The WordPress platform already provides a lot of features and functionalities for users to perform their desired tasks efficiently. In addition to these built-in features, there are over 55,000 WordPress plugins available, it’s quite difficult for beginners to find the best WordPress plugins for their need.

This is why we often hear the question, Which WordPress Plugins should I use? Having the right set of plugins can make a huge difference in your blog / website growth.

First, we are going to find out how to install a WordPress plugin, then we will discuss the different plugins available to make your work very easy when heading into 2021. Let get started.

• How to Install a WordPress Plugin
• Install a Plugin using the WordPress Admin Plugin Upload
• New 30 Essential WordPress Plugins You Should Install in 2021

How to Install a WordPress Plugin

When building your website or blog, the first is to install WordPress. After that is done, you want to customise your website by installing different plugins you need to be successful. Find some easy steps below on how to install your favourite plugins.

WordPress plugins are like apps for your WordPress website. They allow you to add new features to WordPress like a contact form, slideshow, shopping cart, and more. There are thousands of free and paid plugins available for WordPress.

Read Also: How to Effectively Make Money With Your Website

Before you go ahead to install a plugin, please note the following.

If you are using WordPress.com, then you cannot install plugins. There are often complaints from users saying that they can’t see the plugins menu in their WordPress dashboard. It is because you are using WordPress.com, which has its limitations.

You cannot install plugins on WordPress.com unless you upgrade to their business plan. On the other hand, you can install any plugin you want on your self hosted WordPress.org website right out of the box (See the differences between self-hosted WordPress.org vs WordPress.com).

If you want to switch from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, then read our tutorial on how to properly move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.

That being said, now let’s take a look at how to install a WordPress plugin on your website.

To make it easy, we have created a video tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin that you can watch below.

Below you will find three methods: installing a WordPress plugin using search, uploading a WordPress plugin, and manually installing a WordPress plugin using FTP.

Install a Plugin using WordPress Plugin Search

The easiest way of installing a WordPress plugin is to use the plugin search. The only downside of this option is that a plugin must be in the WordPress plugin directory which is limited to only free plugins.

First thing you need to visit the Plugins » Add New page inside your WordPress admin area.

You will see a screen like the one in the screenshot above. Find the plugin by typing the plugin name or the functionality you are looking for. After that, you will see a bunch of listings like the example below:

You can pick the plugin that is best for you. Since in our search, we were looking for WPForms which is the best WordPress contact form plugin, we’ll click the ‘Install Now’ button next to it.

WordPress will now download and install the plugin for you. After this, you’ll notice the ‘Install Now’ button will change into the ‘Activate’ button.

A WordPress plugin can be installed on your site, but it will not work unless you activate it. So go ahead and click on the activate button to start using that plugin on your WordPress site.

That’s all, you have successfully installed your first WordPress plugin.

The next step is to configure the plugin settings. These settings will vary for each plugin therefore we will not be covering that in this post.

Install a Plugin using the WordPress Admin Plugin Upload

Paid WordPress plugins are not listed in the WordPress plugin directory. These plugins cannot be installed using the first method.

That’s why WordPress comes with the upload method to install such plugins. We will show you how to install WordPress plugins using the upload option in the admin area.

First, you need to download the plugin from the source (which will be a zip file). Next, you need to go to WordPress admin area and visit Plugins » Add New page.

After that, click on the ‘Upload Plugin’ button on top of the page. This will reveal the plugin upload form. Here you need to click on the ‘Choose File’ button and select the plugin file you downloaded earlier to your computer.

After you have selected the file, you need to click on the ‘Install Now’ button.

WordPress will now upload the plugin file from your computer and install it for you. You will see a success message like this after the installation is finished.

Once installed, you need to click on the Activate Plugin link to start using the plugin.

You would have to configure the settings to fit your needs. These settings will vary for each plugin therefore we will not be covering that in this post.

Manually Install a WordPress Plugin using FTP

In some rare cases, your WordPress hosting provider may have file restrictions that could limit your ability to install a plugin from the admin area.

