Marco Diversi WordPress 65 Essential And Best WordPress Plugins

65 Essential And Best WordPress Plugins

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WordPress is the most powerful way to create a stunning website, that’s a fact, but what are the best WordPress plugins?

If you are reading this I assume that you know what WordPress is, if you don’t, please read this WordPress basics tutorial.

The good thing about WordPress is that if you have a feature that you would like to have on your websites, chances are very high that with one single click you will be able to install a plugin that will do the job for you with no coding knowledge.

WordPress is the most popular CMS on the internet, even the whitehouse.gov website is on WordPress!

 

According to the latest rumors, there are over 58.300 active plugins you can install and use if you are a WordPress user. Click To Tweet

 

How are we going to pick the best WordPress plugins?

 

Here on this article, I will list some of the best and most essential WordPress plugins you should have installed on your sites.

Then based on your needs you can search for more, but overall these are some of the top WordPress plugins you should have.

Consider that each plugin is taking up space and slightly slow down your site. Try to use and install only the ones that are going to be constantly used and that will add value to your sites.

Do not install 50.000 plugins on your sites…

 

Table of Contents

65 Free Essential And Best WordPress Plugins

Now, I will list 65 awesome plugins, I have at least 35-40 of them installed almost on all of my WordPress sites.

I will give you a short description of what they are doing!

The order of the plugins on this list is just an alphabetical order.

You might not need most of these plugins, but if you are a little tech savvy and curious you can achieve awesome results at least when it comes to speeding up your WordPress sites (you should read this tutorial) and security plugins.

 

1. Accelerated Mobile Pages

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a new technology that Google and search engines like to see on websites.

This plugin will allow you to create an AMP version of your site for mobile users.

What AMP does is to create a simplified version of your site for mobile users that loads blazing fast.

 

Have you ever seen the little flash icon for certain websites when browsing from mobile?

 

amp example on serp

 

That little flash is AMP, the website will load super fast for mobile users and everyone will be happy.

The drawback of this plugin is that sometimes, since it changes the code of your site, call to actions and cool parts that are placed on the regular version of your site might be not as good as for your original site.

It is 100% recommended to install it, but make sure that everything works properly and that your site will still work as intended.

 

accelerated mobile pages

 

2. AdRotate

If you are planning to have any kind of banner or form of advertisements on your site, there is nothing better than AdRotate.

There are millions of settings and features in it, you can create dynamic banners, custom ads, ads that will bypass adblockers and so much more.

The plugin is free and of course, like most of the plugins there is a premium version as well where you will be able to do crazy stuff, but unless you are serious about ads you don’t need it.

AdRotate is the best Ads management solution for WordPress at the moment.

rotate

 

3. Advanced Custom Fields

If you are a precise kind of person the default fields of WordPress might be not enough.

With advanced custom fields, you will be able to create awesome custom fields based on your needs.

The plugin is very intuitive and easy to use, on top of that there is also room for developers to create awesome code for the newly created fields.

If you are looking for a free solution to customize any aspect of your wp sites check out this plugin as well.

advanced custom fields

 

4. AffiliateWP

This plugin is not free and it will allow you to create a fully functional affiliate system on your site.

The plugin works very well although there are more complex and better solutions to adopt when it comes to creating an affiliate system such as:

These solutions are sometimes more expensive and harder to configure compared to Affiliate WP.

If you are looking for a cheap, easy to configure solution and you don’t have a lot of affiliates for your business, Affiliate WP is for you.

If you have a serious business and you want a good and advanced solution the 3 solutions listed above are the cheapest and yet best.

affiliatewp

 

5. Age Gate

Not everyone have regular WordPress sites, some people might have blogs or content that can not be seen by minors.

There are a lot of expensive and efficient solutions out there, like ageid and many more.

Age Gate is a free WordPress plugin that will make sure that a visitor is 18 years old. Age gate will create a landing page where the user will be forced to confirm that is 18 years old or more.

This is required by law in certain countries for instance if you have an adult or porn site that minors should not use.

age gate

 

6. All In One Schema Rich Snippets

This is an essential plugin you should install, it’s very lightweight and it will improve your SEO strategy a lot.

Rich snippets are important on-page SEO features you should add to all of your sites. Rich snippets will tell search engines what ‘something‘ on your website is all about.

For instance, if you go to the bottom of this page you will see that I am using an ‘article’ rich snippet for this article.

If I was reviewing some software instead I could pick the ‘software review‘ rich snippet if I was talking about a person I could pick the ‘person‘ rich snippet.

With this plugin, you will be able to visualize the cool star ratings that you see on the search engines results pages and many other essential things that engines want to know.

all in one schema rich snippets

 

7. Autoptimize

Autoptimize is an advanced speed optimization plugin you should use if you are trying to make your sites faster.

I don’t know if you ever heard about, HTML, CSS and Javascript code.

But these are the coding languages that most of the websites you see online are using. In order to create a website, sometimes a lot of different .css and .js files are needed, each of them will have a different purpose.

