WordPress plugins are extensively vital tools to successfully running your WordPress website(s). And while there are more than 42,000 plugins available for WordPress websites, there is always the problem of picking the right one and not just the right one but also a suitable one for your needs.

This article will provide you with the right information you need to better select the right WordPress plugin for your blog in 2022.

• What Plugins do I Need For my WordPress Blog?
• What is WordPress Plugin?
• What Are The Top 5 Must Have Plugins For a WordPress Site?
• What is The Best Blog Plugin For WordPress?
• How Many Plugins Should a WordPress Blog Have?
• Best Free WordPress Plugins
• WordPress eCommerce Plugins
• Best WordPress Plugins For Design
• WordPress Plugin List
• Most Popular WordPress Plugins And Their Functions
• Plugins For WordPress Premuim
• Top 11 WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Services Plugin
• WordPress Plugin Development
• Best WordPress Plugins For Business
• Why Plugins Are Used in WordPress?
• Best WordPress Plugins For New Sites
• Which Free Plugin is Best For WordPress?

What Plugins do I Need For my WordPress Blog?

WordPress plugins are appreciable tools for summing and increasing functionality to WordPress. We are going to discuss the 10 WordPress plugins you must try for your WordPress website. These plugins will increase the features and functionality of WordPress websites and make them ‘Significant’.

1. Elementor

No number of plugins will help if you’ve built a bad website.
Elementor is the go-to platform for those looking to build a killer WordPress without having to write a single line of code.
It offers users an extensive free account, along with 4 subscription packages.
Best of all, with its built in responsive editor, along with its native integration with Yoast, you can rest assured knowing your site will be optimized for SEO.

This is a favourite to many users. Mostly used on the WPMarmite website, Elementor is one of the prominent famous page builders within the WordPress world. It can even be evaluated more widely as an online site builder, because its paid version allows you to customize the whole layout of your website, including the header and footer.

If you’re a newbie in website creation, or you don’t know anything about coding or programming languages, we say Elementor will definitely guide you, while saving most of your time.

2. Yoast SEO

If you’ve just stepped into the earth of WordPress, surely you have an idea Yoast SEO. This is often the foremost well-known SEO plugin, and also one of the ten most downloaded plugins of all time. Best feature of this plugin is that its red, orange and green traffic lights.

Read Also: Top 10 Best WordPress SEO Plugin 2022

Yoast permits you to optimize the Search Engine Optimization of your website. That’s fundamental if you’d desire to look on the first page of Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. The plugin permits you to give your title and meta description tags, create an XML sitemap. 

3. WP Rocket

WP Rocket could also be a cache plugin, which recommends it boost up the loading of your WordPress pages.  It also has multiple options to accelerate the performance of your site: like loading of images, HTML code minification, minification and concatenation of CSS and JavaScript files, database optimization, etc.

4. Imagify

If we say on average, images take 50% of the whole weight of an online page. They take the longest time to load. So, you’ll simply imagine that, if they’re too large in size, you’ll have to optimize them and reduce their size. As to optimize images, we recommend the Imagify plugin.

It’ll compress the photographs on its own. Without losing quality. It is designed by the same team as WP Rocket, Imagify could also be a freemium plugin: after a specific quota of images to optimize, you will need to upgrade the paid offer if you’d like to continue using the service.

5. UpdraftPlus

The first thing important in your website is secure. Try to do it right, you also require to implement an automatic backup solution on your WordPress site. Just in case of issues (hacking, bugs during an update, your server crashing, etc.), you’ll restore an old version of your content faster than you think that.

Among the several WordPress backup solutions, UpdraftPlus is one of the most leading and effective. Albeit its interface could also be a touch complex (there’s plenty of text), it allows you to repeat your files and databases to the cloud on services like Google Drive, Dropbox or Amazon S3.

6. Mailchimp for WordPress

Mailchimp is the most famous marketing tool within the world for creating an email campaign. Free for up to 2,000 subscribers, it’s ideal for beginners who want to start in marketing. As you would possibly expect, to inform your subscribers of your best stories and make your list grow, you’ll get to collect their email addresses. For this, You’ll need to install registration forms on your WordPress.

This is what this plugin enables: it’ll connect your site to your Mailchimp account. Once created, your forms are often displayed in your articles, pages, widgets, etc. Note that the free version may be a little old-fashioned in terms of interface but this is often (voluntarily) fixed within the premium version.

Another advantage of this plugin: its add-ons, to integrate perfectly with other plugins like Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, Contact Form 7 or Easy Digital Downloads.

7. WPForms

Every website needs a contact form because it makes it easy for your visitors to urge in-tune with you. WPForms is the foremost user-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag & drop online form builder allows you to simply create contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, surveys, polls, and basically all other kinds of online forms with just a few clicks.

8. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most well-liked conversion rate optimization software within the market. It permits you to transform abandoning website visitors into email subscribers and customers. This WordPress plugin and application specialize in getting more email subscribers and sales, fast.

You can use their many high-converting templates to form WordPress popups, slide-ins, announcement bars, gamified spin a wheel, and full-screen welcome mats to capture user’s attention. Each opt-in form or campaign template is often easily customized with their drag & drop builder.

OptinMonster’s powerful display targeting features allow you to personalize the campaigns for every user, so you’ll show the proper message at the proper time. It’s a superb solution for bloggers, business websites, and eCommerce websites. Basically, if you would like to form extra money from your website traffic, then you would like OptinMonster.

9. Sucuri

Security should be a topmost priority for all online business owners. Sucuri offers a WordPress security plugin and web application firewall that’s probably one of the only protection you will get for your site.

They monitor and protect your site from DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, and basically every other kind of attack. If you don’t have a firewall on your website, then you’d wish to feature one today.

10. Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails is one of such small plugins that silently sit in the background and only step out to do some work every once in a while. However, they’re still invaluable when it involves the standard of that employment.

What this plugin does is simple; it’s at the right image sizes set in your current theme then regenerates all of your thumbnails to match. For instance, whenever you turn your WordPress theme, use this plugin to reset your images to seem right.

What is WordPress Plugin?

WordPress plugins are bits of software that can be uploaded to extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress site.

There are tons, literally tons, of WordPress plugins available for free download from the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. There are also premium or paid WordPress plugins.

Why would you want to pay for a plugin? Well, there are several reasons:

• While there are thousands of plugins available for free from the plugin directory, paid plugins usually offer a full time support staff and developers that work on maintaining the security and compatibility of plugins with the latest version of WordPress as well as with other themes and plugins.
• Most of the time, plugins play nicely with the core of WordPress and with other plugins, but sometimes a plugin’s code will get in the way of another plugin, causing compatibility issues. With a paid plugin, it’s just nice to know you have support staff that can help you out if anything goes wrong.

You might be asking what types of things plugins can do. Well, if you can imagine it, there’s probably a plugin for that. All you need to do is take a stroll through the WordPress plugin directory to see all of the possible ways plugins can extend or enhance your WordPress site.

What Are The Top 5 Must Have Plugins For a WordPress Site?

1. Yoast SEO

Active installations: 5+ million

Even if you’ve just dived into the world of WordPress, I’m sure you know Yoast SEO. This is the most popular SEO plugin, and one of the 10 most downloaded plugins of all time.

Famous for its red, orange and green traffic lights, Yoast allows you to optimize the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your site. That’s essential if you want to try to appear on the first page of Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

The plugin allows you to define your title and meta description tags, create an XML sitemap, or even set up your content types.

The free version of Yoast is more than enough to work on your SEO. Be aware that there is a premium version at $89, for use on 1 site.

2. Akismet

Active installations: 5+ million

Well, it turns out that this famous spiced ham is said to be the origin of the word spam, which refers to unwanted email.

Akismet allows you to filter comments that look like unwanted ones. For example, comments that have nothing to do with the content you have published. And believe me: it saves a lot of time and energy.

