One of the great things about WordPress is its huge collection of plugins, but finding the best WordPress plugins can sometimes feel like an insurmountable hurdle.
Consider this number:
58,966
That’s the number of plugins listed at WordPress.org at the time that we’re writing this post.
Having all those options is great, but how do you sift through them to find the best plugins for your site?
Well, you could try installing all 58,966…but that sounds like a lot of work. Instead, let us do the work for you.
Based on our collective decades of experience with WordPress and WordPress plugins, we curated a list of the best WordPress plugins for key features that all WordPress sites need, broken down into 38 different categories.
You won’t end up using every single plugin. However, by the end of this post, we guarantee that you’ll discover some high-quality plugins to improve your WordPress site.
Let’s dig in!
Best WordPress Security Plugins
Having the best WordPress plugins won’t help you if your site gets hacked. So let’s kick off our list with two of the best security plugins to keep your site safe.
WP Cerber
WP Cerber is a freemium WordPress security plugin that offers a comprehensive approach to WordPress security.
It can help you prevent security issues on your site in the first place via its firewall and built-in security hardening rules, such as limiting login attempts.
Then, it can also help you check for any issues on your site via its malware scanning and file integrity checking.
Finally, it also includes tons of anti-spam tools, including geo-blocking options that let you block problematic countries or regions.
Price: Free. Pro version from $99.
Wordfence
Wordfence is the most popular WordPress security plugin. It offers a full-service approach to security, with basic hardening rules, a proactive firewall, and malware/security scanning.
You’ll also get access to other useful features, such as two-factor authentication for your WordPress account.
Best of all, pretty much all the features are free. The one caveat is that new firewall and malware definitions are delayed by 30 days in the free version. For real-time rule updates, you need the paid version.
Price: Free. Premium version from $99.
Best WordPress Backup Plugins
Lots of stuff can go wrong on your website — with one of these three backup plugins, you can be confident that no issue will be disastrous because you’ll always have a clean backup.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the most popular free WordPress backup plugin, thanks in large part to its reliability and integration with a range of cloud storage providers, including Google Drive, Amazon S3, and many others.
You can back up your site manually or also set up an automatic schedule. You can also create partial backups (e.g. just your database) and schedule different parts of your site to back up on different frequencies (such as backing up your database every and your files once per week).
Check out our UpdraftPlus tutorial to learn more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $70.
Duplicator
Duplicator is primarily known as one of the best WordPress migration plugins, but it also makes a great option for backups (especially if you purchase the premium plugin).
With the free version, you can download a copy of your site to your local computer as two simple files. With the Pro version, you get useful features such as off-site cloud storage, scheduled backups, support for larger websites, and more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $69.
BlogVault
BlogVault is a high-powered WordPress backup plugin that automatically backs up your site to secure off-site storage in the BlogVault cloud.
Beyond backing up your data, it can also help you with:
- One-click restores
- Migrations
- Staging sites (including merging staging with live)
If you have a WooCommerce store or dynamic site, it also supports real-time incremental backups so that you can instantly back up changes as they happen and never lose data.
Price: Seven-day free trial. From $89/year after that.
Best WordPress Membership Plugins
Membership plugins let you restrict your content, sell memberships, and manage communities from your WordPress dashboard. Here are two of the best options.
MemberPress
MemberPress is a full-service membership plugin that includes everything you need to create a free or paid membership site.
You can create unlimited membership levels and use them to restrict access to some or all of your site’s content. You’ll also get advanced restriction options such as content dripping and expiration.
You can accept payments via the built-in integrations, along with options to create coupons.
If you want to create online courses, MemberPress even includes its own lightweight LMS (Learning Management System) add-on.
Price: From $179.
Restrict Content Pro
Restrict Content Pro is a well-coded and extensible membership plugin that originally came from the same team behind Easy Digital Downloads, but was later acquired by Liquid Web.
It doesn’t offer quite as many features as MemberPress, but it includes everything you need to create unlimited free or paid membership levels and use those levels to restrict access to content on your site.
You’ll also get other useful features such as content dripping, discount codes, customizable member emails, and more.
Price: From $99.
Best WordPress Popup Plugins
These two plugins make it easy to create your own custom popups. For more, check out our best popup plugins collection.
Convert Pro
Convert Pro is a WordPress popup plugin that’s primarily focused on helping you create email opt-in popups to grow your lists. It helps you create all different kinds of popups, including modal popups, notification bars, welcome mats, and more.
You’ll get tons of pre-built templates as well as a drag-and-drop builder to customize everything (or build your designs from scratch).
To round it all out, you get:
- Integrations with popular email marketing services
- Detailed targeting rules
- Detailed trigger rules, including exit intent
- Built-in analytics and A/B testing
Price: From $79 for use on unlimited sites.
Elementor Popup Builder
Elementor Popup Builder is a feature in the Elementor Pro plugin, which will also make an appearance later on this list. It lets you use Elementor’s visual, drag-and-drop interface to build literally any type of popup, from email opt-ins to calls to actions (CTAs), contact forms, login forms, and lots more.
You’ll also get detailed targeting and trigger rules to control exactly where and when your popups appear, and you can create different types of popup designs, including modal popups, notification bars, slide-ins, and others.