Autooptmize will try to condense all of these files into one single file so that you will reduce the HTTPS request that a browser needs to do when requesting your site.

Be aware that with certain themes and plugins or custom wp sites this plugin might break your site.

What you should do is to activate one by one every single optimization and then purge all your caches, clean your browser cache and test if your site still works.

It is common that for instance, comments would not display, pop-ups and frames would not work, especially if you use the Javascript (JS) autoptmize feature.

If you play a bit with the options and find the ideal config for your site this will boost your site speed a lot.

autoptimize

 

8. Better Click To Tweet

4 years ago I thought that Twitter was completely crap, it was my WTF social network.

Right now, it’s my favorite one, the reason why I say so is that you can use it to read short and fast news from the people you care the most.

You can enable notifications for certain people so that you will stay up to date with the latest news.

In 149 characters you will get the juice of what someone is trying to communicate to you!

And then it is super easy to share stuff on it, get retweets, tractions, and fame!

 

Better click to tweet will allow you to create simple click to tweet buttons like this one you see right now. Click To Tweet

 

better click to tweet

 

9. Child Theme Configurator

If you like to customize your WordPress themes, fine!

This website is customized as well, there are a lot of modification on the original theme and a lot of stuff has been changed to make it look and work the way you see it.

The problem is that WordPress themes get frequently updated, and every time you will update the theme you will lose all the custom modifications you have made.

This is not fun at all and it can consume a lot of your time. Thank god there is a solution for that as well.

The number #1 solution is to create a child theme yourself, this is not super easy and it’s hard to make no mistakes.

The second solution is to install child theme configurator. This plugin will make it easier for you to create a child theme that will work with no bugs and that will preserve all of your custom modifications so that you can update your themes with no worries.

child theme configurator

 

10. Classic Editor

WordPress this year took one of the biggest leaps in a long time. They have created WordPress 5.0 and along with it, a new editor called Gutenberg.

If you are used to the old WordPress editor, writing articles on Gutenberg can be extremely time consuming and not cool as it was before.

They have changed a lot on Gutemberg editor and a lot of people don’t like that.

So the deal is that you can update your wp site to WordPress 5.0 to keep your site secure and to get back the cool classic editor you just need to install the classic editor plugin.

best wordpress plugins 1

 

11. Cloudflare

I am a big fan of Cloudflare, there are several reasons why is that, if you are using Cloudflare on your sites you need to install this plugin and the next one.

This will make sure that all of your Cloudflare features are correctly passed to your WordPress site.

cloudflare

 

12. Cloudflare Flexible SSL

This is another must-have plugin if you have Cloudflare installed on your WordPress site.

Sometimes the WordPress basic URL gets messed up from plugins and features. The basic URL can be different in one setting of your site and another one on other settings of another plugin.

This can cause infinite loop problems with Cloudflare installed on your sites.

This plugin needs to be installed if you have Cloudflare and it does not require any configurations. All it will do is to avoid the chance to have your site going on an infinite loop and hence being unreachable.

cloudflare flexible ssl

 

13. Contact Form By WPforms

If you are trying to create a free and cool contact form for your website, I can recommend contact form by WPforms.

This is one of the most lightweight and good contact form plugins available. You will have a lot of features for free, unlimited forms and easy setup.

Contact forms tends to use a lot of memory out of your site so be careful in which one you pick. This one is well developed and working fine.

contact form by wpforms

 

14. Custom Permalinks

There is nothing I hate more in a website than an ugly URL.

I don’t want to visit a website that has a URL like:

https://mycoolwebsite.com/8943/afc/2010/post84/l-articles/mycat-434.php

I like to have pretty nice and clean custom permalinks like the ones you can see on my website.

I am using custom permalinks to create awesome looking URLsfor my websites pages so that search engines and humans can understand better of what I am talking about.

To divide words it is always recommended to use only hyphens, this symbol here - like so:

https://marcodiversi.com/this-is-a-clean-permalink

custom permalinks

 

15. Data Tables Generator By Supsystic

A cool website is a website that provides nice insights and data. Tables are a nice way to showcase data in a nice way.

I have literally tried at least 4-5 tables plugins on WordPress, the most famous one is TablePress, but I believe not for too long.

Data Tables Generator by Supsystic is definitely the best plugins if you want to create awesome tables on your sites.

They have a lot of options and features, tables can be responsive or they can scroll to the right for instance.

You can add colors, create super nice spreadsheets and so much more.

I am 100% sure that this is the plugin you need to create tables on your wp sites.

data tables generator by supsystic

 

16. Duplicate Post To Copy Posts

You can not clone or copy posts on WordPress with the default settings.

It might happen that you need to make an article or a page very similar to another and it would come in handy to just clone the article and then edit it.

This is the purpose of Duplicate Post To Copy Posts, a plugin that will allow you to clone any section of your site with one click.

duplicate post to copy posts

 

17. Easy Table Of Contents

Table of contents allow your user to navigate your site more easily, there are a lot of plugins that do the job.

I feel like easy table of content is the easiest and most efficient one. I could not find a lot of customization features but overall it works very well and I am using it on all of my sites.