The plugin is free (Akismet becomes paying as soon as you create a commercial site), and available by default on any new WordPress installation. To make it work, simply activate it by entering an API key.

3. WP Rocket

Active installations: 1+ million

WP Rocket is a cache plugin, which means it speeds up the loading of your WordPress pages.

But that’s not all, it also has multiple options to boost the performance of your site: deferred loading of images, HTML code minification, minification and concatenation of CSS and JavaScript files, database optimization, etc.

Developed and maintained by a team led by French founders, it is only available as a paid version (starting at $49).

4. Imagify

Active installations: 400,000+

On average, images represent 50% of the total weight of a web page. They take the longest time to load. So you can easily imagine that, if they’re too heavy, you’ll have to optimize them and reduce their weight.

We recommend the Imagify plugin. It will automatically compress the images you add to your media library. All without losing quality.

Designed by the same team as WP Rocket, Imagify is a freemium plugin: after a certain quota of images to optimize, you will have to subscribe to the paid offer (starting at $4.99/month) if you want to continue using the service.

5. Social Warfare

Active installations: 60,000+

Social Warfare is a very easy to use plugin that allows your users to share your content on social networks. Warfare is a reference to one of the co-creators of this plugin, who is a US Army reservist.

Even if the usefulness of sharing buttons is controversial, they can bring traffic back to your site.

The big pluses of Social Warfare are the many customization options, its performance (your site is very little slowed down), and the possibility to upload your images in the right format according to the social network.

The free version allows you to use 5 social networks. To enjoy all of the features, you have to switch to premium (starting at $29/year).

What is The Best Blog Plugin For WordPress?

In WordPress, we all know plugins are one of the major components that adds functionality to your website. Hence adding some of the best WordPress plugins for blogs will definitely help it grow and reach out more. 

Most of the plugins used for blogs can generally be used for any other website too. But, there are some plugins that are a must-have for a blog. These plugins can really enhance the appearance and user experience for your readers.

Now, let’s go through the best WordPress plugins for blogs.

1. Everest Forms:

While publishing blogs, readers might sometimes be eager to contact you to ask you some questions about it. So, if you want, you might need to make a contact form and Everest Forms is one of the best plugins for blogs to add a form. 

This plugin has a very user-friendly interface for customizations equipped with drag and drop fields. You can add an unlimited number of forms with multiple column support. The forms that you’ve created are also fully responsive and can be used on any portable devices like mobile phones and tablets.

Key Features:

• Shortcode to help add the forms in WordPress blog post, page, sidebar and more.
• Support from Google ReCaptcha to block the spams.
• Redirect the user to a specific page after form submission.
• View Form entries from the dashboard of your website.
• Editable form validation message.

2. Yoast SEO

If you have a blog, one of the most important factors to grow it is search engine optimization. Yoast SEO is one of the best plugins for blogs regarding when it comes to SEO. It has been trusted by most of the WordPress websites because it’s frequently updated to be compatible with Google algorithms.

Yoast has a lot of features that can make your blog effectively better, and not just SEO. It can optimize your keywords and synonyms too. The plugin also analyzes the readability of your blog and calculates the Flesch Reading Ease score so that your readers can understand your content better.

Key Features:

• Keyword optimization for synonyms and related keywords.
• Full control over breadcrumbs for setting primary categories for posts.
• No duplicate content with the help of canonical URLs.
• Content Insights to check the match for chosen keywords.
• Readability Check from Flesch Reading Ease score.

3. Easy Social Sharing:

Easy Social Sharing is a social media plugin that enables your readers to share the contents of your website in their social media. This plugin would be quite beneficial to your blogs as it can grow the reach of your audience. It is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs when it comes to sharing the content on social media.

Your content can be shared on up to 18 different social media networks using Easy Social Sharing. This plugin has an inline layout where you can add the sharing button either at the top or at the bottom of the posts. Hence, it can be convenient to place it at desired position depending on the length and layout of your blogs.

Key Features:

• Floating sidebar layout attached and fixed to the screen border.
• Sharing counts to display the number of shares on social media.
• Live preview of the sharing design at the backend.
• Six different design layouts to choose from.
• Easy user settings with the intuitive settings panel.

4. Akismet Anti-Spam:

If you don’t have any countermeasures for your blogs against spams, chances are, your blogs will be already filled with them. The spam can contaminate your website and backend files through various comments or contact form submissions from the users. To reduce them, you can use the Akismet plugin which is one of the best plugins for blogs to deal with spams.

It is an anti-spam plugin that examines all your comments and contact form submissions to find any sort of harmful content. It automatically analyzes the website and drops out the contents that might occur as spam.

Key Features:

• Extremely easy backup and restore processes.
• Status history for each comment to view where the spam was found.
• Moderators can view the number of spam comments from each user.
• Discard features that block the worst spam to save the storage.
• Fast performance that saves a lot of time.

5. Jetpack

Jetpack is probably one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs if you want to effortlessly manage your blog website. Developed by Automattic, which includes the people behind WordPress.com, Jetpack also provides you with various site statistics. With it, you can keep a track of the visitors or readers you get on your blogs and work out ways to increase them even more.

This plugin also helps in spam filtering, malware scanning, and brute force attack protection. So, unwanted intrusions are prevented in your website through it. Therefore, your blogs will also be in safe hands.

Key Features:

• Powerful customization tools for the design you desire.
• Faster mobile experience with lazy image loading.
• SEO tools for Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook and WordPress.com.
• Top-Notch security with brute force attack protection and spam filtering.
• Ability to manage multiple websites from one dashboard.

How Many Plugins Should a WordPress Blog Have?

There’s not a number of plugins that are set in stone for all users. It depends heavily on the kind of web host you use, though. For shared or budget cloud hosting, stick between 0 and 5 plugins.

If you use cloud hosting, VPS hosting, or a dedicated server, you can run anywhere from 5 and 20 plugins on your site without any issues. Dan Norris, the co-founder of WP Curve, recommends to never exceed 20 plugins.

Less is more, but there aren’t any hard and fast rules for how many plugins you can or can’t have. That’s why you should cut down on the number of plugins that you have on your site.

Small blogs can get by with just a few plugins, but you might need at least 20 on a larger website.

A good rule of thumb is to only install plugins that you truly need. For example, if a plugin isn’t necessary to use a service, like MailChimp or Google Analytics, don’t install it.

You should also uninstall plugins that you no longer need or use. If a plugin isn’t vital to your site’s functionality, go ahead and uninstall it.

Test out plugins before you install them on your site, too, to avoid problems before they start.

When you’re selecting the plugins to remove, be honest with yourself about which plugins are actually essential. There are a few must-haves to consider above.

Blocking spam comments, for example, will keep your blog looking as professional as possible. Clean Talk is a great plugin for spam protection.

Best Free WordPress Plugins

Whether you want to create a contact form, build more beautiful pages, or add eCommerce functionality to your WordPress site, these plugins can help. And the best part is that they are mostly free.

1. Ninja Forms

Every website needs a contact page, and, when it comes to contact forms (or other types of forms), Ninja Forms is one of the best free options you’ll find. This is probably why it’s active on more than a million websites.

It features a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop interface, and AJAX form submission so people can submit a form without a page reload.

And, if you ever feel limited by the (generous) free core version, you can always get extra functionality with Ninja Forms’ huge library of premium extensions.

WPForms is also another great free option for forms — it really just depends on which interface you prefer. I like Ninja Forms’ interface a little bit more, which is why I chose to feature it.

2. Elementor

Elementor is a front-end drag-and-drop page builder. This means it lets you design complicated-looking pages without needing to know a single line of code.

Essentially, it makes web design accessible to anyone.

Even though Elementor only launched in 2016, it’s already grown to the point where it’s active on more than five million websites, and it’s also maintained a 4.8-star rating on more than 5,780 reviews.

