Best WordPress Plugins

|

When looking for the best WordPress plugins, most articles showing up on searches are lists of randomly selected plugins.

I wanted this article to be a list of the actual best WordPress plugins for any functionality you may want to add to your site.

All plugins listed here should be well-coded, reliable, and lightweight (compared to other plugins in the same category).

We’ll cover caching, SEO, page builders, security, real estate, and over 50 more plugin categories.

How the List was Made

The list was made based on feedback gathered from respected developers, feedback from actual users in different Facebook groups and forums, and my own experience with some of these plugins.

Help Keep the List Up-To-Date

It’s obviously difficult for me to stay on top of every single plugin available, so to keep this post up-to-date, I encourage you to share any good or bad experience you’ve had with any of the plugins listed here.

If you’re sharing a bad experience, please try to be respectful and polite when doing so.

Underperforming Plugins

You’ll notice the list includes some plugins that aren’t recommended. However, this doesn’t mean that you should blacklist those plugins.

As time goes on, developers improve their plugins, so if you’ve had a good experience with any of the plugins listed as “not so good,” let everyone know in the comments section as well.

Contents

  1. Caching plugins
  2. Optimization plugins
  3. Image optimization plugins
  4. SEO plugins
  5. Security plugins
  6. Anti-spam plugins
  7. Backup plugins
  8. Clean up plugins
  9. Contact form plugins
  10. Comment plugins
  11. Search plugins
  12. Forum plugins
  13. Social sharing plugins
  14. Instagram feed plugins
  15. Gutenberg plugins
  16. Page builder plugins
  17. Table of contents plugins
  18. Slider plugins
  19. Photo gallery plugins
  20. Question and answers plugins
  21. FAQs plugins
  22. Quiz plugins
  23. Code plugins
  24. Redirection plugin
  25. Migration plugins
  26. User management plugins
  27. Server management plugins
  28. Download manager plugins
  29. Advertising plugins
  30. Affiliate management plugins
  31. eCommerce plugins
  32. CRM plugins
  33. LMS plugins
  34. Membership plugins
  35. Donation and fundraising plugins
  36. Opt-in form plugins
  37. PDF plugins
  38. Age verification plugins
  39. Project management plugins
  40. Real estate plugins
  41. Podcasting plugins
  42. Pricing table plugins
  43. Coming soon plugins
  44. Recipe plugins
  45. Related posts plugins
  46. Chat plugins
  47. Broken link checkers

Disclosure: You should always assume that pretty much every link on this site is an affiliate link, and if you click it and buy something you like, I’ll earn some money to help me buy a DeLorean, build a time machine, and travel back to the 90s so I can watch Hey Arnold! and eat Dunkaroos again.

Best Caching Plugins

After choosing a good host and WordPress theme, a caching plugin should be your next step for increasing website speed.

A caching plugin creates static HTML pages of your site and saves it on your server so they can be accessed more quickly.

Whenever someone visits your site, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the heavier WordPress PHP scripts.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is one of the best (if not the best) premium caching plugins available.

The cool thing about WP Rocket is that most of the performance best practices are automatically applied, so you don’t need to be a techie to use it.

Besides caching, here are other things WP Rocket can do:

  • Disable Google fonts
  • Host Google Analytics locally
  • Host Facebook Pixel locally
  • Create and serve WebP images
  • Reduce the number of HTTP requests
  • Minify JS and CSS files
  • Lazy load images
  • Defer loading of JavaScript files

Pricing: $49 for one year of support and upgrades with a 30% renewal discount.

View Premium


Swift Performance Lite

Swift Performance Lite is one of the best free caching plugins that’ll help reduce your site’s load time.

In fact, a lot of people have gotten better loading times with the free version of Swift than with WP Rocket.

The only downside I’d say is that it does require a tiny bit more tweaking than WP Rocket.

So if you’re an absolute beginner and don’t want to mess around with settings, I’d go with WP Rocket.

However, if you’re more of a techie and/or are on a tight budget, give Swift a try.

They’re both excellent caching plugins.

The free version also has several optimization features, such as:

  • Combining and minifying CSS and JavaScript
  • Generating the critical CSS for each page automatically
  • Removing expired transients, duplicated metadata, and spammy comments
  • Letting you disable plugins on certain pages

With the Pro version, you get even more features, including unlimited image optimization.

Pricing: Free. Pro plans start at $39.99 per year for one site.

Download FreeView Pro


LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed Cache is the best caching plugin for those using LiteSpeed servers (hosts like NameHero and Closte).

Besides caching, here are other things LiteSpeed Cache can do:

  • Image optimization
  • Generate and display WebP version of images
  • Minify CSS, JS, and HTML
  • Combine CSS and JS
  • Automatically generate critical CSS
  • Clean and optimize your database
  • Multiple CDN support

LiteSpeed Cache has over 1 million downloads and a 5-star rating on WordPress.org.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Simple Cache

Simple Cache is another great caching plugin that’s beginner-friendly and gets the job done.

It doesn’t have a ton of complicated settings and it’s faster than other cache plugins with tons of features.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache is another popular and top performing cache plugin that has a beginner-friendly user interface.

Besides caching, here are other things WP Fastest Cache does:

  • Minify CSS and HTML
  • Combine CSS and JS
  • GZip compression

Pricing: Free. Premium plans start at a one-time payment of $49.99 for one site.

Download FreeView Premium


Underperforming or Complicated Cache Plugins:

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache has a lot of settings, which can make it difficult for beginners to use.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily end up breaking your website.

There are other caching plugins that will give you better results without needing any technical knowledge.

W3 Total Cache is still a great tool, but I would leave this one to experienced developers.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache has tons of features and it’s easy to navigate, but it doesn’t improve site speed as much as other caching plugins.

Hummingbird

Quite a few people have been complaining about it breaking their sites.

Best WordPress Optimization Plugins

An optimization plugin will help you improve your site’s performance by reducing HTTP requests and page size, preventing unused assets from loading, and other cool things. 

Keep in mind that some caching plugins like WP Rocket include a lot of optimization options as well, so you might not need to install another plugin.

Autoptimize

Autoptimize is a free and easy-to-use plugin that can improve your site speed by:

  • Reducing the amount of CSS and JS being loaded on each page
  • Letting you disable emojis
  • Optimizing images
  • Lazy loading images
  • Serving images in “next-gen” WebP format

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Perfmatters

Perfmatters is a premium optimization plugin developed by Brian Jackson, former CMO at Kinsta.

It is a lightweight plugin that loads no JavaScript on the front-end of your site and works well with caching plugins.

Here are some of its performance features:

  • Disable emojis, dashicons, RSS feeds, and Google fonts
  • Host Google Analytics locally
  • Disable elements on pages where they’re not being used
  • Lazy load images

Other things that make this plugin awesome:

  • Change login URL
  • Remove comment URLs
  • Disable comments
  • Disable self-pingbacks
  • Limit post revisions
  • Autosave interval

Pricing: $24.95 for one year of support and updates with a 15% renewal discount.

View Premium


WordPress AssetCleanUp

Several themes and plugins tend to load features on every page on your site even if you don’t need them to.

WordPress AssetCleanUp lets you select the CSS and JS that are not necessary to load.

This will reduce bloat and improve your site speed.

For example, some contact form plugins tend to load on every single page on your site. With this plugin, you can set it so that it only loads on your Contact Page.

Pricing: Free and Paid

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins

Images are one of the most common reasons people experience high page load times. However, a blog post without images can be a little boring to read.

Image optimization plugins can reduce the size of your images as much as possible without losing quality so that your page load times remain low.

I personally use a free online tool or export them optimized from my photo editing software. But if you have a ton of images already on your site, a plugin might be a better option.

ShortPixel

ShortPixel is a beginner-friendly image optimization plugin that lets you choose between lossy, glossy, or lossless compression.

Here are some other features it includes:

  • Automatically resize large images during upload
  • Generate and serve WebP images (next-gen format)
  • Cloudflare integration
  • No file size restrictions for individual images

Pricing: 100 free images per month. Paid plans start at $4.99 for 5,000 images per month.

