slider Revolution. Even if you’re against sliders because they disrupt users visiting a page instead of allowing them to use the website the way they want, you’ll love the freedom Slider Revolution gives in building a rich, beautiful experience. The drag and drop visual builder comes with a variety of tools to help you make the most out of your slider including a timeline display.

Cool Timeline Pro
A frequently updated plugin that allows you to add visually stunning timelines to your website with a large variety of timeline template options. Show off things like your company history, product pipeline, history of innovation in your industry, awards, and other things with these timelines.

WP Business Intelligence
Integrate custom charts and graphs into your content using your WordPress database or a secondary MySQL, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle database. Charts and graphs are fully responsive, interactive, and absolutely beautiful. Users love data visualizations and adding them to your blog posts and pages has never been easier as the WP Business Intelligence plugin uses shortcodes which work with any page builder, the classic editor, and Gutenberg. Use the free version to show off data to your users or use the Pro version to turn your WordPress into a powerful business intelligence dashboard builder.

Blog Designer PRO
This plugin gives you access to a large selection of ready built blog post, categories, tags pages, search pages, and WooCommerce product page templates. Easily update the look and feel of various types of pages on your website. This plugin also integrates with WPBakery, Elementor, and other page builders for easier customization (not Divi).

Uber Menu
This menu plugin allows you to provide your users with an advanced navigation mega menu experience by using short codes, adding images, adding widgets, and even using custom HTML. The plugin creates menus that are fully responsive and touch-enabled for smartphones and tablets, flyout menus, and has a grid based system much like page builders do to allow for better control of the layout design.

Elfsight Instagram Feed / Instashow
NOTE: This item is no longer available on Code Canyon and will likely be removed from our list soon
This plugin adds a stunning and functional Instagram feed to your WordPress website. It comes with features like a call to action button option on Instagram posts to encourage customers to make a purchase, integrates with WPBakery, and allows full control over the Instagram UI elements.

Elfsight YouTube Gallery / Yottie
A great plugin to display your YouTube videos in a gallery. While it lacks functionality you might want for a more video-rich website experience such as a video XML feed or a search function, it is an aesthetically pleasing way to allow your website visitors to browse your video catalog. This plugin comes with a selection of gallery types, color schemes, user interface and playback options, and even integrates with Google Adsense for revenue generation.

Flow-Flow
This WordPress plugin allows you to combine various social media and RSS feeds into one display. It comes with a variety of display layout options such as masonry, carousel, and one that resembles that Facebook/Instagram feed itself. The plugin uses “cards” and allows designers to build their own card layout with a drag and drop builder system. You can use this plugin to pull in public content from various sources and moderate that content before it is published. It also has the ability to integrate advertising within the layout to generate ad revenue from your social media activity, contests, hashtags, etc…

Master Slider
A touch enabled slider that comes with 90 pre-built slider layouts and styles. The editor includes a timeline deck, object snapping, and a transitions editing feature. Out of the box this plugin can pull in images from your Facebook or Flickr to quickly build and display image slider galleries and can pull in products from WooCommerce to showcase products in a product image gallery.

Image Map Pro
Easily and quickly create image maps of countries, the world, the human body, floor plans, and more with this WordPress plugin. This is simply the best plugin on the market to generate image maps with tool tips, icons, polygon shapes, and built in menus. Some real-world examples include:
– Detailing what apartments, condos, or commercial spaces in a building are available.
– An interactive map for a university or shopping center.
– Building educational tools for students.
– Showcasing differences in buying behaviors, survey results, votes, etc… in various regions.
– Detailing parts of a new product / invention.

Video Gallery WP
A great WordPress video gallery that allows you to pull in video content from YouTubea and Vimeo and mix that content together with your own custom uploaded videos.

Multipurpose Before After Slider
Give your website the ability to have responive and touch/swipe enabled before and after slider. Perfect for any business that needs to highlight the visual aspects of their work as a case study such as home remodelers, painters, automotive restoration, automative dent / body damage repair, etc…

Age Checker for WordPress
Add a beutiful age validation modal to your website and verify ages with three different modes; birthday input, checkbox, and an enter button. Obviously this plugin is most useful for NSFW websites but is a cost-effective option for other adult oriented businesses too such as vapor shops, cannabis websites, and alcohol brands.

Super Interactive Maps
This plugin offers interactive region / country maps with hotspots, lightbox windows, custom tool tips, custom color capability, and map icons. Comes with 300 vector maps and a WYSIWYG editor with the ability to embed videos and images.