In this situation, your best bet is to install the plugin manually using FTP.

The FTP manager method is the least friendly for beginners.

First you will need to download the plugin’s source file (it will be a zip file). Next, you need to extract the zip file on your computer.

Extracting the plugin zip file will create a new folder with the same name. This is the folder that you need to manually upload to your website using a FTP client.

You would need to access your host through the FTP manager. If you do not have your FTP username and password, then contact your WordPress hosting provider and ask them.

Open the FTP client on your computer and connect to your website using the login credentials provided by your web host. Once connected, you need to go to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your website.

Next, upload the folder you extracted from the zip file to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your web server.

After uploading the files, you need to visit the WordPress admin area and click on the Plugins link in the admin menu. You’ll see your plugin successfully installed on the plugins page.

You need to click on the Activate link below the plugin to start using it.

Upon activating, you may need to configure the plugin settings. WordPress plugins come with their own settings which differ from one plugin to another so we will not describe them here.

New 30 Essential WordPress Plugins You Should Install in 2021

1. HubSpot

HubSpot’s WordPress plugin offers a form and pop-up builder with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface so you can capture your visitors’ information, but it does so much more than that.

HubSpot will collect submissions off any form you have on your WordPress website (even if you’ve built them with our free Forminator or Hustle plugins) and automatically add those new leads into your CRM. You can segment your contact database into lists and personalize your emails using any CRM property.

And all of this for free! You can report on your email’s overall success and see how each contact interacted with your email campaigns thanks to the built-in analytics.

The plugin also includes a live chat and bot builder so you can begin engaging with visitors and generate leads. You can set up chatbots to answer simple questions that your site visitors have so you can continue engaging your visitors even when you are offline.

Once someone submits their information via a form, popup, or the live chat, you can automate a kickback email to get in touch with that lead and share your content with them.

2. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is designed to increase the page load speed for WordPress sites, which will improve your visitors’ overall experience.

The plugin helps to increase server performance by reducing download times. By reducing page load times, overall site performance improves which helps your site’s rank in search engines. W3 Total Cache can also help to improve web server performance during high traffic periods, which is crucial for larger websites.

3. Hummingbird

The average visitor to your site won’t wait even eight seconds for your site to load and Google recommends that your site loads within about two seconds.

If your site takes longer than that, then your visitors are likely going to leave before they even have a chance to check out one element on your site. Plus, Google won’t be keen on ranking you higher in search results.

Caching is one of the best ways you can speed up your site since it saves a fast-loading version that gets served up in browsers lickety-split. This is where Hummingbird swoops in for the rescue to take care of this for you. Plus, it’s easy to use.

Hummingbird scans your site, then gives you an analysis of your site. You can see the overall score for your site’s speed, then fix any issues in a couple of clicks.

This plugin also goes above and beyond the clouds because it doesn’t just do page caching. Hummingbird also minifies, compresses and merges.

This plugin is like the little birdie that tells your site how to fly as fast as a hummingbird. It’s also included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can try Hummingbird for free with a 7-day trial.

4. WPForms

Every website needs a contact form. WPForms is the most beginner friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. It comes with a powerful drag and drop builder that you can use to create beautiful online forms in just a few minutes without touching a single line of code.

WPForms is a one-stop-shop for creating any type of WordPress form including order forms, survey forms, donation forms, email subscription forms, etc.

WPForms come with dozens of pre-built form templates that perfectly adapt to your workflow and save you time. It comes with all the advanced features like: email marketing integration, payment integrations, conditional logic, survey addon, multi-part forms, front-end post submission, and more.

If you’re after a contact form plugin that is both easy and powerful, then look no further than WPForms. We believe it’s a MUST HAVE for every site. It’s being used on over 1 million websites!

They also have a free version available that you can get – WPForms Lite.

5. MonsterInsights

If you want to grow your website, then it’s important for you to know exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights is the best and most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Over 1.9 million websites use MonsterInsights.

