Top 40 Must Have WordPress Plugins [updated 2021]

The internet is an amazing tool that provides anyone with the means to grow their business and career in a meaningful way.

The first hurdle, though, is creating a website that allows you to go about your work without hindering your productivity.

To help you get started – or even find the plugins you hadn’t thought of – this list contains solutions that will help you manage and organize your work, from making your site easier for your visitors to access, to completely manage invoicing and payment.

Each of these plugins is up-to-date, ensuring you’ll get the most out of compatible resources. And many of them are hugely popular in their categories, some with well over 1 million downloads.

1. Back Up Buddy Plugin – DOWNLOAD

Great and most trusted back up plugin. You can easily back up your WordPress files, restore them, and move your WordPress blog.

This plugin is very useful for full WordPress back up.

You can move your WordPress blog easily and without a headache with the help of this plugin.

2. Wp Database Backup Plugin –DOWNLOAD

This WordPress plugin allows users to back up their WordPress database on demand. This plugin allows you to back up core WordPress database tables and you can also back up other tables from the same database.

3. BackWPup Plugin –DOWNLOAD

BackWPup is a must plugin for every WordPress user. You never know when something might break on your blog and you’ll need to restore the web files. How are you gon na do that with no backup of your files? Even when you update your plugins or themes, you never know if something is going to happen. Not every plugin works with certain themes or other plugins you are using.

For example, a few weeks ago, Yoast SEO updated its plugin, so I updated it, and then… I was unable to access my blog because the latest update caused some PHP error (can’t remember what it was now). Luckily, I had a backup of my web files, so I quickly got it back to working, but what if I didn’t? How many visitors would I have lost? How many sales? That’s why you should always backup your files before making any changes to your blog. If you use this plugin for your backups, you don’t even have to worry about doing them. You can set the timing and it will automatically create backups of all your files and send them to your email address or anywhere you want.

Best WordPress Blog Optimization Plugins

4. Wp Super Cache Plugin – DOWNLOAD

Another best WordPress cache plugin for your blog. If you find the W3 Total Cache plugin more complicated to customize, WP Super Cache should be the next choice. It is a very fast caching plugin for WordPress that produces static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog.

WP Super cache is now my favorite WordPress caching plugin, as it will create static HTML pages from your dynamic blog pages; it then shows the generated HTML pages to most of your blog visitors. According to the developers, if your blog gets a large amount of traffic and you’re on an underpowered web server, the plugin will be of great help.

5. W3 Total Cache Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This is the best WordPress cache plugin. This plugin is said to be a complete WordPress performance framework. This plugin helps by improving site performance and thus user experience via caching. The W3 Total Cache plugin is a must-have WordPress plugin for better blog performance.

According to the developer, W3 total cache will give at least a 10x improvement in overall site performance (Grade A in YSlow or significant Google Page Speed improvements) when fully configured. I have personally experienced the effectiveness of this plugin and it is great.

W3 Total Cache has a lot of options in its admin panel, but if you are a beginner and it all seems confusing, just install and activate this plugin. Its default settings will work well for you. It has an inbuilt option to minify the codes, and you can connect it with your CDN account. Our number of requests will surprisingly decrease as it minifies all CSS and JS and merges them into one, so only two requests will be sent to the server.

There is a free and premium version of W3 Total Cache. The premium version will unlock the fragment cache and extension framework.

6. Broken Link Checker Plugin – DOWNLOAD

First, what is a broken link? , A link to any page or image or any CSS or JavaScript file that our site requests to be loaded from the server but it’s not available there.

A broken link breaks our site from indexing by Google and we may lose visitors, so we must fix it ASAP. WordPress has a great plugin called Broken Link Checker that scans through our website and shows us a list of broken links as a result. We can then fix it or redirect it to its equivalent links.

This broken link checker plugin checks your blog posts, blog comments, and other blog contents for broken links. If any link is found to be broken, this plugin will notify you.

7. Wass Up Real Time Analytics Plugin – DOWNLOAD

WassUp real time analytics is a WordPress plugin which analyzes your blog visitors, blog traffic and gives real-time statistics, different charts, and lots of chronological information which helps you with SEO and statistical maniacs.

8. Redirection Plugin – DOWNLOAD

If you don’t have knowledge of Apache.htaccess files to manage your redirects, do not worry. This wordpress plugin manages your 301 redirection and keeps track of your 404 errors without needing knowledge of Apache.htaccess files.

It’s very useful when you change your URL or replace a page with a new one and the old page returns a 404 error. You simply set the old URL to the new one in the plugin settings and you never get a 404 error.

The main benefit of this plugin is that it has a feature that helps us improve our indexing in search engines. If your site returns a 404 page, then the search engine will not crawl all your pages.

If you don’t want to bother with manually setting all 404 pages to their equivalent, you have to set only one option in the plugin settings and everything will be done by the plugin itself.

