30+ Best WordPress Plugins in 2021 [Mostly FREE!]

With over 55,000 WordPress plugins available, it’s quite difficult for beginners to find the best WordPress plugins for their needs.

Often we’re asked by users if there is a magic list of “must-have WordPress plugins” that all pros use.

The answer is YES. Having the right set of plugins can make a huge difference in the growth of your blog or website.

In this article, we have hand-picked the best WordPress plugins of 2021.

Before we get started, let’s take a quick look at how to find the best WordPress plugins.

Finding The Best WordPress Plugin

As we mentioned earlier, there are thousands of free and paid WordPress plugins. Locating a plugin for something that you want to do on your site can be difficult. Here is how you would begin your search.

The search feature on the WordPress.org directory can help you narrow down your quest. However, you will still have to scroll down a lot and many of the results will not be relevant at all.

The best way to search for plugins is by using Google Search, or search through WPBeginner’s plugins category.

When looking at plugins in WordPress.org directory, look at the plugin stats below each listing. It shows the total number of active installs for a plugin, higher installs mean that it has been tested and used by more websites. You will also see the average review stars, last updated, and tested up to information.

For more detailed instructions take a look at this beginner’s guide on how to choose the best WordPress plugin.

If you do not see a plugins page in WordPress, then the most likely reasons is you are using WordPress.com which is a free blog hosting service that allows you to create free blogs on their servers. It is not the same as having your own self-hosted WordPress.org site.

Take a look at this guide on the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. One of the main differences between the two is that you cannot install plugins on WordPress.com blog unless you’re on their higher-end plan.

In order to use powerful WordPress plugins and themes, you will need to move to a self-hosted WordPress.org site. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.

Now let’s take a look at the best WordPress plugins on the market.

Best WordPress Plugins: At a Glance

Here are some of the best plugins that we believe every website must have.

WPForms – Best WordPress Form Builder Plugin
MonsterInsights – Best Analytics Plugin for WordPress
SeedProd – Best Landing Page Builder Plugin
OptinMonster – Best Lead Generation Plugin
Smash Balloon – Best WordPress Social Feed Plugin
RafflePress – Best WordPress Contest Plugin
TrustPulse – Best Social Proof Notification App
PushEngage – Best Web Push Notification Plugin
WP Mail SMTP – Best SMTP plugin
Uncanny Automator – Best WordPress Admin Automation Plugin
All in One SEO – Best WordPress Plugin for SEO
Sucuri – Best WordPress Plugin for Site Security
UpdraftPlus – Top WordPress Plugin for Backup
Constant Contact – Top Email Marketing Tool
MemberPress – Most Popular Membership Plugin
Beaver Builder – Best WordPress Plugins for Page Building
LearnDash – Best LMS plugin
WooCommerce – Best WordPress eCommerce plugin
Shared Counts – Best Social Sharing Plugin
CSS Hero – Best WordPress Theme Editor Plugin
WP Rocket – Best WordPress Cache Plugin
Live Chat – Best Live Chat Plugin
Envira Gallery – Top WordPress Gallery Plugin
Pretty Links – Top Affiliate Marketing Plugin
Revive Old Post – Best Post Scheduling Plugin
Smart Slider 3 – Best Slider plugin
WPML – Best WordPress Translation Plugin
User Role Editor – Best User Role Editor Tool
Better Search Replace – Best Replacing Tool
AdSanity – Top WordPress Plugin for Ads
W3 Total Cache – Top Caching Plugin
Insert Headers and Footers – Top Snippet Plugin

1. WPForms – Best WordPress Form Builder Plugin

Every website needs a form builder to create contact forms, order forms, surveys, polls, and more. WPForms is the most beginner-friendly form builder for WordPress. It comes with a powerful drag and drop builder that you can use to create beautiful online forms in just a few minutes without touching a single line of code.

WPForms is a one-stop shop for creating any type of WordPress form including order forms, survey forms, donation forms, email subscription forms, etc.

