49 Best WordPress Plugins & Tools to Use in 2021 (FREE & Paid)

Wondering what the best WordPress plugins for business websites are? Or, maybe you’re looking for the best free WordPress plugins to get you started (or save a little).

Either way, you’re in the right place. Here, we’re going to share the best free and premium WordPress plugins we’ve found.

Since there are over 55,000 WordPress plugins available on the internet, it’s hard for business owners to choose the best WordPress plugin for their needs.

So, we consulted with top WordPress experts to create the ultimate list of the 49 best WordPress plugins!

Ready to get started? Let’s dive straight into the list.

Best WordPress Plugins for Your Site

Because this guide is so in-depth, we’ve created a table of content to break down the best WordPress plugins based on your needs:

Table of Contents

• Lead Generation Plugins to Grow Your Email List
• Social Marketing and Sharing Tools
• WordPress Analytics Plugins
• Contact Form Plugins
• Affiliate Marketing Plugins
• Email Marketing Tools
• eCommerce Plugins
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plugins
• Posting & Page Builder Plugins
• Gallery & Image Optimization Plugins
• Site Speed & Optimization Plugins
• Site Security Plugins
• Backup Plugins
• Membership Sites & Course Plugins
• Calendar, Events & Scheduling Tools
• Other WordPress Plugins

We kicked things off with WordPress plugins that make it easier to grow your email list. Let’s get started.

Best Lead Generation Plugins to Grow Your Email List

1. OptinMonster: #1 Conversion Optimization Plugin

OptinMonster is the best conversion optimization tool for WordPress that helps you grow your email list, get more leads, and boost more sales. With OptinMonster, you can create high-conversion lead generation campaigns right within your WordPress dashboard.

No matter what type of online business you run, OptinMonster has a solution for you that will help you get more subscribers, increase sales, and convert more of your web traffic into customers.

Plus, our drag and drop campaign builder makes it super easy to create beautiful, effective, high-converting optins that are mobile-friendly.

We also offer seamless integrations with your favorite email marketing services so you can easily personalize, segment, and target campaigns with excellent results.

Key Features:

• Easy-to-use drag and drop builder: Build a stunning optin campaign without hiring a designer
• 50+ optin campaign templates: Templates are categorized based on devices, industry, and goals
• 6 different optin campaign types: Campaign types are Popup, Floating bar, Slide in, Inline, Fullscreen, and Gamified
• Campaign triggers like exit-intent and timed display
• Targeted campaigns using referrer detection, location, and cookie retargeting
• Actionable insights like A/B testing, automated personalization, and smart success
• SupportĀ like live chat, email ticket submission, YouTube video tutorials, blogs, documentation, and more!

Why You Need It:

If you’re monetizing your WordPress website in any way, whether it be lead generation, display ads, affiliate marketing, or product sales, you’ll need OptinMonster. As a conversion optimization toolkit, OptinMonster helps you streamline your monetization strategy. Here’s how:

• Lead generation: Easily create stunning targeted campaigns to skyrocket your email list
• Display ads: Increase your pageviews and help you make more revenue from ads
• Affiliate marketing: Boost affiliate revenue by promoting affiliate products with stunning conversion-optimized campaigns
• Product sales: Reduce shopping cart abandonment, do upsell, downsell, and more…

The best part is that OptinMonster comes with more WordPress-specific targeting rules than any plugin on the market, so you can rest assured that you’re showing campaigns to the right people at the right time when they’re more likely to be converted into leads and customers.

Ready to get started? Click below to start your risk-free OptinMonster account!

Get the #1 WordPress Plugin for Business Today! 

You can also find OptinMonster on the WordPress plugin directory.

2. SeedProd: Best Landing Page Builder

SeedProd is the ultimate landing page builder for WordPress. It’s a powerful tool for creating beautiful landing pages in minutes using a visual drag and drop editor.

It’s perfect for setting up lead capture pages for WordPress blogs, sales pages for eCommerce stores, and everything in between.

Key Features:

• Drag and drop builder to add new features
• Built-in email autoresponder
• Search engine optimized
• Social follow and share
• Prebuilt landing page templates

Why You Need It:

Creating a landing page helps you easily collect emails on your optin, sales, and webinar pages. Using SeedProd, you can build a landing page that looks different from the rest of your site without writing any code.

You can also use SeedProd to create custom maintenance mode and 404 pages that will delight your visitors and get you leads!

Click here to get started with SeedProd

3. RafflePress: #1 Giveaway Plugin for WordPress

RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin for WordPress. So, what’s it doing in the lead generation section of our best WordPress plugins list, you ask? It’s simple.

One of the best ways to increase your email subscriber list is by running contests and giveaways. RafflePress makes it easy to host these contests on your own blog and social media platforms. You can even let your social media followers and website visitors get multiple contest entries when they complete different promotional tasks.

RafflePress has a simple, modern interface with a drag and drop builder you can use to make an attention-grabbing giveaway. But, don’t let the sleek design fool you, RafflePress packs impressive success tracking and retargeting features that you can use to monitor your giveaways and drive entries.

Also, RafflePress has fraud protection, distraction-free landing pages, and integrates with social media platforms as well as email marketing services and CRM software.

Key Features:

• Create different entry options for all major social networks
• Drag and drop giveaway builder
• Marketing and CRM integrations
• Success tracking and retargeting
• Fraud protection

Why You Need It:

Contests really work to boost engagement, which then sends more people to your website. PostPlanner runs one Facebook contest each month, and has seen an increase in page exposure, engagement, and leads as a result.