Price: From $49.
Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins
If you want to use WordPress to sell physical products, digital products, services, or anything else, these two plugins can help.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin and also just plain the most popular way to make an eCommerce store — even more popular than Shopify.
It’s a full-service eCommerce plugin so it covers everything that you need to run a store, from managing products to accepting payments and more.
If you can’t find a built-in feature for what you want to do, you can always extend the core plugin with thousands of free and paid WooCommerce plugins.
Related – check out our Botiga WooCommerce theme or our collection of the best WooCommerce themes.
Price: Free.
Easy Digital Downloads
As the name suggests, Easy Digital Downloads, or EDD for short, is an eCommerce plugin that’s specifically focused on helping you sell digital products such as software, ebooks, audio files, digital images, etc.
Because it’s focused on digital products, it’s able to create a more optimized eCommerce experience with features including download management, software licensing, and more.
Price: Free core plugin. Add-on bundles from $99.50.
Best WordPress Booking Plugins
If you need to accept appointment bookings on your WordPress site, these three plugins can help.
LatePoint
LatePoint is a premium solution that can help you manage both in-person and online bookings.
If needed, you can add multiple services, service providers, and/or locations. Your customers will then be able to choose their preferred details when they book their appointments.
You can also accept online payments right when people book their appointments.
Each service provider gets their own dashboard to manage their appointments and you also have the option to integrate with your favorite calendar apps (such as Google Calendar).
Price: $79.
Amelia
Amelia is a high-powered WordPress booking plugin that offers beautiful interfaces on both the frontend and backend.
You can use it to allow bookings for unlimited services, providers, and locations. You can create one unified booking form for everything and/or dedicated booking forms for specific locations or providers.
Other useful features include online payments, flexible schedules, integrations for Zoom and Google Meet, bundled services, and lots more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $59.
Simply Schedule Appointments
Simply Schedule Appointments is an easy-to-use booking plugin that helps you get up and running with your first booking form in just a few minutes.
The free version works great for solo providers, while the premium version adds support for multiple providers and locations.
You’ll also get other useful features such as classes/group events, Google Calendar sync, page builder plugin integrations, and lots more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $99.
Best WordPress SEO Plugins
Every WordPress site needs an SEO plugin to rank in Google and other search engines. Here are four of the best options.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin by a large margin.
It includes all the core features you need in an SEO plugin, along with focus keyword and readability analysis that newbies might find useful.
If you upgrade, you can also access features such as internal link suggestions, multiple keyword analysis, and more. There are also separate add-ons for specific SEO areas such as WooCommerce, local, video, and news.
Price: Free. Pro from $89 + more for other extensions.
The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is a lightweight WordPress SEO plugin that gives you all the important features that you need with none of the bloat that you might find in other SEO plugins.
It makes a great option for power users who prefer a lightweight, straightforward plugin. It also offers a modular add-on manager to add new features such as focus keyword analysis, local SEO, AMP support, and many others.
Price: Free. Pro from $7/month.
SEOPress
SEOPress is another popular SEO plugin that makes it easy to configure key SEO details via a user-friendly interface.
You’ll also get useful features such as keyword analysis, social graph support, a redirect manager, and lots more. The Pro version adds more detailed support for schema markup, Google suggestions, breadcrumbs, a broken link checker, and lots of other useful features.
Price: Free. Pro from $39.
Rank Math
Rank Math is a newer WordPress SEO plugin that’s quickly grown in popularity thanks to its huge feature list — even in the free version.
Beyond all the core SEO features that you’d expect, you also get free access to useful features, including internal link suggestions, advanced schema markup, a redirect manager, and lots more.
Overall, if you want access to tons of features for free, Rank Math is a good option. There’s also a premium version that adds even more functionality.
Price: Free. Pro from $59.
Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins
Every WordPress site needs a contact form plugin, and you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to quality options. Here are three of our favorites.
Ninja Forms
Ninja Forms is a user-friendly form plugin that helps you easily create forms using a drag-and-drop builder.
The free core plugin works great for simple contact forms, and you can purchase premium extensions to add support for more advanced features (e.g. conditional logic), integrations (e.g. Zapier), and form types (e.g. payment forms).
Price: Free. Purchase individual extensions from $29 or bundles from $49.
Fluent Forms
Fluent Forms is a lightweight form plugin that can help you easily set up all types of forms thanks to its pre-built templates and drag-and-drop form builder.
It works fine for simple contact forms as well as more advanced forms including payments, registration, surveys, and more.
One nice thing about Fluent Forms is that it gives you some advanced features for free. For example, you get conditional logic in the free version, which is something that most other form plugins charge for.
Price: Free. Pro version from $59.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a premium WordPress form plugin that’s especially popular with developers and advanced users. Why? Because while it can certainly handle basic forms with its drag-and-drop interface, Gravity Forms really excels when it comes to more advanced forms such as payment forms, registration forms, frontend content submission, and more.
Another standout feature is its vibrant third-party extension marketplace, which lets you extend Gravity Forms with more advanced features and automation workflows.
Overall, for advanced forms, Gravity Forms is one of your best options.
Price: From $59.
Best WordPress Slider Plugins
If you need to create a slider or carousel, here’s your best option. For more alternatives, check out our best slider plugins collection, too.
