WordPress plugins are really a secret sauce to the site’s performance, security, and overall user experience.

WordPress stands market leader exactly due to the unlimited customisation and flexibility options that plugins offer, making it an ideal choice for everyone from bloggers to business owners.

From optimizing your site’s speed, integrating SEO best practices, or turning your site into an e-commerce shop, plugins featured in our article have been carefully chosen to meet these needs.

Get ready to transform your website into a user-friendly customer magnet with our handpicked and tested WordPress plugins. It’s true! We use all of the mentioned plugins on our and our clients’ sites. Keep reading!

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What are WordPress plugins?

WordPress plugins are extensions that can be installed on your WordPress website to enhance its performance, functionality, and/or user experience.

There are over 59000 free WordPress plugins and many of them also have premium versions with extra features. All these plugins have certain standards to be valid and go through strict testing before they are enabled for WordPress users.

Each plugin is designed in a way that is easy to integrate with almost all themes and other plugins. Of course time to time, there can be some compatibility issues, but developers are keen to fix them as soon as they have found them.

All WordPress websites use plugins because basic websites would be too dull. And if you want to code each functionality separately like in the old days, it would cost you tens of thousands. Instead, you can simply install or purchase plugins and enjoy all the features without having to write a single line of code.

Free WordPress plugins

Free WordPress plugins are there to give your site basic features. But often, developers have limited their function because they are not getting paid for free versions.

Therefore, if you need full functionality, you need to get their premium licences. Of course, there are workarounds. For example, if you know how to code or find an agency like us to develop your site, as we have some plugins with unlimited agency licenses, which we will install on websites without extra cost to you.

Paid WordPress plugins (Premium)

Paid (premium) WordPress plugins usually come with extended or unlocked features, giving you the ability to provide an enhanced user experience. These plugins are developed by professional plugin developers, companies, or individuals working on open-source projects. To receive full access to them, you need to acquire the license or install the plugin after completing the purchase.

There are thousands of plugins on the market, but what you need depends largely on your industry and specific needs. It is why we will cover a wide range of free and premium plugins that suit websites, personal brands, blogs, and online stores.

What are the most popular and best WordPress plugins

SEO plugins
Cache plugins
Speed optimisation plugins
Image optimisation plugins
Online store plugins
Translation plugins
Social media plugins
Calendar plugins
Forms plugins
Page builders
Security & analytics plugins

SEO plugins

SEO plugins help you make your site search engine friendly by adding SEO meta tags & data, improving link structure, and sitemap integration. These plugins provide a user-friendly dashboard with actionable insights and tools so you can improve search engine optimisation on your site.

The best SEO plugins are:

Cache plugins

Cache plugins help speed up website download speed by storing content on cache files. These cached files allow your server quickly retrieve its content when needed, which reduces loading time. This also reduces resources usage on your hosting as these cached files are compact and smaller, helping you to save from having to purchase larger packages. To recap, when a visitor’s browser requests a page, the server provides a cached file. And in simple terms, these cache plugins make your site feel fast for visitors.

Free cache plugins

Anyone can use free cache plugins, but usually, they come with limited features or functions or complicated settings, which may require experts who understand the website’s technicalities. That said, it’s better to use free cache plugins than nothing at all. Some of the best free cache plugins are:

Premium cache plugins

Premium cache plugins are 10 times better than their free counterparts. Seriously. Due to additional features and often more user-friendly interface. Some like WP Rocket even have a lot of automatic features, making speeding up the website a lot easier. That said, some settings can be still too advanced for beginners and may require someone who knows what they are doing. Here are the most popular premium cache plugins are:

By the way, we also provide WordPress website speed optimisation service, where we install WP Rocket with our agency license at no cost to you.

Speed optimization plugins

Aside from cache plugins, there are additional speed improvement plugins. Some are more complicated, others quite simple and small yet powerful.

Image optimisation

Image optimization plugins could also be counted as speed optimization because images can result in 50% of why your site loads slowly. It’s true. But as there are many separate image optimization plugins, they have a separate category in our list of WordPress plugins.

