I know what you’re thinking. There are already so many best WordPress plugins lists already, how is this list any different? We created this list specifically to highlight high-quality plugins that are both well-maintained and easy to use. Also, after managing thousands of WordPress websites over the years, we see how different plugins behave across a wide variety of hosting environments and configurations, and also at a massive traffic scale.
While some plugins might not be perfect (many are far from it), we still want to highlight the plugins that are adding a specific piece of functionality and doing it better than the competition.
This list only includes high-quality plugins that are easy to use, well-coded, and known to be free of security or performance problems. We’ve jettisoned into space any plugins that don’t meet these standards. We originally published this list in 2017 and the plugin landscape has changed dramatically, so this is a ground-up rewrite to showcase the best WordPress plugins of 2024.
Important Note: This list does not contain affiliate links. We’ve invested significant effort to inform you, our clients, WordPress builders, and other website owners, about the best way to add features to your WordPress sites in the safest and most performant way possible, and we’ve done it without needing to earn pennies on your clicks.
Not Your Typical ‘Best WordPress Plugins’ Post
This isn’t a half-baked list of untested plugins that seem cool. No, this list is something much better. We’ve spent a huge amount of time and collective effort choosing, reviewing, and testing every plugin on this list.
These WordPress plugins solve real problems and do so in a way that won’t damage your website. Everything listed in this post is far above average when it comes to code quality, usability, performance, and attention to detail. I can assure you that this list is 100% free of deadbeat plugins.
These Plugins Have Been Through The Wringer
All the plugins in this post have been poked and prodded by the SiteCare team across thousands of WordPress websites. We’ve seen under the hood, and we’ve even run performance tests on some of the larger ones. All of these plugins have been installed on a WP_DEBUG-enabled multisite network with lots of other plugins. We looked for potential conflicts, slow-downs, and other obvious bugs.
There were plugins didn’t make the cut because of code quality. If we wouldn’t feel comfortable running a plugin on our website, it’s been excluded from the list. We’ve also included many playground links so you can test drive these plugins right in your web browser without installing WordPress!
Let’s dive in. Shall we? In no particular order, these are what SiteCare considers to be best-in-breed WordPress plugins:
Best WordPress Plugin for SEO
Yoast SEO
A natural place to start when curating a WordPress plugins list is SEO plugins since they’re such a foundational piece of any website. This base allows you to add appropriate structure, markup, title tags, meta descriptions, and other structured data elements.
While Yoast SEO has come under fire for performance bloat in rare cases, we’ve found that performance-related incidents are rare and usually related to a conflict with another plugin or some other outlier like a massive content database. Even so, we’ve seen it hum along nicely on websites with over 300,000 pieces of content and tens of millions of website visitors, so it’s hard for us to penalize it for isolated criticism.
We would give an honorable mention to RankMath in this category. It’s clearly built with code quality in mind and has some interesting features that don’t exist in Yoast SEO. But for now, the king sitting on top of the WordPress SEO throne is still Yoast SEO.
Best WordPress Plugins for Caching
WP Rocket
WP Rocket touts itself as the #1 WordPress caching plugin, and we’d have to agree. This WordPress caching plugin has easy-to-understand user controls, which is especially impressive in a category rife with overly complex interfaces. Some caching plugins make flight simulators look tame, but not WP Rocket.
The code quality and compatibility with other plugins are best-in-class, and WP Rocket certainly has the quickest and most straightforward setup of any WordPress caching plugin. At SiteCare, we spend a lot of time debugging conflicts and incompatibilities connected to caching plugins, and we’ve chosen WP Rocket to power our own websites because we run into way fewer issues overall without sacrificing results.
While not exactly the same type of solution, Perfmatters is another great option to optimize WordPress performance if you don’t need a true caching solution but still want more granular control over website elements that impact WordPress performance.
Best WordPress Plugins for Social Sharing
Novashare
Speaking of Perfmatters, Novashare is the best social sharing plugin for WordPress. I mention them in the same breath because Novashare is built by the team that makes Perfmatters. They build great products that are mindful of performance impact.
Historically, any type of sharing plugin was bloated with huge third-party libraries and was implemented in a way that wasn’t mindful of performance considerations, such as Google’s Core Web Vitals. Novashare has created a sharing plugin that’s easy to set up and configure and won’t slow down your website. It’s also 100% compatible with the WordPress Block Editor, so inserting sharing buttons wherever you’d like is a breeze. It’s the same sharing plugin we use on our website. Try it out and share this article with your friends!
Best WordPress Plugins for Forms
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is still the best forms plugin for WordPress. We’ve put many others to the test, and when it comes to reliability, features, ease of use, and maybe most importantly, longevity, Gravity Forms is second to none.
