WordPress is fun and blogging sometimes can turn from a weekends hobby to a full time business online generating massive revenue. But if you really consider making your blog a business, you’re going to need to enhance your platform. Galleries to show off your work, easy to manage contact forms, ads management. Here is a list of 100 best wordpress plugins that you absolutely must have in order to smoothly run a creative, professionally looking WordPress blog.
100+ Best WordPress Plugins in 2023
Here’s a list of 100 WordPress plugins that are extremely useful for enhancing your blog’s functionality:
- Yoast SEO: Helps with SEO optimization.
- Jetpack: Offers security, improved performance, and site management.
- Akismet Anti-Spam: Filters out spam comments.
- WooCommerce: For ecommerce functionalities.
- WordFence Security: For improved site security.
- WP Super Cache: Improves site performance through caching.
- Contact Form 7: For creating and managing contact forms.
- MonsterInsights: To connect your site with Google Analytics.
- Smush: For image optimization.
- All In One SEO Pack: An alternative to Yoast SEO.
- Elementor: A drag and drop page builder.
- UpdraftPlus: For backup and restoration.
- WP Rocket: A comprehensive caching plugin to speed up your site.
- MailChimp for WordPress: Integrate your site with the MailChimp newsletter service.
- Really Simple SSL: Helps configure SSL and ensure all resources are SSL compatible.
- Revolution Slider: Create sliders with various animation effects.
- Rank Math: Another great SEO plugin.
- WPBakery Page Builder: A comprehensive page builder.
- Broken Link Checker: Checks your site for broken links and missing images.
- WP-Optimize: Helps optimize your site’s database, clean up your website and enhance performance.
- Redirection: Manages 301 redirections and track 404 errors.
- Advanced Custom Fields: Allows you to add custom fields to your WP edit screens.
- Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons: Adds social share buttons to your site.
- TablePress: Lets you create and manage tables on your site.
- W3 Total Cache: Another caching plugin to improve site performance.
- NextGEN Gallery: For managing large image galleries.
- The Events Calendar: A comprehensive plugin for managing events.
- WPML: For multi-language support.
- Popup Maker: Creates popups for your website.
- WP Forms: Drag & drop WordPress form builder.
- Instagram Feed: Display beautifully clean, customizable, and responsive Instagram feeds.
- LearnDash: A Learning Management System for selling online courses.
- Ninja Forms: Another user-friendly form builder.
- WP Review: Create reviews, using stars, percentage or point rating.
- Sucuri Security: For auditing, malware scanner and security hardening.
- iThemes Security: Provides various ways to secure your WordPress site.
- Google XML Sitemaps: Helps search engines index your blog.
- Duplicator: For migrating, copying, moving or cloning a site.
- Easy Digital Downloads: A complete e-commerce system for selling digital products.
- Disable Comments: Allows administrators to globally disable comments on their site.
- Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP): Displays Google Analytics Reports and Real-Time Statistics.
- Simple 301 Redirects: Provides an easy method of redirecting requests to another page on your site.
- Smart Slider 3: Helps you create sliders and blocks for your website.
- Litespeed Cache: A server-level caching plugin.
- Thrive Architect: Another good page builder plugin.
- WP Fastest Cache: Another popular WordPress caching plugin.
- BuddyPress: Allows you to build any kind of community website using WordPress.
- Admin Menu Editor: Lets you edit the WordPress admin menu.
- BBPress: For creating forum on your WordPress site.
- AddToAny Share Buttons: Lets your visitors share your posts and pages to any service.
- Pretty Links: Shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL.
- Members: Extends your control over your blog.
- Relevanssi: Improves the default WordPress search.
- Polylang: Allows you to create a bilingual or multilingual WordPress site.
- Bloom: An email opt-in and lead generation plugin for WordPress.
- BackWPup: Schedule complete automatic backups of your WordPress installation.
- Schema: Helps you add schema.org structured data markup in recommended JSON-LD format automatically.
- Imagify: Another image optimization plugin.
- Social Warfare: Adds beautiful, lightning-fast social share buttons.
- SEOPress: A powerful plugin to optimize your SEO, boost your traffic, improve social sharing and more.
- WPS Hide Login: A very light plugin to easily and safely change the url of the login form page.
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer: Compresses images and improves performance.
- All In One WP Security & Firewall: A comprehensive, user-friendly, all in one WordPress security and firewall plugin.
- Thrive Leads: Helps in building your mailing list faster.
- Regenerate Thumbnails: Allows you to regenerate all thumbnails after changing the thumbnail sizes.