For more information, check out this helpful review of RafflePress.

Or dive right in and get started with RafflePress today!

Best Social Proof and Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress

4. TrustPulse: Best Social Proof App

You know those cute little popups that tell you, “So-and-so just bought this product?” That’s what TrustPulse can do for your site: leverage the power of social proof to increase your conversions by up to 15%.

TrustPulse isn’t actually a plugin; it’s just a simple bit of code that you embed on your site, easy as that! Then, your visitors will start seeing real-time customer activity notificationsĀ on your website in the form of eye-catching, verified activity bubbles. These notifications instantly add credibility and solidify your good reputation in the eyes of a new visitor.

Key Features:

• Smart targeting using advanced rules and timing controls to show your campaign at the right time to boost conversions
• Flexible design options to match the look and feel of your website
• Actionable analytics show you at a glance which pages deliver the highest conversions
• Works seamlessly with all popular website platforms

Why You Need It:

Social proof is persuasive. Even something as simple as a popup telling site visitors that someone just bought your product goes a long way to show visitors that you’re trustworthy.

TrustPulse helps you take advantage of the human drive for social acceptance and turn social proof into conversions for your eCommerce store.

Get started with TrustPulse!

5. PushEngage: Best Push Notification Tool

PushEngage is an excellent eCommerce plugin to boost sales through push notifications. This software allows you to instantly notify customers about:

• Items left in their cart
• Price reductions
• New promotional offers
• And much more

With PushEngage, you can reduce cart abandonment and boost your overall sales. You do this by creating personalized push notifications that alert users to the things they care about most.

Plus, this eCommerce tool has powerful analytics tracking so you can measure the success of your push notification campaigns. You can also A/B test your notifications to optimize their effectiveness.

You may also want to see our comparison of the best push notification tool for WordPress.

6. Social Warfare

Social WarfareĀ is a social proof plugin that lets you choose the social networks where you want to share your content, as well as where you want the sharing buttons to appear.

Key Features:

• Popular Posts widget lets you show your most popular posts based on how many likes they’ve received
• Click to tweet quotes from right inside posts or pages
• Use shortcodes to place share buttons anywhere you want on your site

See our in-depth MonsterInsights review to get a complete picture of what it has to offer.

Why You Need It:

Social Warfare increases your site’s authority by showing off how many other visitors have liked and shared your content.

The plugin is flexible and easy to use and includes content protection, so content hijackers can’t come along and advertise on top of your stuff.

There are also a ton of pro features that let you customize the look of your sharing buttons, how your content is shared, count minimums, rich pins, and more.

7. Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon is the perfect way to show off your social media content on your website. They’re trusted by more than 1 million active users and boast an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars.

It’s perfect for bloggers trying to build their reputation or businesses trying to boost engagement with their brand.

Smash Balloon offers these plugins:

• Custom Facebook Feed Pro
• Instagram Feed Pro
• Custom Twitter Feeds Pro
• Feeds for YouTube Pro

Key Features:

• Super simple setup with no design or technical knowledge required
• Responsive and mobile-optimized
• Search engine accessible
• Ridiculously customizable
• Support for comments and reactions
• Hashtag and shoppable feeds for Instagram
• Automatic Tweet moderation
• Custom video end actions for YouTube

Why You Need It:

Smash Balloon helps you save time, increase social engagement, and add dynamic SEO content to your site. And, not only are the plugins amazing, but Smash Balloon’s support is out of this world!

Best WordPress Analytics Plugins

8. MonsterInsights

With the MonsterInsights plugin for WordPress, you can set up analytics in just a few clicks and see at a glance how your website is performing.

This plugin allows you to understand complicated analytics like traffic sources and audience behavior easily, so you know what’s working and where you’re wasting your time. With that information readily available, you can create a data-driven strategy to grow your business.

MonsterInsights also offers eCommerce tracking to get the data you need on your WooCommerce or Easy Digital Download store.

Key Features:

• Quick and easy setup
• eCommerce tracking to keep tabs on your company’s health
• Real-time stats
• Google Analytics dashboard

Why You Need It:

Website analytics are vital to the growth of your business, and with MonsterInsights, you have real-time access to the data you need.

No matter what you sell, MonsterInsights shows you the most important eCommerce metrics like total revenue, conversion rate, top products, and top referral sources. In a single report.

Looking to engage with your customers or attract new ones? MonsterInsights has you covered.

You can see exactly which content gets the most visits, has the most time spent on site, and that has the best bounce rate. This helps you analyze and optimize for better engagement.

Click here to get started with MonsterInsights today

Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins & Feedback Tools

9. WPForms

WPForms has a drag and drop builder that makes it easy to create beautiful and highly-effective forms with cool features like smart conditional logic to provide an excellent user experience.

Looking to respond to leads quickly?Ā With WPForms, you can receive instant email notifications for submitted forms to engage with leads right away.

WPForms also offers several addons to enhance its already impressive features. You can easily connect with tools like PayPal, AWeber, MailChimp, and more.

Key Features:

• Instant notifications whenever a form is submitted
• File uploads so visitors can provide whatever information you request
• Multi-page forms

Why You Need It:

Using a contact form keeps you looking professional, streamlines your communication with your site’s visitors, and helps you build your email list.

WPForms lets you build online forms and collect data effortlessly. No coding or design skills required.

Using a contact form keeps you available to your site’s visitors without exposing your email address to spammers. With WPForms, you get instant notification emails whenever a form is submitted and can customize the email subject line for each form. This makes it easy to organize your inbox.