Imagify
Shortpixel
Smush
Converter for Media – Convert WebP & AVIF
Image optimization service by Optimole

Online store-specific plugins

Online store plugins are another necessary group because these add specific functions that transfer your site into a successful online store. Adding additional features such as a shopping cart, checkout, payment, etc.
Important plugins for stores are:

Security & analytics

No site can get away without security plugins. At bare minimum, you need Wordfence or Solid WP Security to protect your site from hackers or malicious codes. We have also added a few niche protection plugins to the list for you to consider:

Wordfence Security
Solid WP Security
Really Simple SSL
Complianz | GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent
Ga Google Analytics
Antispam Bee
Updraftplus – Great WordPress backup plugin
WPS Hide Login – To hide your default login url, which is /wp-admin and change it to anything else.
Edit Author Slug – To change your WordPress user name from author slug so that no-one can not find it out.

Page builders

Page builders are additional plugins that allow you to transfer your wordpress site into a drag and drag-and-drop interface. This gives people with no development and coding skills a chance to manage their websites and make changes when they need to. Here are some notable page builders for WordPress:

Elementor
Beaver Builder
Divi Builder – comes with elegant themes
Gutenberg (WordPress Block Editor)

Forms plugins

Each website should have forms, such as contact, newsletter, or pop-up forms, so visitors can contact you or join your newsletter. Here are some of the best forms plugins we have used:

Calendar plugins

If you have a site that is events-based or accepts booking and reservations, you need calender plugin. Each calender works a litte bit differently, so it is best to test out what is best for your needs. Here are the most popular calendar plugins we have tested:

Social media plugins

Social media plugins are great as they allow you to showcase your feed on your website or share the count of blog articles to build trust with visitors. Here are the most popular social media plugins for you to consider:

Translation plugins

Making your site multilingual starts with choosing a translation plugin. Each plugin has its own pluses and minuses, and it can take a lot of time to set it up correctly. We are not saying to sell our services, but because if you make a mistake, it can be a huge loss to your SEO efforts and user experience. Regardless if you do it yourself or outsource it here are the most used translation plugins:

WPML (Paid)
Loco translate (Free)
Polylang (Free and Paid)

Additional WordPress plugins

These additional WordPress plugin enhance website functionality even further, helping you to manage and customise your site and make it more user friendly.

Tips for choosing the best WordPress plugins

Here are tips for choosing the best addons and best practices to keep your website running smoothly and without error while you test them out.

Check if it works for your WordPress version

But do not take this for granted. Some plugins can get away with many versions of WordPress or PHP before they need to change, as their code is clean and compatible with future upgrades. You will know if it works with your version if there are thousand of installations without bad reviews, which is our next point.

Read reviews

The best way to know if the plugin is good is to simply check how many reviews they have and the total score. All free plugins are in the WordPress plugins library for you to analyze. For premium plugins, you could look at their free version and see if it is sufficient. If not, try premium. Usually, but not always, the more reviews the plugin has, the better it is.

Many plugin providers also have a trial website set up where you can test the plugin before purchasing it or a 14-30 day money-back guarantee, allowing you to test the plugin and see if it fits your needs.

Check compatibility on the staging website

It does not matter what plugin we test on our or our clients’ sites, we do that on staging sites, which is a clone of your live site. So, we can always see if the plugin works as intended. If some errors occur or there is incompatibility with other plugins or themes, we will try to fix it or contact the plugin support or developers to do so. Having a staging site to test plugins is just the best practice before you install a plugin on your live site.

Limit plugins usage

Make sure you do not have too many plugins because each installation adds extra functions and code and, hence, bloat to your site, making it slightly slower. The more plugins you have, the more slower it gets. A good rule of thumb is not to have more than 20-40 plugins unless you really need more.

Delete unused plugins

It does not help if you deactivate a plugin becuase it is still taking space and resources from your server and database. Another thing is that unused plugins may pose a risk if they are not updated regularly, giving you just extra work that you can avoid by deleting plugin you do not need.

Update plugins frequently

Updating plugins should be done every month. While we understand the risk of plugins clashing with each other, themes, PHP, or WP versions -updating is crucial to keep your site secure. If some errors occur, you can find them in error logs, search Google what that error means and contact the plugin support to get it fixed. This is why it is best to update plugins on the staging site to avoid critical errors occurring on a live site. This is also the reason why most website owners outsource their plugin updating to agencies like us, as it’s a complicated task. Outsourcing it simplifies their lives.

Best WordPress Plugins 2024: Optimize Your Site’s Performance and User Experience