20 Best WordPress Plugins of 2024 for Your Business (Detailed List)

If you’ve created a WordPress.org website for your business, you might be interested in adding plugins. Plugins are similar to smartphone apps, but for a website instead of a phone: You add features and functions by installing plugins.

For example, say you want to make it easier for website visitors to share your pages or blog posts—AddToAny Share Buttons makes it possible. Or maybe you want to enhance site security—something like Jetpack might be of interest. When it comes to WordPress, when you have a need, there’s a plugin for that.

The only problem? There are a lot of plugins to choose from. You have more than 50,000 available in the WordPress plugin library, making it tough to determine which ones are worth downloading.

To save you the time and tedium of doing the research yourself, we’ve compiled a list of practical plugins for a new business website. Some are free, while others are paid—but all are useful.

Discover which plugins can help you build the best WordPress website below.

1. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 makes it easy to manage various contact forms on your website, giving you the ability to use simple markup language to customize forms and mail content. The plugin has more than 5 million active installations and a rating of 4 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin directory. It’s free.

Features

Contact Form 7 makes it easy to customize your contact forms’ fields, alter mail content, and insert forms into posts or pages. The plugin also offers various third-party extensions to enhance functionality further. For example, it supports Akismet spam filtering and CAPTCHA. Activate certain features, and the contact form can send a contact form’s data (e.g., the user’s IP address) to the service provider (make sure to clarify the service provider’s privacy policy details).

Alternative: Gravity Forms

Although handy, Contact Form 7 has some drawbacks. For example, it’s known to automatically load on every page, even if you only want it on one page (such as your “Contact” page).

‍Gravity Forms offers an alternative. This contact form plugin offers more extensive functionality, including surveys, payments, file uploads, and user registration. Pricing starts at $59 annually.

2. MailChimp Forms by MailMunch

MailChimp Forms by MailMunch makes it easy to take website visitors and transform them into email subscribers. With this plugin, you can easily add MailChimp opt-in forms to your WordPress blog, e-commerce store, or website.

MailChimp is a top email marketing platform that allows you to create and send custom newsletters and emails to your subscribers. The plugin has 40,000-plus active installations and a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.‍

Features

MailChimp Forms by MailMunch integrates with your MailChimp account so you can simply sync your email list subscribers. You can also coordinate more detailed information like names, birthdays, and additional contact information (e.g., phone numbers). Sign-up forms can be inserted into the widget area, posts, pages, and more. This is an extremely valuable plugin for lead capture.

Alternative: Constant Contact Forms

Constant Contact Forms is one worthy alternative to MailChimp Forms by MailMunch. It likewise lets you add contact forms to your WordPress site to capture visitor data and boost lead generation efficiently. You’ll get a powerful email marketing tool that’s user friendly and not overly complicated.

3. AddToAny Share Buttons

AddToAny Share Buttons allows you to drive traffic to your website and boost engagement. How? It makes it easy for people to share your webpages and blog posts to other platforms, including social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and messaging services (e.g., WhatsApp, WeChat). The plugin has more than 500,000 active installations and a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

AddToAny Share Buttons is highly customizable. For example, you can include standard sharing buttons for content or floating sharing buttons that are responsive and come in different formats (horizontal versus vertical, for example).

There are also counters, follow buttons, image and vector share buttons, and custom share icons if you want to create your own. Some platforms also provide official share buttons, including Facebook and Twitter. You can also integrate sharing analytics—for example, by displaying sharing counts on individual posts and pages.

Alternative: Social Media Share Buttons Popup & Pop Up Social Sharing Icons

For an alternative, check out Social Media Share Buttons Popup & Pop Up Social Sharing Icons. You can similarly add share icons for email, social media, and RSS feeds, choosing from 200-plus platforms. Significant customization is possible, including animated icons. You can also add counters to social media buttons.

4. Akismet Spam Protection

Spam not only hurts your website’s security, but it can also detract from your search engine optimization (SEO) ranking success. Akismet Spam Protection is a handy security plugin to help maintain a safe platform.