Best WordPress SEO Plugins

9. WordPress SEO By Yoast Plugin – DOWNLOAD

WordPress works great in terms of SEO because it’s built with improving search ranking in mind. Though we have to play with other SEO factors like on page SEO, Meta titles, meta keywords, descriptions, etc…

Yoast SEO really works great in this scenario. It plays very well with optimized titles and keywords. We can easily set Meta titles and keywords that users will see when doing a Google search.

This is a complete all in-one seo pack. Install this wordpress plugin and write great blog content. Below are some great functions of this WordPress seo plugin:

• Page Analysis

• Technical WordPress Search Engine Optimization

• Meta & Link Elements

• XML Sitemaps

• RSS Optimization

• Breadcrumbs

• Edit your.htaccess and robots.txt files

• Social Integration

• Multi-Site Compatible

• Import & Export functionality

• Import functionality for other WordPress SEO plugins

It has been downloaded 1+ million times and has a 4.8 rating on the wordpress.org plugin directory. I personally recommend these plugins as I have great results with my site. I just have to set the proper title and keywords and other SEO factors are handled easily by Yoast SEO.

10. All In One SEO Pack Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This is another best WordPress SEO plugin. The All in one SEO plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blogs for search engines.

Keep your blog or website optimized with this SEO pack, so search engines will help you to keep high rankings. Please visit the site to download or type in the All in One SEO Pack from the plug-in download page.

11. Google xml Site Maps Plugin – DOWNLOAD

Search engines love xml sitemaps. This Google XML Sitemaps plugin generates a sitemap for your blog very easily. So that you can submit your sitemap to search engines.

This is another must-have plugin that helps with your SEO. Google XML Sitemaps allow you to automatically update your sitemap whenever you make any changes to your blog. Even if there are no changes made, it still updates the sitemap daily (or whatever you’ve set the date for, I recommend setting it for daily updates). You can also pick what to show in the sitemap and what not to show, so you can lower the memory usage and speed up the process of creating the sitemap by removing the unnecessary pages you don’t want to show.

If you want your site to be better indexed by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask Me search engines, then you need to upload an xml sitemap of your pages and posts to your server so that search engines can crawl all of the posts and pages of your website.

We have a Google XML Sitemaps plugin that plays well with the sitemap. It automatically generates an xml sitemap for our blog or website.

But if you are using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, you don’t need to download and install this plugin. Because the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast includes this feature.

12. SEO Slugs Plugin – DOWNLOAD

Some common words like ‘a’, ‘in’, and ‘the’ are generally not taken into account by search engines. These words are known as STOP WORDS. This plugin removes such stop words from the post slugs of your blog posts and improves search engine optimization.

13. Robots Meta Plugin – DOWNLOAD

A very useful WordPress plugin. The Robots Meta plugin offers the ease of adding appropriate meta robots tags to your WordPress pages. It disables the unused archives, it makes unnecessary links nofollow and many more.

Best WordPress Social Media Plugins

14. Social Media Tabs Plugin – DOWNLOAD

Social sharing is the main thing that plays very well in increasing our website traffic.

I have used many social sharing plugins personally, but wasn’t satisfied with any of them. Then I came across this plugin and found some really great features which come at no cost. It has different layouts that we can use based on our theme styling.

This Social media tabs plugin allows you to add social networking buttons like Google +1, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube subscription, RSS profiles and feeds to any of your blog widget areas.

15. Digg Digg Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin enables the floating share bar on your WordPress blog. It provides a number of social networks to easily integrate into the floating share bar. It is great. Try it. This blog also uses the floating share bar plugin.

So if you like this must-have wordpress plugins list, you can use the floating buttons on this blog for Facebook likes and tweets. It would be appreciated.

16. Share Bar Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin also adds a dynamic and fully customizable social share vertical box to the left side of your blog post with buttons for all popular social networking sites.

Best WordPress Plugins To Enhane Core Functionality

17. WP-PageNavi Plugin – DOWNLOAD

If your WordPress blog has more pages than pages, navigation is a must for your blog. This WP-PageNavi plugin will help you to add a more advanced page navigation interface. It replaces the old interface with links to some pages on your WordPress blog.

18. Revision Control Plugin – DOWNLOAD

WordPress is not able to control the revisions of individual posts and pages. It is very frustrating because more revision copies means more saved posts and occupies more space.

Therefore, this plugin limits the number of saved copies and thus increases the blog loading time.

To solve this problem, the revision control plugin is very useful. This plugin allows finer control over the post revision system in WordPress.

19. FD Feed Burner Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin redirects the main feed to feedburner.com and optionally redirects the comments feed also. The FD Feed Burner Plugin does this without the need to modify your blog templates. Just feed your feedburner URL to this plugin and you’re all done.