Advanced Floating Content
Adds a simple notification bar to the top or bottom of the website or a modal with text, an image, or a video embedded in it. This plugin includes several great features included a scheduling function, animation, and the ability for a top banner to scroll with the page.

Smart Notification
This is a great push notification plugin with a lot of capabilities other plugins typically charge a monthly fee for. Send push notifications on a variety of events including WooCommerce abandoned carts, New post notifications, WooCommerce back in stock notifications, Forum topic notifications, New job listings, and more. This plugin also enables your users to customize their notifications, provides analytics, allows campaigins, comes with emoji support, allows geo-fencing, and integrates with Ultimate Membership Pro.

TablePress
The go to plugin for embedding tables in your pages and blog posts. TablePress is fairly simple, but incredibly powerful when trying to display spreadsheet like content.

Apex Notification Bar
This WordPress plugin adds a notification bar on the top, bottom, left, and right sides of your website. It comes with a selection of 15 different styles and comes with features such as a countdown timer, search box, and video popup. For lead generation the plugin integrates with Mailchimp and Constant Contact.

Advanced Categories Widget
NOTE: This item is no longer available on Code Canyon and will likely be removed from our list soon
Take near-complete control of your category pages with this WordPress plugin. The plugin authors claim a list of awesome capabilities including full control of styling, adjusting the order of posts, showing links to RSS feeds, search function to search only that category, and more. At a bargin price of $7 its worth giving this a shot if you’re wanting to customize your category pages. The plugin claims to have been updated in September of 2020 but the changelog doesn’t show anything since 2015, a sign to be a little cautious.

Lead Generation and Forms

Gravity Forms
The current heavyweight champion of WordPress forms, Gravity Forms is used by over half a million websites and growing. It offers the ability to store form data without requiring a second plugin, easy to use WYSIWG form builder, reCAPTCHA integration, and intuitive notifcation / email controls. Gravity Forms also integrates with nearly every other WordPress plugin where you might want a form integration from CRMs to payment gateways. There’s even a certified developer program and a collection of awesome third-party plugins to extend the functionality of the forms.

Ninja Forms
Another great membership based form system, Ninja Forms packs in a ton of functionality along with an easy to use interface. They too have a long list of integrations withother platforms and plugins and offer a extensive collection of add-ons so you can use the form system exactly the way you want to. Ninja Forms has more pricing tiers than other similar systems and comes in a little less expensive that most other options.

  • Price: $29 to $249.50
  • Estimated Websites: 207,801
  • Last Updated: November 30th, 2021
  • Link: https://ninjaforms.com/

Convert Plus
This is one of the single best plugin purchases you’ll ever make for your lead generation. The plugin offers a ton of pre-designed modal templates to help drive sales, email signups, and more from your visitors. Packed full of features like exit intent, content locker, and 16 different placement options, Convert Plus is an immensely valuable tool a WordPress marketers aresenal and it only costs a $23 one-time fee.

Ninja Popups
This is a fairly low cost WordPress popup plugin and has quite a few features typically reserved for more expensive plugins or those with monthly rate plans. One of the big selling points is that it comes with a massive library of demo popups you can import and customize. It also comes with a neat analytics feature, an A/B testing feature, and allows you to push your contacts directly to a mailing list on a wide variety of platforms. There are several advanced settings and integrations too that should help make this plugin more useful to your lead generation needs. The biggest drawback for this plugin is the layout designer which can be difficult to figure out and is frequently best descibed as a pain.

ninjapopups screenshot wordpress plugin
A screenshot of the Ninja Popups WordPress plugin with a call to action designed to give away a free offer.

Quform
If you need a great stand-alone form that doesn’t require a yearly or monthly financial commitment, then you definitely want to give this form plugin a look. It comes with a lot of the features other from systems do such as a drag and drop form builder, reCAPTCHA, form themes, file uploads, form entry capture, and more.

Mailster
One of the most incredible email marketing plugins ever created for WordPress. This plugin will take your newsletter building to a level only found on top tier email platforms that typically have much higher costs. Build automated campaigns, auto responder emails, and one-time email campaigns all with out limits on subscribers, lists, or number of forms. This plugin also packages a beautiful and useful analytics panel and integrates with pretty much every platform you can think of. If you don’t want to pay for an email sending platform that’s ok too as this plugin works via SMTP or PHPmail.

