As creators of the best WordPress social sharing plugin we know a thing or two about what goes into a great WordPress Plugin. Here’s our hand-curated list of the best of the best.
WordPress has now surpassed 26% in worldwide market share. That is to say that more than 26% of all websites are now proudly powered by WordPress. The next closest content management systems aren’t even close to that number.
Suffice it to say that WordPress is incredibly popular. And one of the reasons it is so popular is because of the robust number of plugins for the system that allows webmasters to optimize and customize the system to do anything they need it to do.
There are literally thousands of WordPress plugins. Some are universal in nature in that they are useful for the vast majority of WordPress users. Others are very specific in nature in that they provide solutions to very specific use cases.
In this post, we’re highlighting a few of the best, most-loved, most-important WordPress plugins in existence. So without further ado, here’s the first plugin:
1: Best Caching Plugin – W3 Total Cache
Easy Performance Optimization using caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and CDN support.
The speed at which pages on your site load is a huge factor both for SEO and for the user experience of your site’s visitors. If your site takes too long to load, your site visitors will leave before they even fully arrive.
The problem is that every page load on WordPress requires the system to run functions, hooks, and database calls. The pages aren’t just static HTML files ready to be handed to your visitors…that is, until now.
W3 Total Cache creates cached HTML files for each page monumentally increasing your site’s load speed. It can also combine CSS and Javascript files into compressed, smaller versions. It can handle CDN’s, browser caching, database caching, object caching, and a whole slew of other caching functions.
W3 Total Cache is the best WordPress plugin on the market for caching. This is the go-to caching plugin used by some of the biggest websites on the web.
Runner Up: WP Rocket is a great paid solution for a caching plugin. If you want minimal setup and instant results, WP Rocket is a great solution.
They’ve also got a great support team, and have high marks from several members of our own team who use it.
Where W3 Total Cache offers incredible versatility, it’s the simplicity that most people love about WP Rocket.
2: Best SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO
Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast SEO plugin.
Yoast SEO is the undisputed world champion of all WordPress SEO plugins. The creators of this plugin have gone to extreme lengths to take all the complications out of SEO.
They provide step-by-step instructions on each facet of SEO including real-time feedback as you type into each field with colors and additional instructions that guide you right to where you need to be. This plugin analyzes your titles, descriptions, and content for length, keywords, and so much more.
This is the plugin that the professionals and experts use, and it’s the easiest, most intuitive plugin for novices as well.
Runner Up: All-in-one SEO is probably the second most popular WordPres SEO solution. With easy setup, and a solid track record, this might be a great alternative if Yoast seems like a bit too much.
3: Best Forms Plugins – Ninjas Forms
Manage forms easily with a simple drag and drop interface. Contact, subscription, or any other form for WordPress.
Ninja Forms offers intuitive and powerful form building. Even in its free version, you have everything you need to build beautiful and highly functional forms inside WordPress with a simple and straight-forward builder interface that any beginner can pick up in no time.
The level of customization of each form is also highly attractive to advanced users who want to create multiple complex forms with fine-tuned settings. And because it’s built to be developer-friendly, the growing number of add-ons makes it possible to do anything you can imagine with these forms.
Runner Up: Contact Form 7 is a staple in the WordPress community. It’s probably the most widely used of all WordPress forms plugins, and has been around for a very long time.
4: Best eCommerce Plugin: WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful, extendable eCommerce plugin that helps you sell anything. Beautifully.
Right out of the box, WooCommerce is by far the most robust eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Not only that, but there is also a huge collection of WooCommerce addons and specialized themes that have been created allowing WooCommerce to take care of anything you can possibly imagine.
This plugin makes it incredibly easy to get a shop setup with your products in it and to start selling fast. It can handle just about any payment gateway. It provides robust reporting options that allow you to see exactly how sales are performing at any given moment.
We began our business using WooCommerce here at Warfare Plugins, and we can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who’s serious about conducting eCommerce on their website.
Runner Up: Easy Digital Downloads is the solution we changed to last year after much debate and consideration among our team. Ultimately, it came down to the fact that EDD had a much simpler and versitle setup for ecommerce shops who strictly have digital products.
We highly recommend checking out Easy Digital Downloads first if you plan on only selling digital goods.
5: Best Redirection Plugin – Redirection
Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirects and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache.
Redirection is the go-to plugin for creating and managing 301 redirects across your site. It’s also incredibly terrific for personally branded affiliate links.