If you need to notify multiple people, you can do that too. Even better, you can customize who receives the notification based on how the user answers the form, saving your team time and reducing the time it takes to get in touch with your visitors.

Get started with a risk-free, 14-day trial of WPForms!

10. Formidable Forms

Formidable Forms is a versatile drag and drop form builder with great performance options.

And, it lets you build interactive forms able to calculate problems in real-time. So, a realtor could, for example, add a mortgage calculator to their site using Formidable Forms. That type of personalization drives visitors wild!

Key Features:

• Calculated form fields make providing online estimates, calculating product options, or showing interest/repayment calculators a breeze
• Conditional redirection so you can route submission response notifications to the right people
• Automatically fill out forms to save time and increase conversions
• Cascading lookup fields display available options based on the selection from the previous form field

Why You Need It:

Formidable Forms also makes it super easy to collect and analyze data. Then, you can view that data in the form of charts, tables, and graphs. With such simple access to optin performance, you can use a data-driven approach toward mailing list optimization.

But wait, there’s more!Ā Formidable Forms integrates with the WordPress eCommerce plugin WooCommerce. There, you can use it to collect customer information, calculate prices based on upsells and shipping, as well as other features to drive sales, and improve the customer experience.

11. LiveChat

The LiveChat WordPress plugin lets you quickly and easily add live chat support to your WordPress website that your visitors can use to get instant answers to their questions and concerns.

Key Features:

• File sharing and chat transcripts
• Smart or manual chat routing
• Feedback from users (chat/ticket ratings, post-chat surveys, satisfaction stats)

LiveChat has tons of customization options, a mobile app, and integrates with the other tools you’re using, making it an invaluable piece of your sales and marketing platform.

Click here to get started with LiveChat for free.

Check out our roundup of the best live chat plugins and software for more live chat options!

12. WP Mail SMTP

Ever have issues with receiving notifications from your WordPress site? WP Mail SMTP can fix that. This plugin reconfigured WordPress to use more reliable methods to send your emails.

Key Features:

• Quick and easy setup, even for beginners with no code needed
• Choose from several SMTP providers including Mailgun, SendGrid, Gmail, and more
• Stop missing out on contact form notifications

Why You Need It:

The way that WordPress is set up by default, the emails that it sends aren’t properly authenticated. If the proper authentication isn’t there, then those emails either go in your spam folder or don’t get delivered at all.

This includes emails such as new comment notifications, new user registration emails, and even your contact form notifications. For small businesses, it can really hurt your bottom line if your WordPress form notifications aren’t reaching your inbox.

That’s why it’s so important to use WP Mail SMTP if your WordPress notifications aren’t working.

Click here to get started with WP Mail SMTP for free.

Best Affiliate Marketing Plugins for WordPress

13. Pretty Links

Create short links that are readable, speakable, and memorable. With Pretty Links, you can create better social and affiliate links, as well as managing your redirects.

You can also create aĀ PrettyBar to the top of any Pretty Links to keep your brand in mind even when visitors are on external links.

Key Features:

• Use a PrettyBar to keep your brand front-and-center when visitors are on external links
• Manage all of your links: social media links, redirects, affiliate links, etc.
• Automatically create shortlinks and tweet customizable messages

Why You Need It:

Pretty Links takes care of a lot of behind-the-scenes link management to keep you focused on creating content.

Click to get started with Pretty Links

14. Thirsty Affiliates

Thirsty Affiliates is another great WordPress plugin for affiliate marketing. It has a low learning curve, it’s easy to set up, and it will totally simplify your affiliate linking strategy.

Key Features

• Automatically update keywords with affiliate links
• Cloak your links in seconds for added protection
• Set up redirects to boost your SEO
• Manage all your links from one user-friendly dashboard

Why You’ll Love It

Again, the key here is simplicity. Thirsty Affiliates makes it easy to manage all of your affiliate links so you don’t have to worry about updates or changes affecting your sales.

When a partner of yours changes their affiliate link, you’ll no longer have to manually make those updates. Instead, you update the link from your dashboard, and you can automatically update everything.

This saves you time and loads of revenue in lost sales.

Try Thirsty Affiliates today!

Best Email Marketing Tools

15. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the email providers that we always recommend because it’s beginner-friendly and offers quick and easy setup.

With Constant Contact, you can send personalized welcome, birthday, and anniversary emails. You can also set a scheduled series of emails to keep your audience engaged.

Key Features:

• Real-time reporting to track email campaigns
• Autoresponder to automate your email marketing

Why You Need It:

Email marketing is still the best way to get conversions. With Constant Contact, you can send a targeted series of personalized emails using their autoresponder feature. This makes it easy to build relationships while still saving time.

There are also a lot of laws surrounding the use of email marketing. Constant Contact helps you stay in compliance with anti-spam laws.

Perhaps the most important reason you need to be using an email marketing service like Constant Contact is being able to track your effectiveness in real-time. Constant Contact provides a ton of information about your campaign interactions. With the reporting from Constant Contact, you can keep track of:

• Emails opened
• Click-throughs
• Spam reports
• Bounces
• Opt-outs

Having this information means you’re able to identify what’s working and what isn’t so you can make changes.

Click here to get started with Constant Contact for FREE.

16. Drip

Drip is perfect for streamlining the drip email process. It’s a simple but potent tool that packs a punch.

With Drip, you can learn about your subscribers and visitors, and use that data to fine-tune your customer outreach. You can track customer data using tags, custom fields, and events. You can use theirĀ purchase intent marketing to identify your best buyers and prospects with a single score that you define.