Download FreeView Premium


Imagify

Imagify is another great image optimization plugin developed by the same team behind WP Rocket.

It lets you choose between Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra compression levels.

Here are a few other key features:

  • Auto-optimize images on upload
  • Generate and serve WebP version of images
  • Resize all images to a specific width

Pricing: Free 25 MB per month. Paid plans start at 1 GB for $4.99 per month (around 10,000 images). You can also choose one time plans instead of monthly.

Download FreeView Premium


Optimole

Third on the list of best image compression plugins is Optimole.

This image optimization plugin has a few more features than the ones previously mentioned.

Here are a few of them:

  • Image URL optimization
  • Serve images from global CDN so you don’t have to worry about them loading slowly
  • Resize large images
  • Low, medium, and high compression levels

Pricing: Free 5,000 visits per month and unlimited bandwidth. Paid plans start at $22.90 per month for 25,000 visits per month.

Download FreeView Premium


LiteSpeed Cache

Besides being the best caching plugin for LiteSpeed servers, LiteSpeed Cache also includes image optimization features, such as:

  • Manually or automatically optimize your images
  • Create and serve WebP version of images

They recommend not using other image optimization plugins at the same time since it can cause some errors.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Swift Performance Pro

Switch Performance Pro is another great caching plugin that has built-in image optimization features.

Here are some of them:

  • Optimize images during upload
  • Unlimited image optimization at no additional cost
  • Generate and serve WebP version of images
  • Resize large images
  • Lossless, slightly lossy, moderate, and aggressive compression levels
  • Delete or keep original images

Pricing: They have a free version called Swift Performance Lite; however, the image optimization features are only available in the Pro version, which is $39.99 per year.

View Pro


Tiny PNG or Optimizilla

I’m a big fan of optimizing images before even uploading them to WordPress.

You can do this for free at TinyPNG or Optimizilla.

They’re both great, but Optimizilla gives you a slightly better quality per file size ratio.

Pricing: Free


Underperforming Image Optimization Plugins

WP Smush and EWWW

These two image optimization plugins don’t have a very good compression quality per file size ratio.

Best WordPress SEO Plugins

WordPress SEO plugins allow you to easily optimize certain elements of your website’s code and structure so that it ranks better in search engines.

However, you should not use more than one SEO plugin.

The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework is lighter and faster than other SEO WordPress plugins, however, it doesn’t have the content analysis feature Yoast SEO has, which can be useful to beginners.

If you’re a beginner that doesn’t need the content analysis feature, The SEO Framework covers everything else you want in an SEO plugin.

Pricing: Free. But they offer some paid extensions that help support the free plugin.

Download Free


SEOPress

SEOPress is another popular, clean, and lightweight SEO plugin. In fact, quite a few people have switched from Yoast to SEOPress.

Here are a few features of the free version:

  • Content analysis
  • XML and HTML sitemaps
  • Import settings from other SEO plugins like Yoast, SEO Framework, Rank Math, and All-In-One SEO.

Pricing: Free. Pro version is $39 for one year of support and updates and unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Premium


Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a great SEO plugin for beginners, as it has the content analysis feature and tool tips that explain everything.

They used to be a little bloated but have gotten better over the years. Most sites shouldn’t experience any issues with high load times when using Yoast.

Pricing: Free. Premium version is $89 per website per year. You should be completely fine with the free version.

Download FreeView Premium


Rank Math

Rank Math is another SEO WordPress plugin that has been getting a lot of great feedback.  

Here are a few things that set Rank Math apart:

  • Optimize unlimited keywords (other plugins like Yoast only let you do one)
  • Automatic keyword suggestions from Google
  • Google keyword ranking (track your keyword rankings in Google)

Pricing: Free

Download Free

Best WordPress Security Plugins

Besides choosing a quality host and theme, another great way to prevent your site from getting hacked is to install a security plugin.

WordFence

The free version of WordFence is great for preventing two of the most common attacks: brute force and code injections.

Another cool thing about WordFence is that since many people use it, they have the largest collection of hack signatures.

Plus, their security scanner is better than those from other security plugins, even paid ones.

Pricing: Free. Premium starts at $99 per year.

Download FreeView Premium


Cerber Security

Cerber Security is a great security plugin for beginners as it explains what each setting does instead of leaving them guessing.

Here are some of its features:

  • Create custom login URL (wp-login.php)
  • Anti-spam for contact and registration forms
  • Automatically detects spam comments and moves them to the trash or denies them completely.
  • Two-factor authentication for WordPress
  • Scans WordPress files, plugins, and themes

Pricing: Free. Premium version starts at $29 paid quarterly.

Download FreeView Premium


Sucuri

Sucuri is a lightweight security plugin that only focuses on scanning and firewall (paid version).

Here are some of the features the free version includes:

  • Remote malware scanning
  • Blacklist monitoring
  • Security notifications
  • Security hardening
  • File integrity monitoring

Pricing: Free. Paid versions start at $199.99 per year per site.

Download FreeView Premium


WPS Hide Login

By default, your WordPress login URL is YourDomain.com/wp-login.php/

WPS Hide Login is a lightweight plugin that lets you change the URL of your login page to anything you want.

This will help protect your account from brute force attacks.

Don’t worry, this doesn’t literally change any files in the core. And deactivating the plugin brings back your original login page.

Pricing: Free

Download Free

Best WordPress Anti-Spam Plugins

Anti-spam plugins are a great way to prevent your site from being flooded with spam comments.

Keep in mind that most security plugins have anti-spam features so you might not need another plugin.

Akismet

Akismet is an easy-to-use anti-spam plugin that comes pre-installed on your WordPress site.

It monitors your contact form submissions and comment section and separates suspicious comments

Pricing: Free for personal use (choose your price). Paid plans start at $10 per month.

Download FreeView Premium


reCaptcha

reCaptcha is a security plugin that protects your forms from spam while letting real people pass through with ease.

Have you seen those boxes that ask you if you’re a robot? Well, that’s what reCaptcha adds to your forms.

Both the free and paid versions are compatible with Ninja Forms, MailChimp, Contact Form 7, and other plugins.

Pricing: Free. Pro version starts at $17.95 per site per year.

Download FreeView Pro


Other Security Plugins

If you have other security plugins like WordFence or Cerber Security installed, you might not need something like Akismet.

Best WordPress Backup Plugins

Don’t wait until something bad happens and you lose all your content to start backing up your site.

Here are some of the best WordPress backup plugins available:

WPVivid

This is currently my favorite free backup plugin.

They allow you to do full and offsite backups to Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Dropbox, as well as full restores.

Here are some of its features:

  • Backup WordPress files and folders
  • Backup database
  • Backup and restore locally
  • Save backups to remote storage
  • Backup scheduling
  • Migrations (install it on two different websites and transfer everything over)

Pricing: Free. Paid versions start at $99 (one-time payment).

Download FreeView Premium


BackWPup

BackWPup is another popular and good backup plugin that lets you set automated backups of your entire website.

Here are some features the free version includes:

  • Full back-ups and scheduling options
  • Remote-backup to S3 (Amazon, Google Storage, and more)
  • Slow backups for larger sites so that you don’t stress your server
  • Progress bars that actually work
  • Generates XML list of plugins and content

The only downside is that it doesn’t have a quick restore feature, so you’ll have to do it manually or upgrade to the paid version.

Pricing: Free. Pro version is $69 per website for one year of support and updates with a renewal price of $39.

Download FreeView Pro


UpdraftPlus

The free version of UpdraftPlus falls behind the other backup plugins we’ve covered, but their paid version is better than the others.

Here are a few features of the free version:

  • Offsite backups (S3, Google Drive, DropBox)
  • Backup scheduling
  • Incremental backups

Pricing: Free. The paid Personal version is $70 for 2 sites and renews at $42 per year.

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress Clean Up Plugins

Clean up plugins can locate and remove unused files to prevent your site from consuming extra resources, which is important if your host charges for storage space.

For example, clean up plugins can locate images in your media library that aren’t being used in any pages or posts so you can delete them.

