31 Best WordPress Plugins For Site Improvement (Most Vital 2023)

Updated: Oct 16, 2023 By: Dessign Team

If you looking for the best WordPress plugins and the must-have when you first create your website, we put together a great list of the best must-have WordPress plugins. We pick for the most popular list on WordPress.org as most of those plugins have over a million downloads and install with an average 4-5 stars review. We pick from all different categories such as SEO, Security, Newsletter, Cache, Optimization, Page Building..

Best & Most Popular WordPress Plugins every WordPress site must have!

1. Yoast SEO

Active Installations: 5+ Million | Rating: 5 out of 5 stars (26,000+ Reviews) | Performance: 97% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+

Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines. This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. Are you not entirely convinced? Yoast SEO is the favorite WordPress SEO plugin of millions of users worldwide!

As Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone, the plugin’s users range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.

Do you know who your competitors are in your niche? There’s a reason why they are your competitors: they do what you do. And they might even do it better right now. That does not mean you can’t win from them, but it does mean you need all the help to get on top and stay on top! Yoast SEO is here to help you out as we’ve helped millions of people worldwide with their WordPress SEO efforts.

2. Web Stories

Active Installations: 20,000+ | Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars (20+ Reviews) | Performance: 97% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+

Web Stories are a free, open-web, visual storytelling format for the web, enabling you to easily create visual narratives with engaging animations and tappable interactions, and immerse your readers in great and fast-loading full-screen experiences.

BENEFITS OF WEB STORIES

The Web Stories for WordPress format puts features and capabilities at your fingertips to engage with your audience via the power of storytelling on the open web. Specifically, you can:

• Create beautiful and engaging content easily: Web Stories make the production of stories as easy as possible from a technical perspective.
• Enjoy creative flexibility for editorial freedom and branding: The Web Stories format comes with preset but flexible layout templates, standardized UI controls, and components for sharing and adding follow-on content.
• Share and link your stories on the open web: Web Stories are part of the open web and can be shared and embedded across sites and apps without being confined to a single ecosystem.
• Track and measure your stories: Supports analytics and bookend capabilities for viral sharing and monetization.
• Capture the attention of your readers by offering fast loading times to your stories: Web Stories are lightning fast so that your audience stays engaged and entertained.
• Engage with your readers via immersive storytelling: Web Stories are a new and modern way to reach existing readers.
• Monetize effectively the beautiful and engaging stories you create:Web Stories enable monetization capability for publishers using affiliate links. For advertisers, Stories is a way to reach a unique audience within a new storytelling experience.

3. Jetpack by WordPress.com

Active Installations: 5+ Million | Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (200+ Reviews) | Performance: 98% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+

Security, performance, and site management: the best way to WordPress is with Jetpack.

24/7 SITE SECURITY

Jetpack is your site’s security detail, guarding you against brute-force attacks and unauthorized logins. Basic protection is always free, while premium plans add expanded backup and automated fixes. Jetpack’s full suite of site security tools include:

• Brute-force attack protection, spam filtering, and downtime monitoring.
• Backups of your entire site, either once daily or in real time.
• Secure login, with optional two-factor authentication.
• Malware scanning, code scanning, and automated threat resolution.
• A record of every change on your site to simplify troubleshooting.
• Fast, priority support from WordPress experts.

4. Akismet Anti-Spam

Active Installations: 5+ Million | Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (800+ Reviews) | Performance: 98% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+

Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Active Installations: 2+ Million | Rating: 5 out of 5 stars (2000+ Reviews) | Performance: 99% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+

Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.

With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Supported since over 9 years and rated as the best WordPress plugin, it will do exactly what it’s supposed to do – providing a complete XML sitemap for search engines. It will not break your site, slow it down or annoy you. Guaranteed!

6. Really Simple SSL

Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https.
To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL.

Any code suggestions? We’re on GitHub as well!

7. WooCommerce Plugin

WooCommerce is a flexible, open-source eCommerce solution built on WordPress. Whether you’re launching a business, taking an existing brick and mortar store online, or designing sites for clients you can get started quickly and build exactly the store you want. Best WooCommerce WordPress theme

Activate the free WooCommerce plugin on a new or existing WordPress site, follow the optional guided tour, and set up a new store in minutes with:

• Product, Cart, and Checkout pages
• Secure payments by credit card and alternatives
• Configurable shipping options, including flat rates and label printing
• Integrate content and commerce across your site via modular blocks
• Automated tax calculations
• Google Analytics, MailChimp, and Facebook integration
• Central store dashboard with key metrics, and more.

8. Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights

GOOGLE ANALYTICS PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS

We believe that it’s easy to double your traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights shows you the stats that matter, so you can grow your business with confidence.