WPForms come with dozens of pre-built form templates that perfectly adapt to your workflow and save you time. It comes with all the advanced features like email marketing integration, payment integrations, conditional logic, survey addon, multi-part forms, front-end post submission, and more.

If you’re after a contact form plugin that is both easy and powerful, then look no further than WPForms. We believe it’s a MUST HAVE for every site. It’s being used on over 1 million websites!

They also have a free version available that you can get – WPForms Lite.

Bonus: IsItWP users get a 10% discount on WPForms. Simply use our WPForms coupon: SAVE10

2. MonsterInsights – Best Analytics Plugin for WordPress

If you want to grow your website, then it’s important for you to know exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights is the best and most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Over 1.9 million websites use MonsterInsights.

MonsterInsights makes it super easy to connect your website to Google Analytics and offers comprehensive tracking features.

Even though Google Analytics is built for tracking almost every user interaction on your website, like form submissions, eCommerce transactions, downloads tracking, etc., the default Analytics setup doesn’t allow you to make use of the full potential of Analytics tracking.

For example, if you want to track an onsite event, like form submissions tracking, you’ll either have to add the custom event tracking code into your website or set up Google Analytics goal for every form. This can be tedious and time-consuming especially if you’re not a developer or an Analytics expert.

With MonsterInsights, you can enable different tracking features in just a few clicks without having to touch a single line of code. At a glance, you can review your site’s performance right within your WordPress dashboard without logging into your Analytics profile.

A lite version of the plugin is available to download for free from the official WordPress plugins repository.

3. SeedProd – Best Landing Page Builder Plugin

SeedProd is the most popular landing page builder plugin for WordPress. When you are creating a new website, it lets you design and customize landing pages quickly. You can use it to get new potential leads and increase your revenue.

Over 1 million business websites are using SeedProd to create landing pages. It offers multiple types of landing page templates, including sales pages, coming soon and maintenance mode pages, webinar pages, optin pages, and so on.

Here are some of the key features that make SeedProd the top choice to build landing pages:

Drag and Drop Builder: It has a user-friendly drag and drop builder with all the options you need. You can use the point and click tool to add text, images, and other elements on your landing pages quickly without editing any code.
Premium Integrations: SeedProd seamlessly integrates with popular third-party WordPress plugins to extend the features and functionality of the landing page builder.
Quick Templates: Some of the most important landing pages templates are just 1-click away. You can enable coming soon, maintenance mode, and 404 error pages to limit access to your website whenever you need. These page templates also help capture leads and grow your email list.
Smart Sections: It has ready-made sections and layouts to add a call-to-action, header, text, and so on. With professional designs, you get the best look for your landing page in just a few minutes.

A free / lite version of the plugin is available to download from WordPress.org.

4. OptinMonster – Best Lead Generation Plugin

OptinMonster is the most powerful lead generation solution in the world. It comes with high-performing pre-built templates that are proven to convert your visitors into leads and customers. You can choose the perfect campaign type that easily grabs your visitors’ attention, like lightbox popup, floating bar, full-screen welcome mat, and more.

Check out our article on the best WordPress popup plugins.

With its powerful targeting and segmentation engine, you can show the personalized messages to every individual visitor on your site based on their geographic location, referral source, the page or section of your site, and more.

Some key features of OptinMonster are:

Exit-intent Technology: Recover abandoning visitors into leads by showing customized campaigns to your visitors at the precise moment they are about to leave.
Onsite Retargeting: Create special offers targeting repeat visitors based on their previous interactions on your site.
Onsite Followup Campaigns: Followup your visitors with triggered campaigns based on visitor interactions.
Cookie retargeting: Create custom browser cookies based on your customers’ demographics data like age, gender, location and then show highly targeted campaigns to drive conversions.

OptinMonster seamlessly integrates with all major email marketing services. A free connector plugin is available to download from the WordPress plugin repository that lets you easily embed your OptinMonster forms.

5. Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon is a social feed plugin suite for WordPress that lets you display social media content on your website the way you want. Smash Balloon makes it easy to set up social feeds within just 30 seconds.