The versatility of Gravity Forms is awesome, and competes head to head with other SaaS-based form builders and beats many of them when it comes to features and ease of use.
Gravity Forms Gets The Job Done. Period.
At SiteCare we make a persistent effort to replace other client’s forms plugins with Gravity Forms unless there’s a very compelling reason to use another plugin. The add-on library is so extensive, and combined with other solutions like GravityWiz, people can build complex forms that handle payments, file uploads, and even automation workflows without needing to write any custom code or encounter compatibility issues.
Best WordPress Plugins for Backups
BlogVault
Backups are tricky. For them to be effective, they need to be automatic, reliable, and easy to restore. The only plugin that can be considered all of these things is BlogVault. The reason for this is that BlogVault isn’t really a backup plugin. There is a plugin component to it, but the software on BlogVault’s servers does the real heavy lifting.
WordPress Backup Plugins Are Flawed by Nature
Creating backups of your website with a WordPress plugin is not a very good idea. There are a lot of popular backup plugins on the market, we’ve reviewed many of them, both free and commercial, but any solution that depends on the WordPress CMS for backups to complete successfully is fundamentally flawed from the start.
A backup plugin has to depend on your server, your database, your version of PHP, your WordPress version, and, in many cases, additional WordPress plugins. Because of this, WordPress backup plugins might make you feel safer, but chances are the restoration process will be laborious and not as simple as the one-click restores that BlogVault can deliver.
With BlogVault, one click and a few minutes of waiting (depending on the size of your website) is all it will take to bring your site back online if it’s ever lost for any reason. To me, that makes BlogVault worth every penny, and is why we trust it for backing up our client’s websites.
Best WordPress Plugins for Migrating Sites
WP Migrate
WP Migrate, formerly known as WP Migrate DB Pro, streamlines the process of moving a database, plugin and theme files, and your media library from one location to another. It’s incredibly slick and the way the Delicious Brains (and now WP Engine) teams have simplified such a complex process is impressive.
We’ve all been faced with the task of moving a site from one web host to another or even from a remote server to our local development environment. If you haven’t, you’re lucky! Moving the database and files back and forth can be a real chore unless you’ve got the right tool for the job. WP Migrate is that tool. We’ve even written an extensive guide for moving WordPress websites using WP Migrate.
Best WordPress Plugin for Consent Management
Termly
This is a relatively new category that has seen a lot of activity over the last several years. The truth is that most of these consent management solutions are difficult to use, unclear about what exactly they’re doing or how they work, and never really help people achieve that warm & fuzzy sensation we want when it comes to complying with online regulations.
Termly GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent Banner is our choice for this category for a few standout reasons. The plugin is built by the same team that brought us WP Rocket and Imagify, so their policy generator and consent banners are mindful of the impact their banners and embeds can have on performance. The setup and configuration is relatively straightforward for most users, and within about an hour, most websites can have the banners and necessary compliance policies live on their website.
We don’t love that the configuration for the banners and policies is offloaded to the termly.io site and can’t be completed in the WordPress dashboard, but in certain situations, a SaaS product is the way to go, and we can see why they made that decision here. Termly includes automatic policy generation. Simply answer a series of questions about your business, and their tool will create privacy policies, cookie policies, and many other website policies needed for compliance for where your site and customers are located.
The last caveat I’ll add for this category is that none of these solutions guarantee compliance with online regulation. If you’re being threatened with legal action for non-compliance or work in a heavily regulated industry, speak to a legal professional who specializes in this area to make sure that Termly (or any consent solution for that matter) will keep you in good standing with the law.
Best WordPress Plugins for Redirections
Redirection
Whether you’re running a small business website or a popular food blog, at some point, you will need to set up redirects. Pages change and URLs die; it’s the reality of owning a website. In the past, setting up these redirects was a real chore. You had to learn to configure a web server using an .htaccess file or make complex server configurations. Simply put, it wasn’t the type of task for the faint of heart for someone seeking to fix the ‘Page Not Found’ errors on their website.
Server Config Nightmares Begone!
I prefer not to think about the hours I’ve spent reading, writing, and testing redirects. Thankfully, Redirection fills today’s need with a simple interface in the WordPress dashboard. The plugin even warns users when a redirect they’re trying to add may be overly aggressive or won’t do what they intended. Whether deleting a post, changing a permalink, or some other structural change, it’s important always to redirect the old location to the new one.
Before Redirection, there really wasn’t a good way to manage redirects in WordPress. There are a few plugins that attempt to manage redirects, but they’re either really old, poorly coded, or both. If you need a plugin to manage redirects for any reason, this is the one you should use. Hands down.
Best WordPress Plugins for Security
All-in-one security plugins that depend on other components, like backups and the web server, that can and will fail are a bad idea. There are focused plugins that help improve the overall security of your website, but an “all-in-one” security plugin is a flawed premise.
