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In today’s post, we will explore 100+ premium and some free must have WP plugins categorized under social, security, e-commerce, sliders galleries, speed optimization, SEO optimization, comment and form builders and much more. Just take a look at table of contents.
Who doesn’t love WordPress? According to , WordPress is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. This is how popular WordPress is. From a tiny nice blog for yourself to a professional complete E-commerce site for your company, WordPress rules the Web.
WordPress is no longer just a blogging platform when it comes to its features. Talk about new and exciting functions- and it hasn’t stop evolving yet!
So, what exactly does WordPress must have to transform it into a fully-fledged functional site? If your guess is plugins, you’re absolutely correct!
Table of Contents:
These Premium WordPress Plugins and some free will make all the difference in your website. You will have more security, easier content management, conversion will be higher and of course your WordPress website will look amazing. There is something for every aspect of your website and blog. So let’s begin!
Social media is one of the crucial components of online marketing. So, choosing the best social plugins for your WordPress site is important. From simple to richly featured, below are some of the best WordPress plugins for social media.
combines all of your favorite social network profiles & feeds into slick slide out or static tabs. Each social network tab is loaded using AJAX only when required, making the plugin very fast loading!
comes with the following features:
With SocialBox you can add a widget to your sidebar, that will help you increase social following as well as increase brand trust if you have a healthy following.
We are using similar feature ourselves, because for the first time visitors, when they see 1WD has more than 200,000 followers, they take a notice that this website is being trusted by many other people.
There is support for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Dribbble, Forrst, Youtube, Vimeo, Mailchimp, Pinterest and more. You can either display following for each of these social networks as well as the total number of followers.
Pick between premade designs or create your own. for more.
is a fantastic new way to engage visitors to your WordPress blog by adding the ultimate Lightbox featuring social media buttons (Facebook Like, Facebook Send, Pinterest ‘Pin it’, Twitters ‘Tweet This’ and now LinkedIn, StumbleUpon & Tumblr) as well as Facebook or Disqus Comments!
comes with the following features:
is a plugin that gives you 10 popular custom-styled social media sharing buttons with counters.
It comes with the following features:
The allows you to provide special bundled shipping rates when a customer purchases multiple items. The plugin is designed to be flexible, so you can define bundled shipping rates based on the shipping destination, the categories of the products being sold, or their shipping class.
comes with the following features:
is a WordPress Plugin which allows the WP e-Commerce Store owners to accept credit cards. It can take less than 5 minutes to set up. This is, by far, the quickest way to integrate Authorize.net.
It comes with the following features:
is a payment service provider for all sizes of business. Accept debit and credit card payments online and in multiple currencies.
It comes with the following features:
provides an easy-to-use and flexible way for you or your client to process orders directly from the WordPress back end without having to go through the payment process necessary on the front end of the site.
It comes with the following features:
Sliders provide a great way to display images, videos or other content in an engaging way. If your theme doesn’t have one built-in or you would just like to add something a bit more exciting then take a look at these premium plugins.
This plugin is the most popular WordPress slider plugin with over 2 million downloads, 500,000 active installs, and 250 five star ratings. There are 4 different slideshow types – Flex Slider, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides and Coin Slider. Check out their website
is currently the top-selling plugin on Codecanyon. It is widely-used by theme authors on Themeforest. It is a responsive (mobile friendly) or full-width slider with must-see-effects. It also keeps or builds your SEO optimization (all content always readable for search engines).
It comes with the following features:
is a premium multi-purpose slider for creating image galleries, content sliders, and mind-blowing slideshows with must-see effects, even from your WordPress posts and pages. It uses cutting edge technologies to provide the smoothest experience that’s possible, and it comes with more than 200 preset 2D and 3D slide transitions.
comes with the following features:
is one of the most powerful slider plugins for WordPress in the market. The slider is fully responsive and mobile-ready. It provides 150+ options, 100+ possible transition effects, from simple ‘fade’, ‘slide’ or ‘swipe’ effects to more complex ‘slice’ effects, 15+ skins and much more.
