24 Essential WordPress Plugins Every Website Needs

What are the essential WordPress plugins that every WordPress site needs?

If you just set up your WordPress site, that question is probably on your mind.

One of the most remarkable things about WordPress is that it gives you access to thousands of plugins to extend your site. However, with so many options to choose from, you may be unsure which plugins you actually need.

There are some plugins that are desined to your site specific needs. In that case, you’ll probably need to do a little searching to find the best options.

But there are also a lot of essential plugins for WordPress that can benefit pretty much any WordPress site, whether you have a blog, a portfolio, an eCommerce store, or anything else.

So, in this article, we’ll explore the must-have WordPress plugins that can help your site no matter what it’s about.

Let’s dive in!

What Should You Consider When Choosing a WordPress Plugin?

1. Compatibility

Make sure the plugin is compatible with your current WordPress version and other plugins you are using to avoid conflicts.

2. Reviews and Ratings

Check user reviews and ratings on the WordPress plugin repository or other reputable sources. Higher numbers indicate that the plugin is trusted and widely used.

3. Updates and Support

Look for plugins that the developers regularly update. Active support and frequent updates indicate a well-maintained plugin.

4. Security

Look for plugins that follow best security practices and offer security features if applicable.

5. Performance Impact

Test the plugin to see if it impacts your site’s loading speed. Poorly coded plugins can slow down your website.

6. Cost

Decide if a free plugin meets your needs or if you need to invest in a premium version. Sometimes, investing in a premium plugin offers better features and support.

7. Documentation and Tutorials

Check if the plugin comes with comprehensive documentation and tutorials. This can be very helpful for setup and troubleshooting.

24 Essential Plugins for WordPress

Here are our top picks for the essential WordPress plugins that can help any WordPress site.

1. MonsterInsights – Best WordPress Analytics Plugin

MonsterInsights - The Best Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

Do you want an easy way to connect Google Analytics (GA) to your WordPress site? MonsterInsights is your best option.

MonsterInsights is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to set up Google Analytics and integrate it into your WordPress dashboard. A major drawback of Google Analytics is that it gives you too many options, which will leave you confused unless you truly understand data analytics.

In other words, it’s really easy to get lost in a number of useless metrics that may never help in the growth of your business.

MonsterInsights makes it easy to get actual insights from raw data, allowing you to make decisions quickly based on what works best for your audience. It’s also easy to focus on relevant metrics for different types of websites.

Key Features:

  • You may quickly install Google Analytics on your website.
  • See real-time stats in your WordPress dashboard.
  • View popular posts, pages, and referral sources.
  • With Google Analytics universal tracking, you can get more information.
  • Google Analytics may be used to track your Google Adsense advertising.
  • With a single click, you may enable file download statistics.

Pricing:

MonsterInsights offers a free version, but its real power is only unlocked when you switch to the premium version. The premium version starts from $99.60/year.

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2. WPForms – Best WordPress Form Plugin

WPForms - The World's Best Drag & Drop WordPress Forms Plugin

Contact forms are an essential component of any WordPress website since they allow users to contact you easily. Since WordPress lacks built-in form functionality, a plugin like WP Forms is a must-have.

WPForms is a popular WordPress form builder that lets you add forms to your site using a drag-and-drop editor. With just a few clicks, you can build contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, surveys, and almost any other type of online form. They have over 1,800 pre-built form templates and visually designed form themes to make your life easier.

Moreover, it works with all popular marketing and payment systems, including Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Authorize.net, allowing you to create effective forms in less than 5 minutes.

Key Features:

  • Easily create a contact form with a drag-and-drop builder.
  • It’s 100% responsive, mobile-friendly, and SEO-optimized.
  • You can use 1,800 pre-built templates to save more time.
  • Instant email notification to incoming inquiries.
  • To improve the user experience, split large forms into numerous pages with a progress bar.
  • Easily create high-performance forms with our smart conditional logic.
  • It provides intelligent anti-spam protection.
  • You can easily link your forms with PayPal and Stripe to take payments, donations, and online orders.
  • Easy integration with mailing services.