You can adjust the settings and automatically create an awesome table of contents for all of your posts in a matter of seconds.

This plugin will pull the titles of the table of content from the headings of your articles.

easy table of contents

 

18. Envira Gallery Lite

Stay away from other gallery plugins! Galleries plugins are the ones that are making your site the slowest and you need to be careful to pick a good one.

In my experience, Envira gallery is the one that has less impact on your WordPress site, easy to use and that works very nicely.

You can create beautiful and powerful galleries in a matter of seconds without sacrificing the speed of your site a lot like with other plugins.

envira gallery lite

 

19. Glue For Yoast SEO & AMP

I will talk about Yoast SEO later, but I have already talked about AMP.

Yoast is the first plugin you should install on your site, and if your plan is to use also AMP as mentioned before you will need this.

This plugin will make sure that all the SEO parameters from your Yoast SEO plugin are correctly passed to the AMP version of your site.

You don’t want to show Google different versions of your sites that might penalize you.

If you are planning to have AMP on your site and Yoast, you absolutely need this.

glue for yoast seo and amp

 

20. Google Captcha (ReCaptcha) By Bestwebsoft

Recaptcha is a security measure that Google is using on many sites.

I am pretty sure that you had to find stoplights or stairs when trying to make a comment or create a login account.

This is a powerful tool you can use to prevent spam on your sites. All you need is to create a free account here and get your API keys.

Drop them into the plugin and choose where you want the re captcha to appear.

It will be way harder for spammers to comment and create fake logins or use your contact forms to send out spam.

google captcha recaptcha

 

21. Gravity Forms

If you have some money to spend, gravity form is by far the best WordPress forms generator on the market.

You will be able to create advanced and beautiful forms of any kind. You will be able to pick among thousands of stunning templates and features.

If you are trying to create beautiful forms, gravity forms are exactly what you need. It is fully integrated with paypal, stripe, slack, twilio and so many other services.

gravity forms

 

22. Heartbeat Control

This is a very simple plugin that will allow you to speed up your site, avoid crashes of your wp site and make everything smoother.

By default, WordPress is talking with the wp core every 15 seconds.

For instance when you are editing a post, in the background there are some processes that are happening to preserve the integrity of the wp system.

While this is a nice feature to have, it can pile up with the CPU usage of your hosting plan and if you have a lot of stuff on your site it can crash your sites and make it slower.

With Heartbeat control you will be able to adjust this frequency to a longer time, it is not necessary that every 15 seconds WordPress communicates with the wp core.

heartbeat control

 

23. Hummingbird Speed Smush

I am personally not using this plugin but I have heard a lot of rumors that it’s a good one if you are trying to speed up your site.

It will minify, compress and do any sort of thing in order to achieve better speeds.

I have created a speed up WordPress configuration guide and I am happy that it does not break any of my sites so I stick to this config.

But if you are new to WP and willing to try also this speed optimization plugin go ahead and do it.

hummingbird speed smush

 

24. Instagram Feed

Instagram is a cool social network, if you have a nice audience or if you would like to feature your Instagram feed on your wp sites, Instagram feed is the plugin for you.

You will have a lot of options to pick from and it will pull out your Instagram feed anywhere you want.

In my experience, this plugin is slowing down your webpage quite a bit. If it is not necessary to have your Instagram feed displayed try not to use it.

If you have a website about photography you might want to use it and try to find the best speed configuration using all the speed optimizations plugins on this list.

instagram feed

 

25. Jetpack By WordPress.com

Jetpack is another essential plugin you need to install no matter what.

This is a plugin developed by WordPress that will allow you to adjust some essential settings from your site.

It will connect to the wordpress.com version of your site which is very important if you are on wordpress.org

Jetpack is going to give you stats, and security measures you need on your sites and there are no doubts you need to install it for free.

jetpack by wordpress

 

26. Litespeed Cache

I have been trying almost all the caching plugins on WordPress since years now.

Although I have created a basic configuration article to speed up your WordPress site, I have recently discovered the Litespeed cache plugin.

This plugin will do its best only if you have a Litespeed server installed on your hosting plan.

In order to know if you have one, you will need to contact your hosting and ask.

If you are using TMDhosting as I always recommend you will have a Litespeed server for free on all the shared hosting plans available.

It will cost you $29 more a month on all the VPS plans and dedicated servers plans.

Honestly, I don’t think that Litespeed is necessary on a VPS server, just upgrade to a bigger plan with more ram and you will improve the speed of your sites.

But, on shared hosting, a LiteSpeed server is dramatically improving your performances and especially with this plugin installed on WP.

 

P.S: You should install the LiteSpeed cache plugin even if you don’t have a LiteSpeed server. There will be fewer features working, but still, this plugin will improve your website speed even with no LiteSpeed server. The default settings are usually fine and there is not a lot to change if you don’t have a LiteSpeed server. Do a gtmetrix test before and after install it and you’ll see an improvement.

 

litespeed cache

 

27. Live Chat

LiveChat is the best Live Chat support solution. If you have a nice website where customer support is an essential part of your business you should use LiveChat.