3. WooCommerce

If you want to create an eCommerce store with WordPress, WooCommerce is the way to do it. Heck, if you want to create an eCommerce store period, WooCommerce is the way to do it. According to BuiltWith, this free plugin powers more than 28% of all eCommerce stores, and is even more popular than Shopify.

It’s active on more than five million sites, has a 4.5-star rating on more than 3,700 reviews, and, most importantly, it just plain works.

4. TablePress

TablePress has one of the most impressive ratings I’ve ever seen for a WordPress plugin:

It has a perfect 5-star rating on more than 4,114 votes at WordPress.org.

And, as someone who has used this plugin quite a bit, I can say it deserves every one of those 5-star reviews.

If you need to display any type of table on your WordPress site, TablePress can handle it.

It gives you a simple, Excel-like interface right in your WordPress dashboard. You can import data from Excel or Google Sheets, use any type of media in your table, and extend it with a huge variety of free add-ons.

5. Envira Gallery

If you have a ton of images that you want to display at once, you need a gallery. WordPress includes basic gallery functionality built into the core, but it’s not very flexible and the end-product looks pretty basic.

Envira Gallery changes that by giving you a user-friendly interface to create great-looking galleries. That’s why it has a 4-8-star rating on more than 1,380 reviews.

WordPress eCommerce Plugins

All else equal, the most important consideration for picking WordPress eCommerce plugins is ultimately about whether a plugin fits your specific needs.

Once you’ve determined the specific elements that match your needs, it’s time to decide between the following WordPress eCommerce plugins:

1. BigCommerce for WordPress.
2. WooCommerce.
3. Shopify.
4. Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart.
5. Easy Digital Downloads.
6. Cart66 Cloud
7. WP eCommerce
8. Jigoshop eCommerce
9. WP EasyCart

Best WordPress Plugins For Design

Websites are an excellent way to get discovered, and WordPress is one of the most popular options for building an online portfolio.

To maintain such portfolios and capture client leads, designers make use of specific WordPress plugins. These tools integrate with your WordPress theme and perform unique functions for your website.

1. HubSpot WordPress Plugin

HubSpot’s WordPress plugin lets you capture, organize and engage web visitors with forms, live chat, CRM, email marketing, and analytics. That’s a lot of value from one plugin — and better yet, it’s free.

This plugin is especially useful for designers. You can easily create forms, popups, and live chat using a drag and drop builder. Adjust colors, stylings, and more to match your brand and provide a seamless experience for visitors.

Built-in analytics makes it easy to understand which sales and marketing actions are driving the most success… and which ones you need to fix. This is useful in deciding what pages need a refresh as well as the impact of any design changes on business growth.

2. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO, created by Joost de Valk, is one of the best plugins for writing content and adhering to all on-page SEO factors. Yoast SEO pushes you to optimize keywords, which is an essential factor Google and other search engines consider when ranking articles.

Yoast SEO reminds you of the little things you might forget when optimizing an article. You can also control which pages that search engines will be able to crawl. With over 5 million installs, Yoast stands out as one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress.

The plugin’s other features include compatibility with WordPress multi-sites, import and export options, social media integration, and RSS optimization.

3. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache helps with performance optimization using caching technology. Companies such as AT&T, Mashable, and John Chow are among the over one million users who trust this plugin.

W3 Total Cache does an excellent job of improving search engine results and is mobile-friendly, too. It also decreases page loading speeds and visitor time on your site.

The W3 Total Cache plugin is compatible with virtual, private, or dedicated servers and clusters. And, it has transparent content delivery network management. Additionally, it supports AMP and SSL, and it incorporates multiple security features as well.

4. Monarch

Social sharing is an essential feature to include in any new website you design. As one of the best social media sharing plugins for WordPress, Monarch helps you increase traffic from social networking sites.

Monarch offers you a variety of different placement options so you can maximize conversion and the number of times visitors share your content. You also have the following options as far as button placement is concerned:

• Floating sidebar
• Above & or below content
• On images & videos
• Automatic pop-up
• Automatic fly-in

When it comes to designing social sharing buttons, Monarch provides all the modern options to choose from. You get complete control over the plugin and a powerful control panel to make customization a lot easier.

5. Optin Monster

More than 1 million websites use OptinMonster for its incredible performance as a pop-up and lead generation plugin. With the help of a drag-and-drop page builder, OptinMonster helps users to build landing pages with various user intents like signing up for free courses, email newsletters, subscriptions, and more.

The plugin offers Multiple Form Types, A/B split testing, page-level targeting, built-in analytics, and more. And, it integrates with almost all email marketing services like MailChimp and Emma.

6. Elementor Page Builder

We all know that a page builder makes life a lot easier for web designers. Even if you are a new WordPress user, a page builder can help you create a completely custom, unique design for your site without writing a single line of code.

Elementor is a plugin that helps you to create stunning pages for your site with a drag-and-drop interface without any coding. This plugin has a free and pro version with several great modules and design options.

You can define sections by height and width, resize columns, position the content per your requirement, and define the gap between each section to make your content look neat.

7. WPforms

WPforms is one of the best WordPress contact form plugins that creates an extraordinary form with just a few clicks. The drag-and-drop form builder helps even a beginner designer create a responsive website without any coding knowledge as you can use smart conditional logic to control the form intent.

There are instant notifications whenever someone submits a form, multiple form templates, protection from spam entries, and you can even collect payments.

8. Modula Image Gallery

Up next is the Modula Image Gallery plugin. While WordPress allows designers to host image galleries, many designers find the capacity somewhat limited.

Enter: Modula Image Gallery. This plugin offers a flexible and completely customizable solution. With this plugin, designers can choose whatever visual style they want instead of being limited by the virtual style WordPress imposes.

9. Soliloquy

Soliloquy is an excellent choice for slider plugin functionality. It quickly creates a website with a drag-and-drop page builder and acts as a responsive, mobile-friendly plugin.

Soliloquy can boost your sales by adding interactive product sliders in your WooCommerce store. It also enables slideshow displays in a full-screen lightbox mode for a better user experience.

Additionally, the plugin creates dynamic sliders from featured blog posts, Instagram images, testimonials, and much more.

10. Sucuri

Sucuri provides website security against malware, hacking attacks, DNS manipulation, and more. Once installed, it uses continuous monitoring and brand management to secure your site. It uses a global CDN for performance optimization and has a detection technology that can quickly identify and alert site owners in the event of any security incident.

The software is easy to deploy, and there are no hardware requirements. With this plugin, your site is safe against DDoS and website hacks.

WordPress Plugin List

So if you’ve been asking yourself what are the top free WordPress plugins, here’s the list you’ve been looking for:

1. MonsterInsights Lite (Free)

MonsterInsights Lite gives you a simple way to connect your WordPress website to your Google Analytics account. With it, you can see how site visitors find your website and what they do while there. With this data, you’re able to capitalize on what site visitors like to keep them coming back for more.

Features:

• Dashboard Reports — See real-time stats in an easy to read report found right in the dashboard of your WordPress site.
• Universal Tracking — Your stats are never skewed thanks to the universal tracking system that’s in place. In other words, if your site visitors switch from a mobile device to a desktop, you’ll still get accurate data counts.
• Robust Pro Features — The premium version lets you track eCommerce stats, traffic sources, advertisements efforts, and you’ll have access to the MonsterInsights Forms addon, which lets you see your form conversion rates so you can make improvements and grow your business online.

2. WPForms Lite (Free)

One of our favorites on this WordPress plugins list of the best free WordPress plugins is WPForms Lite. This popular tool is simply the easiest to use and best WordPress forms plugin on the market. And it comes with tons of ways to help reduce form abandonment.