All you have to do is authorize the plugin and add the shortcode anywhere on your site. Then the plugin will share your content from social media handles instantly.

Smash Balloon offers 4 different social feed plugins:

Custom Facebook Feed: Integrate your Facebook photos, videos, events and more into your website to completely match the look and feel of the site.
Instagram Feed: Add hashtag, shoppable, and tagged feeds to your site. Plus, you can even display Instagram stories in a lightbox popup.
Custom Twitter Feeds: Easily add twitter cards, search based feeds, and automatically moderated tweets with multi-column masonry layout.
Feed for YouTube: Add as many YouTube feeds as you want, including the live streaming feeds.

Smash Balloon lets you customize your feed to match your theme so that it looks great on your site.

Added to that, you can display social sharing buttons so visitors can become subscribers and share your content easily.

6. RafflePress – Best WordPress Contest Plugin

is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market that makes it easy to run a successful online contest.

Unlike a typical contest plugin, RafflePress offers built-in viral sharing option that rewards users with bonus entries if they refer-a-friend or share your giveaway on social media. That way you can drive more traffic, grow your email list, and social media followers.

Let’s take a quick look at some of their standout features:

Drag and drop giveaway builder to build a giveaway campaign in minutes, without touching a line of code.
Pre-built giveaway templates to save you time so you don’t always have to build an attractive contest from scratch.
Make your giveaway viral by incentivizing social sharing.
And a lot more…

The free version of the plugin is available to download from WordPress.org.

7. TrustPulse – Best Social Proof Notification App

TrustPulse is a social proof notification app that leverages the power of social proof to increase trust, conversions, and sales. With TrustPulse, you can track and display real user activities on your site, like purchases and signups. This enforces trust, leading to driving more sales and revenue.

Some of the key features of TrustPulse are:

Real time event tracking: Show a live stream of any action on your site, such as purchases, demo registrations, etc.
Smart targeting: Show your social proof notifications to the right people at the right time.
Works on any site: TrustPulse is a platform independent app, meaning you can use it on any platforms, including WordPress, Shopify, Joomla, Blogger, etc.

8. PushEngage – Best Web Push Notification Plugin

PushEngage is a WordPress push notification plugin that lets you send custom web notifications to your users. It lets you build a long-lasting relationship with your visitors by encouraging them to return to your site with custom notifications. The plugin helps you reach targeted customers with personalized messages.

Here’s a list of the top web push notifications that you can send to your customers and increase your website traffic:

Customers who are interested in your products will automatically get a push notification whenever there is a price drop.
Inventory alerts bring back customers when the product is back in stock.
Timezone specific alerts make PushEngage unique and effective. It lets you send a notification to users based on their local time.

9. WP Mail SMTP – Best SMTP Plugin

WP Mail SMTP helps fix the email deliverability issue that many WordPress sites encounter by routing emails through a proper SMTP protocol instead of your default hosting server.

Popular email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc are constantly improving their services to reduce email spam. One of the things their spam tools look for is whether an email is originating from the location it claims to be originating from.

If the proper authentication isn’t there, then the emails either go in your SPAM folder or worst not get delivered at all.

Also check: How to Create an Email Blast

WP Mail SMTP solves this issue. This is a MUST HAVE plugin for all websites. Currently running on 900,000 WordPress sites.

10. Uncanny Automator – Best WordPress Admin Automation Plugin

Uncanny Automator is a WordPress admin automation plugin. It lets you connect plugins to automate the routine administration tasks and saves time every day. You can use the features of multiple WordPress plugins and combine them to make a single recipe or multiple recipes.

It comes with triggers from a dozen plugins and thousands of apps. The plugin works in three steps: Choose your trigger, create an action to perform, and let it run automatically.

Uncanny Automator integrates with popular plugins and apps, including Easy Digital Downloads, BuddyPress, Automator Core, and so on. You can also use this plugin to automate tasks for your eCommerce store or learning management system.

11. All in One SEO – Best WordPress Plugin for SEO

All in One SEO is the best and most powerful SEO plugin on the market. It allows you to easily optimize your WordPress site for better search engine rankings.