Smart Slider 3
Smart Slider 3 is a freemium slider plugin that helps you create simple or complex sliders using a visual, drag-and-drop builder.
With the builder, you’ll be able to fully design each slide. Then, you can use the detailed settings to control exactly how your slider behaves. It also supports dynamic content so that you can automatically import your latest blog posts, WooCommerce products, and more.
Finally, to help you save time, you get access to 180+ pre-built templates that you can customize to your needs.
Price: Free. Pro version from $49.
Best WordPress Chat Plugins
If you want to add live chat to your WordPress site, these two plugins make it easy to chat with customers.
Tidio
Tidio is a live chat tool that’s super easy to integrate with WordPress thanks to its dedicated plugin at WordPress.org.
Despite being a SaaS (Software as a Service), one of the standout features of Tidio is its ease of setup — you can literally be up and running with a working live chat system in under a minute.
You can chat with your customers from the Tidio web app or mobile apps. Plus, you can create chatbots to respond when you’re not around.
Price: Free for up to three chat operators. Paid add-ons for more features.
Crisp
Crisp is another SaaS live chat tool that’s very easy to integrate with WordPress because of its dedicated integration plugin.
The free plan makes it easy to chat with visitors from the Crisp web app, desktop apps (Mac/Windows), or mobile apps (iOS/Android).
The paid plan adds more advanced features such as canned responses, chatting from Facebook Messenger or Twitter, and lots more.
Price: Free for up to two chat operators. Paid plans from $25/month.
Best WordPress LMS Plugins
Short for learning management system, WordPress LMS plugins help you create and deliver online courses with your WordPress website.
LearnDash
LearnDash is a popular LMS plugin that offers everything you need to launch simple or complex online courses.
If you’re a marketer or business owner, you can charge for access to your courses and restrict content.
Or, if you’re an educational institution, you can take advantage of key features such as flexible quizzes, assignments, and more. There’s also a ProPanel tool that lets you manage your students’ academic progress in detail.
Either way, you can design your courses using a drag-and-drop builder.
Price: From $159.
LifterLMS
LifterLMS is another popular course plugin that works great for marketers and business owners looking to monetize paid courses, as well as more serious educational institutions that need features such as assignments and quizzing.
You can build your courses using a drag-and-drop builder, and you’ll get built-in features to restrict content and manage your members — no separate membership plugin needed.
The free core version offers all of the main course functionality. Many sites will just need to purchase a single premium payment gateway add-on in addition to the core version.
Price: Free core version. Purchase individual add-ons for $120+/each or bundles from $360.
👉 If you want to see how these two LMS plugins compare, you can read our LearnDash vs LifterLMS comparison.
Best WordPress Newsletter Plugins
Want to grow your email list and send newsletters to subscribers? You might not need a dedicated email marketing service — these three WordPress newsletter plugins help you manage everything without leaving your WordPress dashboard.
MailPoet
MailPoet is a full-service email marketing and newsletter solution for WordPress. You can use it to send one-off blasts or set up automatic emails such as a weekly digest of your latest posts or eCommerce automation emails (e.g. abandoned cart reminders).
You can design your emails with pre-built templates and a visual drag-and-drop builder. And, you can also create opt-in forms with the native WordPress block editor.
Best of all, MailPoet includes its own email sending service to make sure your emails make it to subscribers’ inboxes. Or, you can use your own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service.
Finally, you’ll also get built-in analytics and detailed segmentation.
Price: Free for unlimited emails to up to 1,000 subscribers. Pro version from €15/month after that.
Mailster
Mailster is a premium WordPress newsletter plugin that offers everything you need to run your newsletter or email marketing efforts right from your WordPress dashboard.
You can manage your subscribers and create targeted segments as needed. To send emails, you can use the drag-and-drop email builder to send one-off blasts or set up automatic sequences (autoresponders).
Then, you’ll get built-in analytics to track engagement.
Mailster doesn’t include its own email sending service, but it does integrate with any SMTP provider, including free solutions such as SendGrid.
Price: $89.
Newsletter
Newsletter is a creatively named plugin that helps you manage subscribers and send them newsletters without leaving your WordPress dashboard.
The free version lets you send one-off newsletter blasts, while the premium version lets you set up autoresponders and automatic newsletters such as a weekly digest of your latest posts.
Like Mailster, Newsletter doesn’t include its own sending service, but it will integrate with all WordPress SMTP plugins.
Price: Free. Premium bundle from $69.
Best WordPress Forum Plugins
These two plugins help you add a discussion board to WordPress.
bbPress
One of the older plugins out there, bbPress makes it easy to turn WordPress into a fully functioning forum. It’s fairly simple and lightweight, but it includes all the core features that you need.
It also integrates with lots of other plugins, including BuddyPress for more of a social feel. And beyond that, you can also find lots of dedicated bbPress themes.
Price: Free.
wpForo
wpForo is another popular free WordPress forum plugin that offers a more modern design out of the box.
You can choose from four different forum designs, and you’ll get access to built-in features, including user groups, member ratings/badges, live notifications, and lots more.
The built-in user features are fairly robust, but it also integrates with BuddyPress and Ultimate Member if you want to extend them further.
