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Building a website is indeed a lot of work. There are a hundred things that need your attention to build a properly functioning website. Installation of plugins, themes, and other third-party tools is an integral part of it, especially if you are building your website on the WordPress platform. Your choice of these tools could have a huge effect on your website’s performance.
Hence, from this article, you will learn about a bunch of the best WordPress plugins that are a must-have for your website to ensure its smooth functioning.
1. WordFence
WordFence is a popular security plugin you can install on your WordPress website to ensure the overall security of your website. This plugin comes with two very advanced features, including an endpoint firewall (which identifies and blocks malicious traffic) and a malware scanner (which blocks requests if it contains any malicious code or content) to help you keep your website safe.
Unlike its cloud alternatives, WordFence doesn’t break the encryption, it can’t be bypassed, and can’t leak data. Its powerful threat defense feed keeps it updated regarding all the new firewall rules, malware signatures, malicious addresses, etc. to provide better protection for your website. Its additional features include leaked password protection, live traffic(monitors visits and hack attempts), advanced manual blocking, country blocking, two-factor authentication, etc.
2. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular backup plugins out there that helps you keep the backup of your WordPress website’s data. As you know, websites are always under the threat of losing their data to various issues, including server crashes, hacks, malware attacks, deleted files, running bad commands, or even a simple user error, etc. Hence, it would be a huge risk if you are running your website without any proper measures to keep a backup in it.
UpdraftPlus plugin will make a great choice for a great backup plugin on your WordPress website. Its easy-to-use interface has a huge role to play in making it the most popular backup plugin among the rest. Security of your website’s data is of top concern for this plugin, and that’s why it allows you to encrypt the backup of the data and send it over to cloud storage.
Backup scheduling is another cool feature offered by this plugin. With this feature, you will be able to backup and restore your website’s data on an appropriate schedule with just a single click. Scheduled backup can be fixed for every 4, 8, or 12 hours or on a daily, weekly, and fortnight basis. Besides these features, UpdraftPlus also performs cloning, backup, and incremental backup ( A feature that lets you back up the changes to your files that have been made since the previous backup) as well.
3. WPSmartPay
WPSmartPay, the best Paddle payment plugin for WordPress, empowers you to focus on your business while it effortlessly manages payment issues, from tax calculations to currency handling. It offers a variety of useful features that make life easier for a freelancer or business owner. Can be used to set up recurring billing for websites, subscription services, membership fees, etc.
WPSmartPay handles the billing process automatically, so you don’t have to worry about anything. You can also send receipts and invoices to your customers and clients. You can also customize your payment page to make it more attractive to your customers.
With secure payment processing, automatic updates, and dedicated support, WPSmartPay simplifies your payment gateway needs. Don’t let billing complexities hold you back. Get WPSmartPay today and enhance the payment experience of your customers.
4. FS Poster
FS Poster is a WordPress Social Media plugin designed for the social media automation of WordPress-based websites. After integrating the plugin into your website, you can add the 15 most popular social networks and start sharing your posts automatically from WordPress to Social Media. These posts can be custom posts, videos, images, blog posts, and also WooCommerce products. It is also your own choice to decide whether to publish simultaneously or schedule it for a later time. This can be done using “Schedule Post” and “Post interval” features. The logs and social media accounts are unlimited, so that you can add as many accounts as you wish. Customize and shorten your post URLs using this feature within the social media scheduler – FS Poster.
Other than these important features, there are also additional benefits of this plugin, such as emoji, proxy, hashtag, and translation support. Bonus: FS Poster allows users to track link clicks on your social media accounts and get insights about social media engagement and other metrics.
5. WooMultistore
WooMultistore is an enhancement plugin designed to extend the capabilities of WooCommerce for multi-store or multiple e-commerce platforms. It allows you to oversee various functionalities across numerous WooCommerce shops, all from a single WordPress dashboard. The plugin is compatible with both standalone WordPress setups and WordPress Multisite configurations.
This plugin simplifies the process of operating and administering multiple online retail sites. Many WooCommerce retailers aspire to run a multi-store arrangement, often featuring the same or similar products across different stores. However, they commonly encounter challenges in maintaining accurate inventory levels at each location. With WooMultistore, this is no longer a concern. The plugin automatically synchronizes stock levels across all stores in real-time whenever there’s a change in inventory due to a purchase in any of the connected shops.
