Last updated on
April 4, 2024
WordPress boasts a repository that offers more than 50,000+ plugins that can take your website from good to great, and offer you benefits in higher traffic, better speeds and easier website management.
In this article, we’re showing you 16 hand-picked plugins that can enhance your WordPress experience across performance, marketing, blogging, traffic and website management.
WP Rocket is one of those must-have WordPress plugins, and one of the best available to improve your website speed and caching.
WP Rocket is really easy to set-up, even if you lack technical WordPress knowledge.
In essence, WP Rocket generates and stores an unchanging version of your website on your server, which is displayed to a visitor instantly, thus reducing load times. Have a look at an example of a speed test before and after installing WP Rocket:
WP Rocket’s core feature is accelerating load times, but it does much more than that. Some of its handy features include:
Rating (on Trust Pilot): 4.9/5
Price Options:
Single = $49 a year for 1 website
Plus = $99 a year for 3 websites
Infinite = $249 a year for unlimited sites
If you’re looking for a free alternative to WP Rocket, which also offers an easy to use experience, WP Fastest Cache is the way to go.
Some plugins come across as too basic, with little functionality while others can have an overwhelming learning curve. This particular plugin has found a balance between ease of use and range of functionality.
With the free version you get:
Premium version provides these and:
Downloads: 1+ million
Rating: 2625 five-star ratings, 73 one-star ratings
Price Options: Free, Premium ($49.99)
WP Super Minify is a very small plugin, that does one thing and does it effectively: It minifies the code, which makes the overhead slightly smaller and pages load faster.
This plugin combines, minifies, and caches inline JavaScript and CSS files on demand to speed up page loads. Compared to WP Rocket, it lacks in features and complexity but it's perfect for webmasters who want simplicity, and only what the plugin promises; and it does all this for free
Downloads: 20,000+
Rating: 33 five-star ratings, 10 one-star ratings
Price: Free
Jetpack is one of those super plugins that come loaded with useful features. Made by the team that built WordPress itself, Jetpack takes care of website security, traffic growth, image optimization, website performance, appearance, and a few other things.
Some useful features include:
Downloads: 5 million+
Rating: 886 five-stars, 227 one-stars
Price: Free
Personal = $3.5/mo
Premium = $9/mo
Professional = $29/mo
A lead generation and contact management solution: If you need a simple plugin that allows you to create and manage contact forms, Contact Form 7 is the way to go. It may not be very flexible and does not include any advanced styling or formatting options, but it makes up for this with its simplicity. It also happens to be one of the leading free forms available on WordPress.
You can use it to add multiple contact forms on your website and customize them to suit your website.
Downloads: 5 million+
Rating: 1175 five-stars, 276 one-stars
Price: Free
MailMunch lets you create beautiful opt-in forms for your WordPress site without writing a single line of code.
MailMunch specializes in opt-in technologies and their features include:
MailMunch’s plugin stands out for its simplicity and ease of use. Once it is live on your website, you can start growing your email list by deploying opt-in forms that are built to maximize conversions.
Downloads: 20,000+
Price: Free
Rating: 197 five-stars, 11 one-stars
WordPress Landing Pages plugin is another lead generation tool that provides a simple way to add and create landing pages for your website.
Besides letting you create functional landing pages, you can use this plugin to monitor conversions, run A/B tests and customize page designs.
The plugin also comes with a visual editor so you don’t have to learn any coding to create landing pages.
Downloads: 10,000+
Rating: 84 five-stars, 52 one-stars
Price: Free
Click to tweet is one of those plugins that helps you whether you are a blogger or a business with a content channel. It's a simple tool that does as its name says: you can create click to tweet boxes on your page which visitors can then click to share your content on social media.
You can embed ‘click to tweet boxes’ on your pages using either simple code or using a button in your editor once you install the plugin.
Downloads: 10,000+
Rating: 10 five-stars, 3 one-stars
Price: Free
Another blogger friendly plugin, Floating Social Media Icon links to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Linkedin, Pinterest, and many other social platforms.
A floating icon comes in real handy if a visitor is enjoying your website. If they are engaged, they are more likely to further explore your content, and showing them your social media at such critical times can mean more followers and more activity.
The highlights for the plugin include:
Downloads: 30,000+
Rating: 531 five-stars, 15 one-stars
Price: Free
Coming up with the perfect, attention-grabbing headline can be tricky
Pixel Caffeine. What’s more, the title has a direct result on click-through rates. A good title equals more clicks.
Title Experiments is a lesser-known plugin that allows you to easily A/B test your titles to work out which titles best suit your audience.
Downloads: 1000+
Rating: 12 five-stars, 1 one-star
Price: Free
Yoast SEO has proven to be one of the most reliable, most used plugins for WordPress sites.
It's a really comprehensive plugin that assists with countless aspects of SEO, ranging from titles to keyword optimization.
The plugin guides you in real-time when you’re composing posts, and tells you where you can improve your SEO. It’s best features include:
Downloads: 5 million +
Rating: 25,481 five-stars, 515 one-stars
Price: Free, $69 for Yoast Premium
Google XML sitemaps is a useful SEO plugin that helps search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Google to better index your site with the XML maps this plugin creates.
Once the app is activated, it automatically creates an XML map. An XML map enables search bots to view the structure of your website and therefore improve the engine’s ability to pull up results from your website.
It also notifies search engines whenever you create new content, this way you don’t have to manually submit content changes to search engines.
This works in your favor when you’re trying to promote a webpage, and aiming to push it to the top of search results.
Downloads: 2 million +
Rating: 2004 five-stars, 45 one-stars
Price: Free
Developed by the Automattic team (creators of WordPress), Akismet is a great plugin to maintain the integrity of your website by blocking spam.
The plugin checks all comments on your website and filters out the spammy ones. It also provides a status history for each comment, so you can review and manage comments.
As a moderator, you can even review the number of approved comments per user.
Downloads: 5 million +
Rating: 741 five-stars, 37 one-stars
Price: Free
If you’re concerned about the security of your website, Wordfence will put your worries at ease. The plugin offers firewall protection, malware blocking, and scanning, login security options and live traffic monitoring among other features.
After installation, the plugin does a site-wide scan to check for potential security threats and then helps you secure your website. Its features include:
Downloads: 3 million +
Rating: 3168 five-stars, 139 one-stars
Price: Free or $99 for single license use, valid for a year.
The handy plugin allows you to view Google Analytics locally on your website.
After you install the plugin, just enter your tracking ID and the plugin adds the tracking code to your theme’s header.
Besides giving you the obvious advantage of keeping track of analytics from within your website, the plugin offers you the advantage of minimizing DNS requests and speeding up your website by leveraging browser cache.
Downloads: 10,000+
Rating: 55 five-stars, 2 one-stars
Price: Free
Lazy load is a management plugin that helps you boost your page load time by only loading comments when a user reaches that part of the webpage.
This reduces the HTTP requests heavy work and optimizes the experience for website visitors.
The plugin works on thumbnails, images, avatars, and comments.
Downloads: 80,000+
Rating: 61 five-stars, 15 one-stars
Price: Free
If you are looking for an easy way to ensure compliance with GDPR regulations, the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin offers just the help you need. It comes with powerful features that make it effortless to comply with the law.
Notable features of the plugin:
Downloads: 900,000+
Rating: 404 five-star, 20 one-star
Price:
Feel free to install and try these plugins out for yourself and let us know if they helped improve your WordPress experience. We'd love to find out in the comments below!
Rukham is the Content Lead at Mailmunch. He believes trust should be the basis for all marketing communications.
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