Akismet reviews comments and contact form submissions to check for spam, comparing input against a global database of known spam. This protects you against potentially malicious content. It has over 5 million active installations and 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

With Akismet Spam Protection, you can review comments flagged as spam on your administration screen. A detailed status history lets you see when Akismet caught and cleared the comment. An automatic discard feature blocks the most dangerous spam immediately, ensuring site efficiency and saving on disk space. Otherwise, a moderator can mark comments as spam or not.

Alternative: Google CAPTCHA

Google CAPTCHA is another option when it comes to catching spam and keeping your website safe. The reCaptcha plugin helps prevent spam entries across website comments, login and registration, contact forms, and password recovery, among others. The CAPTCHA requires the user to confirm they aren’t a robot by completing a simple task.

Browse Project Catalog for more WordPress services.

5. Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed

Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed lets you easily take content from your Instagram and display it on your website or blog. You can display posts from multiple accounts in one unified feed or across multiple feeds. This plugin boasts over 1 million active installations and has an impressive 5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed allows you to automatically power Instagram oEmbeds so you can efficiently display photos from multiple accounts. The plugin is fully customizable, allowing you to control aesthetic details, like the number of columns, image size, image spacing, and more. You can even use built-in shortcodes or add your own JavaScript or custom CSS for more precise customization.

Alternative: 10Web Social Photo Feed

10Web Social Photo Feed is another plugin that makes it easy to integrate Instagram feeds into your website or blog. The responsive plugin scales to different-sized screens, ensuring a positive user experience. You can customize layouts, create galleries, and coordinate individual or mixed feeds.

6. Modula Image Gallery

Modula Image Gallery gives you great control over image galleries and videos you may display on your WordPress website or blog. The plugin is fully customizable and mobile responsive and requires zero coding to set up. It has over 90,000 active installations and 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

Modula allows you to create galleries using presets. You don’t have to code—simply add your images. This makes it fast and easy to create and tweak galleries. The plugin also has capabilities for video extensions, slideshows, and sliders. Galleries can also be filtered, enhancing user-friendliness.

Further, you have the option to password-protect certain galleries and add right-click protection to prevent people from downloading your proprietary images. There are also creative benefits, such as the ability to add animations for image loading effects.

Alternative: Envira Gallery

‍Envira Gallery is another mobile-friendly gallery builder that simplifies uploading and updating galleries on your website or blog. You can create albums and slideshows, embed videos, and integrate social media share buttons. Elements like watermark protection help safeguard your images.

7. TablePress

As you might guess from the name, TablePress is all about tables. With this plugin, you can create and manage aesthetically appealing tables, embedding them into text widgets, webpages, or blog posts using a user-friendly shortcode. TablePress has more than 800,000 active installations and 5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

TablePress allows you to comfortably work with tables containing diverse data formats, including text, numbers, images, formulas, links, and more. You can also enhance table functionality for your website visitors thanks to elements like pagination, search, and live sorting. You don’t need any coding knowledge to create and manage your TablePress tables.

Alternative: Lightweight Grid Columns

Lightweight Grid Columns is one viable TablePress alternative that allows you to create customized tables. You can define mobile, tablet, or desktop grid width, add tailored inline styles, and ensure equal-height columns. Just specify the type of tool you want (e.g., tablet, mobile, desktop) and then input your shortcode.

8. Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress by MonsterInsights

Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress by MonsterInsights makes it easy to get essential stats about your website. You can enable Google Analytics tracking features and access actionable reports via your WordPress dashboard. There’s no coding needed, and it takes only a few clicks. This plugin has more than 3 million active installations and 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

With this plugin, you can get real-time stats, including audience reports, content reports, form reports, and more. You can also get a search console report to see how well your website is doing in SEO.

If you run an e-commerce shop, you might be interested in their WooCommerce tracking add-on. The plugin’s creators have also taken into account the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and you can take advantage of the EU compliance add-on to anonymize IP addresses, disable demographic reports for remarketing, and integrate cookie consent.

Alternative: Site Kit by Google

Site Kit by Google is an official Google plugin designed to provide you with information about how people find your website. You get user-friendly statistics directly via your WordPress dashboard, where data from multiple Google tools is compiled. You can set it up quickly without any need to edit your site’s source code. Best of all, this is a free WordPress plugin.