They can also locate files left by other plugins after being uninstalled.

Media Cleaner

Media Cleaner is a free WordPress plugin that detects unused media files and deletes them. It analyses your posts, widgets, pages, and more.

The pro version allows you to scan your filesystem, supports page builders, and does live-site analysis.

After running a scan, I would double-check the files to make sure they’re not being used.

You know… just in case.

Pricing: Free. Pro plans start a $24 per website per year.

Download FreeView Pro

Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins

Adding a contact form plugin on your WordPress site will give visitors a way to reach you and inquire about your products or services.

Fluent Forms

Fluent Forms is the forms plugin I’m currently using on this site.

It is a lightweight and easy-to-use plugin with built-in spam prevention.

Another cool thing about it is that it only loads on pages where it’s being used, which will help keep your load times low.

Other contact form plugins like Contact Form 7 tend to load everywhere on your site.

Here are some other cool features Fluent Forms has:

  • Pre-built form templates
  • Built-in data analysis tool (pretty cool)
  • Show the form only for a time or date range.

With the pro version, you can upload files and accept payments via PayPal and/or Stripe.

Which is great if you’re selling digital products like eBooks or printables.

Pricing: Free. Pro Add-On starts at $59 per site per year.

Download FreeView Pro


Caldera Forms

Caldera Forms is another well-coded and free plugin that lets you create responsive forms with an easy-to-use drag and drop editor.

Some features included in the free version are:

  • Conditional logic
  • Date picker fields
  • Honeypot and CAPTCHA spam protection

Pricing: Free. Paid versions start at $49.50 per year for unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Premium


Not so Good

Contact Form 7

One issue with Contact Form 7 is that it loads on every page on your site, not just the one where it’s being used.

Best WordPress Comment Plugins

If you’re not a fan of how the default WordPress comment section looks, you can add a comment plugin to make it look a little cooler and add more functionality.

wpDiscuz

wpDiscuz is a responsive and interactive comment plugin with real time discussion capabilities.

Here are some of its features:

  • Full integration with social media
  • Live notification and comment bubbles
  • Comment voting
  • Sort comments by newest, oldest, or most voted
  • Built-in anti-spam
  • “Load more comments” button instead of pagination

Pricing: The plugin is free and you can buy other add-ons if you’d like.

Download FreeView Add-ons


Comment Reply Email

This is an extremely simple and lightweight plugin that allows commenters to receive an email whenever someone replies to their comment.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Replyable (Postmatic)

Replyable is a great plugin that allows you and your visitors to reply to comments via email instead of having to visit the site.

Pricing: Free. Pro plans start at $2.99 per month.

Download FreeView Premium


Not so Good

Disqus

Disqus can occasionally slow your page loading time due to external access, so you’d have to make a few tweaks to make it load faster. Some comments are stored in your WordPress database and some of that data comes from external servers.

Disqus also allows the selling of every user’s data who’ve commented on your post.

Lastly, in order to comment, visitors must register with Disqus, which can discourage them from commenting.

Best WordPress Search Plugins

Unfortunately, the default WordPress search feature is way too limited and basic to handle sites with a ton of pages and blog posts.

Adding a WordPress search plugin to your site will improve your visitors’ search experience by providing better and more relevant results.

Relevannsi

Relevanssi is one of the best WordPress search plugins to help visitors find what they’re looking for.

Here are some of it features:

  • Sort by relevance, not date
  • Match partial words
  • Find documents matching one search term or require all words to appear
  • Search for phrases with quotes
  • Highlight search terms in the document when user clicks through

One issue with Relevanssi is that it uses hundreds of megabytes of database space to work efficiently.

So it might slow down websites that are hosted on basic shared hosting plans.

Pricing: Free. Paid plan is $99 per year for unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Premium


SearchWP

SearchWP is a premium search plugin that gives you complete control over what visitors can search for.

Here are a few of its features:

  • Keyword stemming
  • WooCommerce integration
  • Supports Advanced Custom Fields
  • Customize how results are ranked
  • Cross-site searches
  • Tells you what visitors are search for and not finding (statistics)

Pricing: No free version. Starts at $99 per year for one site.

View Premium


Advanced Woo Search

Advanced Woo Search is a powerful search plugin for WooCommerce.

Here are some of its features:

  • Product search
  • Search in product title, content, excerpt, categories, tags, ID, and sku
  • Shows product image and price
  • Supports WPML, Polylang, WooCommerce Multilingual, qTranslate.

Pricing: Free. One-time payment of $49 for the Pro version.

Download FreeView Pro

Best WordPress Forum Plugins

WordPress forum plugins will allow you to create a virtual online community to connect, discuss, and share ideas.

bbPress

bbPress is a lightweight plugin from the creators of WordPress that makes it easy to add a forum to your site.

Some of its features include:

  • Create multisite forums
  • Customizable templates

Pricing: Free

Download Free


BuddyPress

While bbPress allows you to create a forum-type site, BudyPress is more for creating an online community.

BuddyPress is somewhat like Facebook where visitors can create profiles, add updates, have private conversations, and create groups.

Here are some of its features:

  • Instant messaging
  • Notifications and activity updates
  • Supports Akismet and bbPress

Pricing: Free

Download Free

Best WordPress Social Sharing Plugins

Adding social share buttons and counts on your site might encourage visitors to share your content and serve as social proof, which can increase your site’s credibility and traffic.

If you’re just starting out, I recommend not enabling total share count as fetching that data can slow your site and you don’t have many shares to brag about anyway.

Novashare

Novashare is a well-coded, but paid, social sharing plugin that won’t negatively affect your site speed.

It doesn’t run on pages where it shouldn’t and uses inline SVG icons instead of third-party ones, so no DNS lookups or additional libraries needed just for the icons. 

Here are some of its other features: 

  • Pinterest image hover pins
  • Click to Tweet block
  • Social share count
  • Mobile responsive
  • Analytics and link shortening

Pricing: No free plan. The plugin is $29.95 for one year of support and updates for 1 site with a 15% renewal discount.

View Novashare


Shared Counts

Shared Counts is another well-coded and lightweight social plugin that will keep your site loading as fast as possible.

Here are a few of its features:

  • Insert buttons before and/or after content
  • Shortcode to insert buttons wherever you want inside your content
  • Email sharing with reCAPTCHA support to prevent spam
  • Total share count
  • Print button

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Grow by Mediavine (formerly Social Pug)

Of all the social sharing plugins I’ve tried, I believe Grow by Mediavine has some of the nicest looking styles.

In fact, I used the premium version of this plugin for a long time.

Here are some of the free version’s features:

  • Place buttons before and/or after content
  • Floating sidebar buttons
  • Display social share count for posts
  • Editable button labels

Pricing: Free. Pro plans start at $34 per year for one site.

Download FreeView Pro


MiloTree

MiloTree is not a social sharing plugin, but a social pop-up plugin that can help you grow your social media followers and get more email subscribers.

You can set it up so that your visitors see a different pop-up each time they visit your site.

The plugin can be connected to your Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, Shopify, and Etsy accounts and stores.

Pricing: No free plan, but they offer a 30-day free trial. They have a $9/month plan and a $99/year one (get one month free if paid annually), both of which allow you to use the plugin on multiple sites.

View MiloTree


Not so Good

Social Warfare

Social Warfare was another social plugin I used to run on my site, but they’ve been hacked a few times so I decided to move away from them.

Best WordPress Instagram Feed Plugins

Another way to increase your website’s credibility and let your audience know you better is by displaying your Instagram feed.

A downside of doing this is that users might click on your Instagram profile, leave your site, and get distracted on the app.

Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed

Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed is an easy-to-use plugin that lets you add Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and/or YouTube feeds to your site.

You can customize things like width, height, number of photos and columns, image size, background color, and more.

Pricing: Free. Pro version starts at $49 per feed per site per year. You can also get the All-Access Bundle, which includes all feeds for $299 per year for unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress Gutenberg Plugins

Since WordPress released its new block editor, Gutenberg, several developers have created block plugins to enhance its capabilities.