The drawbacks of this plugin are that it is not completely free, but believe me, it is the best when it comes to live chat support.

If you are trying to find a free and good solution instead you can use tawk.to. I am using this solution as well since it’s completely free.

Once you create an account with both LiveChat and Tawk.To you will be able to download the WordPress plugin and integrate the service on your wp site.

My advice is to try both and if you feel like you need an advanced chat support service on your site go for LiveChat.

If live support is not very important for your sites you can use tawk.to for completely free like me.

live chat

 

28. Media Cleaner By Jordy Meow

If you are on a shared hosting, although most of them they claim to give you unlimited space this is not true.

If you are uploading a lot of pictures to your WordPress sites it will not take very long to completely use all the allowed space on your hosting.

Every time you upload one picture to WordPress, in the background, there are at least 10 other pictures more or less that are created.

Some of them are scaled pictures for the homepage, some others are thumbnails, some others are just backup copies.

If you have a well-optimized website and you regularly back up your site you don’t need any of these pictures.

With media cleaner, you will be able to automatically delete all the pictures that are not directly used on your WordPress site.

This will allow you to stay on a shared hosting plan for a longer time if you are almost running out of space.

On average, a shared hosting plan allows from 5GB to 15 GB of data on them before warning you that you need to get a bigger hosting.

media cleaner by jordy meow

 

29. OneSignal

Web Push Notifications are all over the internet, there a lot of services offering this on the internet.

Some of these services are annoying, I don’t like to see pop-ups and notification asking me if I want push notification.

OneSignal is a completely free push notification service you can use on as many sites as you want.

There are two ways to install it. My favorite one is to install the code and the SDK on your sites manually. This will give you more features and customizations.

The other way is to head over OneSignal, create an account and install the OneSignalWordPress plugin.

You will be then able to put a nice looking notification button like the one you see on the bottom right of this site.

onesignal

 

30. Open External Links In A New Window

I personally don’t like to open external links on the same page where I am reading something online. An external link is any link that does not include your domain name.

This plugin will make sure that all the links that are not on your domain will open on a new tab of any browser.

You can also add custom options and open in a new tab even certain links even on your site using REGEX.

open external links in a new window

 

31. Optin Monster

I am not using this plugin because I hate pop-ups and lead generation stuff in general. I like simple and clean websites.

But I have heard that this plugin called Optin Monster is very good when it comes to creating stunning and efficient pop-ups and lead generation tools.

You will be able to create great lead magnets and connect them to the most popular EMS services.

 

optin monster

 

32. Polylang

If you want a website available in multiple languages, it will not be possible by default with WordPress.

You won’t be able to create hreflang tags and engines will not be able to see that your site is available in other languages.

The solution is called Polylang, a plugin that will allow you to create versions of your sites in another language respecting the SEO practices.

Here on marcodiversi.com as you can there is a switcher on the top right and you can pick the language as English or Italian.

Using the google translate plugins will not allow you to have your site indexed in the country where you are trying to rank.

If you are planning to have a multi-language website you need to consider that the work will be doubled.

For instance, right now I am writing this article of the best WordPress plugins in English, then I will need to translate it in Italian in order to have my site working properly.

Polylang is one of the only multi-language plugins that works very good, even with AMP enabled.

It is recommended to translate your sites manually since Google is smart and will hate it if you just translate the whole thing with google translate.

So yeah, Polylang is awesome but if you plan to have a multi-language site your work will double.

polylang

 

33. Powered Cache By Skop, Mustafa Uysal

Powered cache comes in handy if you have a VPS server. Usually, on a VPS server like the one on marcodiversi.com with TMDhosting, there is the option to install for free Memcached.

Memchached is an open source software that will ultimately make your sites faster.

Powered Cache is the easiest way I have found to connect the Memcached instances on your VPS with a WordPress site.

All you need to do is to install the Memcached open source software on the VPS. Then you will need to go to your wp-config.php file and connect it with the port and local host of your server.

Once the connection is created, just activate powered cache and thick the option ‘Memcached‘ from the homepage.

If this is not easy to do for you, the best thing to do is to contact your web hosting and let them do it for you.

powered cache

 

34. Rank Math

Rank Math is a new cutting edge SEO plugin you should install on your websites as well. It fully integrates with Yoast SEO and it will give you the chance to play with SEO features that rocks.

Rank math is good because is simple, efficient, free and absolutely useful when it comes to SEO.

 

If you want your site super SEO optimized this plugin will help you a lot with this. Click To Tweet

 

Something you need to be aware is not to mix settings with Yoast SEO. For instance, if you are generating a sitemap already with Yoast do not let rank math create another sitemap.

If you put ‘noindex‘ on tags on Yoast check if this will be done on rank math as well.

The biggest thumbs ups for rank math are the clean code of this plugin and the speed and cutting edge UI that they have.

You can configure your sites with the setup wizard and get better SEO rankings now.

Read my Rank Math Review.

