Top 30 WordPress Plugins for Website Development

WordPress Plugins are integrated into the website during website development to extend the site’s functionality to keep it user-friendly and attractive. 

Being a designer, you must have known the benefits of the WordPress plugins in every website. Along with various themes, the WP offers many types of plugins for every sector to add-on more features and functionality to your website. Plugins help in customising your website content, images and other elements.  

CMS Plugins in WordPress are pieces of software used to customise the website functionalities through interaction, updates, editing and management. These are free and paid you can use them accordingly. The best WP Plugins make your site enticing and easy to use. We’ve rounded up the 15 best WordPress plugins for website development in this article that any professional designer can use to build or enhance their website.    

1. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

   Best SEO Plugin

   SEO is an important part when working on website development. The All-in-one SEO plugin provides the complete package of SEO toolkits. This plugin improves SEO rankings and Increases traffic. Since 2007 it has been popular enough because of its ultimate SEO ranking tools. Whenever you post and built any page, the AIOSEO show the checklist and required suggestions to improve the website elements. Many snippets lead to traffic and click on your website.        

2. WooCommerce

   WordPress eCommerce Plugin

   If you are creating an eCommerce website, then WooCommerce is the best CMS plugin to get a seamless selling experience. It helps in selling everything easily with customisable attributes and extensions. You can develop the website for your clients to allow selling all products digitally.

   It’s an efficient way to add on the inbuilt payment option so that your customers can easily use the online payment mode. WooCommerce has also an order tracker, location, reviews and ratings.      

3. Yoast SEO

   Writing SEO Content

   Yoast SEO helps in optimising keywords and writing SEO-based content. It’s the best plugin for SEO content adhering to website pages. Keyword-based content is essential to rank any page or website in Google, Bing, Edge and many other search engines.  

   It uses the in-built analyser to remind you of each smallest thing you might have forgotten to add. It’ll tell you whether your titles, headings, sub-headings and content is SEO based or not so that you can modify the content accordingly. It’s one of the best plugins with around 5 million installs. 

4. WPForms

   Contact Form Plugin

   For designers who are looking for an option to ease the contact form build, and then WPForms is the best Plugin to use. Contact forms are an easy way for your customer to get in touch. WPForms is a user-friendly plugin that makes it easy to build the form, online order forms, payment forms, subscription forms, survey polls and many other forms. 

   You won’t find such power features in any other CMS plugin like lead forms, form landing pages, GDPR-friendly, login forms, geolocation tracking etc.

   You can try its Lite Version that’s completely free.

5. MonsterInsights

   Google Analytics plugin

   MonsterInsights allows your website to connect with Google Analytics to get information on how people are finding your website and if they stay on your site for the long term or not. It’ll show you major stats essential for your WP dashboard.  

   Once you know how the audience reacting to your website, you can optimise and modify the website to increase the traffic, revenue, sales and subscribers. It has a free version however, the premium version unlocks more features that are useful for website analyse.

6. Elementor

   Page Builder Plugin

   Looking for page builder wordpress plugins? Elementor is for you. Providing drag-and-drop functionality, the Elementor is a popular page builder Plugin that let users customises their pages and posts quickly. It consists of up to 100 pre-built templates, and 100+ widget options where one can easily build a page and integrate features such as social media widgets, icons and more. You can easily access the Elementor plugin to design a new one from scratch using header, footer and more.       

7. Wordfence

   WordPress Security Plugin

   Many website owners use WordFence Plugins to secure their websites. The plugin covers various basic fundamental security aspects. From login security to ransomware detection and malicious traffic security, WordFence offers all fundamental sectors for website security. Installing this plugin will show you the dashboard quickly with your website security data including security issues, blocked attacks, firewall history and, login summary. 

   It also set up 2-factor authentication using a QR scanner for the admin page to keep the website’s details secure. With the installation WordFence, the firewall automatically run in learn mode on the website. Many security features come with this plugin to detect security vulnerabilities.

8. LiteSpeed Cache

   WordPress Caching Plugin

   LiteSpeed Cache is one of the must-have WordPress plugins that ensures your website’s performance reaches the top. It helps in managing the website cache using its advanced features and intuitive interface. You can control the cache for different aspects of your website like login, resources, URLs and more.   