These block plugins are not only easier to use than page builders, but also more flexible and way lighter, which will make your site load significantly faster.

Atomic Blocks

Atomic Blocks is now part of WP Engine (owners of StudioPress, the creators of the Genesis Framework), so you can expect the highest quality and performance from this plugin.

Here are some of the blocks included:

  • Pricing table
  • Accordion
  • Call-to-action
  • Container
  • Post grid
  • Testimonial

They also have prebuilt templates so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


GenerateBlocks

GenerateBlocks is what I used to build this site.

It is an extremely lightweight, simple, and versatile blocks plugin developed by Tom Osbourne, the creator of the GeneratePress theme.

The plugin is very secure and responsive too, but it might be too minimal for beginner bloggers.

Here are some of its features:

  • Four blocks: container, grid, headline, buttons
  • Change typography, spacing, gradients, colors, background
  • Add your own SVG icons

Pricing: Free. Pro version starts at $39/year for one site.

Download FreeView Pro


Kadence Blocks

Kadence Blocks is another great lightweight blocks plugin with a little more options than GenerateBlocks.

One big downside for me is that it doesn’t have a container block.

Here are some of the free version’s features:

  • Prebuilt library
  • Button and testimonial block, info box, accordion, and advanced gallery.
  • Editor width controls

Pricing: Free. Pro plugin is $59 per year for unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Pro


Qubely

Qubely is great for those who love page builders but want their sites to perform a little better.

They offer many more features than the previously mentioned blocks and are a great option for beginners.

Here are just a few of the blocks they have on their free version:

  • Testimonial
  • Accordion
  • Progress bar
  • Social icons
  • Info box
  • Timeline
  • Post Grid
  • Pricing

Pricing: Free. Pro version starts at $39 per year for one site.

Download FreeView Pro


Stackable

Stackable is another great alternative to page builders. It’s very well-coded and their free version has more features than Qubely’s.

Here’s what you get with the free version:

  • 27 different blocks
  • Predesigned templates
  • Page Builder-like tabbed options

Pricing: Free. Premium plans are $35 per year for one site or $99 per year for unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Premium


Kioken

Kioken is another great page builder replacement.

What I love about this one is that it has animations and vertical text, which not many other blocks plugins have.

The free version has great features, such as:

  • 17 blocks (but they’re planning to add more)
  • Modern premade designs
  • Sliders
  • Shape dividers

Pricing: Free

Download Free

Best WordPress Page Builder Plugins

Most page builder functions are now easier done using Gutenberg Blocks and other Gutenberg plugins like the ones mentioned above.

Page Builders also tend to be a little bloated and add a lot of shortcodes, which significantly slow your site speed.

However, if you still want to use page builders, here are a few of the best ones:

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is a well-coded and reliable page builder that’s not only beginner-friendly, but also developer-friendly.

It also has very modern designs, full templates, and a great support team.

Pricing: Free. Paid versions start at $99 per year for unlimited sites with a 40% renewal discount.

Download FreeView Premium


Oxygen

Oxygen page builder is one that’s loved by many people.

When talking performance and page builders, many recommend going with Oxygen as it is clean, stable, and faster than other page builders.

The only downside is that it can be a little difficult for beginners to use.

Pricing: No free version. The Oxygen builder has a one-time purchase price of $99 for unlimited sites.  

View Oxygen


Elementor

Elementor is one of the most popular page builders around.

It has a great pop-up builder, an extensive template and block library, and several other features on their free version.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $49 per year for one site.

Download FreeView Pro


Not so Good

Divi Builder

Chances are you’ve heard of the Divi theme and Divi builder before.

However, the Divi Builder is a little buggy, bloated, and not as beginner-friendly as many “six-figure” bloggers pushing it claim it to be.

The reason it’s promoted by a lot of them is that their affiliate payouts are really good.

If you’re looking for a builder that doesn’t affect site speed that much, I’d recommend not using Divi.

Don’t get me wrong, Divi Builder has tons of great features, but there are just cheaper, better, and easier to use alternatives available.

WPBakery

Just like Divi, WPBakery is a little bloated and can slow your site speed significantly.

Best WordPress Table of Contents Plugins

Last thing you want is for visitors to stop reading your article because it’s too long and they can’t find the section they want to read.

A WordPress table of content plugin will scan your headings and automatically generate a table of content so that your visitors can navigate your posts with ease.

LuckyWP Table of Contents

LuckyWP Table of Contents is the plugin I used to have on my site. It’s super lightweight but doesn’t have too many customization features.

This plugin is also compatible with Rank Math, WP Rocket, WPML, and page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, and WPBakery.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Easy Table of Contents

Easy Table of Contents is not as lightweight as LuckyWP Table of Contents, but it does have many more customization options.

Pricing: Free

Download Free

Best WordPress Slider Plugins

Even though sliders are eye-catching, they can lower your conversion rates and Google rankings by pushing your content further down the page (below the fold).

This was mentioned by Google on their Page layout algorithm improvement.

However, this might depend on the type of website you have.

For example, if you have a photography or travel blog, then a slider might be a great way to display your content.

Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 is a great slider plugin that lets you add images, posts, or YouTube and Vimeo videos.

Here are some other features the free version includes:

  • Static overlay
  • Slide switching animations
  • Autoplay timing options
  • Change slider controls
  • Full-width and boxed layouts

Pricing: Free. Pro version has a one-time purchase price of $35 for one website.

Download FreeView Premium


Soliloquy

Soliloquy is the slider plugin that has the least impact on site speed.

Here are some of the free version’s features:

  • WooCommerce compatibility
  • Pre-made templates
  • Slideshows for blog posts, products, testimonials, photo galleries, and more.
  • Carousel

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $19 per site per year.

Download FreeView Premium


Not so Good

RevSlider

RevSlider is a little bloated and one of the slider plugins that affects site speed the most.

Gallery plugins can also take a significant toll on your site speed, so it’s important that you choose carefully.

But don’t worry, I’ve already done the research for you.

Envira Photo Gallery

While Envira Photo Gallery isn’t the lightest of the gallery plugins, it has the fastest load time and performs the least number of HTTP requests.

Plus, it has a drag and drop builder that makes it really easy to use.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $29 per site per year.

Download FreeView Premium


Modula Image Gallery

Modula Image Gallery is also well-coded and highly optimized for speed. It’s a little slower than Envira, but it’s still faster than many others.

The free version allows you to create unlimited galleries and add unlimited images.

For other extension like right-click protection and adding videos or watermarks, you’ll have to upgrade to the paid version.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $39 per site per year.

Download FreeView Premium


Photoswipe Masonry Gallery

Photoswipe Masonry Gallery enhances the built-in gallery features of WordPress.

It is super lightweight, but a little basic. If you only need a simple gallery plugin, this might be the way to go.

Pricing: Free

Download Free

Best WordPress Question and Answers Plugins

Trying to create more of a Quora, Reddit, or StackOverflow kind of site? Here are a few plugins to help you add Q&A functionality to your site.

DW Question & Answer

DW Question & Answer is a great plugin that allows commenting, answer voting, answer selection, public and private questions, question categories, and more.

It also supports more than 11 languages, reCAPTCHA, and email notifications.

Pricing: Free. Pro versions start at $69 per year for unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Pro


CM Answers

The free version of CM Answers comes with basic moderation and sorting, answer voting, email notifications, and a few customization options.

The Pro version has plenty other features, such as user profiles, question categories, marking questions as resolved, tags, and more.

The Pro version also integrates with BuddyPress and has multi-site compatibility.

Pricing: Free. Paid versions start at $39 per year for one site.

Download FreeView Pro

Best WordPress FAQs Plugins

To minimize the time spent answering the same questions over and over again, you can simply add a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section to your site.

Keep in mind that some page builders and blocks plugins come with this feature, so you might not have to install a different plugin.

Ultimate FAQs

Ultimate FAQs lets you easily create, organize, and display your FAQs in a modern accordion style layout.

Here are some other features the free version includes:

  • Unlimited FAQs with unlimited tag and category support
  • Create FAQ categories
  • Add custom CSS to style your FAQs
  • Bulk import FAQs from a spreadsheet

Pricing: Free. Premium plans start at a one-time payment of $34.47 per site for 6 months of support.