Let’s take a look at some of the best plugins out there to enhance your overall security plan.
Password Policy Manager
Passwords have almost become an entire security problem all by themselves. There are a lot of people out there who claim the age of the password is over and it very well may be. Managing passwords safely has been a real challenge for the team at SiteCare. Tools like 1Password help a lot, but they don’t require strong passwords to be used on a WordPress site.
The Password Policy Manager plugin allows Administrators to force all users to use strong passwords and adhere to change policies as well. This plugin almost didn’t make the cut because of its complexity, sometimes confusing interface, and lackluster design. But its function was important enough that we decided to leave it in. If anyone is looking to create a simpler version of a plugin that will force users to set strong passwords, there’s certainly a need for it.
Two-Factor
If having strong passwords is a step in the right direction, setting up two-factor authentication is a major leap forward for security. Two-Factor makes it simple and easy.
You can easily add multi-factor authentication to your WordPress site using the Two-Factor plugin from the WordPress contributor team. This plugin supports email codes, One-Time Passwords, Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), and backup code authentication. This gives your organization the ability to implement Two-Factor authentication for all sorts of WordPress users.
Two-Factor does exactly what it says and doesn’t rely on third-party services like many other 2FA solutions. The sooner you enable it, the sooner you can stop worrying about your site getting hacked because one of your WordPress users decided they’d be fine without a 2nd factor for logging in.
Cloudflare
Another easy security win is blocking unwanted bots from attempting to log in and otherwise attack your website. Cloudflare is a great way to stop most automated attack scripts from ever having a chance to break into your site. It’s also bundled in all of our SiteCare plans!
Like anything else in the security field, it’s not perfect, so you can’t depend on it as your only security measure. Still, having it can make a huge difference in your overall vulnerability prevention because so many malicious scripts are blocked by default using the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set. Cloudflare is a service we recommend for every website.
Best WordPress Plugins for Page Building
Beaver Builder
With WordPress Block Editor‘s maturity and advancements, I’ll start off by saying it’s really tough to make an argument for any WordPress page builder plugin. The WordPress Block Editor is flexible, lightweight, and has almost all of the builder components needed to create all sorts of unique layouts. Page builders are also notorious for increasing front-end code complexity, which hinders WordPress’s performance.
While page builders might not be for everyone, they still hold some waning value in specific situations. These include seamless integration with a particular theme, crafting complex or dynamic layouts without coding, and utilizing pre-designed templates for a rapid website launch – all without needing programming knowledge. In these instances, we recommend the Beaver Builder page builder.
Page Builders are not the future
Beaver Builder is solid as far as page builders go, but the WordPress Block Editor will eventually become the native editing and layout-building experience for WordPress. We chose Beaver Builder as the best page builder plugin because it uses a lot of core WordPress functionality to do its job, and the code quality is substantially better than most other page builders we’ve tested.
Other page builders we’ve seen and tested seriously impair page load times, pollute the content with shortcodes and generally make a mess out of a website. On the other hand, Beaver Builder works using WordPress’ core features like widgets and will allow you to keep all of your content should you decide to remove it. Beaver Builder’s styles are fairly lightweight and are loaded only as needed; plus, its styles work with nearly any theme out of the box.
If you’re looking for a more straightforward way to build page layouts that are more complex than most default WordPress themes allow, and a custom block theme isn’t an option, go with Beaver Builder for your page-building needs. If you’re using a page builder and regularly getting stuck, it’s worth consulting an expert. Sometimes, a little custom code from an experienced WordPress pro can help you achieve your website goals without the overhead of a page builder.
Best WordPress Plugins for Lead Generation
Convert Pro
The lead generation plugin market is crowded and often uses aggressive marketing tactics, making it challenging to choose the right one. While these plugins can effectively capture leads and build email lists, clumsy implementation can significantly disrupt your website’s visitor experience and negatively impact Core Web Vitals.
We like Convert Pro because the setup is relatively simple and is much more affordable than most competitors in this category. Also, because it’s a self-hosted WordPress plugin, you have full control of how your visitor data is stored, giving you a stronger hold on your user’s privacy. The builder for Convert Pro uses WordPress conventions and is relatively simple to use, although there is a small learning curve to get up and running.
The pre-packaged designs in Convert Pro are visually dated, so you’ll want to keep that in mind before purchasing. It’s certainly a more effective tool in the hands of someone with a keen eye for design, although that’s true about any of these types of products. When it comes to reliability and performance, Convert Pro does a great job of loading lead magnets where you expect them to without mucking up your visitor experience.