It comes with the following features:
is a responsive teaser displaying solution that allows you to show WordPress posts or any custom content with a set amount of teaser items.
comes with the following features:
is a fully responsive and touch-enabled WordPress plugin that combines the functionality of an accordion with that of a slider.
It comes with the following features:
Soliloquy is a very popular WordPress slider plugin, which is paid, but now there is also available free and lite version of this plugin. What makes this plugin special is that it is really simple to add sliders wherever you want with just a few clicks.
By utilizing custom post types, this plugin allows you to create as many sliders as you want with as many images as you want. You can do all of this with just a few clicks.
Features:
Gallery is a cornerstone of many websites today, allowing you to showcase pictures, illustrations, videos and more. If you’re looking for the best photo gallery plugin for WordPress to help you display your images for maximum effects on your blog or website. The following I listed are the best WordPress gallery plugins that will surely blow your mind.
This plugin has been around for a very long time, it has over 12 million downloads and it has over one million active installs. One red flag, is that it has received quite a bit 5-star and 1-star ratings, but still active installs are the highest ever seen on WordPress repository for gallery plugin.
This plugin provides a powerful engine for uploading and managing big amounts of images. You can:
For more features, download and screenshots, .
Watch this introductory video to learn more about this plugin. Oh, and you can preview Photo Gallery .
Photo Gallery is an advanced plugin, that allows you to to add and edit images for different views. You can create image galleries and albums to posts, pages and add them as widgets.
This gallery is fully responsive and has several gallery views you can choose from.
This is one more plugin similar to Justified Image grid, but functionality and design preview look different. Live preview for Essential grid is really great, since they have collected all the , you can use as base for your own designs.
Plugin also has lots of included skins you can use to display any content on grid like portfolios, price tables, service listings, product sliders, video grids and more.
You can easily import or export your grid, skin or meta date later to use for another WordPress installation.
With this plugin you can make your galleries stand out in a beautiful and unique way, to see how it looks like.
This plugin will take existing WordPress galleries and display them, the way you want. You can alternatively load images from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram or use NextGen (image manager) as a source for images. You can also pull image RSS feeds and videos from Youtube or Vimeo and much more.
You can also control every aspect how the gallery will be displayed, there are lots of options. You will also get 87 pages of PDF documentation to learn how to use this plugin.
Responsive, localized, awesome, fully featured and fast gallery. This is the most advanced stock video gallery in the world and, now, as a WordPress plugin.
It comes with the following features:
is a fully responsive media 3D coverflow WordPress plugin that allows you to display media content with an unique original layout from a 3D perspective. It’s perfect for any kind of presentation, for anyone that wants to deliver a great impact on their visitors.
comes with the following features:
It comes with the following features:
This plugin will help you to easily add a thumbnail gallery to your WordPress website or blog. The gallery is completely customizable, resizable and is compatible with all browsers and devices (iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones). You will be able to insert it in any page or post you want with inbuilt short code generator.
comes with the following features:
is a gallery for WordPress based on random grids with a lot of features. It’s responsive and images will adapt with a nice and smooth animation when the browser is resized. You just need to decide width (also percentage) and height and Mikado will create a random grid inside the rectangle.
It comes with the following features:
Backups come handy in case something troublesome happens to your databases or server.
Here are the top features:
Backupbuddy isn’t free, but if you are looking for high quality and reliability, and you can pay a little for that – BackupBuddy is the top choice.
BackupBuddy has several payment options:
(for all versions you will get 1GB of BackupBuddy storage space and 10 iTheme Sync sites)
Watch their preview video and check for more details .
This is another plugin created by iThemes, they also have created BackupBuddy mentioned before. iThemes Security is a premium and comprehensive plugin, including all the things you will ever need to secure your website.
Best features are:
Here are some of the features included:
and watch introductory video to find out more, but this plugin is very recommended to be installed on every WordPress website.