Pricing:

A free WPForms Lite version is available for those searching for a quick solution. You will need to upgrade to their pro version for advanced contact forms. The premium version starts from $49.50/year.

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3. Elementor – Best WordPress Page Builder

Elementor - Drag and Drop Website Builder

Elementor, with over 10 million active installs, is one of the coolest additions to our list of essential Plugins for WordPress. It is a visual page builder that let you to create unique designs for your pages that are independent of your existing theme.

This means you don’t need to be a web development expert to add all those wonderful effects like background overlays, hover effects, animations, and more. Everything can be done with a simple drag-and-drop. It is entirely compatible with the Gutenberg editor and the other WordPress plugins listed here.

Furthermore, Elementor is excellent for individuals looking to design a great landing page for their business. It is also an excellent option for individuals who want a custom design for portions of their website but do not have the funds to pay a developer to complete the work.

Apart from a page builder plugin, it also offers cloud hosting and AI assistance to build your dream website from a single platform.

Check out our complete Elementor review.

Key Features:

  • There are over 300 elements to choose from when creating unique website pages.
  • Hide or show elements in the mobile view to ensure your design is mobile-friendly.
  • Built-in popup builder for Elementor Pro.
  • Maintenance mode is built-in, allowing you to display a coming soon page or even under construction pages to visitors while making changes.
  • 100+ beautifully designed landing page templates to suit a variety of website types.
  • Theme builder to design your theme with Elementor’s website editor.
  • The revision history feature makes it easy to go back and undo changes if you make a mistake.

Pricing:

The Elementor lite version is available for free on the official WordPress plugins repository. However, the premium version starts from $59/year.

Get Elementor

4. Yoast SEO – Best WordPress SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

If you want your site’s content to appear at the top of search engine results, you must have effective on-page SEO.

While WordPress already implements many important SEO features for you, you can kick things up another notch by installing a dedicated SEO plugin.

Yoast SEO is a free plugin that helps you implement all of the important SEO metrics on your site. You can set up SEO titles and meta descriptions, add structured data/Schema markup, manage your social media share cards, and more.

It also has useful analysis tools to help you optimize your content for Google, which is very important if you’re just starting with SEO.

For more advanced implementations, you can pay for premium extensions that help you optimize your WooCommerce store, submit to Google News, improve local SEO, and lots more.

For a quality Yoast SEO alternative, you can also consider the Rank Math plugin. Learn more in our complete comparison of Rank Math vs Yoast SEO.

Key Features:

  • Analyzes your pages and posts for SEO best practices.
  • Automatically generates XML sitemaps to help search engines index your site effectively.
  • Optimize content for multiple focus keywords.
  • Offers readability analysis to ensure your content is easy to read and understand.
  • Provides options to optimize your content for social media sharing.
  • Suggests internal links to improve site structure and user navigation.
  • Prevents duplicate content issues by setting canonical URLs.
  • Easily manage 301 redirects to avoid broken links.
  • Automatically adds structured data for rich snippets in search results.
  • Connects to Google Search Console for better SEO monitoring and reporting.

Pricing:

A free version is available on WordPress.org. The premium version costs $99/year.

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5. OptinMonster – Best WordPress Lead Generation Plugin

OptinMonster - Best WordPress Lead Generation Plugin

The most popular conversion rate optimization plugin on the market is OptinMonster. It helps you to convert website visitors who are about to leave into email subscribers and customers.

Further, you can use their hundreds of high-converting templates to create WordPress popups, slide-ins, gamified spin-a-wheel, etc.

The advanced display targeting tools in OptinMonster allow you to customize campaigns for each user, allowing you to see the right message to the right person at the right time.

It’s an excellent choice for bloggers, businesses, and e-commerce sites. Essentially, OptinMonster is required if you want to generate more money from your website traffic.

Learn more in our complete OptinMonster review.

Key Features:

  • The drag-and-drop builder helps you create visually stunning optin forms.
  • Convert any link or image into an optin form and boost conversions.
  • Get more leads by personalizing campaigns based on your visitor’s location.
  • You can show different popups to new visitors, returning visitors, and customers.
  • It’s easy to analyze clicks, views, and overall conversion rates with our built-in analytics.
  • Option for creating different optin for mobile and desktop users.
  • Integration with all major email marketing software.