MonsterInsights makes it super easy to connect your website to Google Analytics and offer comprehensive tracking features.

Even though Google Analytics is built for tracking almost every user interaction on your website, like form submissions, e-commerce transactions, downloads tracking, etc., the default Analytics setup doesn’t allow you to make use of the full potential of Analytics tracking.

For example, if you want to track an onsite event, like form submissions tracking, you’ll either have to add the custom event tracking code into your website or set up Google Analytics goal for every form. This can be tedious and time-consuming especially if you’re not a developer or an Analytics expert.

With MonsterInsights, you can enable different tracking features in just a few clicks without having to touch a single line of code. At a glance, you can review your site’s performance right within your WordPress dashboard without logging into your Analytics profile.

A lite version of the plugin is available to download for free from the official WordPress plugins repository.

6. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most powerful lead generation solution in the world. It comes with high-performing pre-built templates that are proven to convert your visitors into leads and customers. You can choose the perfect campaign type that easily grabs your visitors’ attention, like lightbox popup, floating bar, full-screen welcome mat, and more.

With its powerful targeting and segmentation engine, you can show personalized message to every individual visitor on your site based on their geographic location, referral source, the page or section of your site and more.

Some key features of OptinMonster are:

• Exit-intent Technology: Recover abandoning visitors into leads by showing customized campaigns to your visitors at the precise moment they are about to leave.
• Onsite Retargeting: Create special offers targeting repeat visitors based on their previous interactions on your site.
• Onsite Followup Campaigns: Followup your visitors with triggered campaigns based on visitor interactions.
• Cookie retargeting: Create custom browser cookies based on your customers’ demographics data like age, gender, location and then show highly targeted campaigns to drive conversions.

OptinMonster seamlessly integrates with all major email marketing services. A free connector plugin is available to download from the WordPress plugin repository that lets you easily embed your OptinMonster forms.

7. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the best SEO plugin on the market. It allows you to easily optimize your WordPress site for better search engine rankings. It comes with all the important features like XML sitemaps, meta information editor, robots control, and so much more.

Unlike most other WordPress SEO plugins, Yoast SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword for your blog and then makes sure you appropriately used it on the page. Yoast SEO shows you a SEO snippet within your page editor so that you can edit your meta description to improve your click-through rates in search results.

In a nutshell, Yoast SEO takes care of all the technical SEO optimization for your site.

8. Defender

WordPress is a popular choice for creating websites and this makes it a perfect target for hackers because they can create a bot to infect millions of sites without lifting a finger. It’s not a matter of if your site may be targeted, but when.

That’s why staying on top of your security game is so important. If you can set up a good defense, you can protect your site from hackers and the Defender plugin helps you do this and more.

Defender searches your site for vulnerabilities and lets you know if any were found so you can patch them up in a single click. This means installing it can also help you clean up your site if you have been hacked. It also works to harden your site’s security to save you from future disasters in one click. Now that’s a superhero.

The best part is, you can set it and forget it when you enable scheduled scans. On second thought, the best part may actually be that this plugin is included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can also try Defender for free with a 7-day trial.

9. Jetpack

Jetpack offers a suite of powerful features for your WordPress site. Enhanced security, improved site performance, plenty of content tools, and visitor engagement features are all part of this plugin.

Additional features include spam-free Comments, Social Sharing, Related Posts, Post by Email, and much more.

Jetpack even offers a mobile theme option that is lightweight and responsive, designed for phones and tablets.

10. Sucuri

Sucuri is a complete website security solution that protects your site from malware, brute force attacks and other potential vulnerabilities.

Once you activate Sucuri, all your website traffic goes through their CloudProxy servers and every request is scanned to filter out malicious requests. This way Sucuri can reduce server load and improve your site’s performance by blocking all malicious traffic from reaching your server.

It protects your website against SQL Injections, XSS, and all known-attacks. In addition to that, they proactively report potential security threats to the WordPress core team and third-party plugins as well.