Sucuri Inc. is the most recognized company when it comes to website security. They were the ones who first discovered the , which haunted WordPress websites in 2014.
To better understand the importance of having security plugin, like Sucuri, installed, , explaining how the site owner unhacked his WordPress blog using Sucuri.
Key Sucuri security features:
There are lots of helpful videos explaining every feature .
Login Lockdown is a simple plugin that records the IP address and time of every failed login attempt. Usually hack attempts rely on breaking into your website admin area buy inputting lots of password lists to guess the password. This plugin locks IP out for 1 hour after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes.
This handy security plugin lets you hide the fact you are using WordPress making it harder for anybody to breach your security.
You can use the plugin to control access to PHP files, which will protect your site from almost 90% of SQL-Injection and XSS attacks, which are caused by accessing PHP files directly. This means you can install unsafe plugins without worrying about security.
List of plugin features:
is a WordPress plugin that provides all in one security solutions to your WP site.
comes with the following features:
As we know optimization of website is very important as our visitor don’t want to wait for the site to load or just leave because there is no way to get support. In today’s world website has to be mobile friendly. So here are some plugins that can help you achieve that in no time.
We are using W3 Total Cache on 1WD, because it really helps to improve the speed your website loads. This plugin is a must have on any high trafficked WordPress website, because of it’s CDN (content delivery network) integration.
There is up to 10x improvement on overall site performance, when W3 Total Cache plugin is fully configured. Page load speed is very important, because it improves user experience and helps you rank higher on search engines. There are many more features like catching of minified CSS, Javascript, feeds, search results and more. There is also a mobile support.
WPTouch helps you make your website fully responsive, it will help even for responsive themes, because they usually don’t work well with third party WordPress plugins you install. claims to be up to 5x faster than desktop or responsive themes, because their mobile solution is 100% CSS.
Some of the cool features:
This plugin reduces file sizes for images in WordPress using lossless methods and image format conversion. It’s important to keep file size low, because the faster it takes to load your pages the more visitors will stay on page and you will also rank higher in search engines. EWW Image Optimizer compresses JPG and PNG files without any loss on image quality.
There are so many benefits to having smaller image file size, read more on their plugin page.
Another important subject. SEO optimization is important as this is our ticket to top of search engines. Here are a few great plugins that will make your life easier when SEO optimizing your website.
Every WordPress website should have this plugin installed if you want to be well optimized for search engines and Google. With this plugin you can optimize every page, post and overall website optimization, including XML sitemaps.
This plugin will also help you to understand how well each post is optimized and how it will look in Google. It is a very, very helpful SEO plugin – definitely a must-have.
This is a great new SEO plugin which has lots of great functionality not found in Yoast plugin.
Premium SEO Pack will help you optimize your website speed performance and load time.
Key features are:
Premium SEO Pack has useful , that you can check.
Use this plugin with precaution: this plugin won’t be great for high quality blogs, but if you want to have more content on your site, or be able to republish original content to get more good backlinks, you can use this.
WordPress Auto Spinner rewrites existing content by replacing most of the text with synonymous words and phrases. This is a popular plugin on CodeCanyon, of it’s features to understand if you want to use it. If you are into building SEO sites, you might be interested trying this plugin out. I wouldn’t recommend it for your company website, since the content won’t be readable for real visitors, but only help you rank well on Google.
Rankie is a WordPress rank checker plugin, that helps to keep a close eye on each keyword position on Google. This plugin will update keywords ranking positions daily and generate handy reports for you. You can get these reports in daily email delivered straight in your inbox.
You can also use Rankie’s keyword research tool which generates keyword list that other people are using to search for topics which interest you. Check Rankie’s plugin to learn more.
All in One SEO Pack is an alternative to Yoast SEO plugin. For full description Check the plugin page. With out the doubt it will help you to always have your site optimized for SEO.
Key features:
It can be used to keep tabs on 404 pages and the plugin will send you an email. You can then go in and manually fix or redirect them.