It is a comprehensive solution that takes care of everything you need to optimize your site.

You can audit your site’s SEO right from your WordPress dashboard.

It has features for on-page SEO such as keywords, rich snippets, and headline tools to optimize posts and pages. Plus, it takes care of technical SEO with features like smart sitemaps, robots.txt, and canonical tags.

In addition, it lets you optimize for local SEO as well as eCommerce SEO.

The best part about All in One SEO is that it’s beginner-friendly so even if you’re new to SEO, you can use this tool to easily get your WordPress website to rank on search engines.

And it gives you analytics to track how well your site is performing and what you can improve.

Alternative: You can try Yoast SEO. It’s another good SEO plugin.

12. Sucuri – Best WordPress Plugin for Site Security

Sucuri is a complete website security solution that protects your site from malware, brute force attacks, and other potential vulnerabilities.

Once you activate Sucuri, all your website traffic goes through their CloudProxy servers and every request is scanned to filter out malicious requests. This way Sucuri can reduce server load and improve your site’s performance by blocking all malicious traffic from reaching your server.

It protects your website against SQL Injections, XSS, and all known-attacks. In addition to that, they proactively report potential security threats to the WordPress core team and third-party plugins as well.

Check out our article on best WordPress security plugins.

Aside from blocking all the attacks, some other ways Sucuri protects your website are:

Its antivirus package monitors your website every 4 hours to ensure your website is free from potential vulnerabilities and malware.
It keeps track of everything that happens on your site, including file changes, last login, failed login attempts, and more…
It allows you to conduct server-side scanning to protect your website from compromised and server-level infections.

13. UpdraftPlus – Top WordPress Plugin for Backup

UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress backup plugins in the market. It’s been rated as the most popular backup solution for WordPress, with over a million active installs.

Even with the free version of the plugin, you can easily set up full, manual or scheduled backups of all your website files including database, plugins and themes. Restoring your files is easy, and you can do it with minimal technical knowledge.

Best of all, it supports multiple cloud storage options including Google Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon S3.

While the free version is fully packed with all the essential features, you can easily enhance the core functionalities with their premium version.

Best Alternative: BackupBuddy

14. Constant Contact – Top Email Marketing Tool

Constant Contact is the most popular email marketing service for small businesses. It comes with tons of customizable email templates that help you get a head start. When getting started, you’ll be prompted to choose your industry, and your previous experience with email marketing. Based on the selection, you’ll get customized content and promotion ideas that will help you level up your email marketing.

Constant Contact offers unmatched support with live chat, email, and discussion forums. They also have a vast library of resources, and it integrates seamlessly with popular lead generation tools like OptinMonster and WPForms.

While most email marketing services offer 14 or 30-day free trial to test the service, Constant Contact gives you full access to their tool for 60 days. After the trial, the subscription starts at $20 per month for up to 500 subscribers.

Constant Contact is best for smart businesses that are just starting out with email marketing.

Best Alternatives: SendInBlue, AWeber, and ConverKit

15. MemberPress – Most Popular Membership Plugin

MemberPress is the most complete WordPress membership plugin that comes with all the features you need to create a powerful membership site with ease. Unlike other plugins, MemberPress lets you transform your existing website into a fully-featured membership site without hassle.

All you need to do is install the MemberPress plugin on your existing site, enter your payment gateway details, setup your products, and start inviting your visitors to join your membership site.

With MemberPress, you can restrict access to specific pages, posts, custom post types, or any existing files from your regular visitors. And with the built-in MemberPress Courses add-on, you can easily create, manage, and sell online courses.

The plugin integrates seamlessly with popular email marketing services, like AWeber, MailChimp, GetResponse, etc.

MemberPress offers built-in support for payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe and Authorize.net. You can also create dynamic pricing pages quickly and easily. The plugin also comes with several pricing page templates to create a unique look.