Pricing:

OptinMonster lite version is available for free on the official WordPress plugins repository. However, its premium version costs $9.97/month (billed annually).

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6. WP Rocket – Best WordPress Performance Optimization Plugin

WP Rocket: #1 WordPress Caching Plugin

WP Rocket is the best WordPress cache plugin. It helps you speed up a WordPress site without any technical skill.

It automatically enables recommended WordPress caching settings such as gzip compression, page caching, and cache pre-loading. To optimize page load times even further, you may enable optional features like lazy loading pictures, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, minification, and others.

Most notably, WP Rocket does not wait for someone to request a page before saving it in the cache. It automatically scans and creates your website cache, resulting in a quick speed performance.

It also offers Imagify, a free image optimization service that speeds up your website even further. Read our Imagify review for more details.

They also integrate with Cloudflare API, Sucuri, and many other tools to help you better configure your website caching setup.

Learn more in our complete WP Rocket review.

Key Features:

  • Preloading of cache for faster initial load times.
  • Minification and concatenation of CSS and JavaScript files.
  • Browser caching to improve load times for returning visitors.
  • Lazy loading for images and videos.
  • Database optimization to reduce bloat.
  • DNS prefetching to speed up external requests.
  • Integration with popular CDNs for faster global delivery.
  • Mobile detection and caching for improved mobile user experience.
  • GZIP compression for reduced bandwidth usage.

Pricing:

WP Rocket is a premium plugin that starts from $59/year.

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7. UpdraftPlus – Best WordPress Backup Plugin

UpdraftPlus - Best WordPress Backup Plugin

While there’s no exact number, experts estimate that roughly 13,000 WordPress sites are hacked on a daily basis. To put it overall, that number equals 390,000 attacks per month and 4.7 million per year.

When you consider that WordPress powers 43.4% of all websites, it’s easy to see why it’s such a popular target.

This is where our next essential WordPress plugin comes in. There are many WordPress backup plugins available, but few are as powerful and user-friendly as UpdraftPlus. It integrates with multiple cloud storage options to keep your backups. You can even automate your backups with a recurring schedule.

Key Features:

  • Easy backups and restoration.
  • Scheduled and customized backups.
  • WordPress multisite network management.
  • Multiple cloud storage options.
  • Website cloning.

Pricing:

UpdraftPlus lite version is available for free on the WordPress plugins repository. The premium version starts from $70/year.

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8. Sucuri – Best WordPress Security Plugin

Sucuri

Security should be the most important priority for all web business owners. Sucuri is a complete website security solution protecting your sites against malware, brute force attacks, and other possible vulnerabilities.

It also protects your website from SQL Injections, XSS, and any other known security problems. Furthermore, they alert the WordPress core team, as well as third-party plugin developers, to potential security issues.

Sucuri also automatically installs a CDN layer, which significantly speeds up your site.

Key Features:

  • Real-time monitoring for malware and security threats.
  • Automatic malware removal and cleanup.
  • Firewall protection to block malicious traffic.
  • Detailed security activity auditing and logging.
  • Website integrity monitoring to detect unauthorized changes.
  • Post-hack security actions to restore and secure the site.

Pricing:

The Sucuri lite version is available for free on the WordPress plugins repository. Its premium version starts from $99.99/year.

Get Sucuri

9. EWWW Image Optimizer – Best Image Optimization Plugin

EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer is the best image optimization plugin for WordPress. It’s simple to use and can optimize images you upload in real-time.

It can also bulk compress and optimize the images you’ve already uploaded.

Although your images are compressed, it will be hard to tell the difference in quality between compressed and uncompressed images.

Furthermore, the entire compression and optimization process is automated. This includes image resizing for the correct page and device size, lazy loading, and even conversion to the next-gen WebP image format.

It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins and save them in locations other than your media library directories.