   Caching tools speed up the website and accelerate the dynamic content in this CMS plugin. Working as the PHP-based reverse proxy, it provides optimisation features for CSS and Javascript files for minimisation.

9. MemberPress

   WordPress Membership Plugin

   It’s the premium plugin that offers membership options to increase sales and revenue. Designers can use the WordPress MemberPress plugin to sell digital courses, downloads, content and other membership features.    

   It’s the specific plugin that a developer uses only when the client needs such requirements. With the professional support team, one can easily set up the MemberPress plugin for the website. it has the speciality to connect with other plugins to use their functionality like password protection, and affiliate programs. Multiple features like content restriction and an automated billing system offer ultimate functionality to you.       

10. UpdraftPlus

    WordPress Backup Plugin

    Backups are essential for everything that exists on the Internet. In WordPress, sites include multiple elements and a huge data that runs the entire website. UpdraftPlus is the plugin that backup and manages the WordPress website. It helps prevent data loss in case your system crashes security breaches etc. A designer can easily restore the website data through UpdraftPlus and set automated backup schedules for auto backups.

    This backup plugin provides several Cloud-based storage options like Google Drive and DropBox. The premium plan works seamlessly to restore WordPress Data and enhance security with premium database encryption.  

11. W3 Total Cache

    Best Caching plugin

    The trustable CMS plugin uses caching technology to optimise your website’s performance. A million users trust W3 Total Cache to enhance search engine results. It helps in page loading speeds using CDN and works great on mobile phones.  

    The best part of using W3 Total Cache is that it’s compatible with various servers and clusters with AMP and SSL support. If you want your website to give 10x site performance, then W3TC is the best option to go with.

12. bbPress

    Best Forum Plugin

    Customising a forum design could be a long and complicated process. Using a forum plugin can save you time and provides sufficient options to get a new forum. bbPress is a free WordPress forum plugin that is easy to integrate with a Forum site. It also offers spam protection using Akismet support.      

    Access the forum admin area from the WP Admin page to manage user accounts, Forums and other features. 

    You can use any theme with this bbPress plugin and it’s compatible with elements and functionality of most of the WP themes.

13. Smush

    Image Compressor Plugin

    A large image has the potential to slow down the website’s loading speed. Smush is the most used image compressor plugin in WordPress websites without any drop in quality. It’s the simplest way to increase the Google page speed. This CMS plugin optimises the image first, then compress around 2X more without affecting the quality where you can use it for bulk images. 

    Features like image resize, size detection to correct it and background optimisation are additional features to improve the WordPress website’s speed. Designers also use the Smush plugin to get PNG, JPEG, and GIF files.

14. WPCode

    Popular Code Snippets Plugin

    Add the custom code to your website using the WPCode plugin without touching the functions.php file. WPCode is used by millions to verify, insert and retarget the scripts in the header and footer. 

    It simplifies tracking codes for various sites like Facebook Pixel, ADSense and Google Analytics. The in-build snippets library includes various snippets for different uses for example; disable comments, SVG file uploads, REST API, convert code and many others.  

    In addition to the header and fodder scripts, WPCode offers you options to add custom PHP, CSS, JavaScript, HTML and text codes. Its pro version includes some powerful features like code revisions, targeting codes depending on the device, and integrating the WooCommerce, conversion pixels and digital downloads easily.    

15. Redirection

    The Best Redirect Manager Plugin

    Redirection, the name explains itself that it’s a redirect manager plugin. Among thousands of plugins, Redirect is popular where a designer can track 404 errors and manage 301 redirections. Over 10 years, it has helped many websites to reduce errors with enhanced ranking. The best part is it’s free and useful. It’s compatible with 5.6 to 8.1 PHP.    

    Installing Redirection helps you build and manage redirects instantly without any Nginx knowledge. You can redirect any URL using Redirection when your WP website supports permalinks. You can configure the Redirection plugin to monitor your new URL redirection and changes on posts or page permalinks. 

16. Really Simple SSL

    SSL Migration Plugin

    Secure Sockets Layer may not use its potential power on your website automatically. But Simple SSL is one of the best plugins to use SSL to its fullest. It provides additional features for SSL migration, Server Health Check, Securing the website and WP hardening.   