MailMunch
A simple to use and setup email capture plugin that comes with a bunch of pre-designed templates to make gathering emails from your visitors a less painful experience.

Subscribe to Download
Entice your visitors to join your email newsletter by temping them with a free digital download if they subscribe. A simple and incredibly useful plugin, especially if you’re not using a bigger lead generation system that offers this functionality. Comes with GDPR feature, link expiration, ip verification, and the ability to store ip data. Don’t worry if you are not a designer either, this plugin bundles in 20 beautiful templates to use.

Opt-in Panda
NOTE: This item is no longer available on Code Canyon and will likely be removed from our list soon
A content locker plugin that hides or blurs your content until your visitor consents to join your email newsletter. Comes with the ability to use single opt-in or double opt-in and integrates with most major email sending platforms. Opt-in Panda also allows users the ability to consent via their social media profile which scrapes data, though we’d recommend extreme caution when using this feature or not to use it at all in order to avoid violating privacy laws / platform terms.

Win Wheel for WordPress
A simple wheel spinning plugin to help drive new leads and entice potential customers to take chance on gaining a unique discount code. This plugin is fairly basic but offers a great set of features to help build your email list, including MailChimp integration. The offers on this wheel plugin are able to be customized as are most features. What it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in solid functionality and routine updates from the developer. Of note this developer offers a similar wheel plugin designed specifically for WooCommerce coupon distribution.

NEX Forms
This form plugin offers a drag and drop form builder which is pretty much the only thing standard about this form. From there NEX Forms gets really unique offering out of the box a ton of different types of forms not found standard in other plugins or form systems. That list includes chat forms, conversational forms, survey forms, quiz forms, contract forms, cost estimate forms, RSVP forms, and more. You’ll also find built in analytics, math logic, dozens of animations, and popup functionality. Like other form systems you can also enhance NEX Forms with add-ons to make it functional exactly how you need it to, but unlike those other systems you won’t pay yearly membership fee. The developers even claim NEX is a zero-conflict plugin, meaning it won’t interfere with any other plugin’s ability to function.

Page Speed and Image Optimization

WP Rocket
The single most useful and feature packed speed optimization plugin for WordPress sites. WP Rocket allows you to set caching, create rules for caching, minimize HTML/CSS/JS, set rules for minimizing HTML/CSS/JS, set rules for lazy loading, keep other sites from embedding your content, preload content, setup dns prefetch for third-party content, control the WordPress heartbeat, force serving of WebP images, replace YouTube video embeds with preview image insetad, preload fonts, add any missing image dimensions into the code, integrate your CDN, and more. Just reading that list of functionality should make you realize why so many websites rely on WP Rocket to handle a big chunk of their page speed optimization and layout shift optimization.

  • Price: $49 to $249
  • Estimated Websites: 1,030,291
  • Last Updated: December 16th, 2021
  • Link: https://wp-rocket.me/

Imagify
Set up rules and automatically compress images uploaded to your media library to optimize them for speed. Also allows bulk optimization of your media library, optimizes images in your theme folder, and creates next-gen WebP image files to serve to modern browsers for speed.

  • Price: Free to $10 / month
  • Total Active Installs: 400,000
  • Last Updated: December 3rd, 2021
  • Link: https://imagify.io/

Autoptimize
An opensource project to help WordPress websites handle a lot of page speed optimization without having to buy a plugin. Autoptimize allows you to minify HTML/CSS/JS, defer JS script loading to the footer, optimize Google Fonts, async JS, and more. This plugin does not offer caching however and recommends you get a caching plugin if you use this one to better improve your performance.

Asset Cleanup
This plugin handles one of the most overlooked parts of page speed optimization. While most page speed plugins work to minify your HTML/CSS/JS files, force browser caching, or compress images this plugin gives you the ability to completely offload specific CSS/JS scripts on a page-level basis. That means if you install an admin plugin that forces its JS file to load on your blog posts you can now go in and remove that file from loading completely on your blog posts, helping them load faster. Be careful when offloading CSS and JS files on a page and take meticulous notes when using this plugin to make reversing issues later on easier.

File Management / Media Library Enhancement

FileBird
Easily organize all of the files in your media library by creating folders and moving your images, photos, pdfs, spreadsheets, and other documents into the folders. This plugin has a simple and clean user interface, allows folders and sub-folders, and has proven compatibility with most major plugins and page builders. An excellent addition for any site with a large media library.

