Recommended Plugins for Your WordPress Website

Frontend Editing Plugins

Frontend editing plugins move the page building process from the WordPress interface to the website itself. While viewing your site, you can drag & drop elements, style them and add your content, which results in a more visual and intuitive experience, with no coding skills required.

Visual Composer

Visual Composer allows you to easily create content for your page and stunning layouts by simply using the drag and drop functionality, no tech skills needed. The 40+ built-in content blocks include items such as call-to-action buttons, tabs, accordions, tour sections or video players. The plugin gives you full control not only over the desktop version of your website, but also over its mobile version.

Highlighted Features

Intuitive editor
It offers 150+ add-ons
Grid builders or parallax
Video backgrounds
Over 60 prebuilt layouts

Price: Starts at $34

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Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is a drag and drop content builder that helps you build custom posts and pages with ease. It works with your WordPress theme but it also offers its own theme included in the package.

Highlighted Features

Real-time editing
Drag and drop elements
Optimized content for mobile devices
Import and export sections

Price: Free

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Live Composer

Live Composer is a 100% free and open source front-end page builder for WordPress that allows users to build PRO responsive websites and landing pages with drag and drop editing. It is very easy to use and you’ll be creating great custom WordPress site designs without having to write a single line of code.

Highlighted Features

Live page building and preview
30+ modules
Import/export sections or layouts
Free one-to-one email support

Price: Free

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Image Gallery Plugins

From animations, layouts and lightboxes to slideshows and 3D displays, there are many different ways you can boost the display of images on your WordPress website. WordPress does come with its Media Library for basic image management, but if you need more functionality, there are plenty of WordPress gallery plugins you can choose from.

Envira Gallery

With the popular, fully-responsive Envira Gallery plugin you can quickly create beautiful responsive photo gallery and video gallery. All galleries created with Envira are completely responsive and mobile-friendly. No matter what device you use, Envira has got you covered. With this easy to use plugin all galleries are totally responsive and mobile-friendly.

Highlighted Features

Pre-built templates
Image proofing
WooCommerce integration
Dropbox importer
Watermark & password protection

Price: Starts at $19

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WordPress Photo Gallery

Photo Gallery is an enriched WordPress photo gallery plugin by Web Dorado, which offers you the possibility to add unlimited images to your website, customize different options for your galleries and organize them into different albums with descriptions and tags.

Highlighted Features

100% Responsive
Detailed three-column visual shortcode for adding created gallery/galleries and album/albums into the posts and pages
Slideshow view with auto play and shuffle features
Possibility of adding Watermarks/Advertisements for each individual image
Redirection option upon clicking image thumbnail

Price: Free

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Foo Gallery

This free WordPress gallery plugin makes creating and managing galleries easy and intuitive for users, but also fully extendable for developers. It also now supports the creation of video galleries with the FooVideo premium extension.

Highlighted Features

Retina thumbnail support
Gallery custom post type
Built-in gallery templates
Multisite support

Price: Free

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SEO Optimization Plugins

WordPress SEO plugins can help you optimize the content on your website, making it search engine friendly. You’ll be able to optimize your post titles and keywords, add the right tags, avoid duplicate content and more.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is among the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. You can use it to edit SEO titles, meta descriptions, add meta value for homepage and for single post, social SEO, edit robots.txt, control indexing of your blog and countless other features. The plugin has more than one million active installs and a 4/5 star rating.

Highlighted Features

Edit SEO titles and meta description
Add meta value for homepage and for single post
Social SEO
Edit robots.txt
Control indexing of your blog and countless other features

Price: Free

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SEO Ultimate

Another excellent SEO plugin designed to help users create SEO-friendly content for their websites. The premium version of SEO Ultimate has dedicated one on one email support available + exclusive features, detailed training videos and custom revisions that won’t be available on the free version.

Highlighted Features

Meta description editor
Author highlighter
404 Monitor
Permalink editor
Meta robot tags editor

Price: Free

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All In One SEO Pack

As the name suggests, this plugin is a simple and efficient all-in-one SEO plugin providing a wide range of versatile SEO options. The plugin is translated into 57 languages and has almost 30 million downloads.

Highlighted Features

Automatic optimization of titles for Google and other search engines
Automatic generation of META tags
Google Analytics support and Built-in API for other plugins/themes to access and extend functionality

Price: Free

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Comments Plugins

Comments plugins can help you broaden the basic WordPress commenting system and turn it into a strong user engagement tool. From threaded commenting to reducing spam, these plugins provide numerous features aimed towards enhancing the commenting experience.

De:comments

De:comments makes comment management much easier, allowing users to share comments, login from social networks, like and dislike each other’s comments, embed images(GIFs as well) and videos. The Likes and Badges feature lets you give bonuses to your most active commenters. The plugin supports WP Multisite and is integrated with open CSS file for easy customization and also infinite-load feature that loads only a specific number of comments at the time. You can always read old comments by simply scrolling down the page.

Highlighted Features

Multilingual
Easy to customize
Single sign-on with social networks
Voting system
Badge system

Price: Starts at $50

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CommentLuv

Perfect for bloggers, the CommentLuv plugin allows your visitors to comment and link to their latest blog posts in the comment. Among other features, CommentLuv helps you send an email to users when they get direct replies to their comment and fight spam. An interesting feature is that it lets you see which of your last blog posts links are getting clicks and on what pages. When buying the Plugin, you’ll get quite a few bonuses including an ebook and the updated version of the WP DealPon plugin.