    Designers use the Really Simple SSL to control third parties and browser features. Its PRO version increases the website security using a content scanner & fixer and file detectors.

17. Advanced Custom Fields

    Plugin For Content Management

    ACF is the plugin that lets you add extra content fields and helps you design your WordPress website faster. Using this plugin, you can educate your customers to learn about your website easily. It’s a fully-fledged CMS plugin to control custom field data, edit screens and more. This CMS plugin helps you add the field on WordPress including pages, posts, users, terms, comments, media and various custom pages.

    Whether it’s about adding an author field or adding a review post, the advanced custom fields plugin allows you to do everything to make your content model easy.      

18. Mailchimp

    Email Subscription Plugin

    You must have heard about Mailchimp before. It’s a very popular plugin used to create the subscription list with free 2000 subscribers on Mailchimp itself. This plugin helps in creating subscription forms with pre-made fields. Designers get options to select the form including preview, and code view that they can also tweak and rearrange. The free version offers customisation for how your form looks but to get a style builder, the premium plan works fabulous.

19. HubSpot WordPress Plugin

    All-in-one Marketing Plugin

    HubSpot, one of the known WordPress plugins allows you to organise, attract, capture, and engage audiences and visitors with live chat, content management, contact forms, analytics, email marketing and other online marketing.    

    It’s a free plugin that’s very useful for designers to contact their audience through drag-and-drop builder. This plugin can help increase sales and marketing actions to gain more success. Designers adjust everything on a site including colours, styling and more to provide the best experience for their audience. If you are a beginner, then you can use the HubSpot WordPress plugin.  

20. Soliloquy

    The Best Slider Plugin

    Adding custom sliders to WordPress websites could be a complicated task. Hence, WordPress has a plugin named Soliloquy that adds slider functionality to a website.       

    It’s one of the mobile-friendly WordPress Plugins that you can easily add to your WooCommerce website. This slider plugin can easily interact with any of the other WordPress themes and sites to enable slideshow displays. This plugin also helps you build dynamic sliders from testimonials, blog posts, Insta images etc. Your audience can find more ways to connect with your business and services through these slides. This plugin gives various page-building options as well.

21. Sucuri

    Security Plugin

    It’s one of the best security plugins that designers use to secure a website. Whether it’s the WordPress website or any other platform, each website needs a security layer from hackers, malware attacks, DNS manipulation and more. The Sucuri plugin is the complete website security package with the web application firewall that continuously monitors your website.    

    The performance optimisation in Sucuri utilises a global CDN that has a detection technology for identification and alertness in case of any security issue. If you don’t want to pay for extra security tools, then install the Sucuri plugin to protect your website from DDoS, XSS attacks, ransomware attacks, spam comment attacks and all others.   

22. WPML

    The B est Multilingual Plugin

    If you are doing WordPress website development, then you won’t be able to build a multilingual website within. Even though WordPress doesn’t provide such options, it has an alternate thing as a plugin, the WordPress multilingual plugin. Businesses, having a website without multilingual settings, can face sale dropouts. A website gets all kind of audience with multi-languages from different geographic locations, hence using the WPML plugin support all languages on a website to help the audience to understand everything on the website.   

23. Contact Form 7

    Contact Form Manager

    Contact forms are important for every business. WordPress has multiple contact form builders but finding the best and most useful one is challenging. Contact Form 7 is one of them that helps to manage multiple contact forms in a WP website.      

    This WP plugin offers ultimate tools to customise the form depending on your client’s need. You can easily markup the mail contents to make it flexible for each surround. The plus point with the Contact Form 7 plugin is that it integrates some of the secure functionalities to forms including CAPTCHA, Ajax-powered submitting, and Akismet spam filtering.            

24. wpDiscuz

    The best Comment Plugin

    Even though WordPress allow commenting by default but comment plugins enhance the user experience on its websites. wpDiscuz is the ultimate plugin option to increase the commenting functionality.   

    You can use this CMS plugin for free with multi-level comment threads. It helps integrate social media accounts into a website or post where users can comment on a post using their account. Prevent spam comments through its built-in reCAPTCHA version 2 free of cost.