Aside from blocking all the attacks, some other ways Sucuri protects your website are:

• Its antivirus package monitors your website every 4 hours to ensure your website is free from potential vulnerabilities and malware.
• It keeps track of everything that happens on your site, including file changes, last login, failed login attempts and more…
• It allows you to conduct server side scanning to protect your website from compromised and server level infections.

11. Akismet

Akismet helps to filter out any comments on your blog that look like spam. The plugin automatically checks comments against the Akismet Web service.

All comments will have a history for users to view that shows which comments were flagged or cleared by Akismet. In addition, those comments that were marked as spam or unmarked by a moderator will be highlighted in history.

12. Beehive

Tracking how and when users visit your site is important if you want your site to gain popularity since it gives you the opportunity to see where you can make improvements to your site. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for this purpose and the Beehive plugin brings this information right to your admin dashboard.

Not only can you track visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration, and referrers, but you can also enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.

Also, you can easily track statistics for your entire site or network with the quick setup and easy to understand display.

13. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the most popular email marketing service for small businesses. It comes with tons of customizable email templates that help you get a head start.

When getting started, you’ll be prompted to choose your industry, and your previous experience with email marketing. Based on the selection, you’ll get customized content and promotion ideas that will help you level up your email marketing.

Constant Contact offers unmatched support with live chat, email, and discussion forums. They also have a vast library of resources, and it integrates seamlessly with popular lead generation tools like OptinMonster and WPForms.

While most email marketing services offer 14 or 30-day free trial to test the service, Constant Contact gives you full access to their tool for 60 days. After the trial, the subscription starts at $20 per month for up to 500 subscribers.

Constant Contact is best for smart businesses who’re just starting out with email marketing.

14. Google XML Sitemaps

This must-have plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site. Having an XML sitemap is crucial in helping search engines better index your blog.

With a sitemap, web crawlers can see the structure of your site and retrieve the results more efficiently. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will be notified every time you create a post about your new content.

15. Forminator

Forminator gives away valuable time-saving and money-making features for nothing. Nada.

• Integrations with other apps, such as Zapier, Google Sheets and a bunch of email marketing apps.
• Integrations with popular payment portals for a simple eCommerce solution. In fact, if you’re using Stripe, you’re really going to love how someone can make a payment without leaving the page.
• Codeless styling so you can create the look you want without tinkering with CSS.
• Conditional Logic so you can create dynamic forms.
• Calculations so your forms can “do the math” for you.

You get full access to 24 advanced fields so you can get your data validation on. With Forminator’s form preview button, you can view your form as you’re building it and designing it, without having to embed it on a page first to see if it looks right.

Forminator is also the only free form plugin that allows you to create forms AND polls, submissions, quizzes, and submit blog posts from a form. And it has a powerful API that you can access for free and use to build your own custom extensions.

Something that’s really important for our European friends is advanced features to help you stay compliant with GDPR. You can adjust how long data is retained, set how long to keep an IP before it is anonymized and there’s even a field for a GDPR checkbox.

16. Snapshot

Backing up your site can save you from a lot of future grief. Did your site just go down? Was your site just hacked? No problem – just restore your site from a backup and it’s as good as new.

But what if your backup was lost, compromised, corrupted, or accidentally deleted? Do you have a backup of your backup? Most people don’t, but you don’t have to worry about that with Snapshot Pro.

This plugin can backup your site, but you can also save your backups to multiple locations such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, your computer and more. Backups can also be scheduled so you don’t have to lift a finger to help save your site the next time disaster strikes.

17. Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is one of the best drag & drop WordPress page builders. It gives you the ability to create a website the way you want without knowing any coding skills. You can drag & drop to build beautiful pages with ease.

Beaver Builder comes with dozens of gorgeous page templates, so you can easily kickstart your design without starting from scratch. You can choose a template, replace images and text with yours, and then hit publish.