Best WordPress Plugins for Displaying Related Posts
Related Posts for WordPress
While the WordPress plugin repository boasts many related posts plugins, many users struggle to find a reliable option. These plugins can often be riddled with bugs, hinder website performance, and fail to deliver the expected related content recommendations.
Related Posts for WordPress (RPFWP) plugin is completely different. Instead of performing complex database queries on every page load, RPFWP builds its own relationships and then references them for lightning-fast queries. It’s a better model for connecting posts overall and making the most relevant connections possible from one piece of content to another.
The engine that powers the relationship-building is intelligent and will detect similarities in your content regardless of how you’ve categorized and tagged your posts. In addition, the plugin lets you modify relationships on the fly from the post edit screen so you can relate many posts to a single one for improved internal linking and SEO.
Best WordPress Plugins for Image Galleries
This category has undergone a huge transformation in the last several years with the rise of the WordPress Block Editor and other media library enhancements.
For the longest time, the only real option for a comprehensive gallery system in WordPress was a plugin called NextGen Gallery. That plugin is still extremely popular today, but it’s not a product we can recommend due to its complexity and mountains of technical debt.
For most people, the native WordPress Gallery Block will fit the bill. It’s easy to use and add galleries to any content on your WordPress site.
For sites with huge galleries that require more image management features within WordPress, take a look at WP Modula as a gallery block alternative. This plugin offers more creative ways to display the images on the website.
Best WordPress Plugins for Images
WordPress’s image-handling capabilities have significantly improved in recent years, making the need for image-related plugins less frequent. Notably, responsive images, once requiring a plugin, are now a core WordPress feature.
There have also been some recent performance-related image improvements to help improve Core Web Vitals and overall website performance.
Regenerate Thumbnails
A common hurdle with WordPress media handling is regenerating thumbnails when image sizes change. Failure to regenerate means your site displays incorrect image sizes despite your settings. This can lead to performance issues and a poor user experience.
Regenerate Thumbnails is a handy little plugin that will rebuild your existing image thumbnails and delete any sizes that are no longer needed. If you ever change your image sizes in the WordPress settings, change themes, or add plugins that use custom image sizes, this is a plugin you’ll want to install. For more advanced users, it also has a command line interface for regenerating thumbnails faster and with fewer hiccups.
Imagify
Compounding the issue of thumbnail regeneration is the frequent problem of users uploading excessively large images. For most websites, there’s no need for high-resolution images like 8000 x 6000 pixels. Often, this stems from a lack of awareness about image optimization. Large images significantly slow down page load times, which can hurt your website’s ranking and user experience.
A way to keep this bad habit in check is to use Imagify. Imagify automatically resizes uploads to fit your website’s dimensions, ensuring optimal display. It also converts them to modern, space-saving formats like WebP and Avif. This translates to significant bandwidth savings, potentially reducing your hosting costs. Imagify is a must-have for maintaining efficient website performance without compromising image quality.
Best WordPress Plugins for Editorial Calendars
PublishPress Planner
If you’re looking for an editorial calendar built into your WordPress dashboard, PublishPress Planner is the only viable option. It’s a game-changer for multi-author blogs, especially those producing high volumes of content. PublishPress Planner keeps your team organized, ensuring every step is completed before hitting publish. For a truly optimized workflow, consider integrating PublishPress Checklists for a seamless content creation experience.
PublishPress Planner and Checklists act as a safety net for your content, ensuring it reaches its full potential. By catching errors, verifying details, and optimizing your posts and pages, you’ll deliver content that resonates with your audience, strengthens your SEO, and maximizes impact. PublishPress Planner excels at streamlining editorial workflows, while Checklists guarantee every post meets your quality standards. Together, they form a powerful suite for multi-author blogs and content-driven websites.
Best WordPress Plugins for eCommerce
WooCommerce
Over the last few years, WordPress has really exploded in terms of eCommerce capabilities and adoption. It’s the largest eCommerce platform in the world now due mainly to the popularity of WordPress and the fact that WooCommerce can be bolted on pretty seamlessly to any existing WordPress site.
Times Have Changed. WordPress is an eCommerce Platform Now.
The one plugin that stands out above the rest is WooCommerce. There’s simply no comparison when looking at the feature set and the extensions for WooCommerce. It’s turned into the largest growing eCommerce platform on the web and has blown past Magento, the long-time king of open-source eCommerce. Even hosted solutions like Shopify have fallen far behind WooCommerce in the overall market share of eCommerce websites.
WooCommerce is complicated software and as such, it adds a decent amount of code overhead to your website. Curating extensions from reputable sources is also important to keep your eCommerce website running smoothly. If you’re going to run WooCommerce, invest in a fast web hosting account. That’s really the nature of the beast when it comes to eCommerce. If you sell products online, you must invest more than people running a traditional blog or brochure site in web hosting.