WordPress Real Media Library
A touch capable plugin that allows you to build file folders and sub-folders with the ability to drag and drop your media files into your folders. This plugin has advanced features too like the ability to upload files directly to one of your media file folders, create photo galleries from a folder, and more. This plugin also works with WordPress Multisite allowing each site to have their own unique folder strucutre. Proven compatibility with most page builders, major themes, and big plugins including WooCommerce.

Booking / Appointment Scheduling

Bookly PRO
Easily add a booking feature to your website with this plugin. Out of the box this plugin integrates with Google Calendar and WooCommerce. You can also get add-ons to add more payment gateways, integrate with more calendars, and more features like recurring appointments and SMS reminders. There is a free version of Bookly on the WordPress plugin directory, but it isn’t very useful for most businesses who need to have a booking system.

Booked
A great option for any WooCommerce website that needs booking. This plugin offers a simplified booking system with custom fields and processes payments via WooCommerce. More cost effective than most other paid options this one is simple yet powerful packing in features like allowing guests and registered users to book, assigning appointments to agents, customized email templates, and multiple calendar creation.

Features

Echo Knowledge Base

Agile Store Locator for WordPress
Build a beautiful store locator to display all of your store locations or where your customers can find your products in physical stores. Powered by Google Maps API this plugin offers a handful of options including according or list display, driving directions, advanced search, ability to import locations, and an admin backend panel. Style your locator with one of 5 pre-designed ready to go templates.

AJAX Search Pro
A powerful advanced search feature to replace the standard WordPress search box that doesn’t require a monthly fee. Comes with sharp and gorgeous template options and a variety of features including custom taxonomy and custom field filters, drag and drop options, and Google powered keyword suggestions. This plugin also has integration with WPBakery, Elementor, and Divi page builders and is theme independent meaning it should work for every theme.

Ultimate Membership Pro
Protect your pages, categories, products, and other content on your WordPress site with this highly rated membership plugin. Comes with features like a content drip, free and paid trials, coupons, email verification, content locker, email verification, user badge system, and conditional logic. You’ll be able to integrate with most major payment processors, monitor downloads and user activity, and even use an API to update the plugin.

DaReactions Plugin
Add social media-like reaction buttons to your posts, pages, custom post types, comments, and BuddyPress activity. Make your WordPress truly unique by customizing the reactions and the icons.

Snax Viral Content Builder
The progenitor to the Bimber theme, this plugin packs a huge punch in terms of viral and UGC content. It comes standard with the ability for users to submit a massive selection of content including; Hot or Not style polls, Versus polls, Stories, Open Lists, Ranked Lists, Memes via a Meme Generator, Trivia Quizes, Personality Quizes, Standard Polls, Ordered Lists, Images, Galleries, Links to content, and media from other sites. The plugin has a bit of a learning curve and lacks simple, intuitive backend controls for editors, however, this is a small price to pay for such a wide array of content possibilities from one plugin.

Directories Pro
A versatile directory plugin that allows you to instantly build a local business directory, a website directory, a user directory, or a property directory. Comes standard with features like multi-criteria reviews, claim a listing, frontend user dashboard, user submissions, custom fields, and support for most major WordPress form plugins. Easily one of the best directory plugins for WordPress and only charges a one-time fee.

Photo Contest Plugin
Host a photo-based contest on your WordPress site quicky, easily, and securely with this plugin. Comes with 4 voting modes; One vote mode, Like Mode, 5-Star Mode, and 10-Star mode.

Contest Bundle
Made by the samee creator of the Photo Contest plugin above, this is a bundle of 3 types of contest plugins: Photo, video, and Recipe. If you want to host multiple types of contests, this bundle is a great value.

EventON
An event calendar that displays upcoming events in beatuifully designed minimalistic style. Packed with features like repeating events, Zoom integration, live events, featured events, location based archives, multi-day events, and more. This plugin is developer friendly running nearly everything through pluggable filters which allows developers to hook in for creating / altering dynamic features. Consistently updated, feature packed, developer friendly – this combo typically requires a monthly subscription fee, but EventOn is just a one-time purchase.

MyArcadePlugin Starter
NOTE: This item is no longer available on Code Canyon and will likely be removed from our list soon
Add a gaming arcade to your WordPress website or build a website just for browser-based arcade games. A review of the games displayed by this plugin showed nothing that used Adobe Flash which is no longer supported though it is possible they still display some. Arcades of browser-based games were once a huge business online and perhaps you could help them get there again or just entertain a few of your users. This plugin fetches games from at least 8 different developers and allows you to add custom HTML 5 and Unity3D games too.