Price: Free core plugin. Option to purchase paid add-ons.
Best Google Analytics Plugins for WordPress
Want to better understand your visitors? These two plugins help you connect to Google Analytics.
Site Kit by Google
Site Kit is an official plugin from Google that helps you integrate your site with a number of Google services, including Google Analytics, Search Console, AdSense, Tag Manager, Optimize, and PageSpeed Insights.
In terms of Google Analytics, it makes it easy to add the tracking script to your site and also view sitewide and page-specific analytics data without leaving your WordPress dashboard.
Price: Free.
Analytify
Analytify is a freemium Google Analytics plugin that serves two main purposes:
- It lets you view analytics data inside your WordPress dashboard, which helps you more easily see and understand key analytics data.
- It helps you set up more advanced types of Google Analytics tracking, such as event tracking, custom dimensions, enhanced eCommerce tracking, form analysis, and more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $59.
Best WordPress Affiliate Plugins
If you want to grow or monetize your site with affiliate marketing, these three plugins can help.
AAWP
AAWP, short for Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin, helps you work with the Amazon Associates program and display Amazon affiliate products on your site.
It lets you show products in various formats (including comparison tables) and also keeps product data up-to-date and accurate via the Amazon Associates API.
Overall, if you make money with the Amazon Associates program, this is a great one to have.
Price: €49.
Pretty Links
Pretty Links helps you manage and cloak all of the affiliate links that you use on your site.
Instead of showing a random affiliate URL such as https://shrsl.com/743jsfhsfh/, you can create a nice clean URL such as https://yoursite.com/recommends/product-name/.
Beyond link cloaking, Pretty Links also makes it easy to quickly insert affiliate links from your WordPress dashboard (no need to look them up each time) and the premium version includes automatic link insertion and other useful features.
Price: Free. Pro version from $79.
AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP is different from the previous two plugins. Instead of helping you display affiliate products, AffiliateWP helps you create your own affiliate program for your WordPress site — e.g. your eCommerce store, online course, etc.
You can be up and running with a full-featured affiliate program in just a few minutes thanks to built-in integrations for popular plugins, including WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LifterLMS, MemberPress, and many other popular tools.
Price: Pro version from $149.50.
Best WordPress Table Plugins
Need to create tables? These are the two best WordPress plugins for simple or advanced tables.
TablePress
TablePress is a popular free table plugin that makes a great option for simple tables thanks to its Excel-like editor and useful settings.
If you want more features, the developer also offers a number of extensions for features such as table imports, row filtering, buttons, and more.
Price: Free. The add-ons are also all available for free, though the developer suggests a donation for the “premium” add-ons.
wpDataTables
wpDataTables is a powerful plugin that includes detailed support for both tables and charts. It’s much more robust than TablePress and also offers a more user-friendly interface.
Basically, TablePress is fine for simple tables, while wpDataTables is a much better option if you want advanced features such as calculations, support for huge tables (millions of rows), advanced charting, and more.
It’s also very flexible when it comes to sources — you can enter your own data, import/sync with Google Sheets/Excel, or even hook up directly to any MySQL database.
Price: Free. Pro version from $59.
Best WordPress Instagram Plugins
If you want to display an Instagram feed on your WordPress site, you need an Instagram plugin. Here are two of our favorites.
Spotlight
Spotlight is a newer Instagram plugin with a beautiful interface and tons of useful features. You can create unlimited feeds from your own account, hashtags, or posts that have tagged your account.
You can choose from great-looking pre-built designs and customize how your feed looks.
With the premium version, you’ll get access to advanced features, including feed moderation, promotion tools (e.g. link a feed item to a product or blog post), filters, additional layout templates, and more.
Price: Free. Pro from $49.
Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed
Formerly known as Instagram Feed, Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed is the most popular Instagram plugin at WordPress.org.
Like Spotlight, it lets you create unlimited feeds from an account, hashtag, or posts that have tagged your account. However, it lacks the same user-friendly interface as you’ll need to configure your feeds using shortcodes if you have more than one feed.
The Pro version adds support for moderation and filters, among other features.
Price: Free. Pro from $49 ($98 at renewal).
Best WordPress Calendar Plugins
If you want to display stylish event calendars on your WordPress site, these three plugins can help.
Modern Events Calendar
True to the name, the highlight of Modern Events Calendar is that it lets you create calendars with very clean, modern designs.
You can be confident that your calendars will look great right out of the box — no need to mess around with custom CSS as some other plugins require.
You can choose from 40+ event/calendar layouts, and Modern Events Calendar also lets you two-way sync with other calendar tools such as Google Calendar.
Price: Free. Individual premium add-ons from $15/each or bundles from $75.
EventON
EventON is a premium WordPress event calendar plugin. It’s the most popular calendar plugin at CodeCanyon, where it’s been purchased over 56,700 times.
One highlight of this plugin versus the others is that it gives you unique calendar designs, including eye-catching card options.
Beyond that, you can add any type of event to your calendar, including dedicated integrations for Zoom and Jitsi. It also has a huge add-on library if you need more features.
Price: $25 for core plugin. Add-ons from $10/each.
The Events Calendar
As the name suggests, The Events Calendar makes a great option for both “calendars” and “events”.