 

rank math seo

 

35. Rating-Widget: Star Review System

Having a rating system on your site, and custom rich snippet configured for ratings, could help your SEO strategy.

There are a lot of rating plugins, this one is definitely an advanced rating plugin with many awesome features you don’t want to miss.

You can customize the stars and the positions of your rating buttons and so much more.

rating widget star review system

 

36. Redirection

Redirection is a very simple plugin that will allow you to create efficient server-side redirections.

Every time you delete a post or simply change the slug of it you will need to tell search engines that the old content moved somewhere else.

Redirection will allow you to create user-friendly redirections so that you can move any of your websites or pages to a new location.

redirection

 

37. ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy is another simple and cheap plugin that will allow you to create an affiliate system for your website.

I have talked about AffiliateWP before which is definitely more expensive and better, but if you are just starting with your new business, ReferralCandy can be a very cheap and good solution as well.

You will be able to manage your affiliate, see the stats and let other people promote the products on your WordPress site.

referralcandy

 

38. Relevanssi Super Search

On WordPress, you can search for stuff using the default search box.

The way that the default box work is very rudimental and not very precise. All it does is to search for similar queries in your MySQL database.

With Relevanssi you will be able to customize the search experience on your site and add a more refined and precise search experience to your users.

relevanssi super search

 

39. Revive Old Post

If you like social networks but you’ve got almost no time to share stuff on them this tool might be very helpful.

You can set up custom times to post your old posts regularly on your social networks.

For instance, you can decide to post all of the posts from 2016 on Facebook, Twitter and so much more today.

This will be all automated, smooth and will not waste any of your time doing it manually.

revive old post

 

40. SearchWP

SearchWP is another great WordPress search improvement plugin.

This plugin works using AJAX, what that means is that when a user will start typing the first letter of what they are looking for, they will be already prompted to some results without the need of hitting the enter button or run the search.

SearchWP is working asynchronously and it will be very cool for a user to see some results already once they type.

Consider that this is using a nice amount of CPU from your server so you might want to check that it’s not going to slow down your sites too much.

searchwp

 

41. SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant

SEMrush is my favorite tool ever, you must know it by now, I simply love them and I think that you need it as well.

If you didn’t already, make a free account with SEMrush now and read some of my SEMrush tutorials as well.

With an account, you will be able to download the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant (SEMrush SWA) and start writing super optimized and SEO friendly articles.

This plugin combined with the superpowers of SEMrush will make sure that your articles are written correctly and that they will rank.

You will get precious insights about what keywords to include in your articles in order for them to rank.

It will tell you if you are stuffing to much stuff in it and if you are using a way of writing that search engines would not love.

SEMrush SWA is one of the best WordPress plugins and a must have.

You should install it now for free, note that you will need a free SEMrush account in order to use it as well.

semrush seo writing assistant

 

42. Shortcodes Ultimate

Shortcodes are a simple trick that is using WordPress to pull lines of code into any page.

A shortcode will look like something like this:

[ su_button url="http://site.com" target="_blank" ] BUTTON [ /su_button ]

This thing will create a button on the front end of your site. Many plugins are using shortcodes to grab the code needed from them.

For instance, if you are using Envira gallery as mentioned before to create a gallery you will need to drop a shortcode to see a specific gallery on your site.

Same applies for tables and many other plugins.

With shortcode ultimate, you will be able to use shortcodes from third-party plugins and custom shortcodes depending on your needs like the button I have shown you above.

Everyone should have this plugin installed.

shortcodes ultimate

 

43. Smush

Pictures and media, in general, can take up to much space on the server. Also if an image is a high-quality image it might be too big.

Every time a user loads a page, if you have 3 images 3MB each it’s already 9MB of stuff. Smushit is a plugin that will take care of this problem to the root.

They have advanced algorithms that will turn your high-quality pictures into an optimized version of it that will take way less space on the server and load way faster.

You can easily turn a 3MB pictures into a 250KB picture with this plugin without losing quality. These advanced features are available only with the PRO version.

With the free version it’s going to compress less, but, this plugin is open source so it’s not forbidden to modify the source code of it.

If you had the patience to read until here, you will discover how to crack this plugin in a few seconds and get the PRO version for free.

All you need is the FTP access to your site and modify a file.

In order to do that you will need Filezilla and your FTP access.

Once you are into your site, go to this location:

wp-content > plugins > wp-smushit

then open the:

wp-smush.php file with an editor like brackets.io

then use CMD + F and search for this:

$api_key

there are several API keys, make sure you will find the one like the one in the screenshot below!

 

wp smushit free

 

Set the license variable to true instead of false, save your file and boom you will have your free WP Smushit PRO.

Every time you will update this plugin you will need to go there and put TRUE again for that variable.

smush

 

44. Social Polls By Opinionstage

It is proven that users like to stay engaged and entertained when visiting a website.

According to recent studies, it is proven that a website that has some sort of games, or surveys, or spinners or false hopes to entertain users convert 400% times more.

There is no better solution than creating a nice survey for your site to understand your user’s needs and reward them with the right products.