Key Features:

  • Compress image files when you upload them to your website.
  • Optimize existing files in your Media Library.
  • Automatically resize new images.
  • Convert compressed image files to WebP. You can also include them in the front end.
  • Enable lazy loading.
  • Convert images to WebP.

Pricing:

The EWWW Image Optimizer lite version is available on the WordPress plugins repository. The premium version starts from $70/year.

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10. Akismet – Best Anti-Spam WordPress Plugin

Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection – WordPress Plugin

If you run a WordPress blog, Akismet is one of the essential WordPress plugins for your website. It keeps spam out of your WordPress comment area by automatically evaluating and filtering comments that appear to be spam.

Akismet filters out 3,500,000 pieces of spam every hour on average, and it integrates easily with the WordPress comment system and a number of other tools, like Jetpack Comments.

Additionally, Akismet provides detailed statistics on the number of spam comments caught and highlights suspicious activity trends.

Key Features:

  • Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
  • Offer the comment history of each comment to see which were flagged or cleared by Akismet.
  • Works seamlessly with popular WordPress plugins like Jetpack and Contact Form 7.
  • Provides detailed statistics on the number of spam comments blocked.
  • Offers an API for advanced integrations and customization.

Pricing:

There is a free version available on WordPress.org. The pro plan starts from $8.33/mo (billed annually).

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11. WooCommerce – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin

WooCommerce - Open Source eCommerce Platform

WooCommerce is a popular eCommerce plugin and a must-have plugin if you plan to sell anything via your WordPress site.

It turns your site into a fully functional online store, allowing you to sell physical products, digital downloads, services, and more. Then, you can accept payments via pretty much any payment processor, including PayPal, Stripe, and tons of local payment gateways.

You will also get tools for managing orders and customer information. And if you need help with payment processing, shipping rates, tax calculations, and other tasks, there are several services available.

Furthermore, you can enhance your store’s functionality with hundreds of free and paid extensions from the official WooCommerce Marketplace, all of which have been verified by the WooCommerce team.

Basically, no matter what you’re selling, WooCommerce can help you get the job done.

Key Features:

  • It’s best for beginners who want to get their eCommerce site up and running quickly.
  • Flexibility for users to add infinite product lists in different categories.
  • You can sell physical, virtual, and downloadable products.
  • Designs that are both unique and professional in appearance.
  • Customization options depend on your business requirements.
  • Accept various payment options.
  • Mobile-friendly.

Pricing:

WooCommerce lite version is available for free on the official WordPress plugins repository. However, the premium extension starts from $79.

Get WooCommerce

12. Smash Balloon – Best Social Media Feeds Plugin

Smash Balloon Best Premium Social Media Plugin for WordPress

Smash Balloon is one of the best social media feeds plugin for WordPress. It is a collection of 6 WordPress plugins. Each of these plugins makes it simple for you to generate and display social network feeds on your website.

Even without hiring a WordPress developer, you can use Smash Balloon to add custom Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and review feeds to your WordPress site.

The best thing about these plugins is you don’t need to be a WordPress pro to use them.

All of the plugins look outstanding right out of the box, and you can show your social media feeds in about 5 minutes. If you want to customize them, all you have to do is check or uncheck the choices. No coding is needed.

Key Features:

  • Setup is straightforward and requires no coding.
  • Feed design that users can change.
  • It uses an intelligent caching and backup system for improved speed and performance.
  • Design that is SEO-friendly.
  • It can show multiple feeds at once.
  • Display the number of likes, shares, and comments.

Pricing:

The Smash Balloon lite version is available on the WordPress plugins repository. However, the premium version starts from $49/year.

Get Smash Balloon

13. Schema Pro – Best WordPress Schema Plugin

Schema Pro

With Schema Pro, you can add rich snippets to your website, allowing it to stand out in search results.

Rich snippets make your site stand out in search results by showing star ratings below reviews, pricing below products, an image or video next to the description, and so on.

Top WordPress SEO plugins, such as All in One SEO (AIOSEO), already include structured, rich snippets of data. However, if you need additional schema types or want to improve the functionality of your existing WordPress SEO plugin, Schema Pro is the way to go.

