WordPress plugins are great way to enhance and add new functionality to your WordPress website. Records show that there are around 74 million websites powered by WordPress. This emerged into a new market and WordPress programmers all over the world started developing plugins for WordPress. These plugins allow users to add new functionality to their WordPress website or blog. Either you want to use WordPress for an online shopping site or you want to use it for social engine building, WordPress plugins are your friends.
What Does WordPress Plugins Used for?
WordPress plugins are used for different type of needs, for example, if you want to use WordPress for a shopping site, you can use WooCommerce plugin. If you want to teach online courses, you may use Sensei plugin for online course management and payment gateways integration.
List of Best Most Popular WordPress Plugins
Since this blog is targeting people who WordPress and its use cases, I have gathered a comprehensive list of most popular plugins for our blog readers. The main purpose of this blog post is to help new WordPress users instead of making money from this blog post. I am listing plugins for different purposes within each section.
WP Plugins for SEO Purposes
1
Yoast SEO – Free Plugin
Yoast SEO plugin enables you to fine tune your website in a way that search engines will love your website, hence your website/blog gets lot of search engine traffic.
2
WP SuperCharge – Premium Plugin ($21)
Wp SuperCharge plugin is not free one, therefore its justifies its price. This plugin allows you to optimize your WordPress website or blog page speed to load it faster. A single button can optimize your website for Google Page Speed Insights and google will start loving your website.
3
WP Super Cache – Free
WP Super Cache enables cache on your website or blog. It makes it possible to bring super page load speed while caching your website’s dynamic pages in static format and serving static pages back to the user’s browser speedily.
4
WP Fastest Cache– Free
This is another famous plugin to enable cache on your WordPress blog. This serves cached version of all pages to the user’s browser yet it increases page load speed.
WP Plugins for Ecommerce Store
1
WooCommerce – Free Plugin
WooCommerce is the #1 WordPress plugin to create ecommerce store with WordPress. It has lot of free and premium themes available to spice up the look and feel of your WordPress Ecommerce Store.
2
WP eCommerce – Free
WP eCommerce plugin is the second largely used eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It too has free and premium templates available online.
3
Easy Digital Downloads – Free
This plugins is developed specially for people who want to sell digital products like photos, videos, applications and other softwares.
WP Database Tools/Plugins
1
WP Optimize – Free Plugin
While the time lapse after your WordPress installation, there may be some database issues or some junk collected in your website’s database. This plugin let’s you optimize database and fix errors as well as removing the junk from database and optimize database speed and space.
2
WP-Sweep – Free
This plugin allows you to clean out database and remove unused entries in database. It also optimizes and fixes database tables issues.
3
Plugins Garbage Collector – Free
This plugin works well for optimizing your website’s database. When you install different plugin on your server, it puts garbage (unused database contents) which are normally called “Orphan Entries”. This plugin collects and removes all the garbage generated from your current plugins or the plugins you used in the past and then uninstalled them.
WP Social Plugins
1
Social Media Feather – Free Plugin
If you want to add social sharing and following buttons to your blog pages and posts. Social Media Feather plugin is your superhero. It allows you to just install and setup things in 2 minutes and start allowing your blog users to share your contents on variety of social sharing plateforms.
2
Crunchify Social Sharing – Free
WordPress websites are sometime overloaded with javascripts. In that case this plugin will suite you much. This plugin adds social network sharing buttons without any javascript embeded.
3
Sharify – Free
Sharify is super lightweight plugin for your WordPress blog. It adds social buttons to your responsive template and will work much better for responsive websites which are shown good on different devices.
WP Image Optimization Tools/Plugins
1
Imagify – Free Plugin
Imagify plugin dramatically improves the image loading speed within your WordPress blog or website. It reduces the image size while removing the raw data inside an image file. It also optimizes color space and removes unused colors from an image. Hence it will output the high quality image but with reduced size on disk.
2
EWWW Image Optimizer – Free
EWWW plugin optimizes images in bulk or one by one. It optimizes the color space and reduces image size on disk without affecting the image quality.
WP Content Delivery Network (CDN) Plugins
1
MaxCDN – Free Plugin
If you have signed up for MaxCDN cloud CDN service. You can use this plugin to integrate that CDN into your website/blog. The Distributed version of your contents on cloud result in super fast page load speed.
2
KeyCDN – Free
This another CDN integration plugin which enables CDN through KeyCDN servers. This is super fast method to optimize your website pagespeed.
3
CloudFlare– Free
This plugin enables cloud based content distribution as well as securing your website or blog from hacking attempts. When you enable and configure this plugin to work with CloudFlare servers, Your website users will get pages served from CloudFlare servers instead of directly getting contents from your servers. This puts an other step from browser to your server and works like firewall.