The plugin also tracks and logs 404 errors showing you which pages users have visited that don’t actually exist. You can then use that knowledge to create 301 redirects so that future visitors who land on those pages will be redirected to the appropriate post or page.
Redirection also automatically takes care of 301 redirects if you change the permalink of a post or page and even if you change the permalinks across your entire site.
6: Best Editorial Calendar Plugin – Co-Schedule
“This plugin connects to CoSchedule, a team content marketing editorial calendar. Send unlimited social messages with each post.”
Getting serious about your blog means you need a plan of attack. If you’re like me, it’s crucial to be able to visually map out and see what your plan is. It not only helps you stay on track, but it gives you an extra boost of motivation.
There is no better plugin for visually planning and coordinating your blog’s content than CoSchedule.
It not only allows you to visually manage your editorial calendar in a beautiful interface, but you can also do things like:
- Easily drag/drop blog posts and social media posts onto your calendar
- Add team members to collaborate with
- Assign and delegate tasks
- Collaborate with tools like Google Drive and Evernote
- Schedule posts to social media (even before the blog posts are published!)
- See your most popular posts and schedule them for social media promotion again
- Much more…
For anyone who wants to take their blog seriously with an editorial calendar strategy, CoSchedule is an indispensable tool.
Runner up: Editorial Calendar is a functional and free alternative if you’re just looking for a simple drag and drop calendar for your WordPress content. For many, CoSchedule may just be overkill but Editorial Calendar is just right.
7: Best Backup Plugin – Updraft Plus
Backup and restoration made easy. Complete manual or scheduled backups stored both on-site or off.
With the rise of website attacks taking place across the World Wide Web, it simply can’t be emphasized enough how important it is to have backups of your website in place. Updraft Plus takes care of this for you.
You can manually create backups of your complete website or you can schedule backups to be created at particular intervals. It even allows you to create off-site backups by storing the backups on Google Drive, Dropbox, or any of several other options. This means that if your site gets attacked, your backup won’t be touched.
Having your files and database backed up can allow you to restore your site after an attack in a matter of minutes so you can have peace of mind.
Updraft Plus is the best WordPress backup plugin on the market and currently sports over 600,000 active installs.
8: Best Security Plugin – Wordfence Security
Providing free enterprise-class WordPress security, protecting your website from hacks and malware.
Wordfence is a free, open-source security plugin for WordPress that provides enterprise-level security. It can scan your entire file system comparing files to the core WordPress repository including themes and plugins. This is excellent for detecting altered files which is almost always an indication of a hack or security breach.
It not only detects existing breaches, but it also works proactively to harden your WordPress from attacks.
9: Best Social Sharing Plugin – Social Warfare
Social Warfare allows you to have your content shared the way that you want it to be shared.
Social Warfare is our flagship product here at Warfare Plugins. You see, we couldn’t find a WordPress plugin that did everything that we needed a social sharing plugin to do so we decided to go ahead and create one ourselves.
Social Warfare allows you to set custom titles, descriptions and images that will be used when visitors share articles from your website. It even allows you to craft custom tweets and custom Pinterest images that will pre-populate the share boxes for your site visitors.
It’s easily the fastest social sharing plugin on the market. It has thousands of visual design combinations to choose from. It offers floating share buttons. It offers a popular posts widget that sort the posts by the number of shares. It offers tweet counts even though Twitter discontinued those counts. It offers in-article click-to-tweets calling users to share the article with stylish quotes.
10: Best Email Opt-in Plugin – OptinMonster
OptinMonster helps you grow your email list by converting visitors into subscribers and customers. Get more email subscribers now!
Popups sure are hotly debated. On one hand, a lot of folks sure do find them annoying. On the other hand, when used right, they double, triple, or even quadruple email subscriber opt-ins.
OptinMonster does all the heavy lifting for you making it easier than ever to create stylish popups that compel visitors to want to sign up to your email newsletter.
This plugin includes lots of customization options that allow you to create an opt-in that works for your site. You can create traditional popups, floating bars in the header or footer, forms that slide into view after the user has scrolled a certain distance, and more.
Runner up: PopupAlly is a great tool if you’re a beginner getting started with pop-up opt-in forms. You can get a good amount of functionality for free, and get your feet wet in the world of advanced lead capture.
11: Best Custom Fields Plugin – Advanced Custom Fields
Customize WordPress with powerful, professional and intuitive fields
Advanced Custom Fields allows you to take full control over the WordPress post editor screen, and it’s the ideal solution for custom data management. It makes it incredibly easy to create field groups, add your fields, and have it ready for data in a matter of minutes.