Features:

• Visual Builder — It comes with a drag and drop WordPress form builder so you can easily create contact forms for your website.
• Pre-built Templates — Pre-built form templates come complete with the form fields you need, so you can customize your form as you see fit.
• Mobile-friendly — It’s 100% responsive, mobile-friendly, and is optimized for SEO.
• Speed — It’s one of the fastest contact form plugins around so you don’t have to worry about it slowing your website down.
• Email Marketing Integration — With WPForms, you can grow your newsletter and email list quickly with the most popular email marketing services around.
• Amazing Pro Features — Collect payments, conduct surveys, hire for a new position with a job application form, and even enable smart conditional logic.

3. SeedProd

SeedProd is the most powerful WordPress landing page plugin there is. It makes it a breeze to design and customize your website’s landing pages. And, it’s raved about on WordPress.org, boasting thousands of 5-star reviews.

Do you want to see how SeedProd works before diving in? We used it to make a WordPress coming soon page. Check out the tutorial to see the full process.

Features:

• Get More Leads — Boost your conversion rates with gorgeous landing pages that convert.
• Easy to Use — A visual builder and tons of landing page templates make building your website’s pages extremely simple, even for beginners.
• Coming Soon Pages — Rank early in search engine results with awesome coming soon page and maintenance mode features.
• Integrations — Connects with tons of other top WordPress plugins to make building and maintaining your landing pages easy and successful.

4. TrustPulse (Free)

TrustPulse leverages FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) to help drive more conversions and sales on websites through social proof. Social proof is a psychological and social phenomenon where people rely on actions and feedback of other people to decide what to do. And you should definitely be using social proof on your site, especially if you have an eCommerce store like WooCommerce.

Features:

• Visual Builder — Comes with an easy-to-use social proof notification builder that lets you build WordPress FOMO popups that are proven to convert visitors.
• Simple Customization — It’s easy to customize things like colors, message, and images, so you can brand your notifications to look like your site.
• Live Activity — Show a live stream of recent activity (purchases, registrations, email signups, etc) as well as an ‘on-fire’ campaign that shows how many people took action on your site during a specific time period.

5. WP Mail SMTP (Free)

If you’re having problems with WordPress not sending emails, you’ll need the best WordPress transaction emails plugin WP Mail SMTP to help you out. This free plugin helps reconfigure the wp_mail() PHP function to use the proper SMTP provider. In other words, it makes sure any WordPress emails that are supposed to send out from your WordPress site are delivered to the recipient’s inbox as they should.

Features:

• It Works — WP Mail SMTP fixes your email deliverability by reconfiguring WordPress to use a proper SMTP provider when sending emails (and it works).
• Multiple Integrations — Brings together all SMTP providers, including Sendinblue, into one plugin so you don’t have to use separate plugins for each provider.
• White Glove Setup  — The paid Elite version includes the team setting it all up for you.

6. OptinMonster

The best WordPress lead generation plugin in the world is OptinMonster — nothing else compares as you can see from this list of the best WordPress popup plugins to explode your email list. It’s simply a must-have for small business owners, bloggers, and any website. That’s because this plugin comes with a treasure chest of valuable features to grow your business online.

Features:

• Exit-Intent Technology — Turn site visitors who were headed to abandon your site into email subscribers instead.
• MonsterLinks™ 2-Step Optins — Convert any link or image into an optin form and boost conversions by 785%.
• Geo-Location Targeting — Get more leads by personalizing campaigns based on your visitor’s location.
• Easy to Use — The drag and drop builder lets you make visually stunning forms in just a few clicks.

7. RafflePress (Free)

RafflePress is a fantastic giveaway plugin that you should be using on your site yesterday. The WordPress world was waiting for an amazing giveaway plugin and RafflePress has delivered.

If you’d like to see some screenshots before diving in, we’ve written a detailed RafflePress review with all the info.

Features:

• Easy to Use — The interface is simple and modern, and you can use a drag and drop giveaway builder to make successful giveaways in just minutes.
• Secure — They offer fraud protection
• Lead Generation — Get more entries by using distraction-free landing pages and grow your email list fast.
• Social Integrations — Connects to all the popular social media integrations so you can grow with viral sharing.
• Tracking + Retargeting — Monitor what’s happening with your giveaways and boost how many people enter them.
• Email Marketing Integrations — RafflePress integrates with tons of email marketing services and CRMs, so it’s a breeze to start using.

8. MemberPress

MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin to use if you’re going to build your own membership site (or part of your site) so you can make extra money from recurring sales. It lets you easily limit access to specific content on your site to only paying members. Best of all, most of everything is automated, so the passive income just rolls in.

Features:

• Payment Gateways — You can easily accept payments with Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net so you can accept multiple types of payments from members for your subscription billing.
• Easy Setup — All you have to do to start is install the plugin, configure the payment gateways, add a product, and invite people.
• Multiple Integrations — MemberPress integrates with tons of different tools from podcasting with Blubrry,  to Amazon Web Services, and of course the most popular email marketing services like Drip, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, GetResponse, AWeber, and Constant Contact. You can even use BuddyPress to manage your forums, encouraging your members to engage with and help out one another on your site.
• Course Builder — With the built-in MemberPress Courses addon, you can easily create, manage, and sell online courses.
• Affiliate Program — Launch an affiliate program for your brand and website to get the word out to others while rewarding your network of die-hard fans.

9. Smash Balloon

The best WordPress social feed tool is Smash Balloon, an impressive collection of multiple plugins that handle different social media platforms. It rakes in an average 4.9 rating and is active on over 1 million websites.

Features:

• Easy to Use — Easily control feeds for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
• Flexible — Customize beautiful feeds to look exactly the way you’d like them to.
• SEO Friendly — Helps keep your feeds in search engine results so you can grow your channels.
• Responsive — Looks great on all devices, so you can increase social engagement between yourself, customers, and fans.
• Stellar Support — Raved about customer support that is super fast and friendly.

10. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator is the easiest-to-use WordPress automation plugin out there. It makes it simple to connect things together on your WordPress website. That way, you can sit back and let your website do the work for you.

Features:

• eLearning Help — Customize automation flows with course signup, autocompletion, and more.
• Powerful free version — The free version integrates with tons of programs and includes dozens of actions and triggers.
• Translation friendly — Tested with a variety of translation plugins, offering help if you run into any translation issues.
• Easy to Use — Absolutely no coding required.

Most Popular WordPress Plugins And Their Functions

The most effective WordPress websites create an enjoyable visitor experience. Whether you’re blogging about the latest fashion trends or selling products for your brand, you can enhance your website with these plugins below.

1. Ultimate Member

Membership websites are essential for building online communities. It’s a chance for people to build fellowship around a common cause. Miranda Hill, a contributor at SmartBlogger, agrees:

“People love being surrounded by a tribe of people just like them, united by a common interest, with similar problems and worries to chat about. And membership sites build tribes.”

You can create your community with the help of Ultimate Member. This plugin allows visitors to register on your site and build customized user profiles. You can even trigger emails to send announcements to specific members. Free extensions also are available to add a terms and conditions checkbox to your registration forms.

2. WooCommerce

One of the main benefits of WordPress is the ability to transform your website into an online store. You can not only set up a blog, but you also can sell products and services. From digital downloads to physical goods, you can start accepting orders in a matter of hours. 

WooCommerce is a well-known eCommerce plugin for building a fully customizable online store. With the plugin’s guided tour, you can add product and checkout pages, configure shipping options, and modify design layouts.

This tool integrates with more than 100 payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Amazon Pay. Premium add-ons make it possible to sell subscriptions and offer coupons.

3. NextGEN Gallery

Research shows that 81% of people only skim the content they read online. People are multi-tasking when they visit your site and can get easily distracted. Your goal is to maintain their attention, and visuals can help keep people tuned into your website. 

With the NextGEN Gallery plugin, you can create an attractive photo gallery. Display your images in three main gallery styles, including slideshow, thumbnail, and image browser. Then, adjust the gallery by selecting the size, timing, transitions, and lightbox effects.

Built for photographers and visual artists, this WordPress plugin also is useful for novices who want to build a simple photo gallery. The user-friendly backend allows you to import metadata, sort photos, and group galleries into albums.