Beaver Builder works with any WordPress theme giving you full control over your content. The best thing is even if you stopped using the plugin, your content gets ported to the WordPress editor. With the pro plan and above, you’ll get beautiful Beaver Builder compatible themes that allow you to modify your styles with the native WordPress Customizer.

18. Branda

When you’re running a WordPress site and a business at the same time, you know looking professional is important and just as crucial as your content and products. That’s why being able to turn WordPress into a white labeling machine is a great idea.

You could replace the WordPress logo for your own, customize the admin bar, and add your own company name to achieve consistent branding across your site. This plugin can do all this and more.

You can completely customize the admin bar, login page, footer, dashboard, and everywhere else WordPress logos and branding appear. You can even add your branding to even more places than that. Plus, you don’t have to touch any code.

It’s easy to set up and use and it works across your entire Multisite network or your single install of WordPress.

Branda is the only branding plugin you need to turn a WordPress site into your company’s site.

19. LearnDash

LearnDash is the best WordPress LMS plugin in existence. LearnDash makes it super easy to create and sell courses, deliver quizzes, award certificates and more.

It enables you to offer a robust learning experience to your members and supports the latest gamification, social learning and micro-content trends.

Some of the ways you can sell your online courses from LearnDash are:

• Memberships: Sell traditional membership access to your entire online courses.
• One-time price: Allow users to make individual online course purchase.
• Subscription: Maximize revenue through recurring payments and subscription for your online course.
• Course licenses: Allow organizers to purchase the license in bulk and grant access to their staffs.

With LearnDash, you can let your students unlock new courses based on the points they earn as they complete courses. This increases user engagement in your online courses. You can also offer front-end user profiles where members can track their learning progress.

20. SmartCrawl

You work hard creating phenomenal content to draw visitors to your site, but are you really drawing in all the users you could be? Good SEO practices can help, but you can go much further with SmartCrawl.

This plugin makes your site more visible to search engines by informing web crawlers when your site has important content that needs registering instead of waiting for web crawlers to find you.

On top of that, SmartCrawl can create a sitemap, customize how your titles and descriptions appear on search engines, add automated keyword linking and you can also view industry-leading reports by Moz.

On top of all that, setting up and using SmartCrawl is quick and easy with the setup wizard.

If you want to check it out for yourself, you can download the plugin for free, or try the Pro version with automated scanning, reports, automatic linking for specific keywords, broken URL checking, 404s, and multiple redirections, plus 24/7 premium support with a 7-day trial WPMU DEV membership.

21. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform for WordPress. With no doubt, it is the most comprehensive solution that enables you to sell both digital and physical goods on your WordPress website.

With hundreds of free and paid extensions, WooCommerce makes it super easy to build and enhance your store, so you can start selling products in minutes. If you want a custom build online store, then you can easily hire WooCommerce developers thanks to the large community.

WooCommerce comes bundled with PayPal (for accepting credit card and PayPal account payments), BACS, and cash on delivery for accepting payments. For more payment gateways, you can install addons on your WooCommerce store.

WooCommerce also provides easy-to-follow documentation that walks you through different aspects of building an online store. The support requests are handled on the official forums, so in case you need assistance, they’ve got you covered. 

22. Shared Counts

Shared Counts is a lean social media plugin for your WordPress site that quickly retrieves, caches and displays various social sharing counts by using SharedCount.com API. This is by far the fastest social sharing plugin in the market. Most other share plugins slow down your website, but this is written by very highly reputable developers who value performance.

Since it’s written by developers, this plugin is very flexible and developer friendly. You can easily customize it to match your theme’s need.

It supports share counts for Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter (using the NewShareCount API), Stumbleupon, and email sharing. It also combines the share count, so you can show total share counts alongside the buttons.

23. Smush Pro

Uploading images to use on your site and in posts is an excellent way to grab your visitors’ attention, but they do weigh down your site. They take up a lot of storage space, but most importantly, they slow down your site. Fortunately, you can compress your images to take care of that problem.