- Cookie Notice for GDPR: Allows you to elegantly inform users that your site uses cookies.
- Easy Table of Contents: An easy way to add a table of contents to your posts.
- Advanced Ads: Helps manage and optimize your ads.
- Slider Revolution: Helps you to create sliders, carousels, hero headers, content modules, etc.
- Autoptimize: Helps to optimize your site by minifying scripts and styles, compressing images, etc.
- Login LockDown: Limits the number of login attempts from a given IP range.
- ThirstyAffiliates: A tool for bloggers to make money from their content.
- Envira Gallery: Helps you to create beautiful responsive photo & video galleries.
- Compress JPEG & PNG images: By TinyPNG, optimizes your images.
- Essential Grid: A premium plugin for creating beautiful grids of your posts, pages, or any custom post type.
- MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress: Helps you grow your Mailchimp lists.
- MainWP Dashboard: Helps you control virtually all of your daily WordPress maintenance tasks.
- Loco Translate: Provides in-browser editing of WordPress translation files.
- Disable Emojis: Disables the new emojis functionality in WordPress.
- GiveWP: A comprehensive donation plugin for WordPress.
- WordPress Popular Posts: A highly customizable widget that displays the most popular posts.
- Soliloquy: Helps you to create beautiful responsive sliders.
- The SEO Framework: An easy-to-use WordPress SEO plugin.
- WordPress Importer: Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more.
- All-in-One Event Calendar: An advanced events calendar solution.
- User Role Editor: Change user roles and capabilities.
- WP RSS Aggregator: Collects RSS feeds from various sources.
- Photo Gallery: A comprehensive gallery plugin.
- Swift Performance: Another caching and performance plugin.
- WPGlobus: Adds multilingual support to your WordPress site.
- YITH WooCommerce Wishlist: Add a Wishlist functionality to your e-commerce.
- WP Google Maps: Create custom Google Maps with markers.
- MetaSlider: Easy to use slider plugin.
- WP Mail SMTP: Helps improve email deliverability.
- Post Duplicator: Duplicates posts along with their settings.
- Gravity Forms: Advanced forms for WordPress.
- FooGallery: Another responsive image gallery plugin.
- EWWW Image Optimizer: Optimizes images as you upload them.
- Ultimate Member: Helps you create online communities.
- Under Construction / Maintenance Mode from Acurax: Lets you display an Under Construction, Maintenance Mode or Coming Soon page.
These plugins will greatly enhance your blog’s functionality, user experience, and overall performance. Remember to keep plugins updated to their latest version for best performance and security.
1. All in One Shortcodes Plugin
All-In-One Shortcodes plugin allows you to add endless amount of easy-to-use shortcodes combination of to ANY WordPress theme and customize the appearance of your content in seconds. Almost each shortcode comes loaded with practically unlimited colors, size and icon combinations. Now you can choose from
- dark icon buttons,
- light icon buttons,
- 3 sizes of web 2.0 colored buttons,
- social bookmark sharing: twitter, facebook, google, etc,.
- jquery powered colored tooltips,
- jquery powered toggles – multiple transition effects,
- jquery powered tabs – multiple transition, effects,
- quotes – multiple design variations,
- dropcaps – unlimited possibilities with any size of color,
- google maps,
- google charts,
- nivo slider gallery – any transition effect,
- colored boxes – unlimited icon/color combination,
- columns,
- video integration for youtube and vimeo – control the size directly from wordpress,
- login / password protected box.
2. All-In-One Cufon plugin
All-In-One Cufon plugin allows you an easy replacement of standard fonts with beautiful catchy fonts.
This plugin implements Simo Kinnunen’s Cufón script, which aspires to become a worthy alternative to sIFR.
3. Manage who sees the ads
Advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, depending on user defined conditions.
4. WP Super Edit
WP Super Edit adds a host of WYSIWYG options to the standard WP visual editor. It adds two full rows of additional features to your visual editor toolbar, including options for applying specific styles and for adding and formatting tables. It’s known to work with version 2.8 and 2.8.1.
5. Events Calendar Pro
- Manage event details in the Events post type
- Upcoming Events Widget
- Provides full template to complement the 2010 theme out of the box (month and list view)
- Extensive template tags for customization
- Google Maps Integration
- Calendar Month view with tooltips
- Detailed List view
- In Depth Screencast and Documentation included just to be safe!