Best WordPress Plugins for Membership
Restrict Content
A comparison of membership plugins really could be a post all by itself. As a matter of fact, WordPress businessman Chris Lema has written on the topic several times. It’s hard to pick the “best” membership plugin because the category is so broad, and use cases vary widely with membership sites.
However, there is a clear winner with an eye to ease-of-use and code quality: Restrict Content Pro (RCP) by the team at SolidWP. None of the other membership plugins tested come close to RCP regarding adherence to WordPress principles, coding best practices, and general usability best practices. It may not be the most feature-filled offering on the market, but it definitely has enough to get the job done for many different types of membership sites.
Plus, if the free version plugin doesn’t do enough for you, the Pro version has features that can extend your membership site with popular email marketing platforms, expiring content, and features to block member password sharing. RCP is developer-friendly because it adheres closely to the best coding standards. Whether you do it yourself or hire a developer to build a membership site, you won’t go wrong with Restrict Content.
Best WordPress Plugins for Local Business
Five Star Business Profile and Schema
Five Star Business Profile and Schema is much cooler than it may seem. It’s a local SEO plugin in disguise. If you own a local business, you probably already know how important it is to drive local search traffic. One of the best ways to help with that is to establish your website as the home base for your business by including local schema.org data throughout your site.
Five Start Business Profile and Schema makes it easy to do exactly that. It’s a free alternative to Yoast’s Local SEO add-on and supports multiple locations. If you’re looking for a way to enhance your local SEO, check out Five Star Business Profile and Schema.
Widgets for Yelp Reviews
For many local businesses, Yelp is the number one place their customers find them. This is especially true of restaurants and any type of service-based industry. A high rating on Yelp is a guaranteed way to get more business in your door.
Widgets for Yelp Reviews allows you to easily display Yelp reviews on your website. The options are very easy to configure and you can filter the reviews you want to display on your site. This not only helps provide social proof to your website visitors and helps gain their trust but also helps with search engine visibility. Editor’s Note: The free version of this plugin only allows up to 10 reviews to be displayed.
Widgets for Google Reviews
And since we’re talking about reviews for local businesses in this section, it’s worth mentioning a plugin that displays Google Reviews on your website, too. Widgets for Google Reviews operates much like Widgets for Yelp Reviews plugin. It lets you add customer reviews from Google quickly and easily.
Google Reviews are key in the local search world. Any retail business owner can tell you that they get at least some of their business from local business directories and Google’s reviews are one of the best. This plugin might not make sense for every local business, but if you’re dialed into local marketing, consider adding it along with Yelp reviews. We recommend all of the review display plugins from TrustIndex.
Best WordPress Plugins for Google Maps
WP Go Maps
Google Maps is a common component in today’s websites, but adding a Google Map embed in WordPress can be challenging. There have been many attempts to build a comprehensive Google Maps plugin over the years, but most of them have issues. Out of all the Google Maps plugins we’ve tested, the only one that stood out was WP Go Maps when robust mapping implementations are needed.
Check out the Map Block for Google Maps for simpler map implementations.
WP Go Maps is designed with the user in mind. Everything about it is friendly and easy to configure. You have control over the size, style, and custom map markers. Every option you can think of is included in the plugin, yet none of them are overwhelming.
You can create as many maps as you like and place them anywhere on your website. If you want even more control, there are blocks, shortcodes, and even developer-friendly template tags. If you need to add a map to your website for any reason, WP Go Maps won’t disappoint you.
Best WordPress Plugins for Testimonials
Strong Testimonials
We’ve already talked about displaying customer reviews from local sites, but how about adding your own testimonials directly to your website? There are a lot of testimonial plugins out there, but Strong Testimonials for WordPress does a great job.
It’s well-coded and has enough features to display testimonials on your website. It includes minimalistic styles that ensure your reviews display nicely without adding a bunch of code bloat. Strong Testimonials is a smart, well-planned system for adding and displaying customer reviews to your site, which is exactly what small business website owners want.
Best WordPress Plugins for Event Calendars
Event Organiser
Navigating all the WordPress event calendar plugins can feel overwhelming. Many popular options suffer from complexity, making them cumbersome to use and challenging to customize. These plugins often boast a laundry list of features, but a significant portion cater to a small user base, bloating the interface and hindering clarity.
Event Organiser is different. Event Organiser has matured into a very versatile and useful plugin. There’s even a pro version with more advanced options like paid events, plus extensions for things like discount codes and data exports. The plugin is fairly easy to configure and use, which is in stark contrast to some of the other options out there.