Smush Pro has been benchmarked as the best image compression and image optimization plugin. Not only that, but it works in a way that saves storage space and helps your site load faster without reducing the quality of your images.

You can compress and optimize images automatically, manually or in bulk and also Super Smush for 10 times the compression power while still not losing out on image quality. It also integrates with NextGEN and WP Retina 2x so photographers need not worry about displaying crisp, stunning images. We’ve also recently added lazy loading to Smush.

You can try the free version of WP Smush on WordPress.org or try out the premium version for free with a 7-day trial. If you’re already a WPMU DEV member, you already have access to WP Smush Pro so you can check it out and see how easy it is to use and maybe even boast that your site has superpowers.

24. Duplicator

Have you ever needed to backup or move an entire WordPress site from one location to another? The Duplicator plugin can duplicate, backup, move, and transfer a site.

The plugin can also serve as an easy utility for those administrators looking to back up their sites.

Need to make a clone of your production site for testing purposes? Yep, the Duplicator plugin is perfect for making a backup of a WordPress site for testing and validation.

25. CSS Hero

CSS Hero is a WordPress customization plugin that helps you customize your WordPress theme without writing a single line of code.

WordPress themes use CSS to control the visual appearance of your website. This means that if you want to customize the look and feel of your site, then you have to learn CSS. This isn’t a feasible option for beginners.

CSS Hero is a great solution if you’re not using a page builder like BeaverBuilder.

26. Live Chat

Live Chat is the best live chat tool that lets you get in touch with your website visitors and point them in the right direction.

The pricing is based on the number of agents that can log into your Live Chat account at the same time. However, you can create as many as agent accounts for organizing your team members. Everything that customers are typing in is visible instantly in the chat window, which helps you provide quick assistance to your customers.

Read Also: 15 Practical Ways to Keep Visitors on Your Website

The tool also comes with powerful built-in reports and analytics. You can even integrate it with your Google Analytics account to measure the impact Live Chat has on your business. You can also get a free WordPress plugin to install on your website.

Live Chat Inc supports integration with all your favorite web apps.

27. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin identifies any broken links that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects.

Once broken links are identified on your site, links can be edited directly from the plugin page to avoid manually updating each post.

28. Disable Comments

The Disable Comments plugin enables administrators to globally control comments on their site. Comments can be disabled according to post type, on pages, attachments, etc.

This plugin works well if you want to disable comments on certain post types or on your entire site. However, if you plan to selectively disable comments on individual posts, then this function is better handled directly through WordPress.

29. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is the best WordPress Gallery plugin that’s both easy and powerful. It comes with a set of pre-built templates that let you easily customize the look and feel of your gallery.

Unlike other popular WordPress gallery plugins, Envira is a lightweight non-bloated plugin. It comes with all the important features out of the box. You can easily enhance the core functionalities by installing one of their two dozen addons.

Some of the key features of Envira Gallery are:

• Drag and drop builder: Create beautiful galleries in a matter of seconds with just a few clicks.
• Responsive mobile friendly: All galleries you built with Envira are 100% responsive, meaning they’ll work great on mobile, tablet and desktop devices.
• Standalone galleries: Create independent galleries that are not tied to your posts and pages.
• Tons of addons: You can find an extensive collection of addons, like Social sharing, Videos, WooCommerce, Watermarking – just to name a few.

30. Revive Old Post

Revive Old Post allows you to automatically share your new and old posts on your social media accounts. It enables you to share your content on multiple platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also allows you to track clicks.

You can set a sharing interval and choose the number of posts to share. You can also post with featured images in your tweets to boost your click-through rates.

Finally

If you do not see a plugins page on your WordPress blog, then the most likely reason is that you are using WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is a free blog hosting service that allows you to create free blogs on their servers. It is not the same as having your own self hosted WordPress.org site.

One of the main differences between the two is that you cannot install plugins on the WordPress.com blog unless you’re on their higher-end plan.

In order to use powerful WordPress plugins and themes, you will need to move for a self-hosted WordPress.org site.