4. Constant Contact Forms

Your email list serves as a bridge between your brand and customers. A high-quality email list can earn your business a loyal following as well as more product sales. To build an email list, you need to add several forms to your website. 

Constant Contact Forms allows you to create customized forms to capture visitors’ information, like names, email addresses, and locations. A big plus is that all the forms automatically adjust to the theme and style of your WordPress site.

If you’re a Constant Contact customer, you also can connect your account to send new leads directly to your email list. You can even create a new email list without leaving the WordPress dashboard.

5. Yoast SEO

Search engine optimization continues to be a powerful channel to increase website traffic. As people search on Google and Bing, relevant keywords can bring new visitors to your site. Sam Hollingsworth, director of search, at Elevation Ten Thousand, explains:

“Implementing strong, quality SEO on a brand’s website and digital properties is always going to be beneficial to that brand and its marketing efforts. It’s considered a ‘new age’ marketing technique, but it’s critical to a brand’s web presence in this day and age.”

Yoast SEO gives you full control to rank higher in search engines. The tool offers title and meta description templating for consistent featured snippets, and it automatically sets canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content.

6. Akismet

Spam is like unwelcome guests attending your birthday party. These party crashers can slow down your website performance and ruin the celebration for your invited guests. 

This scenario is especially true for spam in the comment section of your blog. No one likes seeing spam messages with random letters or explicit language. 

Akismet aims to prevent your site from publishing malicious content by checking your comments and form submissions. This popular WordPress plugin’s discard feature blocks the worst spam to speed up your website.

Akismet keeps a status history for each comment, so you can get a complete picture of which comments were cleared. Moderators can view the number of approved comments for each user, too.

7. MonsterInsights

According to a study, 79% of enterprise executives say that not embracing big data will cause companies to lose competitive position and risk extinction. Data can provide a full perspective of your website traffic and sales. 

Tracking data is crucial, so you’ll want to use a plugin like MonsterInsights to show you the stats that matter. This tool connects WordPress with Google Analytics to provide the customized audience, behavior, and eCommerce reports. For instance, you can discover exactly how visitors found your website and which keyword they searched.

The plugin also includes universal tracking to monitor visitors across multiple devices and platforms. That way, you can attribute your marketing efforts to the right campaigns.

8. Newsletter

Communication is vital when building ongoing customer relationships. You want to inform your audience about product launches and any upcoming events. Email newsletters are an easy way to bring that valuable content to your customers. 

With the Newsletter WordPress plugin, you’ll get access to an entire email marketing system within your WordPress dashboard. The drag-and-drop composer works well for novice designers who need to quickly create responsive emails. Advanced targeting also helps you personalize campaigns to specific subscribers. 

You can send your newsletters in HTML or plain-text format. You’ll have access to email statistics to review total emails sent, open and click rates, and overall interactions.

9. W3 Total Cache

Website load speed is critical to the visitor experience. If a page takes too long to load, visitors will abandon your site and seek out an alternative option.

“Search engines want to deliver results that provide a great experience for their users, so they prefer to rank fast-loading websites. To appeal to search engines, a site should always incorporate page speed SEO into their strategy,” states Jennifer Yesbeck, a marketing manager at Alexa.

W3 Total Cache is a WordPress caching plugin that helps you boost your site’s performance. It seamlessly integrates with your content delivery network and saves bandwidth by minifying and compressing your website’s files.

10. The Events Calendar

Whether you run a community group or a business, your objective as an event organizer is to encourage people to sign up. Both online and offline events can help boost your brand authority and encourage your target audience to participate. 

You can streamline the process with The Events Calendar. This popular WordPress plugin integrates with any WordPress theme to display your upcoming events. Choose between a variety of calendar views: day, month, or list.

When you upgrade to the Pro version, you get extra features, including recurring events, calendar shortcodes, and custom event fields. Also, if you integrate it with the Event Tickets plugin, you can create tickets for events and collect payments via PayPal.

Plugins For WordPress Premuim

It’s easy to get swept up searching through the 54,000 free plugins available in the WordPress repository. But if you’re looking for a plugin that you can rely on, provides updates and support, and has advanced functionality, it’s worth investing in a premium plugin.

1. Elementor Pro

Since its release in 2016, Elementor has quickly grown to become one of the most popular page builders for WordPress, with 5+ million active installs. You can even buy Elementor themes from ThemeForest.

It’s easy to see why it’s so popular. With Elementor you can build complex, pixel perfect page designs using drag and drop. Want to start designing from scratch? Choose from over 80 design elements and add text, buttons and even forms to your pages. Need a template? There are 100+ pre-designed templates to help get you started.

Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version starts at $49 per year.

2. Smart Slider 3

If you’re looking for a visual building plugin that lets you design pages and elements for your site without having to replace your whole theme, then Smart Slider 3 is the plugin for you. It’s not just a slider plugin — it’s a powerful visual builder that allows you to create stunning design elements for your WordPress site.

Don’t be confused by the name — this plugin is truly heavy-duty, allowing you to create everything from homepage sliders and WordPress carousels to fullscreen video sliders and image sliders.

With the user-friendly canvas and content modes, layers, and huge range of elements and templates, Smart Slider 3 blows every other slider plugin out of the water with the level of functionality it provides compared to other premium WordPress plugins.

Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version starts at $49.

3. Sucuri

Sucuri is a trusted global leader in website security that specializes in WordPress security. Its free WordPress plugin provides a comprehensive suite of features designed to bolster sites, including activity auditing, remote malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, effective hardening, post-hack security actions, and security notifications.

Premium users get access to an enterprise grade Website Firewall designed to give you the best security protection any website can hope for. It protects your website from a variety of website attacks, including DDoS attacks, exploitation of vulnerabilities, Zero Day disclosure patches, and brute force attacks.

Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version starts at $199.99 a year.

4. Defender

Defender is one of those plugins that flies under the radar, which is a shame because it’s a beefy plugin that packs a punch as far as security goes. This plugin has all the features you’d expect of a premium WordPress security plugin and more:

• Security scans
• Vulnerability reports
• Audit logs
• Two-factor authentication
• Safety recommendations
• Blacklist monitoring
• Brute force lockout
• IP lockout device
• Simple security tweaks
• Code checker (for core, plugins and themes)
• Login masking
• File change detection
• Automated backups (via Snapshot)

On top of all that, Defender has one of the most user-friendly UI’s of any premium WordPress plugins for security I’ve used. Tweaking security settings can be a headache, but Defender makes it easy (and strangely, kind of fun!).

Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version is included in WPMU DEV’s full toolkit for $49 per month.

5. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the most popular premium caching plugin for WordPress thanks to its huge list of features and user-friendly interface. Compared to free plugins like W3 Total Cache, which are confusing to configure, WP Rocket works as soon as you activate it and includes simple settings for further tweaking your site’s performance.

In addition to browser caching, WP Rocket also provides:

• Minification and GZIP compression for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
• Database cleaning
• Lazy loading
• Cache preloading
• DNS prefetching
• File deferring
• Google Fonts optimization

Pricing: Pricing starts at $49 per year

6. WP Smush Pro

WP Smush Pro is the most popular image optimization plugin for WordPress with 1+ million active installations. It works by applying lossless (or lossy) compression techniques to your images that shrink them in size without any noticeable loss in quality.

A useful feature of WP Smush is the ability to bulk smush images automatically when you upload them to your site so you don’t have to do it manually. It also offers WebP conversion.

Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version is included in WPMU DEV’s full toolkit for $49 per month.

Top 11 WordPress Plugins

If you are looking for content, customer database or marketing, WordPress plugins can make the work quite easy for all.

Among those thousands of plugins, it is complex to find the best free WordPress plugins for your use. So how would you choose the best free plugins for your WordPress website?