Download FreeView Premium


Heroic WordPress FAQs

With Heroic WordPress FAQs, you can easily drag and drop FAQs and reorder them, all on one screen.

Pricing: No free version. Premium versions start at $49 per site per year with a 30-day money back guarantee.

View Premium

Best WordPress Quiz Plugins

Adding quizzes on your WordPress site is a great way to keep visitors engaged and create viral content like BuzzFeed.

Here are some of the best WordPress quiz plugins:

Quiz and Survey Master

Quiz and Survey lets you easily create surveys and different types of questions, such as multiple choice, true and false, checkbox, fill in the blank, and more.

After users have taken the quiz or survey, you can have the plugin email you and them with the results.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $79 per site per year.

Download FreeView Premium


Interact

The free version of Interact allows you embed quizzes, polls, and giveaways into your site.

However, if you want to collect emails and integrate it with ConvertKit, MailChimp, MailerLite, or any other email service provider, you’ll have to upgrade to any of the paid plans.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $29 per month.

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress Code Plugins

Don’t like messing with your style.css and functions.php files?

Don’t worry, you can use any of the following plugins to easily add code to your site without having to alter core files.

Simple CSS

Simple CSS is a great plugin developed by Tom Osbourne, the creator of the GeneratePress theme, so you can expect it to be lightweight and well-coded.

The cool thing about Simple CSS is that you also get a “Simple CSS” metabox on each page so you can add CSS that only applies to that specific page.

Pretty cool, right?

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Code Snippets

Code Snippets lets you easily add and run PHP code snippets on your site so you don’t have to alter your functions.php file.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Header, Footer, and Post Injections

The Header, Footer, and Post Injections plugin is an easy way to add Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Pinterest, and other verification and tracking codes.

You can add these on your header, footer, and inside your content.

Pricing: Free

Download Free

Best WordPress Redirection Plugin

Redirection plugins are an easy way to tell search engines and users that the page they want to visit has been moved and automatically redirect them to a new page you’ve set.

Since setting redirections can affect your page speed, I would try to avoid them as much as possible.

That’s also why I recommend adding redirections manually using htaccess instead of plugins.

Htaccess (manual method)

If you want to keep your website running fast, I recommend you add redirections manually using your .htaccess instead of a plugin.

However, if you’re a beginner who doesn’t feel comfortable doing so, I recommend using the Safe Redirect Manager plugin instead of the Redirections plugin.


Safe Redirect Manager

Safe Redirect Manager is well-coded and less bloated than other redirection plugins available.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Not so Good

Redirection Plugin

The problem with the Redirection plugin is that it significantly slows all the pages on your site, not just the ones being redirected.

Best WordPress Migration Plugins

Nowadays, most hosting companies provide free migration services, so you might not need a plugin.

In fact, if the hosting company you’re switching to doesn’t offer free migrations, it might be better to look for a different one.

However, if you still need a migration plugin for any other reason, here are a few of the best ones:

All-in-One WP Migration           

All-in-One WP Migration is a simple and easy-to-use migration plugin that gets the job done.

You can import your database, media files, plugins, and themes without having any technical knowledge.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Migrate Guru

Migrate Guru is a super-fast and easy-to-use migration plugin that can easily handle sites as large as 200 GB.

Here are other cool things about it:

  • You don’t need add-ons to move multi-sites
  • Your site is copied to their servers so you don’t need storage space (copy is deleted after the migration is complete)

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Duplicator

Duplicator lets you migrate or clone your WordPress site between domains or hosts with no downtime.

You can also do full or partial backups and duplicate a live site to a staging area or vice versa.

However, it might not be beginner-friendly.

Pricing: Free. Pro versions start at $59 for 3 sites for one year of updates and support with 40% renewal discount.

Download FreeView Pro

Best WordPress User Management Plugins

WordPress user management plugins let you have more control over your users than the default WordPress management system does.

With these plugins you can change the roles and capabilities of each user on your site.

This is especially great big websites and multi-author blogs.

Adminimize

Adminimize helps you hide things inside your WordPress admin area that other users don’t need to see or use.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Members

Members is another great plugin that allows you to add roles and capabilities to different users on your site.

Just like Adminimize, Members lets you control what different users can see once logged in.

It also has WooCommerce, Meta Box, GiveWP, EDD, and ACF integration and many other features.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


User Role Editor

User Role Editor lets you modify what different user roles can do once logged in.

Pricing: Free. Pro versions start at $29.99 per site per year.

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress Server Management Plugins

WordPress server management plugins can help you keep track of the health of your site and adjust things based on what you see.

PHP Compatibility Checker

PHP Compatibility Checker is a plugin developed by WP Engine that’s used to check if your WordPress themes and plugins are compatible with newer and faster versions of PHP.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


WP Server Health Stats

WP Server Stats lets you check some of your site’s health stats, such as RAM, CPU, and memory usage.

This is great to see if a certain plugin is consuming a lot of memory or CPU and detect if something wrong with your site.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Not so Good

NewStatPress

NewStatPress uses a lot of server resources and can slow your site.

Best WordPress Download Manager Plugins

Download manager plugins allow you to easily manage, track, and control file download from your WordPress site.

WP File Download

WP File Download gives you a modern desktop-like interface to easily manage and organize your files.

The plugin allows you to create new file categories, change levels, and order them with drag-and-drop.   

You can also set email notifications to know someone modifies a file, and select which users have permission to download, update, edit, and delete them.

Pricing: No free version. Plugin price starts at $29 for 6 months of support and updates and unlimited sites.

View WP File Download


Download Monitor

Download Monitor gives you a nice interface for uploading and managing downloadable files.

Here are a few things you can do with it:

  • Insert download links into your posts
  • Track downloads
  • Sell downloads from within your WordPress site
  • Set member-only downloads (users must be logged in to download files)

Pricing: Free. You can purchase additional extensions for $39 each. 

Download FreeView Extensions


Be Careful With

File Manager

File Manager is a simple plugin that lets you edit, delete, upload, download, zip, copy and paste files and folders directly from the WordPress backend.

You can also easily share files by email.

However, they had a pretty big vulnerability attack where millions of sites were affected, so I’d stay away from this plugin.

Best WordPress Advertising Plugins

Advertising plugins are an easy way to manage and add advertisements on different places of your site.

You can check out some of the best ad network for bloggers here.

Ad Inserter

Ad Inserter is a great ad plugin that lets you place advertisement codes on different places on your WordPress site.

Here are some of them:

  • Before or after post, content, paragraph, comments, or image.
  • Above the header or in the footer
  • Before or after any HTML element using CSS selectors

You can also disable ads on individual posts or pages and insert Google Analytics or any other tracking code.

Pricing: Free. Pro plans start at €20 (around $23.64) per year for 2 sites with a 20% renewal discount.

Download FreeView Pro

Best WordPress Affiliate Management Plugins

Selling your own products and managing your affiliates can seem a little overwhelming.

But don’t worry, these affiliate management plugins will make your life easier so you can focus on creating more awesome content.

AffiliateWP

AffiliateWP is hands down the best affiliate management plugin. It is well-coded and regularly updated and maintained by a great development team.

Here are some things that make this plugin cool:

  • Real-time reporting
  • Automatic payouts
  • Set cookie expiration
  • Changing affiliate URLs so they don’t look super long and weird
  • Affiliates can generate their own referral links
  • Manual or automatic affiliate approval

There are several other features and add-ons available as well.

Pricing: $99 per site per year with a 30-day money back guarantee.

View AffiliateWP


ThirstyAffiliates

ThirstyAffiliates is a plugin that helps you manage your affiliate marketing efforts from all the programs you belong to.

Here are some of the free version’s features:

  • Manage all affiliate links from your WordPress dashboard
  • Link cloaking
  • Add images to your affiliate links
  • Click statistics and reports

Note: ThirstyAffiliates is not for running an affiliate program for your store. It’s only to keep track of other affiliate programs you belong to.