When you create your calendars, you can choose from different views such as daily, weekly, or monthly. You’ll also get useful features such as tooltips on hover to display more details about the events on your calendar.
In addition to displaying a calendar on your site, The Events Calendar also integrates with other calendar apps such as Google Calendar and iCal so that you can sync your calendars.
Price: Free. Pro version from $99.
Best WordPress Event Plugins
Need to host physical or digital events? These three plugins can help.
WP Event Manager
WP Event Manager is a lightweight plugin that lets you create unlimited events, including options for both in-person and online events.
You can also create frontend forms that let people submit their own events, along with other useful features such as recurring schedules, custom fields, and more.
With the premium add-ons, you can add support for event registrations, calendars, paid tickets (via WooCommerce), Google Maps display, and more.
Price: Free core plugin. Premium add-ons from $19/each or bundles from $240.
Events Manager
Events Manager helps you create unlimited events, with support for physical locations and online events, as well as webinar integrations.
You get lots of options for listing events, including calendar views and listing them by location.
Even with just the free version, you can set up recurring events and create tickets. You also have the option to let people submit their own events, including a BuddyPress integration for user profiles.
While the default calendar styling can look a bit dated, one of the key advantages of this plugin is that it gives you a lot of advanced features in the free version.
Price: Free. Pro version from $75.
The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar is the most popular event plugin at WordPress.org, where it’s active on over 800,000 sites.
It lets you add unlimited physical and digital events and showcase them on stylish calendars. You get advanced options for creating events, such as setting up recurring events and linking them to specific venues and organizers.
If you need free or paid event tickets, you can also integrate it with the Event Tickets plugin, which comes from the same developer.
Price: Free. Pro version from $99.
Best WordPress Analytics Plugins
Earlier, we shared the best Google Analytics plugins. But what if you don’t want to use Google’s service? These two plugins help you set up your own self-hosted web analytics.
Koko Analytics
Koko Analytics is a simple WordPress analytics plugin that lets you create your own self-hosted analytics dashboard where none of the data ever leaves your servers. This makes it great for privacy-conscious folks or anyone who doesn’t want to feed the Google data machine.
It’s also a lot simpler than Google Analytics, giving you access to all the core data that you need with none of the unnecessary complexity.
Price: Free.
Matomo Analytics
Matomo Analytics, formerly known as Piwik, is a popular open-source alternative to Google Analytics. It offers a lot of the same features as Google Analytics, but in a free open-source package that you can self-host (or pay the Matomo team to host for you).
With the dedicated Matomo Analytics WordPress plugin, you can easily create your own self-hosted analytics platform and integrate it with your WordPress site.
Price: Free. Premium extensions from $39.
Best WordPress Real Estate Plugins
If you have a real estate website, these two plugins can help you manage and display your properties.
RealtyNA WPL
RealtyNA WPL is a useful plugin for solo agents and agencies that makes it easy to manage properties and supports all RETS-based MLS providers in North America.
While it makes it easy to manage properties and display them in an easily searchable format on the frontend, it also goes beyond that with useful sales-focused features, including a real estate CRM.
It also includes Android and iOS apps that you can white-label with your own branding.
Price: Free. Pro version from $199.
Estatik
Estatik is a full-service plugin to build a real estate website.
It works for solo agents, real estate agencies, and portals. You can add information about your properties using a fully customizable interface (including custom fields).
Then, you can display those properties on the frontend so that visitors can easily search and filter them, including a map view that shows all properties on a real map.
The premium version also adds support for agents, subscription plan payments, bulk import options (including MLS import via API), and more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $89.
Best WordPress Review Plugins
Write a lot of reviews? This plugin can help.
WP Review
WP Review helps you add a great-looking review box to your review posts. You can include multiple rating systems as well as one overall rating (with proper schema markup to get you those rich snippets in Google).
It also includes more advanced features such as user comment ratings, integrations with Google Places, Yelp, and Facebook, comparison tables, and more.
Price: From $67.
Best WordPress Directory Plugins
Whether you need to create a directory of physical locations, people, online businesses, or anything else, these are three of the best WordPress plugins for directories.
Business Directory Plugin
Business Directory Plugin makes it easy to create any type of directory on your WordPress site.
You can manage the listings yourself. Or, you can allow visitors to submit new listings. To monetize these submissions, you can charge a one-time or recurring fee for the basic listing as well as paid upgrades (e.g. featured listings).
With the premium add-ons, you’ll get more advanced features, including user ratings and reviews (make a Yelp clone!), Google Maps listings, more advanced search, and more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $99.50.
GeoDirectory
As the name suggests, GeoDirectory is primarily focused on helping you create directories of physical locations (hence the “Geo”), though it also works for digital content such as job boards and classified listings.
With the free version, you can create a directory for a single geographic area, e.g. one city. If you go Pro, you can support unlimited areas.
You can also let people submit/claim listings and charge for this privilege. Other useful features include user reviews, embeddable badges, advanced search filters, and more.
👉 Our full GeoDirectory review
Price: Free. Pro version from $199.
HivePress
HivePress is a flexible option that works for any type of directory, including physical businesses, job listings, service providers, classifieds, and more.
One of its standout benefits is that it offers free extensions for features other plugins charge for, such as paid listings, the option to claim listings, user reviews, and more.