1. Woocommerce

WooCommerce is a popular eCommerce plugin of WordPress that allows creating shopping site with the large number of products for your small or large business. It is possible to customize the store and also allow adding different kind of extensions that helps to increase features of your store.

Major Features :

• Best free WordPress plugin for online store
• More than 5 million installation
• Able to create website for subscription, booking, membership etc.
• Major payment gateway integrated with COD and bank transfer already with this plugin
• Support major ecommerce features filter, product search, variants, bestselling products
• Beautifully paid and free template for available for ecommerce store with WooCommerce WordPress Plugins

2. Yoast

Yoast improves SEO by using titles and meta description used in the content. It is beneficial to increase the readability of the content. Using Yoast helps to create high standard SEO content that can easily get traffic.

Major Features :

• Most popular and helpful WordPress plugin for SEO
• It’s free version is enough for medium level sites
• Optimize all kind of image types (Jpeg, Gif etc.)
• Help to rank high in search engines like Google, Bing etc.
• Automatically improve technical SEO like canonical URLs and meta tags
• Helping in schema and structure data content for better search engines response
• 5+ million active installation  of this plugin

3. WPML

WPML lets authors write content in different languages and translate content. It also includes advanced features for translation management and an interface for professional content translation.

Using WPML requires no technical or programming skills. Site admins can install it and turn their site multilingual, without any coding. WPML includes a complete API, for integrating with other plugins and translation systems. This way, developers can easily use WPML and turn their products into multilingual.

4. Akismet

It detects spam comments and contact form submission in the WordPress blog database. Moderators are not required to waste the time of spam comments of the licit users.

Major Features :

• Excellent for personal use, best free WordPress plugin for spam filter from user comments.
• Helpful to save moderator time to know spam comments.
• Easy to track moderator and Akismet spammed or not spam comments.
• More than 5 million installation.
• 4.7 stars rated.

5. Optinmonster

OptinMonster is the best lead generation software available on the market. It helps you to convert your website traffic into leads and boost your conversions and sales.

With OptinMonster, you can create beautiful email opt-in forms and display them strategically on your site. You can create different types of campaigns, including lightbox popups, inline forms, sidebar forms, countdown timers, etc., and use smart triggers to display them on your site to the right people.

OptinMonster’s signature Exit-Intent technology helps you convert abandoning visitors into subscribers and customers. Other triggers, like scroll trigger, MonsterLinks 2-step optins, InactivitySensor, etc., are also very effective. OptinMonster is nothing less than a phenomenal tool to help you grow your email list faster than ever.

Pricing: Starts from $9 / month.

6. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin for WordPress. WordPress experts recognize it as the most powerful caching tool. Thanks to its wide range of options and automatic optimization features, it can be easily used by experienced WordPress users as well as beginners.

Unlike many other caching plugins, you don’t have to be a scientist to launch this rocket!

There is no need to configure it; as soon as you activate it, your website will instantly benefit from:

• Static cache for desktop and mobile that is the static HTML version of your content;
• Browser caching (on Apache, if available on the server): this stores certain types of files on your visitors’ local computer;
• Cross-Origin support for web fonts (on Apache);
• Detection and support of various third-party plugins, themes, and hosting environments;
• Combination of inline and 3rd party scripts;
• WooCommerce Refresh Cart Fragments Cache.

7. Sucuri

Sucuri is one of the most widely-used website security platforms on the market. It offers security solutions to websites run on CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, etc.

Sucuri’s security service includes protection and quick recovery from website hacks, DDoS attacks, Blacklist warnings, etc. It also helps to prevent security issues by continually monitoring your site against threats.

Besides, it features website backups, performance optimization, quick threat alerts, and dedicated support from an expert team. Sucuri takes care of your website security entirely.

Sucuri offers a free plugin for basic website protection.

Pricing: Starts from $199.99 / year. (Free version is also available.)

8. NextGEN Gallery

By the numbers, NextGEN Gallery is one of the most popular WordPress photo gallery plugins on WordPress.org. It continues to receive over 1.5 million new downloads per year, along with great overall reviews. It’s developed by Imagely, photography experts who know the industry well.

In addition to a variety of different gallery types, these premium versions also add more advanced features like:

• ecommerce functionality to sell images.
• Image protection (hotlink protection, watermarks, etc.).
• Image deep linking for lightbox galleries.

9. bbPress

bbPress is a WordPress plugin that adds forum functionality to WordPress. Essentially, it lets you create a full-featured forum as:

• Your entire WordPress site
• A small part of your existing WordPress site

bbPress is free, open-source, and aims to be a lightweight solution that won’t slow your site down.

bbPress is a simple, free solution that helps you add a forum to WordPress using many of WordPress’ native features.

Because your forum is a native part of your WordPress site, you’ll be able to easily take advantage of the WordPress user registration system, as well as the huge selection of WordPress plugins that are available to you.

10. BuddyPress

BuddyPress is a free software package that can be plugged into WordPress to create a social networking website. For newcomers, think of BuddyPress as an out-of-the-box social networking website, complete with an administration area that lets you manage the site.

Core features:

• Users can create and update profiles, including the use of profile photos. Site administrators can easily set up the parameters of the user profiles.
• Users can befriend one another. The site owner can decide what special abilities friends have with regard to one another.
• Users can send private messages. BuddyBoss comes with a robust private messaging system, similar to that found on Facebook. Users can choose whether or not to receive an email notification when someone sends them a message.
• Users can form and join groups. Groups can be used for a wide range of functions within the website. Administrators can choose to let their users create and join groups of common interest.
• Users can follow activity streams. BuddyPress activity streams provide a quick digest of the recent activity going on within a site or with regard to a particular user.
• Users can create blogs. Capitalizing on the full functionality of WordPress, the most popular blogging platform in the world, BuddyPress gives administrators and users a full-featured online publishing platform.
• Users can participate in forum discussions. BuddyPress is fully integrated with bbPress, a slick forum system.

11. SEMrush

The Semrush SEO Writing Assistant provides instant recommendations for content optimization based on the qualities of Google’s top 10-ranking pages for your given keywords in a given location. Content professionals, bloggers and marketing experts can check if their texts or the texts of external writers meet various content-quality requirements in just a few clicks.

Features

• Overall score – checks the article’s general quality calculated according to metrics such as readability, text length, and target keywords.
• Readability score – evaluates your text’s difficulty based on the recommended Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease score. You will get recommendations for sentences and words that need improvement.
• Target keywords – shows recommendations regarding the given keywords, their volume and their difficulty.
• Recommended keywords – shows semantically related keywords, that should also be added to your text.
• Tone of voice – make sure that your writing is consistent with the desired level of formality.
• Plagiarism – validate that your writer has submitted original content.
• Linking – check your links for possible errors and problems.

WordPress Services Plugin

Service Showcase plugin displays the service box on WordPress website pages and posts. It comes with 6 different layouts and creates unlimited service showcases with unlimited color scheme.

Service Showcase Features You Will Get

• Responsive Design – Service showcase is completly responsive design.
• Simplified Service Showcase – Service Showcase is simplified with separate posts and pages with separate shortcode.
• Unlimited Service – Publish any number of service posts.
• Service Desgin – 6 Types of service Showcase Desgin are available.
• Column Layout – 4 Column Layout of service Showcase are available.
• Font Family – You change the font family as per requirements.
• Individual Settings option – Desgin every service-box with there desgins.
• Unlimted Shortcode – Create unlimted service box with shortcodes.
• Fully responsive – Service Showcase is Fully responsive.
• Font Awesome Icon Picker – Set your font Awesome icons as per your requirements.
• Unlimited color options – Set your own color using color picker.
• Service Title Font Color Option – Change the Service title color using color picker..
• Service Content Font Color Option – Change the Service content color using color picker..
• Service Icon Color Option – Change the Service icons color using color picker.
• Add Read more Links – Add the internal and external link in the servce read more buttons
• Add and Remove Service – Service can be add and remove in Service showcase desgins.