9. Jetpack

Jetpack is another tool designed to enhance your website’s security and safety. This plugin provides 24/7 automated site security, including malware scanning, spam protection, and real-time backup.

In addition to site security functionality, the plugin helps maintain site speed and promote growth. It boasts more than 5 million active installations and 4 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

This plugin provides essential security features, including brute force protection and automatic scans for code threats like malware. It also has features to improve site speed and performance, such as the content delivery network (CDN), which auto optimizes images.

You can also benefit from advanced site analytics and statistics, giving you a deeper understanding of your website users, and make use of SEO tool integration. There’s even a customer relationship management (CRM) plugin, making Jetpack a real all-rounder.

Alternative: WPForms

WPForms offers many of the same benefits as described above, helping create more user-friendly, efficient websites. The plugin offers spam protection and smart CAPTCHAs to help protect your site. You can also benefit from a drag-and-drop form builder, mobile-friendly responsiveness, and simplified payments for online orders (if you’re running an e-commerce shop).

10. Slider Revolution

Slider Revolution is a responsive image slider plugin for WordPress. It makes it easy to create stunning visuals by providing a drag-and-drop solution for crafting sliders, carousels, and similar visual elements. This tool is used by over 7 million users worldwide and has 4.7 out of 5 stars on CodeCanyon.

Features

You don’t need to be able to code to use Slider Revolution. The convenient tool lets you choose from more than 200 ready-made templates, along with more than 20 add-ons to create special effects like distortion. The visual editor offers improved loading times, and the templates, images, icons, and pre-made layer groups are continually updated and expanded.

Alternative: Soliloquy

‍Soliloquy is a drag-and-drop builder featuring an easy-to-use interface for uploading and rearranging images. It’s mobile friendly and responsive, promising maximum speeds, proper HTML markup, and an SEO-friendly display. You can select from various pre-made templates or customize them using CSS. You can also use the slider builder for WooCommerce product slides.

11. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution that allows you to easily transform your WordPress site into an online store. You can create a beautiful and engaging storefront, choosing from pre-made themes tailored to your industry or brand. WooCommerce currently has more than 5 million active installations and 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

WooCommerce allows you to quickly customize the pages of your e-commerce store using product blocks. You can showcase your goods using custom configurations. Extensions allow for expanded functionality, like dynamic pricing rules, subscriptions, and SEO. You can also configure practical details, like sales tax and shipping options.

Alternative: BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a WooCommerce alternative made for scaling e-commerce even further. With this tool, you can sell across multiple marketplaces and channels using a single system. The system is designed to free up server resources on the back end while maintaining streamlined workflow on the front end.

12. Yoast SEO

Great SEO ensures your website gets found by the people who matter. Yoast SEO helps make that happen. Yoast is considered the No. 1 WordPress SEO plugin. It helps people rank higher in search engine rankings by providing actionable feedback on making SEO improvements. Yoast has more than 5 million active installations and 5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

Yoast provides feedback on technical ways to improve SEO, like adding meta tags and canonical URLs. It can further support creating detailed XML sitemaps to help Google’s bots better recognize and understand your site.

Yoast can also help with content matters, like how to write SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions. The plugin further offers extensions for specific purposes, like local SEO, video SEO, news SEO, and WooCommerce SEO.

Alternative: Rank Math SEO

Rank Math SEO is a Yoast alternative that bills itself as the “Swiss Army knife” of WordPress SEO. With this tool, you can improve SEO in many ways. It gives you feedback for optimizing keywords, provides deep content analysis tests, and can be integrated with Google Search Console for more granular analytics. You can also get access to 30 in-depth SEO tests to figure out where your optimization could use improvement.

13. WP ERP

WP ERP is a business management enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for WordPress. With this system, you can manage your WordPress site and business, including human resources (HR), customer relationship management (CRM), and accounting. The beginner-friendly plugin has more than 10,000 active installations and more than 4.5 out of 5 stars on the WordPress plugin library.

Features

WP ERP has three core modules for HR, CRM, and accounting. There is also an additional project manager module you can opt to integrate. Each module has its own features.