 To run an affiliate program, you would need to use a plugin like AffiliateWP.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start a $49 per site per year.

Download FreeView Pro


Pretty Links

Pretty Links allows you to change your affiliate links so that they don’t look too salesy.

With Pretty Links you can shrink, cloak, track, organize, share, and test all of your links on your own WordPress site.

Another cool thing is that you can place affiliate links into your content right from the WordPress editor without having to visit the affiliate network each time you need a link.

Pricing: Free. Pro plans start at $49 per year per site.

Download FreeView Premium


Not so Good

AffiliateRoyale

AffiliateRoyale is no longer maintained by its developers.

Best WordPress eCommerce Plugins

Switching eCommerce plugins after you’ve set up your store can be a tedious task, so it’s important that you choose a great plugin to begin with.

But don’t worry, here are the best eCommerce plugins to help you launch your store the right way:

WooCommerce

With over 5 million active installations, WooCommerce is the post popular, reliable, and easiest way to start an eCommerce store.

They also have tons of free and paid extensions that make it super easy to build your store, so you can start selling physical or digital products quickly.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another great way to get your online shop set up quickly.

It’s the most scalable eCommerce platform, has more built-in features than its competitors, and lets you sell across multiple channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Pricing: Plans start at $29.95 per month with a 15-day free trial.

View Premium


Easy Digital Downloads

Just like the name implies, Easy Digital Downloads is great for those wanting to sell digital products.

Here are some of the features you’ll find on the free version:

  • Offer coupons and discount codes
  • eCommerce reports
  • Shopping cart and Buy Now buttons
  • Complete customer management
  • Payment gateways supported: PayPal Standard and Amazon Payments

You can get more features and other payment gateways in the premium version.

Pricing: Free. Premium plans start at $99 per site per year.

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress CRM Plugins

Customer relationship management (CRM) plugins help you easily manage your interactions and relationships with clients and potential clients.

You can better understand your customers by gathering and separating their information, which will help you adjust your marketing strategies to increase conversion rates.

Jetpack CRM (formerly Zero BS CRM)

Jetpack CRM gives you an easy-to-use and modern dashboard to manage your clients and sales funnels and quickly look at your revenue.

Here are some of its other features:

  • Send quotes and invoices
  • Track transactions
  • Add custom fields and lead forms

This plugin also integrates with Zapier and works on computers, phones, and tables.

Pricing: The plugin itself is free, but you can purchase additional extensions.

Download FreeView Extensions


WordPress ERP

WordPress ERP is a more complete business management tool as it includes HR management, CRM, and accounting tools.

  • Human Resource Manager (HRM). With this plugin you can manage employee profiles, leave requests, promotions, performance logs, and more.
  • CRM. With the CRM plugin you can manage your contacts, send emails, schedule meetings, create tasks, and more.
  • Accounting. Easily manage your customers, vendors, sales, expenses, bank accounts, and more.

Pricing: Free. You can purchase individual extensions or choose a plan or bundle.

Download FreeView Extensions


HubSpot CRM

The free version of HubSpot CRM allows you to schedule meetings, do live chats, track emails and prospects, get email notifications, create forms and popups, and more.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $50 per month.

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress LMS Plugins

Thinking about creating your own online course?

Then these learning management system (LMS) plugins will make it easier to create and sell them through WordPress.

LearnDash

LearnDash is one of the most popular and easy-to-use LMS plugins available.

With their drag and drop builder, you can easily organize all the lessons, topics, quizzes, and categories you create.

You can also deliver all of your course upfront or slowly “drip” it every week or every few weeks. 

Pricing: Paid plans start at $159 per site per year with a 30-day refund policy.

View LearnDash


LifterLMS

LifterLMS is another great and popular plugin to help you create your online course.

Here are some of the features it includes:

  • Supports multi-tier courses with training modules, lessons, categories, and more
  • Add video, audio, text, and images to your lessons
  • Content dripping and course pre-requisites
  • Group memberships
  • Payment gateways
  • Automated emails
  • Badges and certificates

Pricing: Free. You can purchase additional add-ons starting at $99 each per year.

Download FreeView Add-ons

Best WordPress Membership Plugins

Membership sites have become a very popular way of making money online.

Here are a few plugins to help you start your own:

MemberPress

MemberPress is one of the most popular “all-in-one” membership plugins.

It allows you to accept credit card payments, sell courses and other digital products, and control which users see your content.

Here are other featured it includes:

  • Create coupons
  • Drip content
  • Let users create, update, and upgrade or cancel their subscriptions from within your site
  • Zapier integration

Pricing: Plans start at $149 per year for one site.

View MemberPress


Paid Membership Pro

Paid Membership Pro is a great member management and membership subscription plugin.

You can use it for premium content sites, private clubs and organizations, subscription products, and more.

Here are some features included in the free version:

  • Create unlimited membership levels
  • Flexible pricing (free memberships, trials, recurring, etc)
  • 6 payment gateways
  • 19 add-ons
  • Allow members to view payments, update billing info, and cancel their membership

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $297 per year for up to 5 sites.

Download FreeView Pro


Paid Member Subscriptions

Paid Member Subscriptions is a lightweight and easy-to-use membership plugin.

Just like the others we’ve covered, it allows you to manage members, accept payments, create subscription plans, and restrict access to premium content.

You can also setup a free trial period and a sign-up fee

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $69 per site per year.

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress Donation and Fundraising Plugins

Donations have become a popular way for creators and online entrepreneurs to monetize their content.

These donation and fundraising plugins are great for those creators looking to earn a living online as well as for charities and not-for-profit organizations to accept donations.

GiveWP

GiveWP is the most popular donation plugin for WordPress.

With it you can accept charitable gifts through customizable donation forms, check donation statistics and reports, manage donors, and integrate with several payment gateways, such as PayPal Standard and Stripe.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $199 per year per site.

Download FreeView Premium


Charitable

Charitable is another great donations plugin that’s preferred by some developers, as it offers more control over the fundraising and donations module.

Here are some of its free features:

  • Unlimited fundraising campaigns
  • Customizable donation forms
  • Easily accept donations through PayPal
  • Create and edit donations directly in the WordPress dashboard without any add-ons

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $129 per year per site with a 10% renewal discount.

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress Opt-In Form Plugins

Growing an email list and getting leads is an essential part of running a successful business.

Here are a few of the best plugins to help you build professional and high-converting opt-in forms with ease.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is an all-in-one lead generation plugin packed with a ton of different types of opt-in forms, such as:

  • Scroll mats
  • Multi-step
  • Floating “sticky” bar
  • Slide-in
  • Pop-up
  • Widget area
  • Content lock
  • In-line

It also comes with a variety of pre-designed templates you can choose from to get started right away.

But don’t worry, it also comes with a drag-and-drop builder so you can create your own in case you don’t like any of the templates.

Here are some of the features it includes:

  • A/B testing
  • Customize forms for mobile
  • Precise targeting (categories, tags, posts, or pages)
  • Trigger options (show forms on exit, after a certain time, during scroll, etc)
  • Integration with several email service providers, such as ConvertKit and Mailchimp.
  • Detailed stats and reports

Pricing: Plans start at $67 per year for one site.

View ThriveLeads


Convert Pro

Convert Pro is another great opt-in form plugin that includes the following types of opt-in forms:

  • Pop-ups
  • Multi-step
  • Slide-in
  • Info bar
  • Widget
  • Welcome mat
  • Full-screen call to actions (CTAs)

They also give you the option to use their pre-built templates or design your own with their drag-and-drop builder.

Here are some of the featured they include:

  • Detailed stats and reports
  • A/B testing
  • AdBlock detection
  • Precise targeting
  • Trigger options (show before exit, after a certain time on page, during scroll, etc)
  • Integration with several email service providers

Pricing: Plans start at $79 per year.

View Convert Pro


Email Service Providers

Some email service providers like ConvertKit include free form templates and landing pages with their services.

They don’t typically include as many features as plugins that specialize in opt-in forms, but they offer some good analytics to get started with.

Best WordPress PDF Plugins

WordPress PDF plugins will allow you to embed PDFs on your WordPress site so that visitors can read it without leaving your page.