WordPress Plugin Development

1. Create the Plugin Folder and File

Even if your plugin is starting out small with just one file, it’s good practice to give it its own folder. Start by creating a folder in your wp-content/plugins directory. Inside that, create a PHP file for your plugin.

Give them both a name that makes sense and includes a prefix. I’m calling my folder tutsplus-register-post-types and my file tutsplus-register-post-types.php.

Now open your plugin file and add the commented-out information at the top. You can take mine below and edit it to reflect the fact that this is your plugin, not mine.

<?php /* Plugin Name: Tuts+ Register Post Types Plugin URI: https://tutsplus.com/ Description: Plugin to accompany tutsplus guide to creating plugins, registers a post type. Version: 1.0 Author: Rachel McCollin Author URI: https://rachelmccollin.com/ License: GPLv2 or later Text Domain: tutsplus */

Now, if you save your file and go to the Plugins screen in your development site, you’ll see the plugin on the screen:

You can activate it if you want, but it won’t do anything yet because you haven’t added any code to it. Let’s do that.

2. Add Functions

Now it’s time to write the first function in our plugin. Start by making your plugin and adding the braces which will contain the code. Here’s mine:

function tutsplus_register_post_type() { // movies $labels = array(  'name' => __( 'Movies' , 'tutsplus' ), 'singular_name' => __( 'Movie' , 'tutsplus' ), 'add_new' => __( 'New Movie' , 'tutsplus' ), 'add_new_item' => __( 'Add New Movie' , 'tutsplus' ), 'edit_item' => __( 'Edit Movie' , 'tutsplus' ), 'new_item' => __( 'New Movie' , 'tutsplus' ), 'view_item' => __( 'View Movie' , 'tutsplus' ), 'search_items' => __( 'Search Movies' , 'tutsplus' ), 'not_found' =>  __( 'No Movies Found' , 'tutsplus' ), 'not_found_in_trash' => __( 'No Movies found in Trash' , 'tutsplus' ), ); $args = array( 'labels' => $labels, 'has_archive' => true, 'public' => true, 'hierarchical' => false, 'supports' => array( 'title',  'editor',  'excerpt',  'custom-fields',  'thumbnail', 'page-attributes' ), 'rewrite'   => array( 'slug' => 'movies' ), 'show_in_rest' => true ); }

This includes all the labels and arguments for your post type and (crucially) the register_post_type() function which is provided by WordPress.

I’ve used movies as my post type here as I’m creating an imaginary movie review site. You might want to use something different.

Now, if you save your file and go back to your site, you’ll see that nothing has changed. That’s because you haven’t activated your code. The method we use to activate the function here is by hooking it to an action hook provided by WordPress, the init hook. When you use a function provided by WordPress (such as register_post_type), you’ll find that there’s a hook that you should use. You can find details in the WordPress handbook entry for registering custom post types.

So let’s add the hook. Under your code, and outside the braces, add this line:

add_action( 'init', 'tutsplus_register_post_type' );

We use the add_action() function to hook our code to an action hook, with two parameters: the name of the action hook and the name of our function.

Now try saving your files and going back to your site. You’ll see that the custom post type has been added to your admin menu (assuming you’ve activated the plugin).

Nice!

Now let’s add an extra function, to register a custom taxonomy. Below the code you’ve written so far, add this:

function tutsplus_register_taxonomy() {     // books$labels = array('name' => __( 'Genres' , 'tutsplus' ),'singular_name' => __( 'Genre', 'tutsplus' ),'search_items' => __( 'Search Genres' , 'tutsplus' ),'all_items' => __( 'All Genres' , 'tutsplus' ),'edit_item' => __( 'Edit Genre' , 'tutsplus' ),'update_item' => __( 'Update Genres' , 'tutsplus' ),'add_new_item' => __( 'Add New Genre' , 'tutsplus' ),'new_item_name' => __( 'New Genre Name' , 'tutsplus' ),'menu_name' => __( 'Genres' , 'tutsplus' ),); $args = array('labels' => $labels,'hierarchical' => true,'sort' => true,'args' => array( 'orderby' => 'term_order' ),'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'genres' ),'show_admin_column' => true,'show_in_rest' => true ); register_taxonomy( 'tutsplus_genre', array( 'tutsplus_movie' ), $args); }add_action( 'init', 'tutsplus_register_taxonomy' );

Again, you might want to change the name of your custom taxonomy. Here, I’ve made the taxonomy apply to the post type I’ve just registered (the third parameter of the register_taxonomy function). If you gave your post type a different name, make sure to edit that bit.

Now save your file and take a look at your admin screens. When you hover over your post type in the admin menu, you’ll see the new taxonomy.

You now have a working plugin. Well done!

Let’s take a look at how you might add to it.

3. Enqueue Stylesheets and Scripts

If you need to use custom styling or scripts in your plugin, you could add them right into your plugin file—but that’s not best practice. Instead, you should create stylesheets and scripts as separate files in your plugin folder and enqueue those, using a function provided by WordPress.

Let’s imagine you want to add styling for your custom post type. You could add this to your theme, but you might want to add some specific styling to the plugin to make the post type stand out from other post types in any theme.

To do this, you create a new folder inside your plugin folder called css (or styles, it’s up to you). Inside that folder, create a stylesheet called style.css, or you can give it a more specific name for clarity. I’m going to call mine movies.css.

You then need to enqueue that file in your plugin so that it can be used by WordPress. Add this to your main plugin file, above the functions you already have. I like to add enqueuing and includes first in my plugin file so I can see what other files are being activated.

function tutsplus_movie_styles() {wp_enqueue_style( 'movies',  plugin_dir_url( __FILE__ ) . ‘/css/movies.css’ );                      }add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', ‘tutsplus_movie_styles' );

If you save your file, you won’t see any difference in your admin screens—but if you’ve added posts of the custom post type and your stylesheet includes styling for them, you’ll now see that in the front-end of your site.

Note that the hook used for enqueuing both stylesheets and scripts is the same: they both use wp_enqueue_scripts. There isn’t a separate hook for styles.

Enqueuing scripts works in a very similar way. Follow these steps:

• Add a scripts or js folder to your plugin folder.
• Save your script files in that folder.
• Enqueue the script in the same way as the stylesheet above, replacing the wp_enqueue_style() function with wp_enqueue_script().

4. Using Include Files

Another option as you develop your plugin is to create extra PHP files, known as include files. If you have a lot of these, you might create multiple folders for different types of include file, or you might just create one folder called includes.

There are a few functions you can use to include files, which you’ll find in our comprehensive guide to including and requiring files.

For example, in our custom post type plugin, we might create some code to vary the way the content of the page is output, using the the_content filter hook to amend the code being run each time the content is output on a product page.

Instead of adding this code to the main plugin file, you could add it to a separate file called movie-content.php and then write the code in that file for the way the content is output for movies.

To include this file in your plugin, you add a folder called includes to your plugin, and then inside that folder you add the content-movie.php file.

To include that file in your plugin, you add this code at the beginning for the main plugin file:

include( plugin_dir_path( __FILE__ ) . ‘includes/movie-content.php' );

You don’t need to hook this to an action or filter hook—just use the include_once() function in your plugin file. That will then call the code from the include file as if it was in your main plugin file at that point.

Best WordPress Plugins For Business

If you currently have a business website on the WordPress.org CMS platform, then you’ll be aware of the power of plugins.

Many of the tools that you might be looking for in order to improve the overall function of your website can be found in the following list of the Best WordPress Plugins for Business Websites. If you are ready to take your website to the next level, then let’s dive right in.

MonsterInsights

Knowing how clients and potential clients are finding your website is a great way to help you target clients that are already qualified for a much higher conversion rate. That can be accomplished by utilizing a plugin called MonsterInsights. MonsterInsights provides:

• A quick and easy connection to view Google Analytics reports from your WP dashboard.
• Setting it up is simple and fast.
• You will get real-time data to work with.
• It provides universal tracking across various devices and platforms for improved demographic data.
• You also get eCommerce, ads tracking, custom dimensions, events tracking and much more.