16. Beaver Builder – Best WordPress Plugins for Page Building

Beaver Builder is one of the best drag & drop WordPress page builders. It gives you the ability to create a website the way you want without knowing any coding skills. You can drag & drop to build beautiful pages with ease.

Beaver Builder comes with dozens of gorgeous page templates, so you can easily kickstart your design without starting from scratch. You can choose a template, replace images and text with yours, and then hit publish.

Beaver Builder works with any WordPress theme giving you full control over your content. The best thing is even if you stopped using the plugin, your content gets ported to the WordPress editor. With the pro plan and above, you’ll get beautiful Beaver Builder compatible themes that allow you to modify your styles with the native WordPress Customizer.

Want to get started with Beaver Builder? Check out our Beaver Builder deals to get the best price!

Best Alternatives: Divi and Elementor

17. LearnDash – Best WordPress LMS Plugin

LearnDash is the best WordPress LMS plugin in existence. LearnDash makes it super easy to create and sell courses, deliver quizzes, award certificates, and more.

It enables you to offer a robust learning experience to your members and supports the latest gamification, social learning, and micro-content trends.

Some of the ways you can sell your online courses from LearnDash are:

Memberships: Sell traditional membership access to your entire online courses.
One-time price: Allow users to make individual online course purchase.
Subscription: Maximize revenue through recurring payments and subscription for your online course.
Course licenses: Allow organizers to purchase the license in bulk and grant access to their staffs.

With LearnDash, you can let your students unlock new courses based on the points they earn as they complete courses. This increases user engagement in your online courses. You can also offer front-end user profiles where members can track their learning progress.

18. WooCommerce – Best WordPress eCommerce plugin

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform for WordPress. With no doubt, it is the most comprehensive solution that enables you to sell products, both digital and physical, on your WordPress website.

With hundreds of free and paid extensions, WooCommerce makes it super easy to build and enhance your store, so you can start selling products in minutes. If you want a custom build online store, then you can easily hire WooCommerce developers thanks to the large community.

WooCommerce comes bundled with PayPal (for accepting credit card and PayPal account payments), BACS, and cash on delivery for accepting payments. For more payment gateways, you can install addons on your WooCommerce store.

WooCommerce also provisocdes easy-to-follow documentation that walks you through different aspects of building online stores. The support requests are handled on the official forums, so in case you need assistance, they’ve got you covered. Don’t miss these best WooCommerce hosting reviews.

Best Alternatives: BigCommerce

19. Shared Counts – Best Social Sharing Plugin

Shared Counts is a lean social media plugin for your WordPress site that quickly retrieves, caches, and displays various social sharing counts by using SharedCount.com API. This is by far the fastest social sharing plugin in the market. Most other share plugins slow down your website, but this is written by very highly reputable developers who value performance.

Since it’s written by developers, this plugin is very flexible and developer-friendly. You can easily customize it to match your theme’s needs.

It supports share counts for Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter (using the NewShareCount API), Stumbleupon, and email sharing. It also combines the share count, so you can show total share counts alongside the buttons.

Best Alternative: Monarch

20. CSS Hero – Best WordPress Theme Editor Plugin

CSS Hero is a WordPress customization plugin that helps you customize your WordPress theme without writing a single line of code.

WordPress themes use CSS to control the visual appearance of your website. This means that if you want to customize the look and feel of your site, then you have to learn CSS. This isn’t a feasible option for beginners.

CSS Hero is a great solution if you’re not using a page builder like BeaverBuilder.

21. WP Rocket – Best WordPress Cache Plugin

WP Rocket is the best premium caching plugin available on the market. The best thing about WP Rocket is that it launches upon activation, so you don’t have to struggle with complex plugin configurations.

WP Rocket integrates all the latest features for boosting performance, including lazy loading minification of CSS, HTML and JavaScript files, etc.

Best Alternatives: Super Cache and W3 Total Cache

22. Live Chat – Best Live Chat Plugin

Live Chat is the best live chat tool that lets you get in touch with your website visitors and point them in the right direction.