Beyond user-friendliness, Event Organiser excels in customization. Unlike bulkier event plugins, it lives up to its name with a well-organized and accessible template system. Even novice developers can extend its functionality with relative ease. This focus on clarity and ease of use makes Event Organiser a well-rounded plugin with the perfect balance of features. If you need an event management solution for your WordPress site, Event Organiser is definitely worth exploring.
Conversely, we don’t recommend The Events Calendar WordPress plugin.
Best WordPress Plugins for Podcasting
Seriously Simple Podcasting
For WordPress podcasters seeking a streamlined experience, Seriously Simple Podcasting reigns supreme. From setup to ongoing management and promotion, this plugin simplifies every aspect of your podcast journey. Boasting a constantly evolving feature set, Seriously Simple Podcasting caters to even the most demanding content creators, ensuring you have the tools you need to excel.
Seriously Simple Podcasting will automatically generate your iTunes RSS feed for you, insert your podcast player directly into your post content, and allow you to host your audio files directly on the site or at a 3rd party service like Amazon Web Services or Libsyn. It integrates seamlessly and introduces even more features when paired with the Castos podcasting service.
Because the plugin is lightweight and well-coded, it’s also easy to customize. We have first-hand experience with extending this plugin and can tell you that it’s about as easy as it gets. You can even roll your own custom player if you like since it uses the built-in WordPress audio player to handle playback.
Best WordPress Plugins for Music Players
Cue
One area in WordPress that hasn’t received a ton of attention is audio. WordPress does a fairly good job at handling audio out of the box, but it does leave a bit to be desired. Luckily, the fine folks at AudioTheme specialize in pushing WordPress to the limits of what’s possible regarding audio.
Cue is a cool little plugin that makes adding audio playlists to your site as easy as adding a standard WordPress media gallery. Cue can be an extremely valuable addition to your web presence if you’re a musician, artist, podcaster, or public speaker.
Step things up another level using AudioTheme’s niche WordPress themes geared specifically towards people in the music industry. If you love to jam and need a place to feature your music, check them out. Their products are top-notch.
Best WordPress Plugins for Custom Fields
Advanced Custom Fields
Custom meta fields have revolutionized WordPress layout and template creation. The industry-standard plugin for this functionality is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). ACF boasts a user-friendly interface and seamless integration with the latest WordPress Block Editor advancements, empowering developers to craft highly customized experiences. This makes it a powerful tool for anyone building complex WordPress themes and functionalities.
ACF is a Workhorse.
ACF takes a powerful and versatile approach to extending the functionality of the WordPress block editor. It goes beyond standard block types by allowing you to create custom fields that function as dedicated blocks.
ACF empowers granular control over content layouts and custom field presentation through custom blocks. This seamless integration allows developers to weave custom data directly into block layouts. For complex WordPress sites demanding unique data display and layouts, ACF provides the tools to bring your vision to life. It’s a must-have for crafting truly bespoke user experiences.
Best WordPress Plugins for Site Search
WP Search with Algolia
While WordPress has come a long way, WordPress search still leaves a lot to be desired, both for users on the front-end and administrators on the back-end. WordPress search doesn’t deliver the most intuitive or comprehensive results compared to other platforms. This can be a hurdle for users trying to find specific content and for admins managing a growing website.
We’ve found that offloading the entire search experience to a service specializing in indexing and matching search queries with content is the best way to handle search queries. WP Search with Algolia is a plugin that bridges the gap between WordPress content and the powerful Algolia search service. It’s built by our friends at WebDevStudios and they’ve done a fantastic job with it.
WP Search with Algolia integrates seamlessly with your existing site, delivering a modern search experience that surpasses native functionality. Gone are the days of frustratingly basic search. Algolia boasts features like fuzzy matching, faceted browsing, and typo tolerance, ensuring users can effortlessly find the content they seek. Furthermore, its multilingual capabilities make it perfect for websites catering to a global audience. While an Algolia subscription is required, the dramatic improvement in user experience makes WP Search with Algolia a worthwhile investment.
Best WordPress Plugins for Content Management
As WordPress websites evolve, content management becomes a growing challenge. Hundreds of posts, custom content types, and potentially thousands of pages can quickly spiral into disorganization. The struggle is even more real for organizations managing sites with hundreds of thousands of pieces. Thankfully, various plugins exist to streamline content organization and keep your WordPress site under control.
Admin Columns
While informative, the WordPress post edit screen can become cluttered with an overwhelming amount of admin column data. This is especially true when plugins add their own columns, creating a confusing interface. While “Screen Options” allows some control, it can be cumbersome and might not expose the most valuable data points. This struggle to manage a cluttered screen is a common pain point for many WordPress users.