There are also premium add-ons for bookings, memberships, and more. And, if you want to quickly get up and running, the developer sells premium directory themes based on the plugin.
Price: Free. Individual extensions from $29/each.
Best WordPress Optimization Plugins
Having a quick-loading WordPress site is essential — these three plugins offer a non-technical way to speed up your site.
For more options, check out our full collection of the best WordPress speed optimization plugins, too.
Imagify
Imagify is a WordPress optimization plugin that specifically focuses on optimizing your images. Images account for about half of the average web page’s file size, so finding a way to shrink them can really speed up your site.
At a high level, Imagify will automatically compress (lossy or lossless) and resize all of your new and old images. You can also have it convert them to the WebP format for further optimization.
Price: Free to optimize 20 MB of images per month. Pro version costs $4.99/month for 500 MB or $9.99/month for unlimited.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a premium WordPress caching and performance plugin that can help you implement pretty much every single WordPress performance optimization best practice from one plugin.
It handles caching, code optimization, media optimization, and more. It also has some unique options, such as removing unnecessary CSS on a page-by-page basis.
Finally, where WP Rocket really excels is its user-friendly interface, which makes it easy for non-technical people to set up.
Price: From $49.
Perfmatters
Perfmatters is a WordPress optimization plugin that’s more focused on nitty-gritty tweaks. It doesn’t include page caching, but it does include lots of settings to optimize your site and cut down on page size and HTTP requests wherever possible.
One of its most unique features is its script manager, which lets you enable/disable certain CSS or JavaScript files on a page-by-page or site-wide basis.
Price: From $24.95.
Best WordPress Translation Plugins
Need to create a multilingual WordPress site? Here are three of the best translation plugins that make it easy.
Weglot
Weglot is a WordPress translation plugin that excels at simplicity. Thanks to the magic of machine translation, Weglot can help you have a working multilingual website within five minutes of installing the plugin.
Once you have those baseline automatic translations, you can go back and manually edit them as needed using a visual editor or a side-by-side string editor.
One thing to note is that your translations are stored on Weglot’s servers. So if you stop using it, you’ll need to ask Weglot to export your translations for you.
Price: Free for up to 2,000 words. Pro version starts at €9.90/month.
WPML
WPML is one of the oldest and most-established WordPress translation plugins. It lets you comprehensively translate your site in an SEO-friendly manner.
One area where WPML excels is that it includes built-in tools to outsource your translations to professional translation services or hire a freelance translator/team.
WPML also recently added automatic machine translation support, though only on a page-by-page basis.
Price: From $29, but most people should get the $79 Multilingual CMS package.
TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a user-friendly translation plugin that lets you manage all of your translations using a visual, point-and-click editor.
You can translate your site from scratch manually or use machine translation services such as Google Translate or DeepL.
If you use machine translation, TranslatePress will store those translations in your WordPress site’s database, and you’ll be able to fully edit them.
It’s also SEO-friendly, with full support for multilingual SEO best practices.
Price. Free. Pro version from €79.
Best WordPress Page Builder Plugins
If you’ve ever felt limited by the native WordPress editor, page builder plugins can help you upgrade the WordPress design experience with visual, drag-and-drop editors.
Elementor
Since its launch in 2016, Elementor has rapidly grown to become the most popular WordPress page builder plugin. It offers a visual, drag-and-drop interface that’s packed with design and layout options to give you full control over your designs.
While the free version of Elementor is one of the most flexible free page builders, the Pro version adds tons of useful features, such as full theme building (with support for dynamic content), useful widgets (including a form widget), the popup builder that we mentioned earlier, a WooCommerce builder, and lots more.
You can also find lots of third-party Elementor extensions to add more features.
Price: Generous free version. Pro version from $49.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is another popular page builder that offers visual, drag-and-drop building.
It doesn’t have quite as many features as Elementor Pro, but what it does have is a rock-solid interface that covers all the key features most people need in a page builder.
You can also purchase the separate Beaver Themer add-on from the same developer to add full theme building support to Beaver Builder. There are also many other useful third-party extensions.
👉 Full Beaver Builder review / Elementor Pro vs Beaver Builder comparison
Price: Pro version starts at $99 (Beaver Builder does have a free version, but it’s very limited, so we don’t recommend it).
Best WordPress Social Media Plugins
Whether you want to create social share buttons or otherwise integrate your site with social media, these three plugins can help.
Social Snap
Social Snap is a comprehensive WordPress social media plugin that can help with everything from social share buttons to follow buttons, open graph data, click-to-tweet buttons, and more.
The out-of-the-box designs look great, and it even includes some unique social share button layouts that other plugins don’t offer.
With the premium version, you also get features to automatically share new/old content on social media and add social login to your site.
Price: Free. Pro version from $39.
Easy Social Share Buttons
Easy Social Share Buttons is the most feature-packed WordPress social media plugin that you’ll find. If you want a lot of features, that’s great. If you want something lightweight and streamlined, consider the next plugin on our list.
Easy Social Share Buttons can help you with literally every aspect of social media. You get flexible share buttons, after-share actions, click to tweets, on-image Pin buttons, social follow buttons, social chat integrations, Instagram feed display, and more.