The pricing is based on the number of agents that can log into your Live Chat account at the same time. However, you can create as many as agent accounts for organizing your team members. Everything that customers are typing in is visible instantly in the chat window, which helps you provide quick assistance to your customers.

The tool also comes with powerful built-in reports and analytics. You can even integrate it with your Google Analytics account to measure the impact Live Chat has on your business. You can also get a free plugin to install on your WordPress website.

Live Chat Inc supports integration with all your favorite web apps.

23. Envira Gallery – Top WordPress Gallery Plugin

Envira Gallery is the best WordPress Gallery plugin that’s both easy and powerful. It comes with a set of pre-built templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your gallery.

Unlike other popular WordPress gallery plugins, Envira is a lightweight non-bloated plugin. It comes with all the important features out of the box. You can easily enhance the core functionalities by installing one of their two dozen addons.

Some of the key features of Envira Gallery are:

Drag and drop builder: Create beautiful galleries in a matter of seconds with just a few clicks.
Responsive mobile friendly: All galleries you built with Envira are 100% responsive, meaning they’ll work great on mobile, tablet and desktop devices.
Standalone galleries: Create independent galleries that are not tied to your posts and pages.
Tons of addons: You can find an extensive collection of addons, like Social sharing, Videos, WooCommerce, Watermarking – just to name a few.

Best alternatives: NextGen Gallery and Modula Gallery

24. Pretty Links – Top Affiliate Marketing Plugin

Pretty Links is a must-use plugin for affiliate marketers that let you easily organize all your affiliate links in a single place. With Pretty Links, finding and replacing your affiliate links won’t be a hassle.

For example, whenever you want to change an affiliate link, you don’t need to dig deeper into your site and manually alter those URLs. Instead, you simply do that in your Pretty Links panel, which will automatically change all the published URLs.

It also allows you to cloak your ugly-looking long URLs into shorter pretty links.

Best alternatives: ThirstyAffiliates

25. Revive Old Post – Best Post Scheduling Plugin

Revive Old Post allows you to automatically share your new and old posts on your social media accounts. It enables you to share your content on multiple platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also allows you to track clicks.

You can set a sharing interval and choose the number of posts to share. You can also post with featured images in your tweets to boost your click-through rates.

26. Smart Slider 3 – Best WordPress Slider Plugin

Smart Slider 3 enables you to quickly build a slider the way you want. Let’s take a look at a few features of Smart Slider 3:

Slide library: Easily build a slider with the hundreds of premade slides.
Layer animations: It gives layers motions and transitions.
Dynamic content generator: Import content from external sites, like Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, and more.

Read our complete Smart Slider 3 review.

Best Alternative: Soliloquy

27. WPML – Best WordPress Translation Plugin

WPML is a premium translation plugin that allows you to translate your posts, pages, and custom post types. It’s advised to make a full backup of your site before installing it on your website.

Unlike most other translation plugins, WPML is compatible with most major WordPress themes and plugins, so you don’t have to patch your themes or plugins to make WPML work. It even allows you to translate web copy created with popular drag & drop page builders.

If you need help with human translation, then WPML connects you to leading translation services. WPML takes care of all multilingual SEO and works seamlessly with popular SEO plugins. You can use as many languages as you like with WPML.

They offer 3 premium plans based on the number of features. With every premium plan, you get unlimited website usage right.

WPML is the oldest and most reliable plugin for creating multilingual WordPress websites.

Best alternative: TranslatePress. Check out this TranslatePress review.

28. User Role Editor – Best User Role Editor Tool

User Role Editor is a great utility plugin that allows you to create custom permissions and roles for your WordPress site. This is a great plugin for membership sites, eCommerce sites, corporate sites, or any type of multi-author / multi-user website.

While it’s not needed for all sites, it’s the best plugin of its kind especially when you need it.

29. Better Search Replace – Best Replacing Tool

Better Search Replace is a WordPress utility plugin that helps you quickly Find and Replace different items on your site. This works very similar to the Find and Replace feature in Microsoft Word or equivalent software.

We recommend installing this plugin when you need it because it’s the best of its kind. Once you’re done using the plugin, you can simply uninstall it.