You may also use Schema Pro in conjunction with an existing WordPress SEO plugin by mapping plugin data to Schema Pro fields.

Key Features:

  • User-friendly interface for easy schema markup implementation.
  • Supports 20+ schema types, including Article, Review, Event, and Product.
  • JSON-LD format for faster and more accurate indexing by search engines.
  • Compatibility with popular SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO.
  • Rich snippet previews to see how your content will appear in search results.
  • Custom schema markup creation for unique requirements.

Pricing:

Schema Pro is a premium plugin that starts from $79/year.

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14. TranslatePress – Best WordPress Translation Plugin

TranslatePress: WordPress Translation Plugin

TranslatePress is a must-have plugin for creating a multilingual WordPress website. It allows you to translate all of your WordPress content into multiple languages.

You can add all of your translations from scratch. Alternatively, you can use machine translation technology like Google Translate or DeepL to automatically translate all of your content. In any case, you’ll be able to manage your translations using a visual, point-and-click interface.

TranslatePress additionally creates a static page for each translation and connects them using hreflang tags. This is crucial as it means Google can index each translation, and your site will benefit from multilingual SEO.

Visitors will also be able to select their preferred languages using a frontend language switcher.

Key Features:

  • Integrates with Google Translate and DeepL for automatic translations.
  • Translates posts, pages, custom post types, and even theme and plugin strings.
  • Support for dynamic strings (gettext) added by WordPress, plugins, and themes.
  • Translate content into multiple languages with ease.
  • Allows specific user roles to translate content.
  • Translate image texts and replace images for different languages.
  • Fully compatible with WooCommerce for translating online stores.

Pricing:

A free version is available on the WordPress.org. The premium version starts from €8.25/mo (billed annually).

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15. CookieYes – Best WordPress Cookie Consent Plugin

CookieYes - WordPress Plugin

When exploring the essential WordPress plugins, CookieYes deserves a prominent mention. As a comprehensive GDPR cookie consent solution, CookieYes ensures your website complies with the latest privacy regulations.

This plugin is user-friendly, allowing you to manage cookie consent effortlessly, display cookie banners, and customize cookie notices to match your website’s design.

With features like automatic cookie scanning and categorization, CookieYes helps maintain transparency with your visitors, boosting trust and credibility.

Its seamless integration with WordPress makes it a must-have for website owners aiming to uphold data privacy standards and enhance user experience.

Key Features:

  • Ensures your website complies with GDPR by providing customizable cookie consent banners.
  • Offers various templates and customization options for cookie consent banners.
  • Scans and categorizes cookies on your website automatically.
  • Displays cookie consent banners based on the visitor’s location.
  • Automatically block non-essential cookies to ensure GDPR compliance.
  • Auto-translate the banner in 30+ languages as per the user’s browser language.
  • Compatible with major caching servers and plugins.

Pricing:

A free version is available that is good for blogs and personal websites. The premium plan starts at $10/mo/domain.

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16. Redirection – Best WordPress Redirection Plugin

Redirection

Since we’re talking about essential plugins for WordPress, we can’t leave out Redirection. It is a WordPress redirect manager. Redirection allows you to create custom 301 redirects within your website and keeps a detailed log of clicks. You can also use it to track out broken URLs on your website.

We all know that Google and other search engines hate bad user experiences. A 404 or broken page led to the same. However, you cannot manually examine every post or page on your website, especially when you have hundreds of them.

Simply installing the Redirection plugin will provide a list of 404 URLs, and all you have to do is enter the URL to which you want the plugin to redirect the visitor.

Key Features:

  • Easily create and manage 301 redirects for seamless URL changes.
  • Track and log 404 errors to identify broken links.
  • Set up redirects based on various conditions, such as login status, browser type, or referrer.
  • Use regular expressions for advanced redirection rules.
  • Import and export redirects for easy backup and migration.
  • Detailed logs and reports on all redirects and 404 errors.

Pricing:

Redirection is a 100% free essential plugin for WordPress users.