It comes with over 20 types of fields including text, textarea, checkbox, select, True/False, file, gallery, image, oEmbed, wysiwyg editor, color picker, date picker, Google maps, repeater fields, tabs, and relational fields.
Advanced Custom Fields is created for developers. Once the fields are in place, it has incredibly simple and intuitive functions for retrieving the field data and outputting it in your theme.
The bottom line is that if you enjoy working with custom fields or making customizations to your site’s themes, this is a must-have plugin!
12: Best Analytics Plugin – Monster Insights
Monster Insights allow you to connect your WordPress website with Google Analytics, so you can see how visitors find and use your website, so you can keep them coming back. Simply put, we show you the stats that matter.
Using Google Analytics to track crucial metrics for your blog is a given these days. There’s no such thing as having a website without installing Google Analytics.
In order to do this though, traditionally you would need to add a line of code to the header of your website or WordPress theme. That means if you ever change your WordPress theme, you’d need to remember to do that all over again. This is why we recommend Monster Insights–from the same people behind Optin Monster.
Since the plugin handles the Google Analytics integration, you only need to set it up once and even if you change themes, you don’t have to set it up again.
On top of that, it also allows you to add a few extra tracking parameters for events, downloads, and even which users should be ignored from tracking (like Administrators). It’s the perfect Analytics integration, and we don’t even have a runner-up for it.
Wrapping This Up
I hope you found at least a few plugins that will help you in your journey to creating a rock-solid, power-house WordPress powered site.
If there are any plugins that you think deserve to be on this list but were left out, please let us know in the comments below!
nice, i’m also developing website using wrodpress cms. Thanks a lot!
Quiz polls are also better on sites. They help not only to collect information about customers’ preferences for the purchase of certain goods and services, but also give a significant increase in SEO, as they increase behavioral indicators. There is an excellent stepFORM plugin that allows you to create similar quizas. Questionnaires can be added not only to the site, but for example in the email newsletter or sent to the client directly in the messenger.
Yes, I agree. Yoast SEO is the undisputed world champion of all WordPress SEO plugins. Very nice plugin!
Compared to other sharing plugins, Social Warfare Pro has outdone itself. No other social sharing tool can provide great features such as social optimization tools, twitter share count, click to tweet features, and twitter cards. I give this plugin thumbs up to its developers. It has been my choice, and have used it for years hence, am sure it will be yours too. Get it to maximize your WordPress website or blog experience.
Good list!
I am also using Woocommerce and it is for sure the best ecommerce solution for WP. But I am also installing “WooCommerce Live Checkout Field Capture” to know when my checkout or cart is abandoned.
Thank you for the great plugin selection. I’ve got 4 /10
Amazing collection! Especially loved wordfence
Thanks for sharing! I like it
Hey Nicholas, Thanks, man for this post. Informative as well as very interesting, especially the way you write. Keep up the good job man. Keep posting.
This is a great starting point for newbies who aren’t familiar with these plugins..
thank you very much for the tip I really like
You’re welcome, Nadia!
A perfect list you provided. Thank you for sharing this list with us.
You can also add images gallery, pop up, website builder plugins as well.
I agree with a number of them. I dig your plugin. I’ve never tried Ninja Forms, but Gravity Forms smokes Contact Form 7. I’m surprised BackupBuddy didn’t get a mention either.
This is a great starting point for newbies who aren’t familiar with these plugins. Thanks for sharing.
Yoast SEO is an absolute must plugin for any wordpress site and I use it on all my sites.
Great list. I alway use yoast seo dan w3 total cache. I also use google xml sitemap plugin for indexing my site more faster
Your opinion with me is similar. In my opinion yoast is the best in seo category, w3total cache is the best in cache tools category. updraftplus is the best in backup category. I use jetpack also because it has complete feature.
I used Yoast SEO Plugin for my blog and it helped me lots for generating traffic.
Hello,
I have started blogging myself. I am trying to find out the basic problems that my blog is having and looking for solutions. Also, I’m searching for some basic things like themes and other stuff.
I have read your whole article, I am looking forward to getting a positive result after performing this myself.
Can you suggest me any basic idea that I might need in the future as a new blogger?
Thank you
Nice post but I don’t agree on cache plugin. I tested it many times. WP Rocket it much better.
We actually just switched to WP Rocket too. lol
Great plugins. Thanks for sharing that with us.