This is when it comes Social Polls, a plugin that will allow you to simply create awesome surveys, polls and so much more.

social polls by opinionstage

 

45. Social Warfare

Social warfare at the current moment is the most used and coolest social sharing buttons WordPress plugin.

Most of the websites you are regularly visiting are using this plugin to add social icons and sharing buttons to their sites.

They have advanced analytics, some of the best buttons designs and a lot of features that will allow you to customize this plugin to the next level.

You can create social sharing call to actions and buttons that will follow the user when scrolling on your page.

If you believe in the powers of social networks to get traffic this is the best WordPress plugin for social sharing.

social warfare

 

46. StackPath / MaxCDN

MaxCDN is one of the most popular and best CDN (content delivery networks)!

Now the name is rebranded to StackPath, and it is a must-have plugin and tool if you want to boost your websites speed to the next level.

You can have with no problems both Cloudflare CDN which is free, and StackPath which is not free for custom features using w3 total cache which will be discussed later.

Having a CDN these days is mandatory, there is no way that you drop a website on the internet and that will be not managed from a CDN.

A CDN job is to give a user of any location on the planet the closest version of your site based on their location.

For instance, if you have a website hosted in Chicago, if a user from South Africa will try to reach your site it will take longer than user based in Minneapolis.

A CDN is an advanced tool that will allow you to optimize every single line of code of your site so that it can be delivered with the best speed to any user around the globe the same way as if they were browsing from the same location where your server is based.

If you want to try Stackpath you can do it using the button below. It will be free for a while and then if you see huge improvements you can think about getting a paid plan.

stackpath maxcdn

 

47. Subscribe To Comments Reloaded

Subscribe To Comments Reloaded is another lightweight free and essential WordPress plugin you should install.

It will allow your users to subscribe to comment replies which are not enabled by default.

You will have also a nice set of custom features and customization you will be able to do using this plugin.

It costs no money, it’s useful, it doesn’t slow your site, just use it.

subscribe to comments reloaded

 

48. Sucuri Security / Auditing, Malware Scanner And Hardening

A WordPress site is a delicate environment where thousands of hackers are trying every minute to find vulnerabilities.

Hacking a WordPress site could bring a huge amount of data to the hacker and they would be able to steal precious information relatively easily.

Just think about a WordPress site like a website where every hacker knows how it works and they even have the login URL to the database.

 

There was a period where SQL injections were really popular and #hacking into wp sites was quite easy. Click To Tweet

 

Still, if you don’t have the right measures of security this can be an easy task and people could steal your data and erase your sites.

You should always have Cloudflare on your sites which is good in trying to eliminate weird login attempts and you should also have security plugins like Sucuri and WordFence.

I personally have them both installed on my sites, WordFence is slowing down my sites a bit more compared to sucuri but they both have different purposes so I find that having them both works great to keep hackers away.

Just install the sucuri plugin, connect the API key to your site for free and start protecting your sites for good.

Follow the tips that the plugin will give you to see if your website is in a risky condition.

sucuri security auditing malware scanner and hardening

 

49. Super Progressive Web Apps

Super PWA is a crazy hot plugin, I mean if you are not a geek like me it would probably not blow your mind the same way it blows it for me.

This plugin, with a few clicks, after you activate it, it will create a fully functional web app that users can bookmark on their mobile.

They won’t need an internet connection to navigate your site, and on top of that in the case that they will have an internet connection, it will load the fully cached web app from your server.

Unless you are making new changes to your sites, mobile users will not have to download your site again to visit it.

This will give the best experience to any mobile user trying to visit your site and they will be gladly come back.

Super Progressive Web Apps plugin will turn your site into the best mobile experience ever, reduce the bounce rates and improve the user time on your site.

super progressive web apps

 

50. Thirsty Affiliates

If you are working with affiliate links there is no way that you don’t want to use this plugin.

Thirsty Affiliates is made for the affiliates with love, it’s the best plugin for affiliate marketers.

It will allow you to create awesome redirects so that you can cloak your affiliate links with the way it should be done.

Affiliate links are ugly and search engines don’t like them.

With thirsty affiliates, you can automatically disallow bots from the affiliate links folder, create any kind of redirect, 301, 302 etc…

You can customize your trackers and even have an idea of who is clicking your links.

The most interesting thing is that you will have all your making money links in the same place, well ordinated and easy to get.

thirsty affiliates

 

51. TinyMCE Advanced

TinyMCE will allow you to have a better WordPress editor. You can customize your editor and add cool blocks and a nice dropdown menu as well.

TinyMCE is pretty much essential and a must have plugin if you are planning to write a lot of nice content on your sites.

It will not slow down your sites because it’s just visible on your WordPress backend and it’s one of the top WordPress plugins.

tinymce advanced

 

52. Ultimate Nofollow

I am not sure but unless you add it manually you can not add nofollow links to WordPress by default.

With this simple plugin, you will get an additional checkbox when you are making hyperlinks on your sites where you can add a nofollow attribute.

There are certain links you don’t want tha search engines to follow, or simply you don’t want to pass authority to a website that you think it does not deserve it.