Price: $22.
Novashare
Novashare is a lightweight social share plugin with a focus on performance. It doesn’t give you the advanced features of the two previous plugins, but it does keep your share buttons performance-friendly, with under 5 KB of code on the frontend.
It also still includes key features such as share counts and multiple display options.
If you want a simple tool for share buttons that won’t slow down your site, Novashare is your best option.
Price: From $24.95.
Best WordPress Comments Plugins
Want to improve your comments section? This plugin makes that easy.
wpDiscuz
If you want a full replacement for the native WordPress comments system, wpDiscuz might be just the ticket. It offers a complete overhaul of the WordPress comments section and aims to be a 100% self-hosted and privacy-friendly alternative to the popular Disqus comment system.
You’ll get tons of options, including threaded comments, upvotes/downvotes, notifications, post ratings, and lots, lots more.
Price: Free. Purchase individual extensions or a bundle for $99.
Best WordPress CRM Plugins
A CRM tool, short for customer relationship manager, helps you…well, manage the relationships that you have with your customers.
You don’t need a SaaS tool to do that, though — these two CRM plugins offer native, self-hosted customer relationship management solutions.
Groundhogg
Groundhogg is a native WordPress CRM plugin that also gives you advanced marketing automation features that you typically only get with SaaS solutions such as ActiveCampaign or HubSpot.
The nice thing is that it integrates with popular WordPress plugins so that you can easily trigger marketing automation rules based on users’ activity in those plugins. For example, you can trigger marketing automation when someone purchases or views a WooCommerce product.
Overall, if you want an advanced CRM with marketing automation in a native WordPress package, Groundhogg is definitely your best option.
Price: Free core. Pro plans from $240/year for unlimited contacts.
Jetpack CRM
Jetpack CRM, formerly known as Zero BS CRM, is a lightweight CRM plugin from Automattic, the same team behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce.
It’s primarily focused on contact management, though it does include some lightweight automation features. It also comes with other useful tools such as quotes, invoices, transactions, client portals, and more.
Thanks to its acquisition by Automattic, it also pairs well with WooCommerce.
Note – you do not need to use the Jetpack plugin to use Jetpack CRM.
Price: Free. Pro version from $132.
Best WordPress Recipe Plugins
Have a food blog? These three recipe plugins help you share your tasty recipes.
WP Recipe Maker
WP Recipe Maker is a powerful tool that lets you create your own customizable recipe boxes. You can keep things simple with just ingredients and directions, or you can add more advanced elements such as nutrition data (importable via an API), user reviews, and more.
It also offers useful features such as adjustable servings and unit conversions and lets you add photos or videos to the entire recipe or individual steps.
Finally, everything has proper schema markup to help you get rich snippets in Google.
Price: Free. Pro version from $49.
Recipe Card Blocks
Recipe Card Blocks is a lightweight recipe plugin that’s integrated into the native WordPress block editor (AKA Gutenberg). As the name suggests, it gives you dedicated blocks for key recipe details such as ingredients, directions, nutrition facts, reader comments/ratings, etc.
Because each block is a separate element, you can put them together in your own unique way to create the perfect layout for your recipes.
Price: Free. Pro version from $69.
Tasty Recipes
Tasty Recipes is a premium WordPress recipe plugin from the same people behind Pinch of Yum, one of the most popular food blogs. This inside knowledge gives them the ability to include all the nitty-gritty features food bloggers want.
In addition to all the core features that you’d expect, it offers advanced features, including nutritional data, adjustable servings, unit conversion, user ratings, a printable format, schema markup, and more.
You can also add images and videos to the recipe or even specific steps.
Price: $79.
Best WordPress FAQ Plugins
Need to answer common questions? A FAQ plugin is just the ticket — here are two of the best.
Ultimate FAQ
Ultimate FAQ is one of the most popular free FAQ plugins at WordPress.org.
With the free version, you can create unlimited FAQs and FAQ categories and display them anywhere using a block or shortcode, including the proper schema markup.
If you upgrade to the Pro version, you’ll get additional features such as a FAQ search box with autocomplete, user-submitted questions, a WooCommerce integration, and more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $47.
Heroic FAQs
Heroic FAQs is a premium FAQ plugin that makes it easy to add beautiful FAQ sections to your WordPress site.
You can group together FAQs into different sections and organize everything using drag and drop.
On the frontend, you can choose between accordion or toggle behavior. You’ll also be able to choose from 15 different FAQ icons and five different FAQ styles.
Finally, the FAQ sections include proper schema markup so that you can rank in Google’s FAQ rich results.
Price: From $49.
Best WordPress Landing Page Plugins
If you’re specifically building landing pages, you might want to go beyond generic page builder plugins and choose a dedicated landing page solution — here are three great options.
OptimizePress
OptimizePress is a dedicated WordPress landing page builder that helps you build beautiful, conversion-friendly landing pages via professionally designed templates and a visual, drag-and-drop builder.
Where OptimizePress differentiates itself from regular page builder plugins is that it also includes unique features such as a built-in funnel builder (including upsells/downsells and order bumps), checkout/payment support, digital asset delivery, built-in A/B testing, and more.
It also integrates with the most popular membership plugins to create a full membership site.