20. What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This WordPress plugin is very useful. What Would Seth Godin Do plugin displays a custom message to your blog’s new reader or another message to returning visitors. These plugins do this with the help of cookies.

21. WP Greet Box Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin displays your blog visitors different greeting messages depending on which source they are coming from. The WP Greet Box plugin comes with great options. You can set different greeting messages for visitors coming from different URLs. For example, you can show different messages to visitors coming from Facebook and different messages to visitors coming from Stumbleupon. It depends on you.

22. Nrelate Related Content Plugin – DOWNLOAD

Another best WordPress plugin to show related content from your blog. The Nrelate Related Content plugin provides more customization. It comes with more advanced styles to show in your blog posts and offers appealing looks. This plugin is a must-have WordPress plugin to represent your related posts in a more stylish way.

23. Fast Secure Contact Form Plugin – DOWNLOAD

A very customizable contact form that lets your blog readers send you an email. It automatically blocks all spammers. The Fast Secure Contact Form is the best plugin for contact forms.

With the Fast Secure Contact Form Plugin, visitors’ data will be automatically saved in our database and we can then use it for email marketing purposes to increase our sales.

24. Tiny MCE Advanced Plugin – DOWNLOAD

If you are looking to make a table in a WordPress post, your search ends here. Tiny MCE Advanced is the best WordPress plugin to add and customize tables in your WordPress blog posts. This plugin enables all its features in the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.

25. Yet Another Related Post Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin enables you to show related posts on your blog. Yet Another Related Post Plugin displays a list of related posts on your blog and feed based on its unique algorithm.

26. Dynamic To Top Plugin – DOWNLOAD

If your blog posts and pages are longer, the dynamic to the top plugin will help you by adding a dynamic and automatic TO TOP button for easily scrolling through long posts or pages to the top.

27. Hello Bar Plugin – DOWNLOAD

The Hello Bar plugin directs your blog readers to the page you want and helps you to promote your blog’s most important content.

Best WordPress Advertisement Plugins

28. Pretty Link Lite Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin helps you to shorten links using your own domain name. The Pretty Link Lite plugin is the best WordPress plugin for bloggers who want to clean up their affiliate links and manage records of clicks coming to their blog.

This plugin also saves all the links you want to redirect and you can just pick which one you want to use, so you don’t have to waste time looking for the affiliate link you need.

29. WP125 Plugin – DOWNLOAD

Easily add 125 X 125 ad blocks to your blog and manage your ads. WP125 allows easy and simple 125 X 125 ad management. It offers the best options for displaying ads on your blog. It also tracks clicks.

30. Advertisement Management Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This WordPress plugin offers you the best option for ad placements on your blog. With the help of an advertisement management plugin, you can add advertisements to your blog directly from the backend of your blog.

31. Pricing Table Plugin – DOWNLOAD

If you are selling any products or services on your blog, this plugin lets you publish a pricing table on your wordpress post or page. WordPress Pricing Table generates pricing tables in a very easy and dynamic way.

Best WordPress Comments Plugins

32. Subscribe To Comments Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin help your blog commentators to subscribe to e-mail notifications for subsequent comments.

33. Thank Me Later Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin automatically sends a THANK YOU e-mail to your blog readers who comment on your blog. The Thank Me Later plugin also engages your readers by reminding them to check back.

34. Commentluv Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This is the must-have commenting WordPress plugin. Commentluv rewards your blog readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. It is the best way to reward your blog visitors.

35. G.A.S.P. Plugin – DOWNLOAD

The Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin generates a client-side checkbox asking the comment writer to confirm that they are real humans and not spammers, thus defeating automated spammers.

36. Keywordluv Plugin – DOWNLOAD

Many commentators like to place their links with specific anchor text in the comment section. The Keywordluv plugin rewards commentators by separating their names and keywords and linking to their blogs with the desired anchor text.

37. No Follow Free Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin makes your comments Dofollow by removing the Nofollow attribute. The Nofollow free plugin precisely removes the nofollow attribute from the author’s link and makes it dofollow.

Best WordPress Guest Blogging Plugins

38. Peter’s Collaboration E-mails Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin helps you if you accept guest posts on your blog. It enhances the ‘Submit For Review’ feature for contributor users. It automatically sends e-mails to the relevant users at different post status transitions.

39. Peter’s Post Notes Plugin – DOWNLOAD

This plugin adds notes to the EDIT POST and EDIT PAGE sidebars. Users can also share notes on the WordPress dashboard. If you use it with Peter’s Collaboration E-mail Plugin, notes are sent along with the e-mails in the collaboration workflow.

40. Capability Manager Plugin – DOWNLOAD

As the name suggests, this plugin helps you to manage capabilities for different roles. With the Capability Manager plugin, you can easily create and manage roles and capabilities.

There are so many other plugins available in the WordPress plugin directory. The above plugins have helped me a lot to make my blog more functional. And I am sure these plugins will help and extend your WordPress blog functionality.