Main features:
- A single inventory system manages all your online shops.
- Automate inventory updates across all your stores, eliminating the need for manual adjustments.
- Effortlessly share products among multiple stores.
- Consolidate orders from all your shops into one central location, allowing third-party applications such as accounting or shipping fulfillment software to gather data from a unified source.
- WooMultistore empowers you to concentrate on revenue generation, product research, or reclaiming some personal time.
Cost: Begins at $199/year.
6. GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin
With the emergence of the GDPR law, it has been made compulsory for all websites serving EU citizens to comply with the cookie law. Cookie compliance is a major part of it as well. It is one of the best GDPR plugins available to help you with the cookie compliance of your WordPress website.
This plugin is available in both its free and premium versions. It helps you meet every criterion put forward by GDPR for cookie compliance, such as definite user consent, cookie categorization, consent audit log, consent withdrawal, etc.
Customizable cookie banners are one of the best features of this plugin which lets you create amazing cookie banners that match your website’s style. Cookie category management, Granular cookie opt-in settings, Location-based exclusion of cookie notice, etc. are awesome features included in its premium version that enable smooth cookie compliance of your website.
7. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a must-have plugin for your website if you want your website to have great results in Google ranking. This plugin will take care of everything related to the search engine optimization of your site’s content. Even its free version is a huge help in managing your site’s SEO as it comes with powerful features, including the option to add a meta description, focus keyword, option to preview how your content appears on both mobile & desktop screens, your content’s readability and SEO analysis, etc.
Its premium version is even more powerful with additional features, including the option to add multiple keywords to your article so that your content is more visible during a keyword search. The content insights feature is a powerful one that lists 5 words or phrases you use the most on your page to check if they’re a match with your chosen keywords. With Yoast, you never have to worry about your website’s visitors ending up on a 404 page, as it would be taken care of by the Redirect manager.
8. Fox LMS
Fox LMS is one of the most flexible and user-friendly learning management system plugins today. The plugin is designed to help educators and online course creators to develop and manage courses effortlessly.
The Ays Pro company is actively working on the development of the Fox LMS plugin. The plugin developers are focused on providing an LMS plugin that will surely improve the educational experience of the users and make the learning process a fun activity.
The Fox LMS plugin prioritizes the user experience by offering a highly customizable and flexible platform for online learning. What is great about this plugin is that no coding skills are needed to use it.
Key Features of the Fox LMS Plugin:
- E-Learning Marketplace: Fox LMS will provide an e-learning marketplace where users can explore, purchase, and sign up for a wide range of courses.
- Quiz Maker Integration: The Fox LMS plugin will have an integration with one of the best quiz-maker plugins available in the market, which is the WordPress Quiz plugin.
- Certificate Builder: With this advanced feature, the course creators can design and issue custom certificates to students upon course completion.
- Selling Courses: You, as an online course creator, will be able to sell courses and earn money online.
- User Tracking: The educators can track the user engagement, individual performance, and progress of the students.
9. Simple Author Box
Simple Author Box is a plugin that allows you to add a fully customizable and responsive author box to your site and thus display the author’s name, gravatar, description, and much more. This plugin is very useful when you publish content on your site written by someone who is not your registered user or when several authors work on one article. Namely, with the help of this plugin, you can very easily assign an article/post to a guest author, but you can also assign more authors to one article and give everyone the credit they deserve.
In addition to this, using the Simple Author Box plugin, you can control how the links of the author box will be opened (in a new tab or with a nofollow link attribute). An additional feature that is important to mention is the ability to display or not display the author box, depending on the type of post. When it comes to looks, this plugin allows you to change colors, font family, font size, and many other things.
10. Google Analytics by Monster Insights
Adding a Google Analytics plugin to your website is very useful in keeping track of your website’s performance. It is the easiest way to connect Google Analytics with your website, which, in turn, helps you hugely in improving your site’s performance gradually. Although you can connect Google Analytics to your site manually, it takes days to weeks for it to set up. With the plugin, you can do the same in minutes and view the reports inside WordPress.
With this plugin, you get to know precisely how people find your website, what keywords they search for, what they click on your site, how long they stay on your site, and more. Real-time statistics are another great feature this plugin offers you that allows you to have greater insight into your website. Monster insights let you know exactly which content of your website/blog gets more visitors so you can improve it further for higher conversion rates.