Progress Map
Display store listings, hotel listings, or places of interest on a Google Map with map markers and carousel of the listings being shown. Map capable of display review stars and when users click on a location they see a modal popup of a page on your site with location information. Great for building maps where you curate the listings such as for a group of nearby businesses or sponsors for a charity.

Go Night Dark Mode
Quickly and easily give your website a dark mode capability. Comes with the ability to automatically switch your site to dark mode, several different toggle versions, ability to customize the toggle button, ability to show dark mode only on specific pages, a dark mode only logo version, and can set dark mode based on a user’s OS configurations.

Live Chat Complete
Don’t pay a SaaS company hundreds of dollars per month if you only want simple live chat features or you want to test live chat on your website first. This plugin gives you the ability to add helpful live support chat icon to your website and even to show a contact form when you’re away. Add operators to expand your support operations and get email alerts when new users are online. This plugin can only support 100 simultaneous users at a time, so if you have heavy website traffic volume or a lot of inbound questions this won’t work, but it’s a perfect fit for SMBs that want to experiment with live chat without a new monthly bill.

All in One Support Button + Callback Request
Provide your users with a number of contact options for support from any page on your website. Allow your customers to connect to you via Messenger, Skype, Telegram, WhatsApp, and other platforms. Also integrates with live chat platforms such as Tawk.to, Intercom, LiveChat, Zendesk, FreshChat, and Zoho Chat. You can even havey our customers request a call back.

WP ULike
Add an upvote or like icon to your blog posts and start driving more engagement from your users. You can also add the upvote/downvote or like/dislike functionality to WooCommerce products, Comments, BBpress topics, and BuddyPress activity. The free version offers a great service and the paid version claims to improve on that as the “Most Advanced WordPress Marketing Toolkit”, a claim it doesn’t really deliver on. Though the paid version does offer more advanced features like a schema.org generator, Rest API support, and dozens of templates. The paid version also comes with features not directly related to the upvote/like functionality such as a User Profile builder and AJAX login and registration system.

Fire Push
Send push notifications via the web browser or SMS without having to pay a monthly or annual fee. Users can get live or background notifications when posts are published or updated, products are added, custom deals are created, custom landing pages are created, a product’s price is reduced, or a product is in low stock. Support included for WooCommerce means ecommerce shops can easily increase sales with a little effort.

Modal Survey
Gain feedback from your website visitors or get them to engage with polls, surveys, and quizes. Comes with a variety of features including a content locking modal option, set start and end times, embed the polls / surveys, or display the modal in the corner. Easily view the feedback / activity data and export charts and graphs for publication or embed interactive charts with animation showing the results.

Fixed TOC
Automatically create a responsive table of contents in your pages and posts like Wikipedia articles. This plugin scans a page for headings and uses those to create a table of contents automatically allowing users to more quickly jump to the information that is important to them. Customize the style of your table of contents with various fonts and colors, and determine various options to include. Great for websites that frequently publish large articles.

WP Cost Estimation & Payment Forms Builder
Create a custom estmation form and accept deposits or downpayments for your services with this plugin. Comes with a visual cost estimation builder that has features like conditional logic, save to finish later, and file uploads. The calculated estimation can be a specific price or even a price range. Accept payments with Stripe and Paypal and integrate with Gravity Forms and WooComerce. Great tool for any local service provider offering bespoke services and even for digital based providers.

Cost Calculator WordPress
A simple cost calculator / estimating plugin with an easy to use interface. Offers fewer options that other estimation builders, but works great of businesses with more straightforward pricing. Users can add or remove service items from their estimate too. Integrates with Contact Form 7 and Paypal.

Premium Stock Market & Forex Widgets
Offer your visitors in-depth financial information from stock and forex markets. This plugin pairs up beautiful eye-catching design with real-time stock and forex information presented in a variety of different displays, charts, and graphs.

Premium Cryptocurrency Widgets
Offer your users more details about on over 5,000 hot cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Lite Coin, Ripple, and Ethereum. This plugin presents cryptocurrency values in a variety of unique visualizations including accordions, donut charts, gauges, and even group them in portfolio style. Perfect for adding extra pizzaz to any blog posts about cryptocurrency investing.