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17. Limit Login Attempts Reloaded – Best WordPress Login Protection Plugin

Limit Login Attempts Reloaded

Have you ever attempted to log in to your online banking account and mistakenly entered the incorrect password? When you do this, your bank will often display a notification such as “One failed login attempt.” You have two more tries until your account is temporarily locked, correct?

Banks implement this functionality because it protects against something called a brute force attack.

A brute force attack occurs when a hacker just guesses a number of different username and password combinations until they find one that works. Banks can protect themselves against brute force attacks by limiting login attempts, as hackers will be blocked after a set number of failed attempts.

As the name suggests, Limit Login Attempts Reloaded allows you to apply the same level of security to your WordPress site.

You can select how many unsuccessful attempts are permitted, as well as the temporary lockout time if that number is done. To avoid mistakenly locking yourself out, put your IP address on a safelist.

Key Features:

  • Safeguards your site against brute force attacks by limiting the number of login attempts.
  • Sets a maximum number of login attempts per user, IP, or combination of both.
  • Sends email alerts on lockouts and failed login attempts.
  • Enables you to whitelist or blacklist specific IP addresses.
  • Provides logs of all login attempts, including successful, failed, and blocked attempts.
  • Works seamlessly with WordPress multisite networks.

Pricing:

A free version is available on WordPress.org. The premium plan starts at ₹469.99/mo.

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18. Easy Table of Contents – Best WordPress TOC Plugin

Easy Table of Contents

If you want to improve the usability of your content, adding a table of contents is a great place to start. Visitors can immediately know what to expect from an article and, if they’re in a hurry, can go straight to the right section.

While you can create a table of contents manually, a more convenient alternative is to use a plugin that generates a table of contents based on the headings in the article.

Easy Table of Contents is a popular plugin that allows you to add a table of contents to your blog articles, landing pages, sidebar, and custom post types.

The plugin is easy to use and creates a list based on the content of the article’s headings. It’s compatible with the WordPress block editor, Divi, Elementor page builders, and more.

Additionally, you will also get customization options to change font size, adjust the width of the table, and decide the number of headings to use when creating a table of contents.

Key Features:

  • Automatically generates and inserts a table of contents into posts, pages, and custom post types.
  • Supports the Rank Math plugin.
  • Supports smooth scrolling for a better user experience.
  • Option to enable a collapsible table of contents to save space on the page.
  • Show time of reading for your posts/pages.
  • Sticky heading highlights while scrolling through the content.

Pricing:

A free version is available on WordPress.org. The pro version starts from $49.

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19. BuddyPress – Best WordPress Community Building Plugin

BuddyPress – WordPress Plugin

BuddyPress allows you to turn your WordPress site into a social community with features such as user profile pages, friend requests, user groups, private messaging, and more.

You can use BuddyPress to create a standalone social community. Or, use it to enhance your existing membership site, online course, forum, and so on.

For example, if you use LearnDash to create your own online courses, you can add BuddyPress to the mix to create a social community where your students can more easily engage with one another.

Key Features:

  • Allows users to create and join groups, fostering community interaction.
  • Users can connect and follow other members.
  • Seamless integration with bbPress for forums.
  • Works with most WordPress themes.
  • Extensive customization options for admins.

Pricing:

BuddyPress is a 100% free WordPress plugin.

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20. Ninja Tables – Best WordPress Table Plugin

Ninja Tables: Best Table Plugin for WordPress

Tables are an excellent way to present huge data sets in an easy-to-read format. They can be used to share original data, provide pricing comparisons, create directory sites, and much more.

WordPress has a default functionality that allows you to add tables to posts and pages, but it’s limited and lacks design options.

Ninja Tables is an excellent WordPress table plugin that allows you to easily and quickly build stunning tables. This plugin has various features that make customizing easy.

You can choose one of 13 different color schemes or make your own to match the look of your website.

You may also choose how your table will appear on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.

Key Features:

  • Drag and drop table builder.
  • Highlights cells based on specific conditions for better data visualization.
  • Supports CSV, JSON, and Excel formats for data import and export.
  • Provides powerful filtering and sorting options for better data handling.
  • Compatible with WooCommerce and other popular plugins.
  • Allows for dynamic formatting based on cell values.