Key features:
Provides an easy way to add a 301 redirect for the posts, pages on your WordPress site. You can even set wildcard redirect rules using this plugin.
YARPP comes with a lot of features like cached related posts, adding related post in RSS feed.
Main features:
If you have a blog an important feature is having a comment section below your posts. For every site however there is importance to have a contact form. Check these plugins for building forms and comment sections.
Gravity Forms is a well known plugin, because it allows to create WordPress forms easily and quickly. Anything form related – Gravity Forms can do it. Create order forms, customize content and style, even add advanced fields, like file uploads.
This simple plugin, will empower you to create contact forms on your website. It supports CAPTCHA spam filter and Akismet spam filtering.
QuForm plugin is a drag and drop form builder, that lets you create unlimited forms with 15 form elements you can choose from. Entries will be saved on WordPress with an option to export data.
There are lots of customization you can do, like enabling Ajax, using CAPTCHA, add animation and more. Check to see what’s possible.
Disqus is a free comment system, that replaces your WordPress comment system with Disqus comments. Since many websites are using Disqus (more than 200,000 active installs), it is already widely recognized.
Its best feature is its connection with a large discussion community where commentators can keep track of their comments across the web encouraging them to comment more.
There are more than 20 field types you can choose from, making custom data management and collection real easy and simple. Make surveys and collect necessary data from your clients without any issues now! for more details.
You can do almost everything on your website. If you want to advertise affiliates of yourselves these plugins below are your saviors.
Pretty Link Pro will help you to shrink, cloak, track and organize your links. The most helpful feature is that it let’s you cloak your affiliate links, but you can do much more with it.
You can use it to:
Basically whatever you want to do with your links, you can do it with this plugin. Check out the to understand if this plugin is for you
Ninja Popups is great plugin to convert website visitors into qualified leads, by getting them to subscribe to your email list. This plugin supports all the main (and not so well know) email marketing providers. It has all the features you would expect in a good popup plugin.
Key features:
You want to offer more for you members, but don’t know how? These plugins are your answer!
UserPro will allow you to start your own user community, create profiles and open registration for new users in minutes! You will be able to sync UserPro with WooCommerce, BuddyPress and BBPress as well as integrate with email auto-responders like Mailchimp, Aweber and Campaign Monitor.
With this plugin you will be able to:
If you are in need of creating a community or upgrading existing one, you should check out , to see if it’s for you.
This plugin is a pure CSS3 web pricing tables with 2 table styles and 20 predefined color versions. You have lots of configuration options within admin panel to edit table, columns, rows, active columns, hover states, tool tips, column ribbons, tick/cross icons and a lots of more.
Features are:
Check out the to see how pricing tables will look live.
With this plugin you will be able to add an audio play at the top or bottom of your website. Audio player is fully HTML5 audio engine powered and will run on all the mayor browsers and mobile devices.
It supports audio from places like Soundcloud, Official.fm and you can upload your own Mp3 files. Comes handy if you are doing audio interview or simply want to create a music page on your site. to understand if this plugin is for you.
Have you ever wanted to display tables, pie charts, bar or area charts on your WordPress posts or pages? Now you can do it without additional coding.
There is a helpful video showing what you can do with wpDataTables plugin, enough said:
Oh, here is (login:demo, password:demo) and here is .
With this plugin you will be able to make your WordPress back-end beautiful. There are 30 premade admin themes and you also have an option to create your own design. You can customize basically everything like – admin menu, buttons, typography, forms, background colors, branding etc.
This plugin will be great if you have users who register on your site and you want to white-label and customize the branding. You can also create a custom branded login theme. Check (username:demo, password:demo) for more details.
This is the most popular WordPress plugin on CodeCanyon, as it is being used by more than 500,000 websites.
You can add highlight regions to the map and display them either as regions (color whole region) or as markers (colored bubble). You can also add a tooltip or action to highlighted active regions and customize lots of other things.