Thanks for sharing these. Installed and running a WordFence scan now and about to add Social Warfare, too.
Great collection. You described very good list of plugins.
I just installed User Activity Log Pro Plugin on my website. It is very helpful to monitoring and tracking of all the activities occurs on the admin side.
Great plugins. Thanks for sharing that with us.
Most people avoid security plugin when it comes to wordpress, but having a plugin like Wordfence make life lot easier. I install all the listed plugin on the first strep after installing wp on any domain. Great in-dept list.
Hey Nicholas,
This article includes all essential plugins which would be required by everyone at some point in their blogging career. Thanks for sharing such great list with us. I am going to give a try to Wordfence Security plugin as it is must to have on a blog.
Thanks
Hi,
How much does the Social Warfare plugin cost for 3 sites?
I see the price for 5 sites, but I do not need it, pay for 2 sites that I do not have, not the means to do that.
Hi Wolfneo! You would simply buy 3 single-site licenses.
Very nice information. I was searching for best sharing plugin. I shall try this one. Thank you for information.
You’re welcome!
Great list, I use half of them already and the other half I’m going to give a try. Thanks for putting this together.
What about some promising newcomers like https://woobought.com/ ? Most ones in this list are great, but not from 2016 :).
Amazing List Nicholas,i use most of them on my site and i am really proud of that.
Also,along with them,i also use Transposh as a Translation plugin,because my site is ML and hence i need a translation plugin.
But great curation on your part.
For good plug-in I use is https://wp-rocket.me/ and https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/ they help me a lot on my wordpress page
That’s impressive! I believe that social warfare stands out of the crowd when it comes to social sharing plugins. I’ve used almost all the plugins mentioned and really feels confident after using them. Thanks for this awesome list.
Great plugins. Thanks for sharing that with us.
I’d love to see ImageInject as one of the recommended plugins:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-inject/
I’ve already tried all of the plugins, and yes, several of them are the best but the rest aren’t.
Good list btw.
Thank you, I love this plugin! Everyone, it connects the FREE photos in the Creative Commons library to your WordPress website!
Nice list of plugins, I am using most of the above stated plugins and they ar performing great. I am using itheme security and am ok with it. But I think Broken Link Checker should be on the list.
Yes, great addition Ogunrinola! I also use Broken Link Checker on my personal blog.
Nice list post! Some great plugins in this list. Would love to get your thoughts on our new automatic comment moderation plugin, WFP team. We’re focused on removing bullying and hate speech from the internet. The plugin is in the early stages right now, but would appreciate any constructive feedback you might have! Thanks in advance 🙂
Great List!!! thx!!!
Nice, you mentioned some great plug-ins! I used the Trustbadge reviews widget on my online shop https://www.litespot.co.uk/ to collect and show customer reviews. It’s fairly easy to use. They have many integrations in different shop systems. And it comes with 7 languages and is mobile-optimized. There’s a freemium version available at at http://www.trustbadge.com so you can try yourself if it helps 🙂
My number one must have plugin for every website owner is “duplicator clone”. It is the most effective,easy and simple to use backup plugin. You can duplicate,backup your website,clone your website or migrate wordpress website from one hosting place to another for free.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator-clone/
UpDraftPlus is a great free plugin for backups but recently I started using VaultPress services. Basic daily backups plan is very affordable ($5).
Google Authenticator is another great free security plugin to add two-factor authentication to your blog.
For Spam protection, LHZeroSpam is a great free plugin. This is not very popular plugin, I found this one very useful.
W3 Total Cache, Yoast SEO, Google XML Sitemaps and a plugin for tracking broken links are the essential wordpress plugin to every wordpress hosted site. The truth is, using many plugins together isn’t a smart way, buত listed 11 plugins are obviously recommended as well as with the above plugins which i’ve mentioned. BTW, niche sharing dude.
As someone else said, WP Rocket caching plugin wins hands down over W3 Total cache IMHO. Used W3 for years on many sites and it was always time-consuming to set up and test with various site configurations, particularly using a lot of js. One day it started throwing up an error I just didn’t have time to try and sort out, so I tried out WP Rocket. In all honesty, I installed it, clicked a few things – and it ran. Slowly rolled it out across other sites and found it a breeze, and the speed increase was great. Downside for some – you will have to pay for it. But I have found that if you just want something to work, shell out and pay for the premium. Build it into the site cost. Done the same for Yoast and others. As an aside – found the same with backup solutions. Faffed around with different things, but found that Vaultpress was the same deal as WP Rocket. Paying for it and it ‘just works’. Install and forget. Am going to check out your guys social warfare plugin as I like the look of it!