PDF Embedder

PDF Embedder is a simple PDF plugin that uses JavaScript to embed PDFs instead of third-party services or iframes.

With it you can change the width and height of your document or let it be automatically sized.

It also has Next and Previous buttons so readers can easily move to other pages as well as zoom buttons.

Pricing: Free. Premium plans start at $20 per site per year with a 50% renewal discount. 

Download FreeView Premium

Best WordPress Age Verification Plugins

Age verification plugins will allow you to set age restrictions for some (or all) the content on your website.

This is great for websites that post movie trailers, beer or liquor websites, and gambling or adult-themed sites. 

Age Gate

Age Gate is an SEO-friendly (crawlers are omitted from age checks) plugin that will ask users to verify their age on page load.

Here are some of its features:

  • Restrict the whole site or specific content
  • Omit logged in users from being checked
  • Three choices of input: dropdowns, fields, or yes/no buttons
  • Remember Me check box
  • Add legal note at the bottom of the form

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Age Verification

Age Verification is another plugin that lets you add a pop-up window to your site and verify the visitor’s age before letting them access the content.

You can customize things like background image, logo, title, minimum age, message text, and Yes/No button text.

Pricing: Free. Pro version is $49.95

Download FreeView Pro

Best WordPress Project Management Plugins

One of the most important aspects of running a successful business is staying organized.

Here are some great project management plugins that can help you with that.

Projectopia

Projectopia allows you to easily communicate with your team and clients and access everything from within your WordPress dashboard.

Here are some of the features it includes:

  • Workflow control
  • Role based team members
  • Client dashboard
  • Projects and milestones
  • Tasks with timers
  • Ticketing

Pricing: One-time payment of $59 with 6 months of support.

View Premium


Kanban Boards

Kanban Boards can be used for agile project management, CRM, tracking sales, scheduling content publishing, hiring new employees, and more.

Here are some of its key features:

  • Assign tasks to team members
  • Filter tasks
  • For privacy and security, data is stored separately from your WordPress data
  • Manage which users have access to the board

Pricing: Free. Pro plans start at $149 per year with a 90-day money-back guarantee.

Download FreeView Pro

Best WordPress Real Estate Plugins

Launching a website on WordPress for your real estate business is simpler than you think.

The days of needing to knowing how to code or have tons of technical knowledge to do so are over.

Here are the best real estate plugins to help you sell houses, rent apartments, or list any other type of real estate on your site:

Estatik Real Estate Plugin

Estatik Real Estate Plugin is an easy-to-use real estate plugin great agencies and single agents.

Here are some of the free version features:

  • Saved searches and wishlists
  • Sort by price, date, or popularity
  • Select property labels, such as featured, openhouse, or hot
  • Photo gallery and video
  • Request info widget

The Pro version includes things like agents support, private fields, subscription plans with payments via PayPal, map view widget, and more.

Pricing: Free. Paid versions start at a one-time purchase price of $89 for unlimited sites (support is only for 1 year unless you pay extra, but you still get future updates for free).

Download FreeView Premium


Essential Real Estate

Essential Real Estate is a free plugin that allows you to do more than just property listing.

You can also manage different agents, track stats, invoices, transactions, and even schedule tours for your customers.

Here are some other features it has:

  • Both sellers and customers can submit properties
  • Flexible search
  • Listing expiration date
  • Email listing alerts
  • PayPal, Stripe, and wire transfer payment methods
  • Map directions, Google suggestions, and geo location search

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Real Estate Pro

Real Estate Pro is another great real estate plugin that’s fully responsive and allows you to add free and paid listing.

Here are some other features it includes:

  • Feature listing
  • Rating breakdown
  • PayPal and Stripe payment gateways
  • Select membership type (free accounts, one-time payment or recurring payments, free trials, etc.)
  • Agent public profile
  • Payment history

Pricing: One-time payment of $39 with 6 months of support.

View Premium

Best WordPress Podcasting Plugins

Podcasts have been gaining a lot of popularity lately. It allows people to consume content while driving or doing other things.

Seriously Simple Podcasting

Seriously Simple Podcasting allows you to easily manage your podcast right from your WordPress dashboard.

Here are some of the free version’s features:

  • One-click imports (bring all your podcast content into your WordPress site with one click)
  • Unlimited storage, bandwidth, podcasts, and episodes
  • Customize your podcast webpage and media player
  • Episode transcripts
  • Podcast editing services

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $190 per year.

Download FreeView Premium


Fusebox

Fusebox is another great and easy-to-use podcast WordPress plugin. Here are some features the free version includes:

  • SEO-friendly live text
  • Downloadable transcript PDF
  • Sitewide sticky plater

The Pro version of Fusebox has a ton more features, such as email capture, social sharing, custom colors, speed control, host migration, downloadable MP3s, timestamps, and more.

Pricing: Free. Pro version is $96 per site per year.

View Fusebox

Best WordPress Pricing Table Plugins

Making it difficult for visitors to find prices on your site can make you look like a sketchy person and decrease conversions.

Pricing tables make it easy for them to look and compare prices between your products, services, or plans.

Responsive Pricing Table

Responsive Pricing Table allows you to easily create pricing tables from inside your WordPress dashboard.

Here are some of the features the free version includes:

  • Add features to your different plans
  • Customize the looks of your table
  • Add different elements, such as title, subtitle, description, icons, and price
  • Change currency
  • Set recommended plan

Pricing: Free. Pro version is $19 per year for one site or $49 per year for unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Pro


Go Pricing

Go Pricing comes with a lot of styling options and includes over 250 sample tables you can simply import if you don’t feel like creating one from scratch.

The plugin is compatible with the most popular page builders, such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, and WPBakery.

It also includes other features like:

  • Column animations
  • Live preview
  • Supports audio, videos, and maps

Pricing: One-time payment of $27 with 6 months of support.

View Go Pricing

Best Coming Soon Plugins

Bought your domain name but aren’t ready to launch your WordPress site yet? Or maybe need to pull your site down for maintenance?

Whatever the reason might be, a coming soon plugin can help you keep gathering emails and ranking on search engines, or build hype if you haven’t launched your site.

WP Maintenance Mode

WP Maintenance Mode allows you to easily put your site on maintenance mode. All you have to do is go to the plugin’s settings and check “Activated.”

WP Maintenance Mode also gives you the option to:

  • Set a countdown timer
  • Customize the looks of the page (colors, text, and backgrounds)
  • Add a subscription box or contact form
  • Set a coming soon page

It also comes with a few landing page templates and SEO options.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Coming Soon Page and Maintenance Mode

With over 1 million active installations and a 5-star rating, the Coming Soon Page and Maintenance Mode plugin by SeedProd is one of the most popular coming soon plugins.

Here are some of its features:

  • Create coming soon, under construction, and maintenance mode pages
  • Customize the look
  • Add custom CSS and HTML
  • Translation ready
  • Multisite support
  • BuddyPress support

The Pro version includes more features, such as:

  • Custom footer branding
  • Google Analytics support
  • Progress bar with automatic completion calculation
  • Built-in referral system
  • Integration with email service providers
  • Social share buttons
  • And more

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $37 per year per site.

Download FreeView Pro


Maintenance

The Maintenance plugin lets you put your site in maintenance mode, set a temporary page with authorization, and customize the look.

 Here are some other things you can do with it:

  • Upload your own logo
  • Add blur background effect
  • Set a full-screen background
  • Customize title, headline, and text
  • Exclude pages

Pricing: Free

Download Free

Best WordPress Recipe Plugins

Not only are recipe plugins great for displaying ingredients, cook times, and instructions in an organized way, but also to tell search engines that your site isn’t only blog posts and pages.

In fact, if you have a recipe blog and want to monetize with ads, some ad networks won’t approve you without having a quality recipe plugin installed.

CookBook

If you care about site speed (which you should), CookBook might be the recipe plugin for you.

This plugin is easy to use, well-coded, lightweight, SEO-friendly, and a favorite among developers.