If you are looking for a cool plugin that will add a nofollow attribute to your hyperlinks you know how to do it now.

ultimate nofollow

 

53. Updraftplus – Backup/Restore

If you are on a shared hosting you might not be able to do backups of your sites on your server.

If you are on a VPS you might be able to do it, but still, there is nothing easier than updraftplus to create a full WordPress backup.

Simply install the free version of updraftplus and adjust the settings of it a little bit.

You will need to connect an external drive or Dropbox or any other services in order to save a copy of your WordPress sites.

Once you are done with the settings, just click the backup button and start your backup.

If you will ever need to restore your site or if you have made some mistakes and you want to go back as it was before, you can do it with this awesome free WordPress backup plugin.

updraftplus backup restore

 

54. W3 Total Cache

W3 total cache is the most complex caching plugin you can install on your websites.

I have created a full tutorial on how to setup this plugin correctly, you will also find all the good settings to boost your speed.

If you want, you can download my configuration file here, all you have to do then is to change the sitemap of your site with yours under ‘page cache‘ and connect your cloudflare account and memcached if you have it it is installed on your server.

This plugin looks pretty scary and with so many features and stuff, but if you just import my settings the hard job will be done for you.

This plugin is awesome and essential if you are trying to speed up your websites.

w3 total cache

 

55. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is another great plugin created by Automattic, hence the guys who developed WordPress, Jetpack, Askimet and so much more.

This is one of the best WordPress plugins if you are trying to create an effective and cheap e-commerce store on WordPress.

You will be able to sell any kind of product and still keep your WordPress site without the need of using expensive solutions like Shopify etc…

WooCommerce is the best WordPress solution if you want to build a  super cheap store on WordPress.

You can start completely free by connecting your WordPress site via the jetpack plugin and wordpress.com

In order to have advanced features and accept payments you will need to get a cheap plan, but still, this is an awesome plugin.

woocommerce

 

56. WordFence Security

WordFence is another WordPress security plugin.

It will take care of your website and alert you if there is malware on your site, if code got modified and it will track all the traffic in order to avoid bots sucking off all your hosting processor power.

Wordfence combined with sucuri will make your sites way more secure for free.

If you are interested in keep hackers away install WordFence.

wordfence security

 

57. WP Disable

WP disable is another free and essential plugin you need to install on your sites.

You will be able to disable a lot of useless things that will just slow down your sites and piss off search engines.

For instance, you can disable google maps, remove querystrings, disable pingbacks and trackbacks, enable spam comments cleaner and so much more.

They also have image compression add ons and caching add ons, but if you have installed smush and w3 total cache you won’t need those.

wp disable

 

58. WP GDPR Compliance

I don’t know what this is, but in Europe they have some rules called GDPR you must respect.

This is all about privacy and stuff like that, if you want to make your site a little more compliant with all of these no sense rules install this plugin.

It will automatically add consent buttons and checkboxes your users will need to thick in order to make some actions on your sites so that the douchebags in Europe that made these laws will be happier.

wp gdpr compliance

 

59. WP Last Modified Info

WP last modified info is a life-changing and one of the best WordPress plugins, it is super light and all it does is adding a line of code with the date that you update your posts.

For instance, if you go back to a post you have made 3 years ago, maybe it needed to be modified.

If you don’t have this plugin on WordPress Google will have a harder time to figure out when you have updated this post.

This plugin will tell search engines that there is a new version and that they should pay more attention to your newly updated post.

wp last modified info

 

60. WP Sticky Sidebar

Most of the WordPress themes that you will install will have a nice sidebar.

If you would like to have the sidebar to stick when a user is scrolling you will need to install this simple plugin.

All you have to do is to install it and then find the ID or Class that is wrapping your sidebar. You can use the dev tools of your browser to find out the ID or Class of your sidebar.

You can also add multiple classes and IDs if your website is made in different sections with different themes for instance.

wp sticky sidebar

 

61. WP User Avatar

WP user avatar is a simple plugin that will allow you to put a custom avatar to people that does not have a gravatar account.

If they have a gravatar account this will be pulled out on your account, if they don’t, nothing cool will pop up.

This plugin will allow you to add pictures to the users that register to your sites and to add pictures to the avatar of the comments that users with no gravatar will make.

wp user avatar

 

62. WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize is another great plugin created from the guys behind updraft plus mentioned above.

This plugin is a must install and a masterpiece of a plugin you will need to install in order to create a lightweight wp site.

You will need to adjust the settings of wp optimize to create awesome database optimizations, periodically MySQL cleanups and spam automatic removal.

In order to have a fast and reactive site, your WordPress database needs to be clean and with no useless stuff on it.

WP optimize will do this hard job for you.

wp optimize

 

63. WPforo

WPforo is according to me the best and easiest way to create a fully functional free forum for your WordPress site.

I have created a tutorial just for wpforo here, if you want to check out the forum on marcodiversi.com made with WPforo you can click on the previous link.