- Includes support for venue, cost, address, start and end time, google maps link
- Support for international addresses, time and languages
6. Facebook Traffic Pop for WordPress
Tap into Facebook’s 600 million plus users now with the hottest Facebook traffic plugin. Facebook traffic pop is a new breed of ‘popups’ that will allow you to have your users like your pages, instead of trying to get them to click ads. More likes = more exposure = more traffic = more money!
7. Twitter Ultimate-Wordpress Plugin
Twitter Ultimate – A WordPress Plugin offer following features
- Realtime Twitter Feed-Live Tweets
A realtime incoming tweets,live tweets
- ShortcodesShortcodes which helps to embed directly into page or post
- Multiple instance You can have multiple instances of twitter ultimate feed
- Multiple Query/Username Options – You can display tweets from multiple queries or usernames
- Two types of search – You can either display tweets from usernames or tweets mentioning a word
- Autoplay On/Off – Realtime incoming tweets can be disabled/enabled on load
- Start/Stop Feed – Options to start or pause incoming tweets
- Speed Control Options – Ability to control speed of incoming tweets
Tweets count options Options to control number of tweets to be shown in the feed - Width Control option Options to control width of the feed widget
- Easily Customizable
8. WP No External Links
Mask all external links to internal! In your own posts, comments pages, authors page… It does not change anything or write to base – just processes output.
9. Spell, Style and Grammar check with After the Deadline
Smart plugin that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions.
10. 5sec Maintenance Mode
- 6 beautiful, funny templates to make your visitors less angry while you’re offline
- customizable countdown timer
- customizable progress bar
- fully editable templates
- customizable complex access rules by user groups and IP-s
- temporary access links for your clients
- SEO and Google friendly
- disables feeds too
- famous 5sec installation – everything is preset for you
11. Visual Composer for WordPress
Visual Composer for WordPress will save you tons of time working on the site content. Now you’ll be able to create complex layouts within minutes! Have you ever noticed how much time you spend fighting with [shortcodes]? No more trial and errors with “shortcodes magic” – Visual Composer will take care of that. Add columns/elements with one click, then use your mouse to drag elements around to re-arrange them. Control element width with simple mouse clicking.
12. Tweet Blender
Similar in functionality to Twitter’s own widget but has support for multiple authors, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.
13. WordPress Email Newsletter Plugin
The email newsletter plugin is an advanced bulk emailer designed especially for WordPress 3. It is very easy to use and feature rich. Heaps of features which allow you to quickly send professional newsletters to your existing wordpress user database.
14. Clicky
While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.
15. Twitter Avatars In Comments
Self explaining comment title, plug-in that uses Twitter to show avatars in comments in WordPress blogs.
16. SI CAPTCHA for WordPress
Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or regiser, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WPMU and BuddyPress compatible.
17. Old Post Promoter
Old Post Promoter will choose posts at random from your published collection and change their publication dates so that they will appear on your front page and in your RSS feed. Note that this does not work if your permalink structure includes dates.
18. Custom Widget Areas for WordPress
Have you ever wanted to show different Sidebars (Widget Areas) on Pages, Posts, Custom Post Types or even inside your content? Then this is exactly what you need.
This plugin lets you create your own Sidebars (widget areas), configure them by adding widgets, and replace the default sidebars on Pages, Posts (single Posts), Categories and Custom Post Types or even show widgets directly in the content of Pages or Posts. You can easily assign a sidebar (custom widget area) to any individual Page, Post or Custom Post Type.
19. TinyMCEComments
This plugin turns the comment field from a primitive into a WYSIWYG editor, using the internal TinyMCE library bundled with WordPress 2.0 or up, without the need of another separate installation. Functions that only available to writers like adding images were removed and will not show up in the toolbar.
20. SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF)
SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) is an Ajax powered modal contact form. It utilizes the jQuery JavaScript library and the SimpleModal jQuery plugin.
21. uPricing – Pricing Table for WordPress
uPricing is a pricing table for WordPress. We have been developing it for our WordPress themes, but have decided to release it as a standalone plugin. It is a premium quality Pricing Table with a nicely polished WordPress admin.
22. Accordion Image Menu
This is a different menu that uses your post images as a background. You can insert the menu wherever you want: content, php files or widget if your theme allows it.
23. Quick Search
Quick Search add AJAX Search to your site sorting results by Posts, Page and Comments. You can easly customize the popup menu style by modifying the file quick-search.css.
24. Ozh’ Better Plugin Page
Better Plugin Page brings a few valueable enhancements to the Plugin Management page: tiny icons, less clutter, quick action links. Handy for those who have 70+ plugins on their blog.