This plugin is a superb tracking machine that performs the tracking of your site’s inbound & outbound links, demographics & interests of your audience, popular sections (posts, pages) of your website, forms, referrals, Ads, file download, etc., to provide you with some valuable reports. Hence, Google Analytics is indeed a must-have plugin for your WordPress website if you want it to perform well.
11. Survey Maker – WordPress Survey Plugin
This WordPress survey plugin helps website owners gather data from a set of people and analyze them quickly. This plugin is an excellent tool for collecting data for research, audience targeting, or for collecting feedback. It offers a great deal of customizable templates, sample questions, and features.
No coding skills are required to create surveys, and surveys work well both on desktop and mobile devices. Anyone can customize it and create advanced surveys with minimum technical skills. The plugin allows you not only to develop simple and usual surveys but also chat surveys, surveys with the logic jump, conditional surveys, etc. With a wide range of question categories, you can design surveys with an infinite number of questions.
The premium version includes even more features and question types. Allows to integrate Mailchimp, Google Sheets, Slack, and so on. Also, it includes a variety of limitation features.
You can give access to only people with specific roles, protect your survey with a password, or decide the number of attempts for your survey. Sending emails to users, to admin, or sending summary emails to users is another handy feature of the survey maker’s premium version. All of these features make Survey Maker the best tool for creating advanced and user-friendly surveys for your projects.
12. Nextend Social Login
Nextend Social login plugin is the simplest way to employ social logging on your WordPress website. These days social login has become a popular way to log in/register to a website as it doesn’t require you to fill up a long registration form or to remember a username & password combination.
This plugin supports all popular social login providers including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, VKontakte, PayPal, Disqus, etc. It is packed with many more powerful features including request E-mail feature (an option to request your users for their email addresses since it may not be accessible from all the social providers), and customizable login layout & style to give your site’s login buttons the exact look you need.
With Nextend you will give your users/visitors an easy way to log in and share their opinion. This will help you in getting more comments on your website. You can also restrict social login for specific user roles ie; you can force admins to log in with their password. All these above features make Nextend social login the best choice for a social login plugin.
13. Extra Product Options (Custom Addons) for WooCommerce
Customize your WooCommerce product pages with the Extra Product Options and Custom Addons plugin. It provides 16+ different custom field types to capture additional information from your customers. Let your customers personalize their purchases. Add, edit, modify and rearrange the custom and default product fields based on your need.
A light-weighted plugin to access flawlessly. Custom product options like text boxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, color picker, date-time pickers, and some others are there to explore. Dynamic fields feature and custom price fields serve a wonderful experience for users. Optimize your product page with this plugin to get high conversion rates. Also, customize your checkout page to get some reach for your site.
File uploading options are there to increase your sales conversion rate. Easy to use and well-performing one. Comes with a user-friendly interface. The free version provides a lot of features for us. If want to explore all of it, then go with the pro!
14. WC Serial Numbers Plugin
One of the standout features of WooCommerce is its ability to be extended with plugins. A great example of this is the WC Serial Numbers Plugin. This plugin is designed to help businesses that sell products requiring unique serial numbers, such as software, licenses, or electronic goods.
Features of WC Serial Number Plugin
- Generate and Manage Serial Numbers: This plugin allows you to generate, manage, and assign unique serial numbers to products. This is particularly useful for businesses selling digital products or services.
- Automated Delivery: Once a customer makes a purchase, the serial number is automatically sent to them via email. This saves time and ensures that customers receive their products instantly.
- Easy to Use: The plugin is straightforward to install and configure. You can quickly add serial numbers to your products and manage them from your WordPress dashboard.
- Secure: It ensures that each serial number is unique and can only be used once, preventing unauthorized use or duplication.
- Detailed Reports: The plugin provides detailed reports on the usage of serial numbers, helping you keep track of sales and inventory.
15. WC Category Slider Pro
The WC Category Slider Pro by PluginEver is an efficient and user-friendly plugin designed to enhance the browsing experience on your WooCommerce store. In today’s competitive e-commerce landscape, providing an intuitive and visually appealing way to explore product categories is crucial. This plugin offers a sleek and customizable category slider that seamlessly integrates with your existing WooCommerce setup.