WP Job Openings
One of the most simplistic but powerful job listing plugins ever created for WordPress. WP Job Openings offers a smooth experience for small to mid-sized employers who want to list job openings on their website and accept applications on those job openings. This plugin comes in a free and premium variety, but the free plugin version is unlimited and offers a wonderful job listing experience. This plugin offers a simple UX for adding new job listings and a great UX for potential new employees. There are a lot of extras in the free version you may expect too such as built-in schema markup, HR role settings, job search feature, and web hooks for developers. The dev team also offers 2 free add-ons for the free plugin to help extend the functionality even more. If you need more power for your job listings such as giving your HR staff the ability to rate applicants or integrating in a third-party form, then you can go Pro for between $39 and $119 / year.

Automation

WP Twitter Auto Publish
Simple to setup and simple to use plugin that automatically tweets your newest blog posts and pages to your Twitter handle. You can add hashtags that are posted with every tweet. Comes with advanced features like choosing what categories to tweet from, tweeting custom post types, and formating the layout of your automated tweets. Great for bloggers who write their content in advance and schedule it and typically only cover one topic. The biggest drawback is not being able to tweet out different hashtags for each post or a different format for each post.

WordPress Automatic Plugin
Automatically pulls in content from various websites using API scraping techniques. This style of website is often built by spammers hoping to get free money from ranking in search engines and running ads. There are other uses however, for example you could automatically pull in your own YouTube videos to display on your site. Or you could automatically pull in your products from eBay to your website. This plugin does what it says it does and opens up a lot of potential in automating keeping your own site updated allowing you to focus on using the third-party plaforms.

FS Poster
A great social media post scheduler built right into your WordPress website. FS Poster allows you to automate posting to 13 different social media networks including Google My Business, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Telegram among the other standard ones. Easily duplicate a previous share, see your upcoming scheduled content on a calendar view, and track analytics data.

WooCommerce Upgrades

WZone
Import products from Amazon to your WooCommerce website and keep them syncrhronized. Build out an amazing Amazon Affiliate program or display your own products from Amazon on your website. Users will be able to add multiple products to their cart and checkout, paying for them all at once as they normally would. This plugin doesn’t interfere with your ability to sell your own products on your site via WooCommerce either.

WooCommerce Extra Product Options
Adds extra features to your product options including conditional logic, checkboxes, color picker, range picker, text areas, and more.

Ultimate Affiliate Pro
Build your own affiliate program and grow your sales by paying comissions for others to help sell your products / services. Comes with every feature you’ll need to help your affiliates be successful, track their success, and get paid. Includes a banner management system, rankings for affiliates, recurring rewards for subscriptions, ability to pay lifetime commissions, a public leaderboard, and network marketing functionality. Integrates with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Ultimate Membership. Payments can be processed with Paypal or Stripe.

Lumise Product Designer for WooCommerce
Allow your customers to design their own products and pay you for making them. The product designer allows users of your WooCommerce shop to customize hooides, t-shirts, sneakers, coffee mugs, stickers, ball caps, bags, and business cards. Comes with great features like auto-snapping of images, crop/edit photos, layer masking, photo filter effects, and import/export functionality. Integrates with WooCommerce and Dokan as well. The maker also offers a package of add-ons for this plugin to further extend the functionality with support for Dropbox syncing, adding a distress effect, and other advanced options.

WOOF WooCommerce Products Filter
Adds advanced filtering capabilities to your WooCommerce shop. Allow your customers to filter by price range, sku, color, and taxonomies. Great for websites with a lot of products to help users find exactly what they are looking for.

Ali2Woo
Quickly and easily imports products from AliExpress into your WooCommerce store for building a dropshipping store. Includes features like AliExpress shipping tracking, bulk order management, and a filter to only import products with a fast shipping time.

AliExpress Dropshipping and Fulfillment for WooCommerce
Another AliExpress import plugin, this one comes with the ability to set global settings for products and you can setup rules to automatically fulill orders.

WooCommerce Lottery
Add product lotteries to your web store. These allow customers to pay a price and pick numbers to try and win a prize. The plugin selects numbers at random and notifies winners. It is unclear if this is legal in all jurisdictions and the plugin doesn’t appear to have legal settings for specific regions, check local laws before using. Interesting way to gain attention for big ticket items like smartphones, jewelry, TVs, etc…

B2BKing
Turns a WooCommerce shop into a private / B2B / wholesale marketplace. Comes with features such as hiding prices for guests, tiered pricing, approval requirements, and wholesale order forms. A perfect fit for anyone starting a wholesale or private membership marketplace.