30. AdSanity – Top WordPress Plugin for Ads

AdSanity provides an easy way to insert affiliate banners inside a post or sidebar widgets. You can manage your affiliate campaigns and ads within your WordPress admin panel.

The main benefit of using AdSanity is you can display affiliate banners only on a specified timeframe on your website. With its performance report, you can easily track the performance of each banner you publish on your site.

31. W3 Total Cache – Top Caching Plugin

With active installs on over a million websites, W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. It improves your server performance by caching every aspect of your site and also offers content delivery network integrations.

It’s been used and recommended by countless companies and publications like AT&T, MattCutts.com, Mashable.com, and others. Whether your site is hosted on a shared hosting network or a dedicated server, you’ll find the plugin helps to improve your web server performance and reduce page load time. Perhaps, it’s the only plugin designed to optimize all practical hosting environments.

It offers support for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

The developers claim that the plugin can offer up to 80% bandwidth savings via minification, the process of reducing the size of your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and feeds without having a negative impact.

Best Alternative: WPRocket

32. Insert Headers and Footers – Top Snippet Plugin

Insert Headers and Footers is a simple utility plugin that lets you insert code like Facebook Pixel, custom CSS, meta verification, and others in your website’s header or footer area.

This saves you from editing your theme files. You can make all the changes from a simple interface inside your WordPress dashboard.

And that’s our list of the best WordPress plugins in 2021. Before we wrap up, you may be interested to know the difference between free and premium plugins so that you can make the right choices.

Top WordPress Plugins – Free vs. Premium

There are thousands of WordPress plugins, which are available for free on WordPress.org directory. However, there are lots of WordPress plugins that are sold on third-party websites as premium plugins. This makes many new users wonder whether premium or paid plugins are better in some way?

Free WordPress plugins are available to you without any warranties. Support for free plugins is usually limited, and it is not guaranteed. Some free plugin authors do provide excellent support for their free plugins, but sooner or later it becomes a chore. There is no financial incentive for plugin authors to keep answering user questions on their free plugins. This means that free WordPress plugins are available on an as-is basis with no warranties.

Paid WordPress plugins on the other hand offer premium support for their product. Most of them are licensed GPL too, which means they also come with a limited warranty. But having access to support means you can get help much faster.

This does not mean that premium plugins are always a better alternative to free WordPress plugins. In fact, many of the most popular WordPress plugins are free. For example, All in One SEO, WP Super Cache, WPForms, and many more.

You should focus on finding a good plugin, that is easy to use, and has excellent reviews. Once you have narrowed down your search, you can decide whether you want to go for a premium plugin or a free alternative. You can try the free plugins first but if they are too difficult to use, then you can go for a paid plugin.

How to Install a WordPress Plugin

There are two easy ways to install a WordPress plugin from the admin area of your site. For free WordPress plugins, you can go to Plugins » Add New and search for the plugin name that you want to install.

Carefully look at the results to make sure that you are downloading the plugin you wanted and then click on the Install button. Once installed, you will need to activate the plugin.

If you downloaded a WordPress plugin in a zip file, then this is how you will install it.

Simply go to Plugins » Add New page, and then click on the ‘Upload Plugin’ button at the top.

WordPress will now show you a page where you can upload the plugin zip file. Simply click on the choose file button, locate the zip file on your computer, and then click on the install now button.

WordPress will now upload the plugin file to your website, extract it, and install the plugin. Once the installation is finished, it will show you a success message with a link to activate the plugin.

It is important to remember, that you need to activate a plugin before you could use it on your WordPress site.

For more detailed instructions, take a look at our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

That’s all we have for you. We hope you liked our list of the best WordPress plugins. For your next steps, you’ll find these resources helpful:

Once you sign up for multiple plugins, you’ll need to keep a track of all your passwords. You’ll also need to update your plugins regularly to make sure your site is using the latest and most secure version. So we’ve also added posts that will help you maintain these plugins using a maintenance service or an auto-update plugin.