Some of the features it includes are:

  • Nutritional data
  • Recipe ratings
  • Schema and JSON-LD recipe markup to help you rank in Google
  • Jump to Recipe button so your visitors don’t get frustrated
  • Print button

Pricing: 59.99 per year for 10 sites.

View Cookbook


WP Recipe Maker

If CookBook is a little too minimalistic for you, then WP Recipe Maker is another great recipe plugin loved by developers that’s easy-to-use and has more features.

WP Recipe Maker is obviously a little heavier than CookBook, but that’s because it includes a ton more features.

Here are some of the free version’s features:

  • Pin recipe image
  • Pinterest rich pins
  • Template editor
  • Recipe metadata for SEO
  • How-to instructions metadata
  • Fallback recipe
  • Comment ratings
  • Recipe snippets
  • Recipe video
  • Import from other plugins

The premium version includes even more features, such as user ratings, kitchen timer, adjustable servings, premium templates, call-to-action buttons, nutrition labels, clone recipes, and more.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $49 per year per site.

Download FreeView Premium


WP Tasty Recipes

WP Tasty Recipes is one of the most popular, SEO-friendly, and nice-looking premium recipe plugins available.

Here are some features that make this plugin great:

  • SEO-friendly (JSON-LD structured data to let search engines know everything about the recipe)
  • Import recipes from other plugins, such as Ziplist, Meal Planner Pro, and WP Recipe Maker.
  • Video integration
  • Flexible formatting
  • Customize it how you want
  • Add complete nutritional information
  • And more

Pricing: $79 per year for one site.

View WP Tasty Recipes


Recipe Card Blocks Pro

Recipe Card Blocks is a recipe plugin that was built to work perfectly with WordPress’ new block editor, Gutenberg.

The cool things about this is that you can easily access everything inside the WordPress editor, just like any other block, instead of having to use a different interface and add shortcodes.

Just like WP Tasty Recipes, Recipe Card Blocks is also SEO-friendly.

Here are some of the blocks included for free:

  • Recipe card (with Schema markup)
  • Recipe details
  • Ingredients
  • Nutrition facts
  • Directions

The Pro version includes more features, such as:

  • Star rating
  • Custom Pinterest image and description for Pin
  • Adjustable servings
  • Ingredients quantity
  • Food labels
  • Social sharing

Pricing: Free. Pro version is $69 per site per year.

Download FreeView Pro


Zip Recipes

Zip Recipes is another great and easy-to-use recipes plugin that’s optimized for Google.

With the free version of Zip Recipes you can:

  • Copy and paste recipes you already have from Microsoft Word or other programs
  • Add a featured image
  • Add nutrition facts, cook and prep time, and notes
  • Include a Print button

Some of the Premium version’s features include:

  • Automatic nutrition generation
  • Automatic serving adjustment
  • Reviews and ratings
  • Save recipes on social media
  • Recipe search

Pricing: Free. Premium versions start at $39 per year per site.

Download FreeView Premium


Not so Good

Easy Recipe Plus and WP Ultimate Recipe

These plugins are bloated, not very well coded, load quite a bit of JavaScript, and use a lot of server resources. All of these things can significantly slow your site. 

Adding related posts on your widget area or at the end of your content is a great way to keep your visitors engaged, increase page views and might help reduce bounce rate.

This is especially great if you cover several categories or topics on your WordPress site.

Related Posts Thumbnails

Related Posts Thumbnails allows you to add related posts thumbnails after a post.

With it you can:

  • Change thumbnail sizes
  • Select how many posts to show
  • Choose a start date
  • Select type of relation (categories, tags, categories and tags, or custom taxonomies)
  • Change styles
  • Select where to display related posts (page type, post type, post categories)

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Inline Related Posts

Inline Related Posts allows you to place related posts boxes inside your content instead of your widget area or at the end of posts.

It can automatically detect line breaks and automatically put multiple boxes in all your blog posts.

You also have control over the styling of the boxes.

Pricing: Free

Download Free


Not so Good

Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP)

YARPP uses a lot of server resources to look for related posts, which can significantly slow down your website, especially if you have a ton of posts.

Best WordPress Chat Plugins

A great way to connect with your audience and increase engagement and conversions is to add a chat box on your WordPress site.

Zendesk Chat

Zendesk Chat is one of the most popular live chat plugins for WordPress.

Here are some key features of the free version:

  • Unlimited conversations per month
  • Keep your chat history for 14 days
  • Mobile optimized (visitors can chat with you from any device)
  • Proactive chat
  • Chat rating
  • Check your visitor flow and usage pattern

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $19 per agent per month (or $14/month if billed annually).

Download FreeView Premium


Tidio

Tidio is another great live chat plugin that has a beautiful interface and unlimited chats on its free version.

Here are a few more features included on the free version:

  • Up to 3 chat operators
  • 500 emails per month
  • 100 unique reachable visitors
  • Desktop and mobile apps
  • Visitors info
  • 3rd party apps integration

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $18 per month for unlimited sites.

Download FreeView Premium


LiveChat

LiveChat is a premium live chat plugin that allows you to place a chat widget on your site or mobile app.

Here are some of its features:

  • Direct chat link so customers can come directly to your chat page
  • Facebook Messenger integration
  • Unlimited chats
  • Agent rating
  • Multiple website support
  • Ticketing system
  • Daily summary

Pricing: No free version. Paid plans start at $19 per month per agent or $192 if billed annually.

View LiveChat


Not so Good

Tawk.to

Several users have mentioned how Tawk.to loads tons of external resources and significantly slows down their sites.

Plugins used to check for broken links tend to use a lot of server resources and slow down your site. Therefore, I suggest you use any free online tool to occasionally check for broken links.

Dr. Link Check and Online Broken Link Checker

Dr. Link Check and Broken Link Checker are free online tools you can use to easily check for broken link.

Final Thoughts on the Best WordPress Plugins

I really hope you enjoyed and found this list of the best WordPress plugins useful.

If you did, I would appreciate it if you shared it with other site owners who you think might find it beneficial as well.

Also, I’ve you’ve had any good or bad experience with any of these plugins, let me and everyone else know in the comments section below.

That way you can help keep this list up-to-date.

Just remember to be polite and respectful when sharing a bad experience.

Chris

Christian Coulson

Christian is an industrial engineer who's used his knowledge and experience to grow 7Sigma Physiques—his fitness coaching business and blog with thousands of monthly readers.

Comments

  1. I appreciate all of your knowledge and time you put into this post. I didn’t know about some of these plugins and now I do. 🙂

    Reply
  2. I was just looking at a plugin to help with the images; it seems ShortPixel Image Optimizer is a good choice for now. But OMG, there are so many! Is there a limit to the number of plugins for one site?

    Reply
  3. Ok, this post is epic! I love how you explain the plugins well because they can be overwhelming, especially in the beginning. My personal SEO favorite is Rank Math. I used to have Yoast and it’s great too. Thanks for creating such a comprehensive post!

    Reply
  4. This is such great information! I get lost over all the different plugins and which ones to use. Will definitely be using this as a resource!

    Reply
  5. Wow, this post on best WordPress plugins is incredible. Thank you for such a thoughtful and helpful article. I actually am using five plugins on your “not so good” lists, so I will take the time to reevaluate some better options for my site. Thank you for your help!

    Reply
  6. Woo! Good job Christian. Thanks for sharing.
    I would like to recommend one more free useful plugin Blog Designer. It is a step ahead WordPress plugin that allows you to modify blog and single page layouts and design. It has unique 6 high-impact blog templates are available in it like Classical, Light Breeze, Spektrum, Evolution, Timeline and News.
    Get more plugin detail: https://wordpress.org/plugins/blog-designer/

    Reply
  7. Your article always include a decent amount of really up to date info. Where do you come up with this? Just saying you are very imaginative. Thanks again

    Reply
  8. Youre so cool! I dont suppose Ive read something like this before. So nice to find somebody with some original thoughts on this subject. realy thank you for beginning this up. this web site is one thing that’s needed on the web, somebody with a bit of originality. helpful job for bringing one thing new to the internet!

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Heather Ritchie Cancel reply