WooCommerce Page Builder for WPBakery
An absolute neccessity for any WooCommerce website using WPBakery as a page builder. Gives you the drag and drop page builder functionality of WPBakery to help make amazing product landing pages. Add extra features to your site and take full control of your product pages without using code.

WooCommerce Page Builder for Elementor
Cutomize the layout of your WooCommerce main page, category pages, and product pages using the Elementor page builder.

Search Engine Optimization

Yoast
The OG of SEO plugins for WordPress Yoast is an incredibly powerful plugin that when used correctly can completely transform how a website grows with organic search traffic. The one thing about Yoast that is not super compelling is that they offer a variety of paid plugins for various things outside of the Yoast free / pro versions. For things like Local SEO, Video SEO, WooCommerce SEO, and News SEO you’ll have to pay an extra fee each year. Aside from the pricing quirk and a few past issues of note, Yoast has been a consistently amazing SEO plugin and is at least partly responsible for the success of millions of websites around the world.

Rank Math
NOTE: We are currently performing a thorough review of this plugin to determine if it should stay on this list or not.

A strong competitor for the crown of best SEO plugin, Rank Math comes standard with some great features. However, the $99 per year version is where the plugin sets itself apart from the rest of the crowd, bundling in features like an advanced schema generator, support for News SEO, support for Video SEO, automated schema for Easy Digital Downloads, automated image captions, and a heck of a lot more. If you’re in the market to pay a yearly fee for an SEO plugin you should at the very least compare the feature set from Rank Math and the competition to make the right selection as Rank Math takes the W in several scenarios.

  • Price: Free to $199 / year
  • Total Active Installs: 600,000
  • Last Updated: January 8th, 2021
  • Link: https://rankmath.com/

Broken Link Checker
An open source collaboration between WPMU and ManageWP, this plugin can monitor and find broken internal and external links on your site and notify you via the WP Admin dashboard or through email.

SEO Friendly Images for WordPress
Automatically creates alt and title attributes for images to make them W3C / WCAG compliant and SEO friendly. Can also handle lazyloading via unveil.js, though that feature isn’t as good as ones built into other plugins purpose built for page speed. The automation of your alt and title attributes can help especially if you have a lot of images and works on posts, pages, and other content.

Interlinks Manager
Automatically creates internal links inside of your content based on keywords or phrases you select. The plugin also attempts to calculate internal linking values, unfortunately for many SEOs they use the phrase “link juice” for this value.

WP Automatic Links
Automatically creates internal links inside of your content based on keywords or phrases you select. This plugin is currently free but exclusive to our clients at Joe Youngblood SEO & Digital Marketing Consulting.

Note: After thorough testing and review “The SEO Framework” and “SEO Press” have been removed from this list. Both lack features that are critical for technical SEO today and that cannot be subsituted with other plugins or extensions. If or when this changes we will re-evaluate these plugins for inclusion. Both are popular with developers because they are “lightweight” but both are likely to cause harm to your SEO due to missing features.

Security & Backups

WordFence Security
One of the most powerful security plugins ever built for WordPress, you can get the basic version of WordFence for free and start blocking malacious attacks on your site instantly. Out of the box the free version limits login attempts, has an integrated malware scanner, and has endpoint protection. WordFence’s biggest defining trait however is their Threat Defense Feed which keeps the plugin constantly updated with the latest firewall rules.

WPS Limit Login
Stop brute force attacks by restricting the number of login attempts. If you’re using an outdated login restricting plugin (i.e. https://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-login-attempts/) then you are likely vulnerable to attack and should switch to one that is being updated like this one.

WPS Hide Login
Make your WP Admin login page inaccessible by redirecting it to a different, custom URL instead.

Hide My WP
A “security by obscurity” plugin that makes it difficult for tools hackers use to identify your website as being a WordPress site, the plugins your site uses, the theme your site is using, and to find the login pages of your site. This helps reduce the liklihood of XSS attacks and brute force attacks.

Updraftsplus
They claim to be the world’s most trusted backup and restore provider for WordPress and that claim is probably true. A stable and reliable backup plugin with excellent free features for any site owner to make a backup of their site and easily restore it later on. Comes packed with features like scheduling your backups and can push backups of your site to remote storage locations for safe keeping including Google Drive, Dropbox, and AWS.