Custom Admin Columns To the Rescue
Before Admin Columns was released, WordPress users were pretty much stuck with whatever WordPress and their plugin authors injected into the post list screen, but that’s no longer the case. With Admin Columns, users can add, remove, reorder, and customize nearly every aspect of the admin screens by changing some settings. This kind of thing might not be a huge deal on a smaller site, but on larger sites with lots of different data types, a well-organized admin panel takes a huge step toward improving the WordPress user experience. If you get lost in the WordPress admin panel, take this plugin for a test drive.
Yoast Duplicate Post
Duplicating content on a WordPress site can be a huge time saver. While we’d never recommend adding duplicate content to your website, having similar content on different types of sites is very common. Whether setting up landing pages for paid ads, service description pages, or products for your eCommerce store, you can save a lot of time using Yoast Duplicate Post.
It’s a lot easier to edit existing content than to keep starting repeatedly. Yoast Duplicate Post also has a “Rewrite and Republish” feature, which is extremely powerful for writing large updates to existing content on your site. One word of warning: This plugin will duplicate every piece of data in a post. If you use this plugin, you’ll want to update your new content’s meta descriptions, titles, categories, etc. We’ve seen clients use this plugin but not update every detail of a post or page and end up with an SEO mess.
Simple Page Ordering
While WordPress allows hierarchical ordering of pages through the “Page Attributes” section, managing a large number of pages this way can be cumbersome. Simple Page Ordering steps in to simplify this process. This plugin provides a user-friendly interface for dragging and dropping pages into your desired order, saving you significant time and frustration, especially when dealing with extensive content.
This plugin empowers you to effortlessly drag and drop any hierarchical post type, including custom creations like testimonials, staff profiles, or portfolio projects. This intuitive interface streamlines organization, ensuring your content appears in the desired order on your website’s front end. It’s a true time-saver, especially for complex sites with intricate content structures.
WP Help
WP Help from Mark Jaquith was an easy choice for our best WordPress plugins because it allows website owners to create documentation hubs or knowledge bases for nearly anything you can imagine.
Whether it’s instructions for adding a certain type of content to the website or content styling guidelines, WP Help can quickly set up internal documentation. It’s especially helpful on multisite networks because the documentation can be synced across as many sites as you’d like.
WP Help boasts an intuitive interface, making it a breeze to set up, even for non-technical users. You’ll have a robust knowledge base in no time, empowering your website’s users and ensuring consistent content across your sites.
Best WordPress Plugins for Replacing Sidebars
Content Aware Sidebars
We’ve been advocating for contextual sidebars for as long as we can remember. Using different sidebars for different sections of your website is a great way to enhance your SEO, make your email opt-in forms more compelling, and improve the user experience of your website by ensuring that the content in the widget areas matches up nicely with the rest of the content on each page.
What are contextual sidebars anyway?
Generating contextual sidebars once required custom code and required complex programming. Content Aware Sidebars allows you to mix and match widget areas to different pieces of content on your site. For example, what if you want to display a list of subcategories in your sidebar that are related to the top-level category of an article or recipe, but you want your email newsletter widget to display on your WordPress pages? Content Aware Sidebars can accomplish everything within the WordPress dashboard without knowing any PHP code.
Best WordPress Plugins for Battling Spam
Akismet
One of the biggest issues with WordPress comments is spam. Whether your blog is new or has been running for years, you will attract spam bots. There are a lot of spam-blocking plugins out there, but in my opinion, you won’t find one better than Akismet.
The Akismet Spam Fighting Model Can’t Be Beat
Akismet indeed has down periods of effectiveness. Spammers are always changing their techniques. When the spammers find a loophole they can abuse, you might notice that Akismet misses a bit of spam or starts marking legitimate comments as spam. The team at Akismet works hard to keep up with the constant tweaks and adjustments needed to keep pesky spammers at bay.
Impatient users might see a small amount of spam and switch to another anti-spam plugin and experience effective results in the short term. However, as soon as a popular site implements the same anti-spam plugin you’ve just installed, spammers will uncover that plugin’s weakness, and your site will again be hit with a wave of spam.
Akismet continues to adapt and is an effective solution for the long term. Backed by WordPress’s parent company, it has been tested by the biggest sites on the internet. As a smaller site, you’ll receive the benefit of Akismet’s network of worldwide spam patterns and your spam will be caught and quarantined.
Best WordPress Plugins for Comments
Now that we’ve dealt with spam let’s talk about comments. Comments are the lifeblood of any blog. Commenters are your community and your chance to build a relationship with your readers. There’s been a recent trend to disable comments and push the conversation to social sites like X, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but keeping the conversation on your own website will help with overall engagement as well as search engine visibility.
The WordPress comment system is feature-packed by default, but let’s look at a few plugins that provide enhancements to make it even better.