Feel free to make an account and contribute, it’s free and it will give you the chance to play with wpforo.

WPforo is very good, they have a lot of advanced features and you can create a forum that works very good and it looks for good for completely free.

Install it, follow my guide and you’ll be ready to have a kickass forum in no time.

wpforo

 

64. Yet Another Stars Rating

Yet another stars Rating is another good options if you are looking for an awesome star rating plugin.

The difference from the other plugin listed here called rating widget is that here you will have more options to make your user rate something.

You can create custom big tables and gather more data, the thing that is not very good is that it is not fully compatible with AMP yet and it doesn’t look super awesome like rating widget.

You will need to drop shortcodes in your pages to have this plugin work.

yet another stars rating

 

65. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO claims to be the best SEO plugin available at the moment. With a couple of millions of installs and many essential features, the free version is a must install on your site.

They have recently launched rank math, which is listed above and they actually are promising very good as well.

I am not sure yet but it looks like rank math is a nice alternative to Yoast SEO and it might be even more powerful.

With Yoast SEO you will be able to see if you are writing articles which are SEO friendly.

You can play with meta descriptions, tags, and disallow all the stuff that you don’t want to show on search engines.

It will create a nice sitemap and you can control a lot of stuff with Yoast SEO.

If you are looking to rank organically, test both Rank Math and Yoast SEO, these plugins will tell you exactly what to do step by step.

The first thing you should do each time you install massive plugins like this one is to go over every single option and settings and adjusting them accordingly to your needs.

yoast seo

 

 

How To Have Free Premium Plugins And Free Premium Themes (Warning)

 

Almost all of these plugins are Freemium!

Freemium means that you can use most of the features completely for free and get extra awesome features paying for a premium version.

If you don’t know it, once you install these plugins you will have all the source code in the directory folder of your site.

On top of that, all the WordPress software is open-source, and what open-source means is that you can modify it and you won’t have any legal issue.

I showed you how to have the smush plugin for free because it’s the easiest one to crack, but the same applies to all the other plugins.

Some plugins are easy to crack some others requires some advanced coding skills. There are many websites that are constantly cracking and uploading new versions of these premium plugins for free.

You can just go on these sites and download any kind of premium plugin and premium theme for completely free.

Some examples of these nulled plugins sites are here:

All you have to do is to download and upload these plugins to your site and you will be premium.

 

Should I Get Nulled Free Plugins And Themes?

You might ask:

 

Am I stupid to pay for these plugins or themes then? #wp Click To Tweet

 

The reply is actually:

no you are not stupid!

 

  • it’s legit to give some cash to the developers of these premium themes and plugins.
  • these nulled/cracked themes and plugins are most of the times modified and hacked. They will most likely expose your sites to vulnerabilities, viruses and they will make it easier to hack your sites. In certain cases, the people who cracked the plugin can have control of your sites and actually control it and inject malicious code. You can run a simple test for nulled plugins here on VirusTotal. Download the plugin and upload it on VirusTotal. This website will tell you if there is some compromised software in it. Be aware that sometimes these scanners can not see all the bad behind a plugin, so you might install the third party cracked plugins with a lot of caution.

There are certain situation where these nulled plugins are rather safe, and that they can be used for a one time call.

If you have a special need you need to accomplish on your site just for one time, like for instance ‘media cleaner‘ plugin and some plugins that needs to be used just one time you can try to use nulled plugin. Make sure that they did not modify code on your sites via the Sucuri plugin for instance.

 

P.S. If you are not tech savvy you might want to choose to buy original premium plugins if you need too, to avoid any serious problem.

 

Conclusions

On this article, you can find some of the best WordPress plugins available on the market.

99% of them are completely free to use for the basic needs a regular user have. Most of them are the plugins I use on my sites.

I try to install only the ones I really need in order to make my site the more light as possible. Each of these plugins takes up space and sacrifice speed on your sites, so install only the ones you need.

I feel like a lot of these plugins on this list are essential and need to be installed, for instance, the caching plugins and the security plugins.

There are then ‘SEO plugins‘ and ‘make my site sexier plugins’ that need to be installed as well.

I told you that you can easily crack these plugins or download free premium version for free but it’s very risky.

If you have more plugins that should be listed here I would like to hear your voice.

If you have any question about setup and something is not clear on this list you can contact me or comment below.

I hope that you will share this article with all of your friends that are playing with WordPress and if you liked it please give it a tweet now. Click To Tweet

marco diversi eagle

What You Will Learn On This Blog! 

Stay tuned and subscribe to my blog so you will get notifications on new posts. I will slowly break down these topics:

  1. SEO(Search Engine Optimization).
  2. Affiliate Marketing.
  3. Free and Paid traffic hacks.
  4. Coding and WordPress
  5. Make money with a computer and an internet connection even while you sleep.

Follow me on social media, you’ve got all the links on the right bottom side of this blog, also comment and contact me if you need help. 

Here are my top resources I always use to become a great affiliate, take a look here!

Do you want to be a free man or woman? Jump in the crew then!

Much Love and Peace Out,

Marco Diversi.

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