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:
We are using this plugin ourselves, because it looks really great and it allows visitors to see total number of shares in a beautiful way. With this plugin you can use up to 20 of major social networks and encourage readers to share your content.
There are 19 templates, 12 display locations, 4 button display styles, 9 counter styles and after share actions you can add to your website. You can also add social media sharing to images and have social fans counter added. Check the .
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:
This plugin is the ultimate solution for your Social Meta Data problem by automatically grabingb social meta data enriched with Google+ Snippets, Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Card.
It comes with the following features:
combines 4 of the most powerful social media tools to make one of the best social media marketing tools ever. Social Traffic Pop builds on everything that made the original Facebook Traffic Pop such a hit and takes it to the next level.
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:
More and more people are buying things online so it is a great idea to add e-commerce functionalities on your site. With big names such as Amazon and eBay already doing great business, the web has evolved to become a great platform for product and business exposure. Good thing WordPress can now integrate e-Commerce plugins. The following are some of the best e-commerce plugin you use for your business site.
WooZone Report is a cool plugin, that you will want to use if you promote Amazon products in your WooCommerce shop. You will be able to keep track of the Amazon products and see how many views, how many products were added to cart and redirected to Amazon. You can receive reports straight in your inbox.
Some of the features:
WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress plugin for eCommerce solutions. With this plugin you will be able to transform your WordPress website to eCommerce store.
Note that all the promoted themes and most add-ons there are paid, and only WooCommerce plugin itself is free, but it’s still a great deal.
Features:
is the best plugin for a vehicle or vehicle parts website. With this plugin, the administrator can show filter plugin on the sidebar or footer widget. He can also add car models, products at the backend.
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
With Metaslider you will be able to create responsive and SEO optimized slideshows in seconds. You also can crop images, drag and drop reorder slides, preview slides within admin panel and configure your slideshow a lot.
Watch the introduction video above for more details.
is an easy-to-use jQuery image gallery and content slider plugin with animated captions, responsive layout and touch support for mobile devices. For its menu, you can use thumbnails, tabs or bullets. Use it as image slider, slideshow, HTML content slider, gallery, banner rotator, video gallery, carousel or even presentation.
comes with the following features:
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, .
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.
This plugin allow readers to view larger versions of images and galleries in a lightbox overlay effect, which is optimized for mobile devices. It has more than 100,000 active installs and have received 250 five star ratings.
Some useful features:
A responsive and filterable portfolios with ease on your website. Media Grid comes with masonry layout; it is designed to adapt each portfolio to any situation and mobile optimized for responsive themes.
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’s another great gallery plugin that comes with a horizontal flow, vertical flow and classic grid. Especially helpful when you use both portrait and landscape images at the same gallery. Ideal for presenting your photographs and really close to the way images are presented in Flickr.
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:
WordPress is pretty secure against hacker attacks, but since WordPress is being used by 20% of all world websites, you should take security precautions nevertheless. Better be safe than sorry, right?
All websites should have regular backups, in case something bad happens, but other things are just like icing on cake.
This is the most popular premium backup plugin for WordPress and it is the best way to backup and move your WordPress website.
Backups come handy in case something troublesome happens to your databases or server.
Here are the top features:
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:
You can read more about how iThemes Security will protect your website .
This is the most popular free plugin on WordPress repository and with over 2.4 million downloads, more than 400,000 active installs and 1400 5-star ratings is a good choice.
UpdraftPlus allows you to backup your data to the cloud to places like Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive and much more. You can later restore this backup with a single click.
They have more useful features like:
There is also a premium version of Updraft, with additional addons, upgrades and support. Compare free and premium version .
Wordfence is a free enterprise class security and performance plugin that makes your site up to 50 times faster and more secure.
This plugin provides a complete anti-virus and firewall package and tools that will help you to recover from a hack. It has more than 900,000 active installs and more than 2000 5 star ratings.
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:
Install new plugins and themes on your website without worrying about being exposed to common web attacks and new vulnerabilities that are discovered within plugins.
Read more about .
It comes with the following 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:
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:
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.
If you don’t prefer to always work from NotePad, you will really appreciate this website builder, that will save lots of your time, because you won’t even need to touch a code.
Some of the features are:
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