With the HR module, you can manage company information, employee profiles, time-off requests, and more. With the CRM module, you can manage customer data, contacts, and activity logs. Finally, the accounting module lets you track expenses, income, receivables, and more.

Alternative: HubSpot

HubSpot is another all-encompassing tool you can use for diverse business management processes, including email marketing, live chat, and CRM. You can use it to engage directly with website visitors via live chat, create a newsletter, and analyze business growth. It can also be used to create forms and pop-ups.

14. Sucuri Security

Sucuri Security is another tool to boost WordPress site security. A globally recognized authority in web security topics, Sucuri’s free plugin covers everything from activity auditing to malware scanning. This plugin has upward of 800,000 active installations and a ranking of 4.5 out of 5 in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

Sucuri Security’s features are significant, including file integrity monitoring, blocklist monitoring, post-hack security actions, and website firewall. Security notifications are sent directly to you, so you can be sure you’re always up to date on any potential issues that could jeopardize your website’s safety.

You don’t need to set up a Sucuri account to access the free version. However, to get full functionality (including the firewall), you may want to upgrade to premium.

Alternative: All In One WP Security & Firewall

The All In One WP Security & Firewall is another option to take your WordPress site’s security to the next level. This tool checks for potential security vulnerabilities regularly, monitoring user accounts, logins, and registrations, as well as database security and file system security. You can also use blacklist functionality to ban users based on IP address.

15. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a caching plugin that you can use to improve your WordPress site’s speed, conversions, and SEO rankings. It’s another straightforward tool, with no coding required. More than 1.7 million websites are already using this plugin, which has excellent reviews and nearly a 5-star rating on Trustpilot.

Features

WP Rocket offers diverse features, including page caching and preloading, GZIP compression, browser caching, and e-commerce optimization. It’s compatible with the most popular WordPress themes and plugins and can be easily customized to make your platform even faster.

With reduced latency and improved availability, you can make your website more accessible and enjoyable to use. Freelancers, agencies, bloggers, and e-commerce retailers can all benefit from this plugin.

Alternative: WP Fastest Cache

If you’re looking for an alternative, consider WP Fastest Cache. This tool helps improve site speed by eliminating the need for rendering pages repeatedly. It includes cache for desktop, mobile, widget, GZIP, and minify HTML, CSS, JS, and more. You can also optimize images, clean up databases, and convert WebP. Note that you’ll need a premium plan for full functionality.

16. MemberPress

The MemberPress plugin is a great addition if you run a WordPress-based membership site. It lets you build your member site easily, accept payments securely, manage who sees your content, and sell digital downloads and online tutorials. Thousands of WordPress-based membership sites already use this tool.

Features

MemberPress allows you to tightly control who accesses your digital products based on criteria like pages, posts, categories, and tags. You can build and sell courses, customize coupons, create engaging pricing pages, and build your own community forums. The plugin is easy to implement and works with all WordPress themes. You can also use it for analytics purposes, thanks to its clear reporting.

Alternative: LearnDash

LearnDash is another plugin that makes it easier to build and sell courses online. This learning management system (LMS) was created by e-learning experts and is distinct thanks to its clear drag-and-drop course builder and capabilities for dynamic content delivery. You can drip-feed lessons, for example, and take advantage of advanced quizzing functions.

17. Imagify

Images are a major part of any modern website. However, they can hurt your SEO efforts if you don’t implement them correctly. Imagify helps you optimize images without this happening. This plugin has more than 500,000 active installations and a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

Imagify lets you easily optimize images, making them lighter so that they don’t slow down your website speed—one of many SEO ranking factors. It can also convert WebP images, further reducing your website’s size and enhancing speed.

Imagify works with all types of images, including animated, and across all formats, including PDF, GIF, PNG, and JPG. You can optimize up to 20 MB of images per month for free (that’s about 200 images). This tool is also compatible with WooCommerce and NextGEN Gallery.

Alternative: Smush

Smush is a straightforward alternative that likewise helps ramp up website speeds by saving space on images. The image optimizer helps compress images without affecting quality, stripping unused data and resizing width and height. You can automate optimization for even more streamlined usage. There are no monthly limits, and you can optimize up to 50 images in a single click.

18. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a marketing toolkit you can use to control email opt-in forms, pop-ups, and newsletter subscriber lists. This tool can help you boost email subscribers, increase conversions, get more page views, and improve overall engagement. It has over 1 million active installations and 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

OptinMonster offers many useful features, including a drag-and-drop pop-up maker with pre-built templates designed to boost conversions. Other features include exit intent pop-ups and on-site retargeting. All of this works to keep website visitors on the page and more likely to convert. You can also use this tool for pop-up A/B testing and analytics. Other benefits include email marketing and CRM integrations. There are also integrations for WooCommerce and BigCommerce.

Alternative: Bloom

Bloom is another email opt-in and lead generation plugin you might consider. It aims to help you create more targeted content that will convert visitors into loyal followers. You can choose from six display types, from widget area opt-in forms to inline opt-in forms and more. You have 100-plus pre-made templates available. There are also 19 email marketing integrations to choose from.

19. Elementor

Elementor is a webpage builder that makes it easier to design an attractive WordPress site. Benefit from high-quality page designs with more than 100-plus templates to select from. If you aren’t a web design expert and want a beautiful site, this can be a big help. This plugin has over 5 million active installations and 4.5 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

In addition to pre-designed templates, Elementor gives you over 300 blocks—section templates that you can combine into pages, such as testimonials, calls to action (CTAs), and services. You can put these blocks together to create full pages. The plugin also boasts 40-plus widgets to further enhance your design capabilities, including headers, tabs, image galleries, buttons, and more. The website builder is a free, open-source developer API product.

Alternative: Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder offers an alternative WordPress page builder. This flexible system allows for drag-and-drop building, giving you easy control over your website. It features content modules, various column layouts, and mobile-friendly options. You can customize your design with your own CSS classes. The plugin also supports third-party shortcodes and widgets.

20. VaultPress

You’ve put a lot of time and effort into your website. Of course, you want to protect it. VaultPress offers real-time backup to help preserve your platform and security scanning capabilities (powered by Jetpack, another name on this list).

The plugin is built by Automattic, which also operates and safeguards millions of WordPress sites. It has more than 60,000 active installations and boasts 4 out of 5 stars in the WordPress plugin library.

Features

A basic VaultPress plan includes an automatic daily backup of your entire website (zero caps on storage space), one-click restoration, and regular statistics reporting. In terms of security, you further benefit from spam protection, brute force attack protection, and an activity log. Upgrade to a professional plan, and you get an unlimited backup archive (for personal and premium plans, the limit is 30 days).

Alternative: BlogVault

BlogVault offers another backup option. The plugin provides free cloud storage, one-click migration, and in-built free staging. You also get fast website restores. You can manage many different websites from one dashboard, allowing for streamlined oversight if you have multiple platforms. This user-friendly tool is also easy to set up, with no technical knowledge needed, thanks to automated workflows.

Additional considerations when installing WordPress plugins

When installing WordPress plugins, choose wisely. The above list has been vetted for secure, reputable products. However, be aware of buggy plugins or, worse, scams masquerading as plugins that could harm your website if you download them.

It’s a good idea also to limit the number of plugins you use. This makes it easier to maintain oversight of your website and troubleshoot potential problems. A website with 50 plugins will be much more time-consuming to troubleshoot than one with five, for example.

Further, be aware of how plugins can impact website performance. Some can use up significant server resources, for example, resulting in slower page load time. You don’t want to end up creating a less user-friendly website experience overall because you’ve overloaded on plugins.

Remember, the end goal is to enhance user-friendliness and add new features. Prioritize tools that will bring the most concrete benefit to your website visitors and you as the site operator. Then, do your research to choose the best product for your needs (as you can see, many plugins serve the same or similar functions). Using unnecessary plugins is among the WordPress mistakes you should avoid.

Conclusion

As you can see, there really is a plugin for pretty much everything. The above list covers some of the highlights worth considering as you scope out how to build and improve your WordPress website. While you don’t need to implement each one, familiarizing yourself with useful plugins can help you meet your overall website performance goals.

Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this article. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyse and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.

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