Are you overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of plugins that WordPress offers, and are you not sure which plugins you should have?
Well, there are 58000+ plugins for your wordpress website, and it is really hard to decide which plugins you should use in your website. In this huge number, there are various niche-specific plugins too.
However, there are many plugins that every website should use, but in this article, we will look at the Top 11 most important plugins for your wordpress website. But, before that, let’s clearly understand what the wordpress plugin means.
What is a wordpress plugin?
WordPress Plugins are bits of software (tools) that contain functionality that you can add to your wordpress website. It can also be used to improve/expand the existing functionality of your wordpress website.
WordPress plugins allow you to add a new function to your wordpress website without writing or editing a code. If you want to add a new feature/function to your website, there is probably a plugin for the same. From Ecommerce, SEO, Design features, social media, security, etc. There are numerous plugins for everything.
Now, as we clearly know what wordpress plugins are, let’s have a look at the Top 11 crucial plugins for your wordpress website:
Top 11 Must-have Plugins for your wordpress website 2022
- Yoast SEO:
Search engines are the best to drive organic traffic. Every day, Google handles more than 9 billion searches. The organic traffic that you get is based on the SEO of your website.
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO tool for wordpress websites, and since 2008 it has helped millions of websites to rank higher in the search engine results.
Key Features:
- Helps in finding and adding the right keywords to your website to improve the ranking, index, and reach of your website.
- Know the optimized percentage of your website, and improve it with suggestions.
- The readability check helps you in improving the quality of your content.
Price:
Yoast SEO offers a base version for free. Moreover, Yoast also provides a premium version that comes with advanced features and support. The cost starts from $89/year.
- WPForms:
Every website needs a contact form so that the site’s visitors can easily contact you directly. It is an important part of your website, as this is the place from where the visitor of your website is converted into a lead/client.
The drag and drop feature of the plugin allows you to easily create contact forms, payment forms, online subscription forms, online order forms, and any other form that you want to create.
Key Features:
- Create fascinating forms for free.
- WPForms has integration with multiple payment platforms and marketing, and therefore you will be able to build the perfect form in less than 5 minutes.
- Use the pre-built templates to build your form quickly.
Price:
WPForm offers a free version and also a premium version that comes with multiple templates and integrations. The premium version starts from $ 39.50/year.
- UpdraftPlus:
UpdraftPlus is a backup plugin that offers automatic and manual backups for wordpress sites.
On an average 30,000 websites get hacked each day. Moreover, as various plugins are used in the website, updates from one plugin can cause crashes and errors. At times like this, the backup can save you from a lot of trouble and therefore, this is a safe strategy that all wordpress websites should have.
Key Features:
- Automatic and manual backups as per your requirement.
- Easily restore your website to the previous version.
- Offers local as well as cloud backup.
Price:
UpdraftPlus offers a free as well as a premium version which starts from $42 per year.
- Elementor:
Elementor is a website designing tool that you can use to craft your page with attractive and appealing original designs. The plugin allows you to create attractive designs and provide impressive effects on your webpage without spending money on graphic designers.
Key Features:
- Customize your website based on your preference and taste.
- Use effects like background overlays, hover effects, animations, and many more with just drag and drop.
- Choose from 150+ templates to enhance your website into a beautiful masterpiece.
Price:
The Elementor plugin is free for use. However, Elementor pro version is also available which provides more pro features and added advantages. You can choose the premium version that starts from $49/year.
- Constant Contact:
How do you connect with your users when they have left your site? Email is the most widely used for contacting the customers. Multiple business websites widely use email marketing to connect with their customers when they are not using the site.
Constant Contact is a marketing tool plugin that allows you to create an email list and then send impactful and effective newsletters to the users.
Key Features:
- Constant Contact is a very useful email marketing tool ever.
- Easy and quick set-up for even the non-tech users.
- Effortlessly create the email list and target the users with effective newsletters.
Price:
The Constant Contact plan starts from $20/month.
- Wordfence Security:
Almost 30% of the websites are powered by wordpress, and therefore it has become one of the most frequently hacked platforms. To be safe from hackers, the Wordfence security plugin can help you.
The plugin can put up a firewall, perform regular security checks, and help get rid of the malware.
Key Features:
- Wordfence Security provides complete protection to your website.
- Works in autopilot mode.
- Helps to block thousands of attacks every month.
Price:
It offers a free version and also a premium version that starts from $99 per license.
- Optimole:
Did you know that if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you will lose half of your users? In many cases, the user will not visit your website again.
Images take more time to load, and therefore they can increase your website’s loading time. You do not want your website’s content to kill your website’s loading speed. In such a case, optimizing them can help you improve your website’s loading speed, and Optimole helps you by doing this.
Key Features:
- Optimole automatically compresses your graphical content.
- It optimizes your PNG and JPEG images.
- Helps in resizing the images that are uploaded on your website.
Price:
The Plugin can be used for free upto 5000 users a month, after that, you can use the premium version for $22.52 per month.
- Revive Old Post:
The most used mobile app category is social media apps. People use social media apps regularly, and they spend hours on these apps. Therefore the best place to target them is the social media platform.
The perfect plugin for this is the Revive old post plugin which will bring more traffic to your website by taking your website’s old and new publications and sharing them to Twitter and Facebook.
Key Features:
- Auto share your site’s new and old articles on FB & Twitter.
- Helps to drive more traffic to the website
- Schedule the social media posts.
Price:
Revive Old Post offers a free version, and you can also opt for the premium version for more features. The premium version starts from $88.5/year.
- Sassy Social Share:
Have you seen various social media buttons when you read articles or even when you are on a website? These little social media buttons allow you to effortlessly share the content of the website/web page on social media platforms.
Sassy Social Share plugin allows you to add these social media buttons to your website so that the users can easily share your content.
Key Features:
- Offers the sharing buttons for all widely used social media platforms.
- It will display the current share counts of each page.
- It lets you pick and customize the button styles.
Price:
You can choose the free version with basic functionalities, or you can opt for the premium version that comes with various add-ons and starts from $7.99.
- Cookie Notice and Compliance for GDPR/CCPA:
Do you receive a cookie notification/pop-up when you open a new website? This is a compulsion for various countries under their laws and regulations for data privacy.
You can also enable the cookie notification for your site using the Cookie Notice and Compliance for GDPR/CCPA plugin.
Key Features:
Showcases the cookie notice to all the users.
You can choose from the template, or you can write your own cookie notice too.
The users can also use this notice to check the cookie settings of your website.
Price:
Cookie Notice and Compliance for GDPR/CCPA is a free plugin.
- WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a plugin that will decrease the site’s load time and increase the page speed of your website. It is a cache plugin that will create dynamic cache of each page of your website so that the server can easily and quickly load them, and as a result, your website will load faster.
Faster website has a direct impact on the ux-part that your website provides.
Key Features:
- Creates cache of your website’s dynamically generated pages
- Helps in loading the pages faster
- Improves the user-experience of your website.
Price:
WP Rocket’s premium version starts from $49/year.
Conclusion
This sums up the Top 11 crucial plugins for your wordpress website. We hope you find some interesting plugins in this list, and it helps you decide which plugins you should use.
If we missed any must-have plugin for the WordPress website that you think should be in this list, do let us know in the comment section.