25. Advanced Spoiler
Show or hide contents(text, image etc.) with animated effects wrapped by spoiler markup tag([spoiler][/spoiler]).
26. GD Star Rating
GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and also add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin. Plugin includes advanced settings panels that will allow you to control many aspects of rating. Plugin also supports multi ratings along with thumbs based ratings.
27. UberMenu – WordPress Mega Menu Plugin
UberMenu is a user-friendly, highly customizable mega menu ( or mega drop down menu ) WordPress plugin. It works out of the box with the WordPress 3 Menu Management System, making it simple to get started but powerful enough to create highly customized and creative mega menu configurations.
28. Easy Comment Uploads
This plugin allow your visitors to attach images or other file to their comments as easily as possible.
29. Quote Comments
This plugin adds a tiny link that says “Quote” on each comment on your posts. Click it, and the contents of the comment is copied to the comment area, wrapped in blockquote tags. It’s even compatible with MCEComments plugin.
30. SEO Super Comments
For each user comment plugin will create a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information. This page will not actually exist in WordPress database, but we will create it dynamically using a WordPress plugin.
What we instantly get in this way is big jump in site’s index visible to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawl-able, index-able and most importantly rank-able content. Also meaning you will start to get search engine traffic for the context of the comment.
31. uBillboard – Premium Slider for WordPress
uBillboard is a slider for WordPress. We have been developing sliders for our WordPress themes for over a year now, and all that experience has been distilled into this one slider plugin. It is a premium quality jQuery-based slider with a nicely polished WordPress admin.
32. TTFTitles
The TTFTitles plugin is another dynamic text replacement plugin that lets you replace your headers with images using any TrueType font you choose. It’s mostly a rework of the Image Headlines plugin. It has been tested with WP 1.5.2 up through 2.7.
33. Image Drop Shadow
Image Drop Shadow wordpress plugin adds stylish drop shadow to images posted on your blog using jQuery. Just install it and all your posted images will automatically have a drop shadow.
34. J Post Slider
Show your post in fancy jQuery box, rotating images, with show-up text box with post description. This Plugin will present your HOT posts, in jQuery animation show.
35. Live Blogroll
Live Blogroll will make your blogroll livelier. It will show a number of ‘recent posts’ for each link in your Blogroll using Ajax.
36. Adding Form Validation to Comments using jQuery
This tutorial will show you how to use jQuery to do some instant checking on an example comment form.
37. Snazzy Archives
Snazzy Archives is a visualization plugin for your WordPress site featuring an unique way to display all your posts. Your archive page will never be boring again!
38. Lightbox Evolution for WordPress
Lightbox Evolution is a tool for displaying images, html content, maps, and videos in a “lightbox” style that floats overtop of web page. Using Lightbox Evolution, website authors can showcase a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.
39. Ozh’ Absolute Comments
Absolute Comments is a comment manager plugin that lets you instantly reply to comments, either from the original Manage Comments administration page, or from the email notification, without the hassle of visiting the post first.
40. NoFollow Free
This WordPress plugin remove the “nofollow” attribute from your wordpress blog’s comments (precisely from the author’s links) and/or from the comments text links and it inserts (if you want) an image band at the top of your pages with the phrase: “NOFOLLOW FRE” to encourage your users to submit comments. The last release includes new options to replace the nofollow only when the author posted X comments before and put back the nofollow when some blacklisted words are matched. The replacement of the nofollow is also based on the users type (registered and visitor users). Every option can be customized by the options page “NOFF”.
41. jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries
Makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox to display the fullsize images.
42. jQuery Comment Preview
Live comment preview without page reboot. Works on jQuery.
43. WordPress Plugin jQuery Pagebar
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.
44. Google Analyticator
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
45. Subscribe to Comments
Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!
46. Social Media Plugin for WordPress
This plug-in adds social media sharing options under the content section on WordPress Posts and Pages.
47. Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry, with Double-Opt-In Feature. Based on version 2 of “Subscribe to Comments” from Mark Jaquith
48. WP Comment Remix
WP Comment Remix adds a plethora of new options and features to WordPress. From Reply and Quote links for commenters, to a full upgrade to the edit comments pages in the admin panel, WPCR will save you time and effort when running your blog.
49. Tango Smileys Extended
Smileys in comments is also supported, and may be inserted using the standard emotion shorthand or through the CTI interface introduced in TSE 2.0.1b.
50. Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering
This plugin numbers your comments sequentially and hierarchically, with full support for the new comment features available in WordPress 2.7 and later — including threading, paging, and your choice of ascending or descending date order.
51. WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam
An extremely powerful WordPress anti-spam plugin that eliminates blog comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-free contact form feature as well.
52. Simple Pull Quote
The Simple Pull Quote plugin lets you insert pull quotes into your blog posts to emphasize certain sentences or phrases using custom fields. Pull quotes can be styled by editing the included CSS file. It works with WP 2.7 or 2.8.
53. Live Comment Preview
Live Comment Preview is the simplest way to get live comment previews on your site. Simply activate the plugin -That’s it! This plugin uses only client-side Javascript to format a preview, it does not make any Ajax requests to the server. This provides a smooth live preview as you type.
54. AJAXed WordPress
AWP’s basic features include inline paginated posts, inline comments, threaded comments, the ability to submit comments with AJAX, pagination of your homepage, live comment preview and much more, but it does not, however, force you to use any feature, and it also allows all aspects of the plugin to be easily customized through a single Administration panel. It also has special features that will ensure compatibility with many other plugins.
55. Ajax Comment Posting
There are many comment-related plugins in WordPress plugin directory. However, if you’d like to find just a simple comment-posting Ajax plugin, you won’t find any. That’s why I developed a simple and small (5kB) yet functional Ajax Comment Posting (ACP) plugin. Not only will it post your comment without refreshing the page, but it will also make sure that you’ve filled all the form fields correctly.
56. Akismet
Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.
57. WP Ajax Edit Comments
WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.5+) allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.
58. OpenID
OpenID is an open standard that allows users to authenticate to websites without having to create a new password. This plugin allows users to login to their local WordPress account using an OpenID, as well as enabling commenters to leave authenticated comments with OpenID. The plugin also includes an OpenID provider, enabling users to login to OpenID-enabled sites using their own personal WordPress account. XRDS-Simple is required for the OpenID Provider and some features of the OpenID Consumer.
59. GD Star Rating
GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. I featured this plugin some time ago already, but this is totally related to comments.
60. IntenseDebate Comments
IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!
61. PayPal Payment Terminal WordPress
Features:
-display as widget in sidebar or in any page/post -unlimited services addition
-super easy installation
-view all transactions
-filter transactions by date period
-sort and search transaction list
-customizable widget area fields
-automatic notifications to you and your customer
– NEW in v2.0 shortcode [pppt_paypalform] – allows to display paypal payment form on any page/post of your wordpress site!
62. WordPress jquery slider/banner image rotator
Have you ever thought of having slider/banner and ads on one page and every one they’re JavaScript driven? Imagine how cool it is! you’ll be able to have one JavaScript file and multiple sliders. dump the ugly animated GIFs or Flash ads. If you have already got one li slider, simply add another unordered list and initialize the new slider / banner. Done! you have got a further slider or ad banner. perhaps you would like to update your banner? perhaps the show dates modified or the merchandise worth in your ad has change? No downside, merely upload the new image with an equivalent name, and you have got a current ad. it’s over cool! Save time, save work and simply be artistic.
63. WP update notifier plugin
The update notifier is a simple wordpress plugin to display notifications to your user when you update something or when you wish to make an announcement. The plugin is simple yet effective and extremely usefull.
This plugin:
- Is easy to install & configure
- Has 8 Different colors available
- Allows easy archiving
- Is cross browser compatible
64. Google Web Fonts for WordPress
Google Fonts Pro is a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to instantly access over 200 of Google’s Web Fonts with power and ease. You can take full control over the font and typography used on your site in a matter of minuets!
65. Twitter Traffic Pop for WordPress
Instead of forcing your visitors to see popups with ads, why not ask them to Tweet instead! Tap into Twitter’s 100 million plus users with this hot new popup style marketing tactic. Make Twitter your slave with one line of code! More tweets = more exposure = more traffic = more money!
66. WordPress Geo IP Redirect
A self-contained GeoIP Redirection script that utilizes the native PHP GeoIP library, Geo API and Browser Language.
- Very simple to install, 3 steps and you’re done!
- Uses accurate PHP GeoIP functions.
- Incase you don’t have these enabled (GoDaddy shared customers), it will fallback to using a reliable API to determine the users country.
- For added protection or incase the API returns an unexpected result, it uses the browser language in a last attempt of a possible redirect.
- Users will know no different, no waiting, no loading bars, seamless redirection.
- Utilizes PHP $_SESSIONS for optimisation and security.
- Uses a Search Friendly 302 redirect.
- Transfers any query strings in the URL to the new location.