  • Price: Free to $329 / year
  • Total Active Installs: 3,000,000
  • Last Updated: January 25th, 2021
  • Link: https://updraftplus.com/

Antispam Bee
If you want to have comments on your website but want to make it easy to fight and block spam, this is the plugin you are looking for. Comes with a bunch of features to make your dreams of spam-free comments come true including only approved commentors, only comments from certain contries, only comments in certain languages, keeping a local database of spammers, and automatically detect and delete spam comments.

Sucuri
This security plugin allows WordPress owners to monitor file integrity, remote malware scanning, and blacklist monitoring. The free version of the plugin is good, but doesn’t include a website firewall like other freemium plugins do. The paid versions of Sucuri are famously good at defeating hackers and malware attacks though and should always be considered for anyone paying to add security options

  • Price: Free to $500 / year
  • Total Active Installs: 700,000
  • Last Updated: January 20th, 2021
  • Link: https://sucuri.net/

Core Enhancements

Classic Editor
Replace the awful Gutenberg block editor with this plugin. The WordPress.org core team released this plugin after complaints about the new editor during testing. It works as flawlessly today as it has for years, a great replacement for the block editor. The biggest drawback is that the current team plans to deprecate this plugin as of December 31st, 2021.

WooCommerce
Easily turns a WordPress blog into an ecommerce shop.

Jetpack CRM (Formerly Zero BS)
Add a free CRM to your WordPress site and give extra functionality to your WooCommerce store, build a client portal, and more. Owned by the creators of WordPress, Auttomatic, you can also get premium features for a yearly fee.

Yoast Duplicate Post
Quickly duplicate any page or post using this plugin now owned by Yoast. Makes creating boilerplate pages much easier and more effecient.

WP User Avatar
Give your site users the ability to add an avatar directly through your website without having to use Gravatar.

All-in-One WP Migration
Easily export your WordPress site files and database and import them to another WordPress install. A great way to move websites between hosts and to make quick backups you can download locally. The biggest draw back here is that if your have a big website exporting and importing the site will either take a long time or even time out depending on server settings.

User Role Editor
Make custom user roles quickly and easily, change capabilities of roles, and assign specifici capabilities on a user basis.

Really Simple SSL
The easiest way to activate your site’s SSL and fix ‘mixed content’ on your site. Improves security and performance with only one or a few clicks.

Advanced Custom Fields
Add custom fields anywhere on your website and make your WordPress site even more unique and useful.

Simple History
A simple logging system to show detail updates and changes to your WordPress in the past several weeks. The logging isn’t comprehensive and should only be used as a simple and free way to see changes between a few users.

Super Progressive Web Apps
Turn your WordPress website into a progressive web app and allow users to add your app icon to their smartphones and tablets. The premium version has a one-click Android app generator to put your app on the Play app store.

  • Price: Free to $499 / year
  • Total Active Installs: 50,000
  • Last Updated: January 6th, 2021
  • Link: https://superpwa.com/

SVG Support
Adds SVG support to your WordPress site.

Safe SVG
Another way to add SVG support to your WordPress website. This plugin has (had?) a paid version, however, the website for the paid version is currently not operating correctly and the free plugin hasn’t been updated for 9 months. It is still operational and useful, though until things start getting fixed we might recommend using a different SVG plugin.

Coming Soon Page, Maintenance Mode & Landing Pages by SeedProd
Easily create coming soon pages, maintence mode pages, 404 pages, and landing pages.

Site Kit by Google
The most popular plugin created by Google yet, this shows stats on your Admin dashboard from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Adsense, Tag Manager, Optimize, and PageSpeed Insights.

Post Types Order
Reorder your posts with drag and drop functionality.

WordPress Popular Posts
An incredibly customizable widget that allows you to display your most popular posts with a variety of criteria and options.

Pretty Links
Create custom redirect URLs using your WordPress website’s domain name to track outbound or internal clicks.

Have something to add to this list? Message the author on Twitter or Contact us and we’ll review your WordPress plugin suggestion for inclusion.

This article will be continually updated with the last updated date listed below.

First published: 2/01/2021
Last updated: 1/03/2022

Joe Youngblood

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Joe Youngblood is a top Dallas SEO, Digital Marketer, and Marketing Theorist. When he's not working with clients or writing about marketing he spends time supporting local non-profits and taking his dogs to various parks.

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