With over 2 million active installs, MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

At MonsterInsights, we make it “effortless” to properly connect your WordPress site with Google Analytics, so you can start making data-driven decisions to grow your business.

Unlike other Google Analytics plugins, MonsterInsights allow you to enable all advanced Google analytics tracking features with just a few clicks (no need to hire a developer).

9. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

10. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin

UpdraftPlus simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently-active installs. Backup your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!

Backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email. The paid version also backs up to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.

11. MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress

MAILCHIMP FOR WORDPRESS

Allowing your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter should be easy. With this plugin, it finally is.

This plugin helps you grow your Mailchimp lists and write better newsletters through various methods. You can create good looking opt-in forms or integrate with any existing form on your site, like your comment, contact or checkout form.

12. WordPress Page Builder – Beaver Builder

WHAT IS THE BEAVER BUILDER PAGE BUILDER?

Beaver Builder is a flexible drag and drop page builder that works on the front end of your WordPress website. Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, you’re going to love taking control of your website. Stop writing HTML or wrestling with confusing shortcodes. With Beaver Builder, building beautiful, professional WordPress pages is as easy as dragging and dropping.

13. Elementor Page Builder Plugin

It’s about time for a live page builder, with no limits of design. A page builder that delivers high-end page designs and advanced capabilities, never before seen on WordPress.

FASTER. MUCH FASTER.

Instant reaction was a key feature we wanted to achieve. And we did. Instant drag & drop page builder, instant live edit, instant page load. The speed of Elementor is not matched by any other page builder, free or paid. This makes the interface fun and easy to work with, as well as reduces the time it takes to design.

14. WP Rocket

Web performance is a comprehensive field, full of difficult and abstract technical techniques and terms. We have followed with a certain obsession the WordPress philosophy : “decision not option”, which means to apply only what is necessary for the end user.

The difficulty of existing solutions that are far too complex to use and to set up for the beginner makes it our priority to create an efficient product, that is easy to set up on any WordPress site.

15. Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan

THE MOST POPULAR WORDPRESS FIREWALL & SECURITY SCANNER

Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe. Rounded out by 2FA and a suite of additional features, Wordfence is the most comprehensive WordPress security solution available.

16. Contact Form by WPForms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for WordPress

WORDPRESS CONTACT FORM BUILDER PLUGIN

We believe that you shouldn’t have to hire a developer to create a WordPress contact form. That’s why we built WPForms, a drag & drop WordPress form builder that’s EASY and POWERFUL.

WPForms allows you to create beautiful contact forms, feedback form, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site in minutes, not hours!

At WPForms, user experience is our #1 priority. Our pre-built form templates and workflows make WPForms the most beginner friendly contact form plugin in the market.

17. Gutenberg Plugin

“Gutenberg” is a codename for a whole new paradigm in WordPress site building and publishing, that aims to revolutionize the entire publishing experience as much as Gutenberg did the printed word. Right now, the project is in the first phase of a four-phase process that will touch every piece of WordPress — Editing, Customization, Collaboration, and Multilingual — and is focused on a new editing experience, the block editor.

The block editor introduces a modular approach to pages and posts: each piece of content in the editor, from a paragraph to an image gallery to a headline, is its own block. And just like physical blocks, WordPress blocks can added, arranged, and rearranged, allowing WordPress users to create media-rich pages in a visually intuitive way — and without work-arounds like shortcodes or custom HTML. Get the best free Gutenberg themes for WordPress.

The block editor first became available in December 2018, and we’re still hard at work refining the experience, creating more and better blocks, and laying the groundwork for the next three phases of work. The Gutenberg plugin gives you the latest version of the block editor so you can join us in testing bleeding-edge features, start playing with blocks, and maybe get inspired to build your own.

18. All-in-One WP Migration

This plugin exports your WordPress website including the database, media files, plugins and themes with no technical knowledge required.
Upload your site to a different location with a drag and drop in to WordPress.
There is an option to apply an unlimited number of find and replace operations on your database during the export process. The plugin will also fix any
serialisation problems that occur during the find/replace operation.

Mobile device compatible: All-in-One WP Migration is the first plugin to offer true mobile experience on WordPress versions 3.3 and up.

19. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users:

• Users who are not logged in.
• Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
• Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

99% of your visitors will be served static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them.

20. Smush – Compress, Optimize and Lazy Load Images

Optimize your images turn on lazy load, resize, compress and improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!

And whether you spell it ‘optimise’ or ‘optimize’, Smush will compress all your images without a visible drop in quality.

21. Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate all thumbnail sizes for one or more images that have been uploaded to your Media Library.