The data you capture using this plugin can help improve your bottom line by utilizing targeted marketing rather than mass marketing. Don’t just wait for clients to come to you, go out and find them using data gathered from MonsterInsights.

W3 Total Cache

If you want your business to be noticed among the thousands that are similar to yours, you will need to keep your SEO and user experience ranking high. W3 Total Cache is a plugin that can assist you in that goal. With this plugin you can:

• Improve SEO ranking, especially with mobile-friendly sites.
• Increase overall site performance.
• Optimize conversion rates.
• Make your pages render more rapidly so you won’t lose customer interest.
• Improve web server performance, and a whole lot more.

Through the use of this plugin, you can vastly increase your odds of getting noticed among that long list of competitors and get more conversions for your efforts. Discover what the W3 Total Cache plugin can do to increase your bottom line.

Slack

Communication is one of the major factors involved in any successful venture. Collaborative communication between the various members of your team utilizing the Slack plugin can significantly enhance how well your company performs when it counts the most. With Slack you get:

• Customizable integration with WordPress.
• Optimized notifications that can be configured to fit your specific needs and preferences.
• Ongoing development for future integration to various other plugins.

By enhancing the communication of your team members, you can present a more professional and seamless experience to your clients. Learn how to integrate Slack into your business website today.

Really Simple SSL

Establishing the foundations of trust and assisting your clients and potential clients in feeling safe and secure while utilizing your site should be a high priority for any business. Really Simple SSL can help you to accomplish that goal. Here’s what you get:

• Handles any issues WordPress might have with SSL.
• Automatically fixes any unsecure content on your site.
• Redirects incoming requests to safer https format.
• Changes your site url and home url to the safer https format.

These are just some of the ways this plugin can help provide those who visit your website with a safer experience, which in-turn builds their trust and confidence in your brand. Provide that added security on your site using the Really Simple SSL plugin.

BackupBuddy

In a perfect world, data would never be lost and you would never have to worry about losing all of the work that you put into designing your WordPress website. However, in the real world, smart website business owners make use of plugins like BackupBuddy to be certain that all of their hard work was not in vain. With this plugin you can:

• Backup profiles for themes, media files and plugins.
• Customize your backup profiles.
• Backup specific directories within or outside of WordPress.
• As well as exclude certain profiles individually or globally
• And that is only the beginning.

Repeating work that has already been done because it was lost is not only frustrating, but it costs you time and money. If you want to be sure that your WordPress work is secure make use of the BackupBuddy plugin.

WPLegalPages

If you are doing business, it is guaranteed that there are going to be legal requirements and commitments to be fulfilled. You can simplify the process of fulfilling these requirements by making use of the WPLegalPages plugins. Here is what this plugin can do for you:

• You get easy integration and installation to your WordPress site.
• Allow the establishment of forced page and post options.
• Editing pages is easy and convenient.
• There are plenty of pre-built legal templates to make use of.

Navigating through the legal aspects of your business contracts can be time consuming, but you can help speed up that process using this plugin.

Why Plugins Are Used in WordPress?

Plugins are used to extend or add functionality to your website. For example, if you want to sell products or take donations on your site, you’re going to need a plugin to handle that. Other plugins that most WordPress websites need include a WordPress backup plugin, a WordPress security plugin, a WordPress forms plugin, a WordPress SEO plugin, just to name a few.

If you’re reading this, you are probably already using WordPress. WordPress is an outstanding Content Management System (CMS) for websites, powering 37% of all websites on the internet. Even with all that power, WordPress on its own can’t do everything. That’s where plugins come into the picture. But just because you can do something with a plugin doesn’t mean you should.

Best WordPress Plugins For New Sites

These plugins help you boost your marketing efforts, including optimizing for search engines, growing an email list, and more.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the leader in its field when it comes to search engine optimization. This free plugin comes with a ton of features including XML sitemaps, title and meta description templates, schema implementation, and control over your site’s breadcrumbs.

Importantly, Yoast SEO also analyzes everything that appears in your content – keywords, titles, meta descriptions, and more – to optimize your posts and pages for the search engines.

2. Rank Math

While we mentioned Rank Math as an alternative to Yoast SEO, it’s so good that it deserves its own spot on any list of the best WordPress plugins.

Rank Math can do everything that Yoast SEO can do. But one of its standout points is that it also adds a lot more features than Yoast SEO, even in its free version. For example, you can optimize for multiple keywords, get related link suggestions, set up redirects, and more – all for free.

3. Convert Pro

Convert Pro is a popular plugin to help you grow your email list with popups, slide-ins, notification bars, and other types of forms. It integrates with most popular email marketing services so that you can add subscribers directly to your service of choice.

You can start from pre-built templates and customize everything using a visual, drag-and-drop builder. You’ll also get advanced targeting and trigger rules, along with analytics and built-in A/B testing.

Convert Pro costs $79 for use on unlimited websites.

4. MailerLite

MailerLite is a powerful email marketing service that helps you manage your subscribers and send them one-off or automated emails. You can easily create dynamic flows and set up automatic emails to market on autopilot.

It integrates with most popular WordPress list building plugins, including the Convert Pro plugin from above. There’s also a free dedicated plugin at WordPress.org to help you create signup forms.

As a side note, MailerLite is also the actual service that we use to manage email marketing here at WPKube.

5. Monarch Social Sharing

Monarch is a social media sharing plugin created by Elegant Themes. Integrating with over 35 social networks, this plugin will encourage readers to share your posts and pages, helping your content to reach a wider audience.

Read Also: Must Have Plugins For WordPress Blog in 2021

Within the dashboard of this all-in-one solution, you can customize your sharing buttons and configure your display settings, as well as monitor analytics to see how your sharing buttons are performing. This premium plugin is available when you purchase an Elegant Themes license, which also gives you access to the Divi and Extra themes, as well as the lead generation plugin Bloom.

Which Free Plugin is Best For WordPress?

Here are some of the best plugins that we believe every website must-have. Most of them are free, while the others have the premium option.

1. WPForms – Best WordPress Form Builder Plugin
2. MonsterInsights – Best Analytics Plugin for WordPress
3. SeedProd – Best Landing Page Builder Plugin
4. OptinMonster – Best Lead Generation Plugin
5. Smash Balloon – Best WordPress Social Feed Plugin
6. RafflePress – Best WordPress Contest Plugin
7. TrustPulse – Best Social Proof Notification App
8. PushEngage – Best Web Push Notification Plugin
9. WP Mail SMTP – Best SMTP plugin
10. Uncanny Automator – Best WordPress Admin Automation Plugin
11. All in One SEO – Best WordPress Plugin for SEO
12. Sucuri – Best WordPress Plugin for Site Security
13. UpdraftPlus – Top WordPress Plugin for Backup
14. Constant Contact – Top Email Marketing Tool
15. MemberPress – Most Popular Membership Plugin
16. Beaver Builder – Best WordPress Plugins for Page Building
17. LearnDash – Best LMS plugin
18. WooCommerce – Best WordPress eCommerce plugin
19. Shared Counts – Best Social Sharing Plugin
20. CSS Hero – Best WordPress Theme Editor Plugin

Bottom Line

WordPress is a fantastic platform for building your own blog, portfolio, or eCommerce site. It’s packed with tools to help you create a professional-looking site and monitor its performance, and you can make it even better by installing WordPress plugins to add new features.

Some WordPress plugins are free, while others are premium products with a price tag to match. You can find free plugins using WordPress’s own Plugin Directory, which is accessible from your dashboard. Paid-for plugins can be uploaded using the Add New option from the plugins menu,

You can only install third-party plugins if you’re hosting your site yourself using the software from WordPress.org. If your site is hosted on WordPress.com, you won’t have a plugins menu.