Price: From $99.
Leadpages
Leadpages is a powerful landing page builder that offers features such as built-in A/B testing, lead generation forms, built-in checkouts/payments, integrations with lots of marketing tools, and more.
You can easily design your landing pages using the visual, drag-and-drop builder, and Leadpages also includes tons of professionally designed templates.
Leadpages is technically a SaaS landing page tool, rather than a native WordPress plugin. However, it does offer a dedicated WordPress plugin so that you can integrate your landing pages into your WordPress site.
Price: From $27 per month.
Thrive Architect
Thrive Architect is a WordPress page builder plugin that puts a special emphasis on landing pages and conversion optimization, which is why we’re putting it in this section.
You can build your landing pages from scratch or choose from hundreds of pre-built landing pages. Either way, you’ll be able to use the visual, drag-and-drop builder to control every part of your design.
You’ll also get useful conversion elements such as lead gen forms, countdown timers, testimonials, and more.
If you pair it with the separate Thrive Optimize plugin, you can also run A/B tests.
👉 Full Thrive Architect review
Price: Only available as part of the Thrive Suite membership, which gets you access to all of the developer’s plugins and themes from $228 per year or $90 per quarter.
Best WordPress Map Plugins
Need to embed Google Maps on WordPress? This plugin can help.
WP Google Maps
WP Google Maps gives you an easy way to create and embed simple maps or complex custom maps.
You can choose from multiple map themes and then customize them with markers and shapes/lines.
You also get advanced features, including store locator support, filtering markers by category, directions, adding content to map markers, and lots more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $39.99.
Best WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins
If you want to create a photo gallery, these are two of your best options.
Modula
If you want the easiest way to create a simple grid gallery, Modula is definitely one of your best options because it creates beautiful galleries right out of the box.
One of the most unique things about Modula is that it also offers a drag-and-drop grid builder that lets you control the exact layout of your gallery.
In addition to stylish layouts, you also get useful features such as Ajax gallery filters, hover effects, deep linking, and more.
Price: Free. Pro version from $39.
Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is a flexible gallery plugin that’s packed with powerful features, which makes it a great option for photographers and other power users.
You can certainly use it for simple galleries, too. But where this plugin really shines is with features, including client proofing, eCommerce support, Adobe Lightroom integration, and more.
You can also create galleries from dynamic sources, such as automatically generating a gallery of your most recent WooCommerce products.
Price: Free. Pro version from $29.
Best WordPress Schema Plugins
Adding schema markup/structured data to your site helps you get Google Rich Results. These two plugins can help.
Schema Pro
Schema Pro is a powerful schema plugin that makes it easy to set up your own custom schema markup structures using JSON-LD markup.
Essentially, it lets you map data on your WordPress site (including custom fields) to the structured data for your chosen schema type. You can also conditionally apply your schema rules to specific post types, taxonomies, authors, and more.
Beyond that, it also helps you set up basic sitewide structured data.
Price: From $79.
Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP
Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP is a free WordPress schema plugin that supports 35 different schema types.
Using conditional display rules, you can match these schema types to specific post types, taxonomies, and more.
The premium version also adds more advanced support for reviews and review schema, including letting you fetch reviews from 75+ different services.
Price: Free. Purchase individual add-ons or bundles from $99.
Best WordPress Grid Plugins
Need to display a grid of your blog posts or other content? This plugin can help.
Content Views
Content Views gives you an easy way to display posts, pages, or any custom post type in a stylish grid layout.
You can either display all of your most recent content or filter by author, category, tag, and more.
Then, you can customize the grid layout using the simple interface and display it anywhere on your site using a shortcode.
Price: Free. Pro version from $39.
Best Gutenberg Block Plugins
If you’re using the native WordPress block editor (Gutenberg), you can find lots of plugins that extend the editor with new blocks and features. Here are three of our favorites.
GenerateBlocks
GenerateBlocks comes from the developer of the popular GeneratePress theme and has the same focus on clean, lightweight code.
It only adds four new blocks, but those four blocks are essential building blocks that you can use to create pretty much any design — Container, Grid, Headline, Buttons.
Think of it as the foundation for all of your block editor designs.
Price: Free. Pro from $39.
Stackable
Stackable is a comprehensive Gutenberg plugin that aims to turn the block editor into a full page building experience.
To help you do that, Stackable comes packed with 27+ custom blocks, additional options in Gutenberg (such as more advanced responsive controls), support for dynamic content (to insert content from custom fields), and hundreds of pre-built block templates.
Basically, if you want something that will completely change the Gutenberg experience, this can be a good one to consider.
Price: Free. Pro from $49.
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg is a popular free collection of blocks from the same developer as the Astra theme.
It gives you access to 30+ new blocks, including basic foundational blocks such as advanced columns as well as content-specific blocks such as pricing tables, testimonials, form stylers, and more.
Price: Free.
Try the Best WordPress Plugins Today
And with that, we’ve come to the end of our hand-picked collection of the best WordPress plugins.
You certainly won’t want to install all of these plugins on your site, but we hope that you found a bunch of great new plugins to improve your site in meaningful ways.
Now it’s over to you — do you think there’s another plugin that deserves to be on our list of the best plugins for WordPress? Let us know in the comments!