Pricing:

A free version available. The premium version starts at $55/year or $247 lifetime for one domain.

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21. WP-Paginate – Best WordPress Pagination Plugin

WP-Paginate – WordPress Plugin

WordPress’s default pagination feature offers two options: Previous and Next.

That is better than nothing, but you can see how it makes navigating difficult for your readers, especially if you have lots of blog posts on your blog. This is also not good for your SEO.

WP-Paginate allows you to create navigation using page numbers. This open-source plugin gives a number of pagination styles and color options, as well as the ability to apply custom CSS for pagination links using the Custom CSS tab in WP-Paginate Settings.

Additionally, the plugin also allows pagination for post comments. As a result, readers will not feel overwhelmed when reading comments or submitting their own responses.

Key Features:

  • Easily customize the appearance and functionality of pagination links.
  • Choose from various pagination styles to match your site’s design.
  • Insert pagination anywhere on your site using shortcodes.

Pricing:

WP-Paginate is a 100% free must-have plugin for WordPress.

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22. WP Mail SMTP – Best WordPress Email Delivery Plugin

WP Mail SMTP - Best WordPress SMTP Plugin

By default, WordPress sends emails via the PHP mail function. The problem is that WordPress hosting companies either do not properly configure this feature or disable it to avoid abuse.

This simply means that you and your users may not get essential email alerts from your WordPress site.

WP Mail SMTP fixes this problem by delivering WordPress emails over a standard SMTP mail server. It is also one of the most effective WordPress SMTP plugins on the market.

The plugin allows you to improve your email deliverability by connecting your website to SMTP service providers such as Brevo, SendLayer, and AWS.

In most cases, you’ll only need your mailer account’s API key to connect it with WP Mail SMTP. If you opt for the Google / Gmail mailer, you can even enjoy a one-click setup process that makes life a whole lot easier!

Key Features:

  • Supports various SMTP providers for secure email sending.
  • Tracks all emails sent from your site.
  • Provides insights into email performance and delivery status.
  • Supports OAuth for secure authentication.
  • Allows sending test emails to verify settings.
  • Sends notifications if emails fail to send.

Pricing:

A free version is available, and the pro version starts from $49/year.

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23. SharedCount – Best WordPress Social Media Plugin

Shared Counts – Social Media Share Buttons

Adding social share buttons is a great tactic to encourage visitors to share your content on social media. Share buttons don’t just encourage visitors to share, but they also make it easy for them to do so with just a few clicks.

That’s why you’ll see social share buttons on pretty much every website nowadays.

Shared Counts allows you to add beautiful social sharing buttons on your website easily. These include Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

It also shows share counts, which helps you add social proof to your website.

Key Features:

  • Supports popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
  • Tracks and displays the number of shares for each post.
  • Optimized for speed, ensuring minimal impact on site performance.
  • Do not use cookies or track users, ensuring GDPR compliance.
  • Offers various button styles and customization options to match your site’s design.

Pricing:

SharedCount is a 100% free WordPress plugin.

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24. WPCode – Best WordPress Code Snippet Plugin

WPCode - The Best WordPress Code Snippets Plugin

While maintaining your WordPress site, you may sometimes need to add custom code snippets to your WordPress header or footer for verification.

WPCode allows you to add code snippets to your WordPress site without editing your theme’s function.php file.

In addition to header and footer scripts, WPCode allows you to add custom PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and text code snippets.

Furthermore, it has a code snippet library where you can find the most common WordPress code snippets and insert them in one click.

Key Features:

  • Access a library of pre-made snippets for various functionalities.
  • Apply snippets conditionally based on specific pages, user roles, and more.
  • Insert header and/or footer codes using conditional logic.
  • Create and use shortcodes to insert snippets within posts and pages.
  • Deep integrations with Gutenberg, WooCommerce, and more.
  • Export / Import code snippets.
  • Smart code validation to prevent PHP errors.

Pricing:

A free version is available, and the pro version starts from $49/year.

Get WPCode

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Install any of these must-have WordPress plugins today to improve your WordPress site with plenty of new features.

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