Key Features:

• Tags, custom fields, and events help you identify and track key information about your customers
• Purchase Intent marketing makes it easy to identify your best customers and prospects
• Pre-built campaigns and workflows to get started quickly

Why You Need It:

People buy from businesses they trust. Drip helps eCommerce companies build that trust by focusing on the customer relationship.

With Drip’s tags, custom fields, and events, you can fine-tune the information you have about each customer, making it easy to personalize communications and build relationships. Using email blasts is effective for some things, but Drip also gives you the power to laser-focus your campaigns to your customers’ interests and behaviors.

Drip lets you set up email sequences, either using their pre-built campaigns or by creating your own email series. Email sequences are important to keep you in a customer’s mind. You can also use Drip’s email sequences to recover abandoned carts, increasing conversions, and your bottom line.

Click here to get started with Drip for free.

17. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is a great email marketing plugin. With it, you can manage contact lists and segmentation to improve campaign performance, as well as use Sendinblue’s SMTP for deliverability and tracking of transactional emails.

The reporting dashboard gives you a real-time look at performance, including opens, clicks, and bounces.

Key Features:

• Transactional emails with real-time metrics
• Dynamic personalization for customer-focused emails
• Custom KPI/indicator tracking to show you the metrics you care about

Why You Need It:

Marketing automation saves you time and money. Reason enough, right? The benefits go beyond that.

Automation helps you boost interaction with your contacts through targeted emails that reach them at the right time in their customer journey. And, increased interactions give you a better understanding of your audience, allowing for even greater personalization.

Sendinblue makes it easy to create custom communications that will be more relevant to your audience and make them more likely to click.

Click here to get started with Sendinblue for free.

Best eCommerce Plugins for WordPress

18. WooCommerce

When you use the WooCommerce and WordPress together, you get a robust eCommerce solution that is entirely customizable. You can create your storefront using one of the countless themes available and easily manage orders and customers.

WooCommerce has nearly 300 extensions that extend the functionality of the plugin through site enhancements, marketing, payments, shipping, etc.

Key Features:

• Sell anything, anywhere
• Offer extensive payment options
• You have complete control of every aspect of your store

Why You Need It:

WooCommerce and WordPress together create a tremendously powerful eCommerce platform. With WooCommerce, you can add categories, tags, and attributes that make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for. You can also show off product ratings and reviews on product pages to leverage the effects of social proof.

Processing payments is easy with WooCommerce too. The platform offers the ability to use the most popular providers; extensions can help you add lesser-known payment gateways if you choose. When you offer customers payment options, you’re removing barriers to closing the sale.

WooCommerce lets you manage customers and orders to enhance the customer experience. You can give refunds with a single click, and shoppers can either open a customer account or checkout as a guest. The easier you make it for your visitors to purchase, the more likely they are to do it.

19. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads is a WordPress plugin designed to meet the unique demands that come with selling digital products, including:

• Optional unlimited re-downloads for paying customers, so nobody purchases the same file twice
• Complete file access control, including expiring download links and restricting download access to approved customers only
• Download tracking tools, so you can see who’s downloading what

Also, don’t be surprised by Easy Digital Downloads’ lightweight design. It’s fully capable of being customized to meet the unique needs of your business thanks to aĀ growing list of supported extensionsĀ that offer a wide range of functions.

From alternative payment processing solutions to specialized download management tools, Easy Digital Downloads’ addons give you complete control over who can access your virtual content and how.

Best SEO Plugins to Grow Your Traffic

20. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

AIOSEO is the best WordPress plugin for SEO. It’s easy, powerful, and can help you strategically boost your rankings.

AIOSEO is the most comprehensive toolkit for WordPress SEO. It has over 2 million users who love the easy-to-use dashboard and lack of SEO “jargon.”

Plus, it has an automated setup wizard to help you choose the best SEO settings for your business.

These features and more make AIOSEO the best WordPress plugin for SEO on the market.

Key Features

• On-page SEO checklist
• Headline analyzer to improve titles
• Smart meta tag generator to automatically update dynamic values (like dates of the year)
• XML sitemap generator
• SEMrush integration to discover related and additional keywords
• And much more

Why You’ll Love It

Again, AIOSEO is the most comprehensive SEO plugin for WordPress. It will help you write better titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, and more.

Whether you’re an experienced SEO or just starting out, you can’t go wrong with AIOSEO.

Learn more about All in One SEO today!

21. SEMrush

SEMrush helps you keep track of what your competitors are doing. You can check out the keywords where they’re ranking (both paid and organic).

With SEMrush, you can set up side-by-side domain comparisons, conduct competitive analysis, and create up to 50 target keyword lists.

Key Features:

• Advertising research lets you know what your competitors are up to
• Keyword research helps you choose the right keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns
• Audit your site to get an in-depth overview of what’s working and what needs attention

Why You Need It:

SEMrush helps you leverage what’s already working for your competitors. With inside information about your competitor’s marketing strategy, you can create your own solid marketing strategy to combat them.

Using SEMrush’s audit tool gives you a quick and easy way to perform a comprehensive SEO audit of your WordPress site. You’ll know what needs your attention to make your website better, faster, and more attractive to search engines.

Get started with SEMrushā€”7-day money-back guarantee!

22. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins and with good reason. This plugin provides the help you need to optimize your pages with up to 5 keywords (free version is 1 keyword) and get you climbing up the search engine rankings.