My two cents.
I totally agree Paul. We’ve actually been testing out WP Rocket on our beta site and I’m pretty happy with it. Great group of people behind it as well!
I included your list in my crowdsourcing (and then some) post on the topic –
http://yeys.com/114/6-wordpress-plugins-that-i-think-will-actually-benefit-my-blogs/
Thanks!
Yes, I saw that Anne! Thanks for that. Curious as to why you passed up on Social Warfare for your sharing tool of choice. Would love to hear your feedback! 😀
Great collection. Thanks for sharing.
You’re welcome!
HI,
I am using WordPress SEO by Yoast and i am satisfied with it as compare to All in one SEO, I have a question which arises into my mind that, Some Plugins are out dated or not compatible with the latest or current version of WordPress, or these are not updated from many years, Can we use these plugin on our blog is they work or have any issue ??
I would not recommend using plugins that are not regularly updated.
There is no doubt that These are the must have WordPress plugins for every blogger.
Currently I am using few of them like Yoast SEO, Jetpack, W3 Total Cache, Redirection, Wp Smush.it.
For WordPress security, I am using ” iThemes security ” also known as ” Better WP Security “.
Thanks for sharing this list with us.
You’re welcome Brenda!
Hi Nicolas,
I am using Woocommerce. It’s the easiest ecommerce plugin in the market. For contact form I am using WPForms Lite. It is incredibly easy to use.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpforms-lite/
Hi Nicholas and Dustin,
I almost agreed to every plugin you recommend. Almost.
But guys, have you ever tried WP Rocket ? It is BY FAR the best cache plugin out there. You should definitely give it a try.
And Imagify (their image compression plugin) rocks too.
I consider you guys as the “WP Rocket of the social shares” so trust me: you won’t be disappointed!
I have seen WP Rocket before Nicolas, just never tried it. I’ve been taking a close look at them as a business though as we grow ours and I’ve gained some keen insight from their approach to transparency, marketing and business model.
If you ever want to reach out to them, don’t hesitate to ask. Cince I’m in the French WordPress ecosystem I can introduce you very easily.
Thank you for everything you do Dustin!
having issues with Social warfare and Wp Rocket though 🙁 (already emailed u Dustin)
Hi Nicholas,
Yes to most of these! And good to see Jason throw in the Broken Link Checker. That plugin is gold!
The only reason I’m not endorsing them all is I haven’t used them all.
Isn’t the Yoast plugin an incredible story? That one continues to dominate. Nobody can seem to create a better SEO plugin.
My audience will appreciate this post, so I’ll be sharing, Nicholas.
Thanks,
Matthew
Thanks for sharing these. Installed and running a WordFence scan now and about to add Social Warfare, too. BUT Yoast SEO — ugh. After 3.0 version it is not worth using. Editing screen freezes up if you have a longer post and it’s been wreaking havoc for users. Been looking for a SEO plugin now to replace it.
Awesome Marian! Hope you love both WordFence and Social Warfare! Sorry to hear about the trouble with Yoast. I haven’t had any trouble since version 3.0, but I have heard a small rumble of negative feedback about recent updates.
Hi Dustin,
I am facing a issue in my disabling wordpress right sidebar for particular theme.
Please let me know is there any plugin available that I can install.
Thank you
Vijay Bhabhor
Great collection- picked up a few good pointers. Thanks! Have I told you lately how much I love Social Warfare? I was publishing a piece today and used the SW Click To Tweet version. It’s such a happy thing to have the ease for changing the content of the tweet from the quote on the post. Love that!
I just installed updraftplus on my wp site… after trying two other backup plugins with (dropbox) less than perfect results (timeout errors) I think I finally found a keeper! It’s slow… but it gets the job done. Thank you!
Glad you like it Geckonia!
I would also add Broken Link Checker, User Role Editor, and Widget Logic
Great article and wrap-up of the “Must have’s”
You’re absolutely right Jason! How could we forget that one! Will add it in at the end.
100% agree with you Dustin.
I highly suggest Widget Options : https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-options/ instead of widget logic 😉
I second widget-options. Great plugin. Easy to use.
Great plugins resource. Thanks for sharing that with us.
You’re welcome, John!
It solves my problem. Thanks for sharing.
Completely agree with that tbh