Highlighted Features

Add keywords
Include a top commentator widget
Integrate TwitterLink
Integrated click stats

Price: Free

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Disqus

Another great comments plugin goes by the name of Disqus. The balance between its rich features and the ease of use, made it one of the most well-known WordPress comments plugins. The plugin stores the comment database on their servers and you don’t have to own a WordPress website in order to use it. Disqus lets users subscribe and engage on your website and any other site they leave a comment on, lets readers add images and videos, allows upvotes, downvotes, threaded replies, recommends and offers full spam filtering, making commenting a lot easier and more interactive. Whether it’s adding social share buttons, tweetable quote boxes, follower counts, encouraging or tracking social shares in WordPress, Social Sharing Plugins will help you get more traffic by making your visitors share your content on their own social networks.

Highlighted Features

Flexible options
Adapts to your page
Users can add images and videos

Price: Free

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Social Sharing Plugins

Whether it's adding social share buttons, tweetable quote boxes, follower counts, encouraging or tracking social shares in WordPress, social sharing plugins will help you get more traffic by making your visitors share your content on their own social networks.

Monarch

Created by Elegant Themes, Monarch is a fantastic plugin that offers powerful features to encourage social sharing. Moreover, once you sign up, you get access to their collection of captivating WordPress themes as well. Your social sharing activity will be definitely improved with the brand new social sharing methods that Monarch offers.

Highlighted Features

It makes it easy to add sharing buttons in different locations on your website
Create automatic sharing pop-ups and fly-ins
Lets you display over 20 social networks on your site
Create button effects

Price: Free

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SumoMe

With this amazing plugin, your readers will easily share your articles and join your email list on mobile or web. You can get the plugin free for basic features but you can also have advanced functionalities if you upgrade to one of their paid plans.

Highlighted Features

Works with major email services like HubSpot, Vertical Response, Zapier, Campaign Monitor and more
Optimization of the most effective sharing options on a per page basis
Managing how share counts are displayed

Price: Free

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AddToAny

By using the AddToAny WordPress sharing plugin, you will allow people to share your post and pages to services like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google, WhatsApp and many more. In order to use the plugin you don’t need to register and no user accounts are necessary.

Highlighted Features

Automatic Google Analytics integration (access guide) for sharing analytics
Loads asynchronously so your content always loads before or in parallel with AddToAny
Responsive Floating Share Buttons are mobile ready by default

Price: Free

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Speed Optimization Plugins

One of the priority measures to be taken for an improved user experience is speed optimization. Fast websites also rank higher on Google so if website speed is your concern, there are plenty speed optimization plugins you can choose from. Among other things, these plugins can help with performance optimization, remove trackbacks, clear out post trash, optimize images and clean up your WordPress database.

W3 Total Cache

This WordPress caching plugin helps increase website performance and reduces download times through functionalities like reverse proxy integration via Nginx or Varnish and transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. Fast and easy to configure, W3 Total Cache is recommended by numerous web hosts and trusted by many popular companies.

Highlighted Features

Compatible with shared hosting and dedicated servers
Accelerated Mobile Pages
Secure Socket Layer
Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)

Price: Free

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WP Smush

If you need an image compression plugin, WP Smush is a great choice. With over 2.7 million downloads, the plugin does an amazing job compressing the size of your images while the quality remains the same. Every existent or newly uploaded image is carefully scanned and scaled before being added to your media library. For even more functionality, you can go for WP Smush Pro.

Highlighted Features

Process JPEG, GIF and PNG image files
Optimize any image in any directory
Global and individual settings for multisite

Price: Free

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WP Optimize

WP Optimize helps you clean up and optimize your database by removing stale post revisions, trashed comments, akismet or other stale metadata, trackbacks, pingbacks and transient options. The plugin can show you your current database size and how much space can be optimized. Before using WP Optimize or updating to a major version, it’s recommended to back up your database.

Highlighted Features

Removes all unnecessary data
Carries out automatic clean-ups
Show database statistics and potential savings
Translated into several languages

Price: Free

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Backup Plugins

If you accidentally delete your blog or your site gets hacked, a backup plugin can be a life-saver. You can conveniently schedule daily, weekly or monthly backups and store them on the cloud or your computer and restore your database in just a matter of clicks.

VaultPress

Founded by Automattic, VaultPress is a real-time backup and security plugin. It’s subscription based, so to start using the plugin you must first subscribe to one of the plans. It is now powered by Jetpack and backs up every post, comment, media file, and dashboard setting on your site to their servers.

Highlighted Features

Daily backups for the Basic plan and real time backup for the Premium plan
Automated restores
Daily malware scanning
Spam protection

Price: Starts at $9/month

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BackupBuddy

Powered by the well-known WordPress development studio iThemes, this plugin offers you power to schedule daily, weekly, or monthly backups and store them in their cloud service Stash or Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud or FTP. You can also get email notifications and use ImportBuddy to restore or move your WordPress site. BackupBuddy is not a subscription based service so you can use the plugin on the number of sites that your plan provides.

Highlighted Features

Set up backup schedules to automatically run on customizable schedules
Customize the type of backup BackupBuddy runs
WordPress Database Restore & Database Rollback

Price: Starts at $80

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BackUpWordPress

With 200,000+ downloads and an impressive 4.7 star rating, BackUpWordPress is one of the most popular free backup plugins. The plugin allows you to choose a schedule suitable for you to back up your website, files and database. If available, it uses zip and mysqldump for even faster backups. Premium extensions are also available for purchase if you need to send backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, FTP, Rackspace, DreamHost, etc.

Highlighted Features

No setup is required
Works in low memory
Each backup file can be emailed to you
Works on Linux & Windows Server

Price: Free

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