With Yoast SEO, you’ll stay optimized even when Google decides to change its algorithm since the plugin is updated every 2 weeks. You can also avoid duplicate content, have full control over breadcrumbs, and with the premium version get a host of other features that help you make sure that your topics and keywords are looking good on every single page.

Key Features:

• Keyword optimization, obviously
• Readability check to make sure that your content is accessible
• No duplicate content that canĀ confuse search engines
• Redirect manager to avoid broken links or outdated content (premium feature)
• Add structured data to get rich snippets in search results

Why You Need It:

If people can’t find you in search results, they can’t buy from you, right? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you connect with the people who are looking for your products and services.

Yoast SEO helps you with brand awareness, site traffic, social media, pay-per-click ads (PPC), lead generation, and just about everything else you need to keep your business growing.

Only about 10% of people continue past the first page of search results. Yoast SEO makes it easier for you to get there.

23. RankMath

RankMath is a free SEO WordPress plugin that’s easy to install and simple to understand and use.

The plugin handles your meta description, XML sitemaps, redirects, Schema, and everything else related to on-page SEO. Plus, it gives you full control over everything. Want to index or noindex manually? Be their guest. Or, take it easy and throw it on autopilot.

Key Features:

• Automated image SEO to improve rankings by adding image ALT tags
• Rich snippet support to improve click-through rate by making your content stand out
• Customizable breadcrumbs to make navigating your site easier

Why You Need It:

RankMath includes features that would make even the most robust SEO plugins jealous. And it’s a FREE plugin.

Seriously. Not only do you get the standard SEO analysis and rank tracking, but RankMath includes deep Schema support, WooCommerce integration, and is multi-site compatible.

Plus, it’s super easy to apply social media metadata to your site, create and manage even complex redirects, and view Google Search Console data.

24. Broken Link Checker

Broken links are the worst.

The Broken Link Checker for WordPress helps you monitor your WordPress site for broken links so you can fix them before you get bouncing visitors. This plugin monitors links in posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields. You can use it to find links that don’t work, redirects, and even missing images.

Key Features:

• Monitors links wherever you want: posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and custom fields
• Edit links right from the plugin dashboard
• Get notifications via plugin dashboard or email of links that don’t work, missing images, and redirects

Why You Need It:

Broken links can do a lot of SEO damage. They’re also annoying and create a bad user experience. Even checking for broken links every six months can help you reduce bounce rates and increase page views.

Best WordPress Page Builder Plugins

25. Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is an incredibly powerful drag and drop page builder for your WordPress website. You’ll be able to easily create and edit your website posts, pages, and custom post types, allowing you to experiment with the placement of your page’s elements to increase conversions and sales.

You can get started with one of their pre-built templates or save your design as a template. You can create a column-based layout easily, and even switch themes without losing any of your content.

Key Features:

• Live, frontend editing takes the guesswork out of site design
• WooCommerce support makes it easy to design a storefront
• Editor mode lets you handoff sites to clients without worrying about them breaking their pages

Why You Need It:

A lot of premium WordPress themes come with different page layouts, but a page builder like Beaver Builder lets you build out pages visually, instead of using code. When you’re starting a business or running a business on a budget, you probably don’t have the time or money to fuss with coding your site or hiring a developer to do it for you.

With Beaver Builder, you can easily and quickly create a site, getting your business up and running in no time. This ease-of-use also helps with testing out marketing ideas like different product page layouts.

When you have control over your site design, you’re able to grow your store and your audience. Plus, Beaver Builder works with WooCommerce so you can easily drag and drop products to build your online store.

Get started with Beaver Builder today!

26. Elementor

Elementor is another popular landing page builder for WordPress. It has a drag and drop builder that allows you to quickly and easily create stunning landing pages in minutes.

It also comes with tons of tools and integrations to help grow your list. That includes things like optin forms, email provider integrations, and other valuable 3rd-party marketing tools.

There’s a reason why Elementor has built up such a positive reputation among WordPress users. It’s simple to set up and can help you create the landing pages you need for more conversions and higher sales.

Features

• Drag and drop builder
• Live editing
• Reusable blocks and templates
• 3rd-party integrations
• Optin forms to capture leads
• Customizable them, color, font styles, and more!

Why You Need It: If you struggle with design, this can be a great option for you to get started. It has lots of templates to help save you time and an intuitive drag and drop builder for customization options.

Get started with Elementor today!

Best Gallery & Image Optimization Plugins

27. Envira Gallery

Yes, you can easily create image galleries in WordPress without using a plugin, but why would you want to create basic and boring galleries when you can use Envira Gallery to create beautiful and responsive ones?

Envira Gallery helps you create stunning galleries anywhere on your site, create albums, open images in popups, and more. You can even make your gallery SEO friendly with deeplinking and pagination.

Key Features:

• Supersize lightbox images, so you don’t have to crop or resize
• Create standalone galleries that aren’t tied to specific posts or pages
• Access tons of addons to extend functionality even more

Why You Need It:

The internet is a visual place. Envira Gallery helps you create stunning galleries that your visitors will enjoy, keeping them on the site longer.

Unlike the default WordPress gallery, Envira lets you create standalone galleries that even have their own unique URL. This means that you can easily share the gallery that you want to share.

Envira Gallery also has addons available that can help you do amazing things. With the deeplinking addon you can get SEO benefits with unique, indexable URLs for all of your gallery items. The pagination addon speeds up load times by creating thumbnail images on multiple pages for your larger galleries.

28. EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer optimizes your images as you upload them to WordPress. You can even optimize images that you’ve already uploaded.

