June 26th, 2020 | Updated on April 25th, 2023
Any WP website needs a certain set of plugins to help it to work to its best capability. Mostly the niche of your website would decide what all plugins would be suitable.
Security, speed, SEO are some of the things that most website owners are concerned about. There are many plugins that are useful but not all of them can be used.
Officially there are nearly 55000 plugins and these can handle every feature or function. You may also find multiple plugins for one feature.
Choose from our list and read their reviews before committing. Here are 10 WP plugins that are extremely popular and used by most people to operate their website.
1. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
With Contact Form 7’s reCAPTCHA (v3) integration ability, you can protect your contact forms from spambots.
Since a spambot targets everything—not only contact forms—you may also want to protect other components on your website (such as comment forms) using reCAPTCHA technology.
2. Yoast SEO
This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. As Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone, the plugin’s users range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.
Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders. A dedicated team of developers, testers, architects and SEO experts work daily to improve the plugin with every release.
Whether you are a business owner or blogger, a content creator, a developer or an SEO expert: Yoast SEO helps you keep your website in perfect shape.
3. Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content.
You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
It Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam. Major features in Akismet include:
- Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
- Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
- URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
- Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
- A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.
4. Classic Editor
Classic Editor is an official plugin maintained by the WordPress team that restores the previous (“classic”) WordPress editor and the “Edit Post” screen.
It makes it possible to use plugins that extend that screen, add old-style meta boxes, or otherwise depend on the previous editor.
In addition, the Classic Editor plugin includes several filters that let other plugins control the settings, and the editor choice per post and per post type.
Each post opens in the last editor used regardless of who edited it last. This is important for maintaining a consistent experience when editing content.
5. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a flexible, open-source eCommerce solution built on WordPress.
Whether you’re launching a business, taking an existing brick and mortar store online, or designing sites for clients you can get started quickly and build exactly the store you want.
WooCommerce is built to allow store managers to run an eCommerce site themselves, no web developer needed.
There is also a free WooCommerce mobile app (Android and iOS) for store management on the go.
6. Jetpack
Jetpack is your site’s security detail, guarding you against brute-force attacks and unauthorized logins.
Basic protection is always free, while premium plans add expanded backup and automated fixes. Jetpack’s full suite of site security tools include:
- Brute-force attack protection, spam filtering, and downtime monitoring.
- Backups of your entire site, either once daily or in real time.
- Secure login, with optional two-factor authentication.
- Malware scanning, code scanning, and automated threat resolution.
- A record of every change on your site to simplify troubleshooting.
- Fast, priority support from WordPress experts.
7. Elementor Page Builder
With Elementor’s unique features, you can create websites that have that certain ‘designer touch’.
Among our page builder features are: Box Shadows, Background Overlays, Hover Effects, Headline Effects, Animations, Shape Dividers, Gradient Backgrounds and much more.
Blocks are pre-designed section templates that can be easily combined into any page.
Blocks include a variety of categories: services, testimonials, call to action and more. Save and reuse Elementor templates on different pages, or export them to a different website with a click.
8. Really Simple SSL
Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum.
The entire site will move to SSL. The plugin handles most issues that WordPress has with SSL, like when you’re behind a reverse proxy/loadbalancer, or when no headers are passed which WordPress can use to detect SSL.
All incoming requests are redirected to https. Default with an internal WordPress redirect, but you can also enable a .htaccess redirect.
9. Duplicate Post
This plugin allows users to clone posts of any type, or copy them to new drafts for further editing. There is also a template tag, so you can put it in your templates and clone your posts/pages from the front-end.
Clicking on the link will lead you to the edit page for the new draft, just like the admin bar link. Duplicate Post has many useful settings to customize its behavior and restrict its use to certain roles or post types.
10. All-in-One WP Migration
This plugin exports your WordPress website including the database, media files, plugins and themes with no technical knowledge required.
Upload your site to a different location with a drag and drop in to WordPress. There is an option to apply an unlimited number of find and replace operations on your database during the export process. The plugin will also fix any serialisation problems that occur during the find/replace operation.
11. The Events Calendar
With this WordPress Plugin, you can easily create and manage an events calendar on your WordPress site. This plugin has professional tools that are capable of managing all types of events — virtual as well as in-person. It’s also extensible, easy to use, and completely customizable.