Comment Reply Email
Comment Reply Email is a handy tool that does one thing but does it well. Commenters receive an email when someone replies to their comment. This helps increase engagement and brings people back to the website frequently. With this simple plugin, you can enjoy more page views, greater community participation, and if your site is monetized, you can receive the benefit of more advertising revenue.
Disable Comments
If you decide to turn off the commenting features in WordPress completely, Disable Comments is a simple plugin that does exactly what it says on the tin. Most WordPress themes don’t include a way to disable comments on all pages, posts, or custom post types with a single option. Typically, a theme won’t include the option to disable comments via XML-RPC and the REST API. Disable Comments is the plugin you’ve been looking for if you want full control over where comments are allowed on your site.
With a few clicks, you can turn off comments for every entry of any post type. You can update the value in the database to disable comments even when the plugin has been removed. This plugin is well-coded and has been around for quite some time. It’s a great tool if you’re certain comments aren’t needed on your website.
Comments Not Replied To
Last, but most certainly not least, is a plugin called Comments Not Replied To. As the name suggests, this plugin makes it easier to see which comments you haven’t answered. We know how fast comments can stack up if you’re blogging regularly. We know how important it is to keep up with comments if you want your community to thrive.
This plugin adds a new column in the WordPress comments administration panel that indicates if the post’s author has replied to a comment. It’s a small improvement that can make a big difference on popular blogs, and it pairs very nicely with the Comment Reply Email plugin.
Best WordPress Utility Plugins
This final category is what I’m calling WordPress utility plugins. These are plugins that don’t fit neatly into any of the other categories I’ve mentioned, but that are still incredibly useful.
Restricted Site Access
Install Restricted Site Access next time you clone or stage a WordPress website. Anyone who has ever had two copies of the same website running side-by-side knows that bad things can happen, like search engines crawling both sites, or duplicate email notifications being sent, or even giving an early preview to the public of an in-progress project.
All of these scenarios can have grave consequences, and 10up has built a simple and elegant way to make sure that duplicate websites stay behind the scenes where they belong. The tool even allows access via IP address without a login, so authorized visitors can still easily view the duplicated website without requiring a login. It’s such an important tool that we bundle it as a must-use plugin into our staging environment workflow at SiteCare.
It has other applications beyond staging sites too. Restricted Site Access is a great answer for any scenario where an entire WordPress website is meant to be kept private.
Convert to Blocks
We’ve talked at length about how the Block Editor is the future of WordPress. But there’s a potentially big hurdle to adopting it. What about all of the content that was built using the WordPress Classic Editor? How many people hours will it take to convert all of that content to blocks?
With Convert to Blocks from 10up the answer is… not terribly long. This plugin sits in the background and auto-converts any content built with the Classic Editor once that piece of content is opened for editing. We’ve found it to be extremely reliable and has support for many different types of content. It’s rare that we find issues with content that it’s converted. It even has a command-line option for converting content in bulk! For legacy content libraries that need to be updated to the Block Editor, you can’t go wrong with Convert to Blocks.
Query Monitor
Query Monitor brings advanced debugging to the everyday user. Even if users aren’t able to fix every issue flagged by Query Monitor, it’s an extremely powerful tool to help identify performance-related issues, and as we all know from G.I. Joe, Knowing is half the battle.
Query monitor adds special views to the admin area of the website to identify issues with a slew of potential coding, database, theme, block, and performance problems. The list of items that are flagged by Query Monitor is extensive, and brings otherwise difficult-to-diagnose WordPress issues to the forefront. We use Query Monitor every day at SiteCare. It’s an invaluable utility plugin and we can’t recommend it enough.
User Switching
John Blackbourn is the author of the Query Monitor plugin and apparently he only creates hits, because he’s also the author of User Switching, which is another plugin you absolutely need to install for any website with membership or eCommerce functionality, or even multiple levels of user access. User Switching does exactly what it says, it allows Administrators to switch to any other account on the WordPress installation with one click and without needing to know the user’s password.
Being able to login as any other user allows Admins to view the experience as if they were that user. This can be extremely useful when troubleshooting access issues, viewing gated content, or even performing a quick test to make sure certain users don’t have access to something that they shouldn’t in the WordPress site. There are many other plugins that have similar functionality, but none of them strike the balance of features, security, and simplicity the way that User Switching does.
Wow. What a list of WordPress plugins!
Phew! After exploring a massive repository of over 60,000 WordPress plugins, we’ve finally reached the end of our list! We’ve carefully curated 39 of the best plugins for you. Remember that the “perfect” plugin will always vary depending on your specific website needs. Based on our extensive experience, this list provides a valuable resource for most users seeking top-rated plugins across various categories.
If you have further questions about finding the ideal plugin for your unique situation, feel free to reach out to the SiteCare team. We’re happy to offer any guidance or advice that might be helpful.
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