There are no speed or file size limits, and the plugin offers intelligent conversion options, so you’re always getting the right image format for what you need.

Key Features:

• Unlimited file size for uploads
• Optimize every image on your site, not just the media library
• Intelligent conversion options to get the right image format

Why You Need It:

EWWW Image Optimizer increases page speeds via image optimization. Increased page speeds result in better search engine rankings and will also improve conversion rates for sales or signups.

Best Site Speed & Optimization Tools and Plugins

29. MaxCDN

MaxCDNĀ is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that makes images and other static site content load faster and keeps your site secure. With MaxCDN, you’re getting the most reliable CDNĀ andĀ easy WordPress integration.

This plugin offers built-in, platform-wide security, capacity, scalability, and real-time control.

Key Features:

• Built-in, platform-wide security
• Comprehensive delivery security features like access control and content protection
• Real-time control for things like cache purging, config updates, and SSL certificate management

Why You Need It:

Yes, Google loves fast sites, and site speed can improve your overall ranking. You know who else loves fast sites? Your site’s visitors. A fast website is part of a great user experience and ensures that your visitors don’t bounce because something is taking forever to load.

MaxCDN not only helps with WordPress website speed, but also reduces bandwidth use and cost, adds security, and increases availability and uptime. With MaxCDN, you get protection from DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service) that can cause your site to go down.

Get started with a one month free trial of MaxCDN today!

30. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a simple-yet-robust caching plugin for WordPress. Caching creates an ultra-fast page load time, and WP Rocket gets started the moment it’s activated.

Key Features:

• Cache preloading simulates a visit to preload your site, improving indexing by search engines
• Images are loaded on request (as the visitor scrolls aka lazy loading), improving your site’s load time
• Static file compression reduces the weight of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files, reducing load time

Why You Need It:

Site speed matters. WP Rocket makes it easy to shave seconds off of your load time using caching. Those seconds can make all the difference with your bounce rate.

31. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is one of the best WordPress caching plugins built to increase your site’s speed and, byĀ extension, your ranking in search results. When fully configured, W3 Total Cache boasts at leastĀ a 10X improvement in overall site performance.

The reduced page load times provided by this plugin can lead to improved conversion rates and increased visitor time on site.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive caching of everything associated with your site
• AMP and SSL support
• Caching statistics to get insight into your site’s performance

Why You Need It:

W3 Total Cache can help you get your users interacting with your site faster using optimized progressive render. Reducing page load time leads to increased visitor time on site. Visitors also tend to view more pages when the site loads quickly. Both of these things result in higher search engine rankings, letting users find your site, and your products more easily.

This plugin also helps improve your web server performance to sustain high traffic periods.

32. Redirection

Redirection is the most popular redirect manager for WordPress and helps you easily manage 301 redirects and keep track of 404 errors.

With this plugin, you not only can do straight URL matching, but you can use conditional redirects. Redirection makes it easy to redirect based on things like user login status, the browser your visitor uses, the referring site, cookies, and more.

Key Features:

• Conditional redirects in addition to a straightforward URL matching
• Track 404 errors so you can fix them
• View logs of all redirects including user and browser information

Why You Need It:

Redirection makes it easy to manage your redirects, so your site is always up to date. If you delete a post or change your permalinks, you’ll want to use a redirect, so you don’t lose visitors with a 404 error when they try to access the page that’s now gone.

Redirects are also good for SEO because it signals to the search engine that the page it’s looking for has been moved. This means that your old page’s traffic and backlink strengths can be transferred to the new page.

33. Smush Pro

Smush Pro is a plugin by WPMU DEV that helps you optimize your site’s images. It’s one of the most powerful and effective image optimizing tools available for WordPress.

This plugin allows you to quickly and automatically reduce the size of your site’s images. In turn, this improves your site’s speed times which improves user experience (UX) and gives your SEO a boost.

They’re trusted by over 700,000 websites and have optimized over 64 billion images.

If you want an easy way to make your site blazing fast, Smush Pro is certainly a tool worth looking into.

Key Features

• Optimize unlimited images in 1 click
• Super Smash images for 2x the compression
• Back up your original image files for more security
• No size limits
• Automatic resize and scaling features

Why You Need ItĀ 

This is the most low-hanging fruit way to improve UX and SEO. Many site owners don’t know the effect their images have on their site’s performance.

With just 1 plugin, you can rest assured that your site’s images aren’t causing your site to run more slowly than it needs to.

Best WordPress Security Plugins

34. Sucuri Firewall

If you don’t already have a firewall on your website, get one. Sucuri Firewall offers a plugin that complements your Sucuri services, making it easy to integrate those services into your site.

Sucuri can protect your site from just about any type of attack, including brute force attacks from spam comments, malware, DDoS attacks, etc.

This is hands down one of the most reliable and best WordPress plugins for security.

Key Features:

• Unlimited malware and hack cleanup
• A comprehensive 5-step process to ensure that your site is protected

Why You Need It:

Sucuri keeps your site and users’ information safe. It blocks attacks before they even reach your server, meaning your site is always secure.

When you use Sucuri’s scanning functionality, your site is monitored every 3 hours to check for malware, malicious JavaScript, malicious iframes, suspicious redirections, spammy link injections, and more. You can also make sure your site isn’t blacklisted to keep your reputation intact.

Get started with Sucuri today!

35. All In One WP Security & Firewall

All In One WP Security & Firewall is hands-down the best free WordPress security plugin available. It’s user-friendly and comes with a range of features that boost security and keep your site running smoothly.