    Moreover, this wpDiscuz plugin offers many other features that speed up the website’s load speed. Options like “Load More” and “Read More” can be optional buttons for users who want or don’t want to scroll down all the comments.  

25. Modula Image Gallery

    The Best Gallery Plugin

    Many gallery plugins slow down WordPress websites which can be frustrating. Modula Image Gallery is a lightweight plugin for hosting image galleries on the WordPress website. It’s a flexible and customisable solution for every WordPress designer that allows you to choose the visual styles, edits and images. It provides three plans to help you choose the right image gallery – start plan with 1 website, Trio plan with 3 websites and Business plan with 5 websites. Get the Many gallery plugins to show your artwork through your images gallery.

26. Jetpack

    Best Plugin For Everything

    If you want everything in one plugin, then Jetpack is the best option for you to use on your website. Jetpack is a WordPress plugin with security, design tools, marketing, performance and traffic control. WordPress experts have made this plugin to make your website designs faster and safer to increase sales.

    The security is automated and turned on for 24 hours. It also backup the website data and restores it with 10GB of cloud storage. It provides migration features for the new host, themes, plugins, duplicate websites and more databases. In addition, you can see the activities of users on your website. Jetpack is most suitable for e-commerce websites offering 2-factor authentication, powerful tools for business growth and interaction of different plugins and platforms.          

27. Akismet

    Best Spam Comments Protection Plugin

    Spam comments can trick your genuine visitors to provide their details by using many malicious links. Hence, it’s important to protect your website from such spam comments because such links can inject malicious codes and viruses into your website. WordPress had the Akismet plugin to secure your posts from such spam comments. Hence, you won’t require examining all posts and comments manually. Contact forms are easy to integrate with such WordPress plugins to prevent spam users in contact submission.

    Akismet displays the URLs to identify harmful links in the comment body. If you activate and use its discard feature, then it’ll remove the worst spam comments forever. You can turn on the plugin setting for storing the spam messages for 15 days which works as the trash folder.

28.  WP Rocket

    Caching Plugin for beginners

    If you have just started designing and developing the WordPress site, then WP Rocket is the best caching plugin that you can go with as it doesn’t require any technical skill. It is a beginner-friendly plugin that improves the WP website performance and speed and also provides a free image optimisation service.

    WP Rocket is a paid plugin that automatically activates required caching settings including page cache, pre-loading and gzip compression. However, you can activate some other features, for example; CDN support, minification and DNS pre-fetching. Such features help your website load faster that automatically crawls and creating the cache. 

29. Revive Old Posts

    Social Media Auto Post and Scheduling Plugin

    Revive Old Posts is a social media manager plugin that one should use on their WordPress website. This plugin boosts traffic and increases the number of social media followers. How? ROP share social media post and content automatically. The linked social media accounts with your WordPress website atomically upload posts.

    All you have to do is, install the Revive Old Posts plugin on your WP website like over 40,000+ did, then schedule a post for your social media page or account including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Google My Business. Persons with blogs and sites, Social media marketers, e-commerce stores and hobby bloggers can use this plugin for the best results.

30. Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO

    Links Monitor/ Fixer WordPress Plugin

    Last but not least, Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO is a WordPress plugin that monitors and fixes internal and external links in your website. This WordPress plugin is one of the best link fixers in WordPress that ensures to function of all links correctly. It’s the must-have tool to get a website’s links report, and server IP prevention from getting blocked. The plugin detects broken links instantly and fixes them to keep the website updated. However, the AIOSEO account is required to use this plugin. If you wish, then it’s possible to exclude certain URLs to be scanned by this plugin.

     

Final Words –

Whether you are a beginner or a pro designer, WordPress plugins are always helpful while building a website. We have provided a list of the best WP plugins that help in making your designs user-friendly and easy to catch. The list of WordPress plugins includes our experienced designers’ suggestion which means this blog ensure efficient results using the above CMS plugins.

Have anything else to discuss? Looking for a website design agency? Contact our skilled WordPress developers to learn more about your new website project. For more useful resources you can browse our blog and keep an eye on our Medium page (coming soon).