The plugin supports various customization options, allowing you to tailor the slider to match your website’s aesthetic and functional needs. You can choose from multiple slider styles, set the number of categories per slide, and even control the speed and animation effects. Additionally, the WooCommerce Category Slider is fully responsive, ensuring that your category slider looks great on all devices, from desktops to smartphones.
With this plugin, you can enhance the visibility of your product categories, making it easier for customers to navigate your store and find the products they are looking for. The slider can be placed on any page or post using a simple shortcode, giving you the flexibility to position it wherever it will have the most impact.
Furthermore, the WooCommerce Category Slider by PluginEver is lightweight and optimized for performance, ensuring that it won’t slow down your website. It’s also compatible with most WordPress themes and other plugins, making it a versatile choice for any WooCommerce store.
All these features make the WooCommerce Category Slider by PluginEver an excellent choice for any WooCommerce store owner looking to improve their site’s user experience and boost sales by showcasing product categories in a stylish and accessible way.
16. DT – Directory
DT directory is a power-packed WordPress plugin for creating fantastic directory websites. It comes with a modern layout and multiple premade starter templates. 10 Prebuilt unique listing styles to uniquely display the businesses on the directory. Fully customizable single-page styles that suit every business.
Advanced search functionalities with the filters to precisely find what the users are searching. Integrated with Google Map API to provide map output of locations with an easy distance calculator. Custom map icons and infoboxes to showcase the businesses. Get complete statistics with a detailed report of listing, sellers, and packages. Users can claim and verify their listing to confirm ownership.
It is monetizable and seamlessly accepts payments with Woocommerce support. Additional functionalities include social logins, virtual tours, media attachments, countdown timers, unique MLS numbers, and lead generation forms.
17. WooCommerce Product Video
WooCommerce Product Videos is an incredible plugin for your online store. It helps showcase your products and makes it easier for your customers to see what you’re selling. If you want to boost your business and make online shopping a breeze, this plugin is for you.
With WooCommerce Product Videos, you can add videos to your products. This is great because it lets your customers see the products in action. You can upload your videos or embed them from popular platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. It’s easy to use, even if you need to be tech-savvy.
Your customers will love it because they can get a better look at your products. It helps them make informed decisions, making them more likely to buy. Plus, it’s not just about videos; you can customize the video player to match your website’s style. This makes it more attractive to your customers and keeps them engaged.
The best part is that WooCommerce Product Videos works seamlessly with your online store. It won’t slow down your site or cause any technical issues. You can set it up quickly and start using it right away. It’s a simple, hassle-free way to make your online store more effective.
18. Academy LMS
Feeling overwhelmed by the thought of creating an online course? Say hello to Academy LMS, the ultimate WordPress LMS plugin that’s here to save the day!
Picture this: effortlessly dragging and dropping your course content, adding unlimited lessons and quizzes to keep things lively, and watching your students eagerly absorb your knowledge. That’s the magic of Academy LMS’s intuitive course builder.
But that’s just the beginning! Built with React JS, Academy LMS ensures your online learning platform is lightning-fast. You can even craft sophisticated multi-tier courses if you’re feeling ambitious.
And here’s the kicker: Academy LMS integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, making selling your courses a walk in the park. Want to offer subscription plans? No problem! Prefer one-time payments? Done! Academy LMS lets you pick the perfect pricing model for your courses.
But there’s more. Academy LMS isn’t just about creating courses; it’s about crafting an unforgettable learning experience:
- Engage your students with advanced quizzes that challenge their knowledge.
- Keep them coming back with content dripping that releases material over time.
- Monitor their progress with detailed analytics and reporting.
- Celebrate their success with customizable certificates.
Academy LMS is ideal for anyone aiming to build a captivating and effective eLearning platform:
- eLearning platforms: Elevate your online learning game!
- Course creators: Share your expertise with the world, effortlessly.
- WordPress developers: Create stunning online courses in no time.
- Aspiring educators: Don’t let tech obstacles hold you back. Get started with Academy LMS today!
Conclusion
All the above-described plugins are truly going to be the valuable assets of your WordPress website. They take care of the very basic needs of a website such as its security, data backup, easy login options, GDPR compliance, search engine optimization, etc for ensuring its proper functioning and growth.
As these plugins are available both in their free and premium versions, it is up to you to choose whether to go for free or premium. Still, it would be better if you chose premium versions for plugins that handle security and data backup since you might need constant and best support in these areas.