Key Features:

• Login Lockdown keeps your WordPress site protected against brute force attacks
• Force logout capabilities
• The ability to blacklist specific IPs or IP ranges
• A security dashboard that shows important info like failed login attempts, account activity, and users online

Why You Need It:

All In One WP Security & Firewall has lots of features and extendability. And, if you do run into issues, their support is easy to deal with and very patient.

36. Really Simple SSL

Really Simple SSL is just that: a really simple SSL tool to get your entire site SSL in one click.

Options are kept to a minimum in this lightweight plugin, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. This plugin automatically detects your settings and configures your site to run over https, the way search engines like Google want to see it.

Key Features:

• Get your entire site SSL with 1 click
• All incoming requests are redirected to https
• Insecure content is fixed by replacing HTTP URLs with https

Why You Need It:

Using this plugin can save you hours of work enabling SSL on your site. Now that Google is going to be marking pages without https URLs as insecure, this is the time to check this out.

Best WordPress Backup Plugins

37. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is the most popular and highest ranking scheduled backup plugin for WordPress. Even the free version lets you backup your files and database to the cloud and restores with a single click.

Key Features:

• Multi-site compatible
• Supports manual and automated backup and can even be customized to backup at a specific time
• Backups can be encrypted for security

UpdraftPlus is free for the base plugin, but also has a paid plan with additional features and priority support. Get started with UpdraftPlus today!

38. VaultPress

VaultPress is a backup and security service that not only backs up every post, comment, file, and setting on your site but also protects you from hackers, malware, accidental damage, and host outages.

Key Features:

• Automated daily backups with unlimited storage
• 30-day backup archive
• Brute force attack protection and uptime monitoring

Why You Need It:

VaultPress was created by Automattic, the same folks who bring you WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Akismet, and more. So, you just know it’s good. Plus, site migration is super easy, and you get priority support from WordPress experts.

Best WordPress Membership Site & Course Plugins

39. MemberPress

MemberPress is an all-in-one membership plugin for WordPress. With the MemberPress plugin, you can create an unlimited number of memberships and customize the pricing, who can join, or how long a trial period will last.

Key Features:

• Integrates with popular email marketing services likeĀ Constant Contact, Mailchimp, AWeber, GetResponse, etc.
• Includes content dripping and access expiration
• Powerful access rules to protect posts, pages, images, videos, etc.
• Includes LMS features to create online courses
• Simple payment gateway integration
• Customizable checkout

Why You Need It:

MemberPress lets youĀ place members into groups, control upgrades, and createĀ dynamic pricing pages. It’s also easy to send reminder emails, making it simple to advertise holiday or flash sales.

You also get control over your coupons with the power to control expiry dates, set a discount percentage or fixed amount, choose which products coupons apply to, or create a custom coupon code.

Get started with a 14-day, no-risk trial of MemberPress today!

40. LearnPress

LearnPressĀ comes with a wide range of free tools to help you get your courses off the ground, andĀ its professional bundleĀ makes it easy to expand your services as your content grows.

Key Features:

• User-friendly drag and drop builder
• Create unlimited courses, lessons, quizzes, and questions
• Control student and instructor access with multiple course settings and lesson settings

Why You Need It:

LearnPress has an enormous library of free and premium addons that you can integrate into your eCommerce site, allowing you to make individual adjustments to your platform while paying for only the addons you need.

41. LifterLMS

Whether you’re offering a coupleĀ of individual programs or a collection of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), LifterLMS has everything you need, from content management tools to addons thatĀ target specific segments of your market.

LifterLMS lets you expand on your content by adding course prerequisites, training modules, group memberships, and other tools you can use to customize coursework.

Key Features:

• End-of-course certificates and achievement badges
• Automated emailing
• Support for Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net

Why You Need It:

You can integrate LifterLMS with other marketing tools, like MailChimp, WooCommerce, and WPForms to boost conversion rates even more. Plus, LifterLMS providers a student interface that works directlyĀ from your WordPress website and provides easy access to course materials, timetables, tests, and test results.

Try LifterLMS for 30 days for just $1!

Best Calendar, Events & Scheduling Tools

42. BirchPress

The BirchPress plugin lets your visitors make and pay for appointments on your WordPress site. You can customize your booking form with the built-in form editor and configure the emails that are sent when appointments are made, changed, or canceled.

BirchPress is bundled with PayPal, but if you use WooCommerce, you can set up other payment gateways.

Key Features:

• Powerful admin dashboard for booking and appointment management
• Client management
• Email notifications to staff and clients

Why You Need It:

If you are looking for a solution that will allow your clients to book and pay for appointments through your site, you have found it.

Offering online appointment booking saves staff time and makes scheduling convenient for your customers. Online booking options can even get you more customers. More and more, people are hanging up the phone in favor of clicking their way to appointments with everyone from their personal trainer to their dentist.

Get started with BirchPress today!

Best Miscellaneous WordPress Plugins and Growth Tools

43. Nextiva

Nextiva is a VOIP business phone service that comes with unlimited free domestic calling, voicemail to email or text, advanced call routing, and more.

Key Features:

• Call Pop provides account information, caller sentiment, and past interactions right on your screen when you get a call
• Sentiment Analysis lets you track customer interactions to get a complete picture of their customer journey
• Communicate, manage sales, and manage customers on a single screen

Nextiva makes it easy to track and act on customer data and feedback. Get started with Nextiva today!

44. Easy Affiliate

Easy Affiliate, previously known as Affiliate Royale, is the best affiliate program plugin for WordPress. With this all-in-one tool, you can quickly and easily create a self-hosted affiliate program for your eCommerce store.