This is useful for situations such as:

• A new thumbnail size has been added and you want past uploads to have a thumbnail in that size.
• You’ve changed the dimensions of an existing thumbnail size, for example via Settings → Media.
• You’ve switched to a new WordPress theme that uses featured images of a different size.

It also offers the ability to delete old, unused thumbnails in order to free up server space.

IN MEMORY OF ALEX MILLS

In February 2019 Alex Mills, the author of this plugin, passed away. He leaves behind a number of plugins which will be maintained by Automattic and members of the WordPress community. If this plugin is useful to you please consider donating to the Oregon Health and Science University. You can find more information here.

22. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.

W3TC is the only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress trusted by millions of publishers, web developers, and web hosts worldwide for more than a decade. It is the total performance solution for optimizing your WordPress Website.

23. Autoptimize

Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. You can optimize and lazy-load images, optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more. As such it can improve your site’s performance even when already on HTTP/2! There is extensive API available to enable you to tailor Autoptimize to each and every site’s specific needs.
If you consider performance important, you really should use one of the many caching plugins to do page caching. Some good candidates to complement Autoptimize that way are e.g. KeyCDN’s Cache Enabler or WP Super Cache.

24. iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)

ITHEMES SECURITY IS THE #1 WORDPRESS SECURITY PLUGIN

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.

Most WordPress admins don’t know they’re vulnerable, but iThemes Security works to lock down WordPress, fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. With advanced features for experienced users, our WordPress security plugin can help harden WordPress.

25. Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening

Sucuri Inc. is a globally recognized authority in all matters related to website security, with specialization in WordPress Security.

The Sucuri Security WordPress plugin is free to all WordPress users. It is a security suite meant to complement your existing security posture. It offers its users a set of security features for their website, each designed to have a positive effect on their security posture:

• Security Activity Auditing
• File Integrity Monitoring
• Remote Malware Scanning
• Blacklist Monitoring
• Effective Security Hardening
• Post-Hack Security Actions
• Security Notifications
• Website Firewall (premium)

26. WPS Hide Login

WPS Hide Login is a very light plugin that lets you easily and safely change the url of the login form page to anything you want. It doesn’t literally rename or change files in core, nor does it add rewrite rules. It simply intercepts page requests and works on any WordPress website. The wp-admin directory and wp-login.php page become inaccessible, so you should bookmark or remember the url. Deactivating this plugin brings your site back exactly to the state it was before.

27. WP Mail SMTP by WPForms

WORDPRESS MAIL SMTP PLUGIN

Having problems with your WordPress site not sending emails? You’re not alone. Over 1 million websites use WP Mail SMTP to send their emails reliably.

Our goal is to make email deliverability easy and reliable. We want to ensure your emails reach the inbox.

WP Mail SMTP fixes your email deliverability by reconfiguring WordPress to use a proper SMTP provider when sending emails.

28. WPML

WPML is a plugin for WordPress. Simply put, plugins extend the functionality of the basic WordPress CMS. In our case, WPML makes WordPress run multilingual.

WPML lets authors write content in different languages and translate content. It also includes advanced features for translation management and an interface for professional content translation.

Using WPML requires no technical or programming skills. Site admins can install it and turn their site multilingual, without any coding. WPML includes a complete API, for integrating with other plugins and translation systems. This way, developers can easily use WPML and turn their products into multilingual.

29. GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform

GiveWP is the highest rated, most downloaded, and best supported donation plugin for WordPress. Built from the ground up for all your fundraising needs, GiveWP provides you with a powerful donation platform optimized for online giving.

Transform the way you accept online donations. With GiveWP you can accept charitable gifts through customizable donation forms, view donation statistics and reports, manage donors, and integrate with a wide variety of third-party gateways and services.

30. Pretty Links – Link Management, Branding, Tracking & Sharing Plugin

Pretty Links helps you shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look how you want using your own domain name!

PRETTY LINKS

Pretty Links enables you to shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Links tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Links is a killer plugin for people who want to clean up their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, their links on Twitter to come from their own domain, or generally increase the reach of their website by spreading these links on forums or comments on other blogs.

31. LiveChat – WP live chat plugin for WordPress

Use the WordPress Live Chat Plugin by LiveChat to add live chat support to your WordPress website quickly and effortlessly. Provide instant communication with on-site visitors and customers and enable a prompt resolution to their questions or concerns.

Increase your sales and build stronger customer relationships with a fully functional WordPress live chat plugin.

32. Duplicate Page

Duplicate Posts, Pages and Custom Posts easily using single click. You can duplicate your pages, posts and custom post by just one click and it will save as your selected options (draft, private, public, pending).

If you need step by step instruction how to duplicate nay post or page in WordPress checkout our step by step tutorial.