The best way to understand what this plugin is capable of is to .
Manage your WordPress posts with thumbnails just the way you want with just a few clicks. Special Recent Posts plugin will be great for web magazines as it comes with more than 120 customization options. Check out to find out more.
Some of the features are:
This WordPress plugin will help you import the data from one WordPress installation to another. You can import posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, authors and more to WordPress export file. With more than one million active installs, this plugin is proving to be useful for many.
Edit Flow is a handy plugin if you have several people in your editorial team. It lets you collaborate between members with notifications, editorial calendar and editorial comments.
You can create custom stages to workflow, story budget and separate your team in departments.
This plugin will add more functionality to visual post and page editor. With TinyMCE you will be able to create tables, search and replace within editor, set font family, font size and many more. With more than one million active installs TinyMCE is a very useful plugin to use when you want to customize pages and posts more than available by default.
When you spend a lot of time writing a blog post or creating a landing page, you want people to be able to share it. Here are several social sharing WordPress plugins to help your readers share your hard work.
While this social sharing WordPress plugin doesn’t add a direct social sharing option, it does let your readers connect with you outside of your site. There are a lot of people who may comment on Twitter but not say a word to you in the comment section.
There is always a cost to having a site. Even if that cost is just a web host, the money needs to come from somewhere. Respond is a dual purpose social sharing WordPress plugin packaging social sharing with possible revenue. You will need to sign up for an account with them and let them check out your site before you can start earning though.
When you are marketing anything, there is a good chance you will want to track what you are doing to make sure your efforts aren’t wasted. Trackable Social Share Icons is a good place to start tracking how people are sharing your site. One feature here that differentiates Trackable Social Share Icons is it links to Google Analytics.
Google+ is growing like crazy and shouldn’t be overlooked. If your audience is there, it is a good idea to give them a way to share. Add Google 1 lets you add the 1 button to the location of your choosing with a bit of code, or by setting the default location and size.
This sidebar widget lets you have a ton of different social icons in your WordPress Sidebar. Many times, if people don’t see the social site they want to share on, they don’t dig any farther than a glance to find it.
Follow Me is one of those icons that stick to the side of the page and stays in the same spot as you scroll up and down the page. At the time of this writing, there are 43 different social sites you can ask people to follow you on. Some sites are not your normal choices like Blip.fm and Mahalo.
Flexy talk plugin allows you to get started with chatting to the Facebook fans and site visitors. You can easily do it from any device, including the mobile and tablets, etc. You can create a free account and enjoy unlimited chats with your visitors.
This is a multi-channel communication platform for the websites. This plugin can be used to assist customers during their visit, provide support, and answer questions. There is no coding skill required for it.
This plugin will enable Callback, VoIP, and Video on your website. Also, it includes fully customizable graphics and real time analytics.
This plugin allows you to chat with your visitors with a clean and easy to use interface. You can respond to chats from your iPhone, or Android device. You can also enable the proactive chat to trigger live chat automatically with visitor after some defined seconds.
This plugin lets you easily add beautiful live chat to your site or blog. You can handle all the live chats, emails, tickets, Facebook and Twitter feeds. You can easily modify the look and feel of this plugin with custom CSS, logos, and messages.
With this chat plugin, you can bring two-way chat to your website. You can host your own live sessions, interact with your visitors and boost your sales without taking help from third party JavaScript or other codes.
Chat plugin allows you to add a site wide-chat window in the bottom corner of your site. You can also add chat to any blog post or page, and answer support questions.
Live Chat plugin is a simple great plugin, that lets you chat with your potential customers or visitors of the site. Live chat is a great marketing tool, because you can address visitor issues right before they are making decision. You’ll get up to 30% more sales by actively using this tool and having it on your landing page. Check out the .
Some of the features:
This plugin is fully featured real-time chat for your WordPress website. This plugin has a window-based client out of the box. Without having to visit the admin interface, you will be notified from your Windows tray from where you can start chatting straight away.
Some of the features are:
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