It comes with a pre-styled affiliate dashboard, a powerful admin panel, commissions tracking, custom link generation, and much more.

Key Features:

• Includes a built-in affiliate application process
• Ability to set multiple commission levels
• Monitor real-time clicks and affiliate stats reports
• Pay commissions with PayPal 1-click payouts
• Integrates with popular email marketing services

Why You Need It:

If you’re not familiar with it, affiliate marketing is when customers or other content creators promote your product, and every time they make a sale, you pay them a small commission.

Having an affiliate program is like having your own non-salaried online sales team and it can boost profits by 30%!

Get started with Easy Affiliate today!

45. ReferralCandy

With ReferralCandy, you can create an awesome referral program to reward loyal customers with cash, store credit, discounts, or free products for referring their friends.

ReferralCandy has widgets ready to go, like a click-to-open popup, embedded sharing page, and post-purchase popup. You can also distribute awards automatically, and only successful, verified referrals are rewarded so you won’t have to worry about fake ones.

Key Features:

• Track referral engagement, customers’ shares, and new sales
• Cross-channel promotion to make it easy for customers to join
• Distribute rewards like coupons, cash, or gifts automatically

Why You Need It:

Referrals play an enormous role in someone’s decision to make a purchase. Think about it for a minute. If a friend or business you already trust tells you that something is worth checking out, aren’t you more likely to take a look? Referral programs let you reward your loyal customers,Ā so they know that their business and referrals mean a lot to you.

These types of programs aren’t right for every business, but if you’re already getting organic word-of-mouth referrals and have 100-200 transactions per month, a referral program could be just the thing to kick your sales up a notch.

Referral programs can be difficult to set up and manage, but ReferralCandy makes it easy.

Click here to try ReferralCandy FREE for 30 days!

46. Uncanny Automator

With Uncanny Automator, you can connect your existing WordPress plugins and apps together to automate routine tasks.

Creating automation recipes is super easy and there’s no coding required. Simply choose your triggers, select which actions you want to be performed automatically, and let Uncanny Automator do the work for you.

This is by far one of the best WordPress plugins for automation.

Features:

• Integrates with 50+ popular WordPress plugins
• Connects with over 2,000 apps
• Easy-to-use recipe editor

Why You Need It:

Instead of having to perform routine website tasks manually, you can use Uncanny Automator to save a ton of time.

For example, when a user submits a form, this plugin can automatically enroll them in your course, then create a calendar event for it. With your site on autopilot, you can focus on more important tasks.

Get started with Uncanny Automator today!

47. Relevanssi

WordPress search isn’t the best, mostly because it doesn’t search for everything. With a great plugin like Relevanssi, you can customize your search to include pretty much every bit of content on your site and offer cool options like “Did you mean…” suggestions or fuzzy matching.

Key Features:

• Extends search functionality to include comments, categories, post excerpts, and more
• Show “Did you mean” suggestions
• Multi-site support (premium)

Why You Need It:

Visitors expect to be able to find what they need on your site. If they do a search and don’t find it quickly, they’re going to go somewhere else to find it.

With the increased search functionality offered by Relevanssi, you’ll improve user experience and reduce bounce rates.

48. Slack

Slack is great for any team, but when your team is spread out across the world like ours, it’s a must. You can use the plugin to send notifications to Slack channels when certain events in WordPress occur: a post status changes to pending, a post is published, and when there’s a new comment.

This plugin also has a WooCommerce extension that lets you send a Slack notification when a payment in WooCommerce is marked as complete.

Key Features:

• Real-time messaging between teams
• WordPress notifications

Why You Need It:

If you have a multi-author WordPress site or distributed team, Slack can keep you connected in real-time.

You can easily set up notifications to keep your team informed when a post is published or updated, WordPress updates are available, or if you’ve received a new comment, among several other things.

The plugin also has support for WooCommerce. This means that you can automatically notify your team when you get a new order, and order is changed, or a product goes out of stock.

Pushing notifications saves time and lets your team focus on the things they need to get done.

Click to sign up with Slack and get a $100 credit!

49. Jetpack

Jetpack may be last on this list, but it’s certainly not the least qualified to be here. In fact, we weren’t exactly sure where to place this plugin because it’s got a little bit of everything for:

• Security
• Performance
• Site management

Jetpack helps you with security by offering real-time backups, malware scanning, and spam blocking.

But it also optimizes your site for speed by offering its own WordPress content delivery network (CDN).

Plus, Jetpack can function as a complete CRM so you can manage your contacts and new leads. This feature also includes social media posting, so you can engage more efficiently with the social platform of your choice.

Like we said earlier, this plugin falls into the “Jack of all trades” category and can be great if you’re just starting out.

Features

• Improves website security
• Manage contacts
• Boost site speed and performance
• Post to social media
• Automate site backups/updates

Why You Need It:Ā Like every “Jack of all trades,” Jetpack could also be considered a master of none. It’s great for beginners who want a single tool to manage their site. That said, it doesn’t specialize in any particular niche, so it sometimes comes up short of other plugins for individual categories.

Check out Jetpack today!

And that’s it!

These have been the best WordPress plugins and tools you can start testing this year. We hope you found this post helpful.

If you did enjoy it, you might also want to check out the following resources:

• 35 Best Signup Form Examples for Higher Conversions
• Mobile Popup Best Practices to Increase Sales
• Benefits of Email Marketing: Why (& How) to Grow Your List

These articles will have everything you need to attract new leads, get higher conversions, and generate more revenue for your business.