As a novice administrator who just wants a respectable website for their business or blog, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the over 60,057+ WordPress plugins accessible in the WordPress plugin repository, in addition to the many more that are available through third-party websites.
Since WordPress is an entirely free and open-source platform, anyone can create and market plugins. You will unavoidably receive goods of various qualities. Fortunately, experience has shown us that when it comes to WordPress add-ons, especially plugins, popularity is often a solid indication of quality.
I bet you’re thinking about which plugins are essential when launching any kind of WordPress site in this sea of plugins. It’s not a simple question, is it? WPinnLearn has compiled the top 16 most popular WordPress plugins in repository for you so you don’t have to waste time on time-consuming searches.
The Most Popular WordPress Plugins In Repository
- Yoast SEO
- Contact Form 7
- Elementor
- Classic Editor
- Akismet
- WooCommerce
- Jetpack
- Really Simple SSL
- WPForms
- Wordfence
- All-in-One WP Migration
- Yoast Duplicate Post
- All in One SEO
- UpdraftPlus
- MonsterInsights
- WP Mail SMTP
1. Yoast SEO
Containing more than 5 million active installations The best WordPress SEO plugin is Yoast SEO. Millions of websites all over the world have used Yoast SEO since 2008 to help them rank higher in search results.
SEO for Everyone is Yoast’s stated goal. Users of the Yoast SEO plugin include everyone from the local bakery to some of the most visited websites on the internet. Yoast SEO Free comes with everything you need to manage your SEO, and its extensions and premium plugin unlock even more features and capabilities.
It concentrates on on-page SEO, which entails modifying page structure and content to increase the amount of high-quality search traffic. Yoast SEO is a free plugin that offers a sizable number of functions to help you find issues, improve the content, and raise the rating of your website.
Some of Yoast’s top free features include breadcrumbs, schema blocks, Google preview, automatic SEO updates to your page HTML, and XML sitemap production. Yoast SEO will scan your site for keywords and readability and then offer improvement ideas based on best practices for anything it can’t repair automatically.
2. Contact Form 7
With over 5 million active installations Contact Form 7 is another popular WordPress plugin in the repository.
Multiple contact forms can be managed by Contact Form 7, and you can easily mark up the forms and an email’s contents. Contact Form 7 makes it simple to build user-friendly, adaptable forms for your WordPress website. Your forms can be upgraded with CAPTCHA and spam filtering powered by the Akismet anti-spam plugin, as well as being Ajax-driven, which allows them to get data from your database and change appearance without requiring a page reload.
So, why is Contact Form 7 so popular? The plugin contains everything customers require and nothing they don’t (such as no paid editions or upsells), and it still manages to be simple to use even after being a part of the WordPress ecosystem for so long.
3. Elementor Website Builder
With over 5 million active installations Elementor is the leading website-building platform for WordPress.
With the help of an easy-to-use visual builder, Elementor enables web designers to create polished, pixel-perfect websites. You can quickly and easily create excellent websites for your customers or your business without writing a single line of code. Join a large global community of web designers who use Elementor to produce outstanding websites.
The what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) drag-and-drop page builder for WordPress is called Elementor. By simply clicking and dragging your selected parts into place in any configuration you like, you may build your website pages with it. To create visually complex websites without touching any code, many WordPress users rely on page builder plugins, and Elementor is among the finest.
With the help of the numerous page templates provided by Elementor, you can easily create a visually appealing page for your website. After selecting a template, add pre-made elements to the website, such as photos, buttons, search bars, sliders, social media symbols, and many others. To provide a responsive, mobile-friendly experience, Elementor also allows you to smoothly switch between desktop and mobile screen views.
4. Akismet
With over 5 million active installations Akismet is another popular WordPress plugin. If you’ve ever dealt with spam, you are aware of how annoying it can be. WordPress users adore it because of game-changing plugins like Akismet.
Do you enjoy seeing a ton of spam in the forms and comments on your website? That gets us to our next plugin, which we didn’t believe was the case. The most popular and effective WordPress spam protection plugin is Akismet. The WordPress developers, Automattic, also work on it.
It’s quite simple to use Akismet. Akismet will automatically check all comments and submissions to contact forms for questionable activity when you install and activate the plugin. Any submission or message that has been accidentally flagged can be recovered by users using Akismet.
5. Classic Editor
With over 5 million active installations Classic Editor is another popular WordPress plugin in the repository.
WordPress added the Gutenberg Editor to its list of essential features in 2018. The block-based editor Gutenberg enables users to position and arrange page content using movable blocks. The new user experience with this extremely visual building process was generally positive. However, as you can probably guess, many experienced WordPress users disliked having their editing system changed. The Classic Editor plugin was created for this reason.
The WordPress team’s creation, Classic Editor, conceals Gutenberg and brings back the “traditional” WordPress interface for editing posts and pages. Users with various tastes can simply switch between the two editors thanks to the ability to flip between them without having to activate or deactivate the plugin. Conveniently, WordPress plugins that change the classic editor interface are also compatible with the classic editor.
6. WooCommerce
With over 5 million active installations WooCommerce is the leading eCommerce plugin in WordPress.
You’ve probably heard of WooCommerce if you’re trying to use WordPress to sell things. It is by far the most well-known eCommerce plugin and enables you to turn any simple WordPress website into an effective online store.
WooCommerce has the tools you need to organize, display, and sell regardless of your niche, whether it be physical goods, digital downloads, or subscriptions. With the plugin, users can create customer profiles, select from a variety of shipping and payment options, manage inventory, and even create coupons.
WooCommerce is a dominant force in the WordPress ecosystem; there are WooCommerce themes to enhance your storefront, WooCommerce plugins to expand the plugin’s features and functions, and numerous integrations with marketing automation and CRM tools.
WooCommerce does the bulk of the heavy lifting for WordPress online stores better than any other plugin. The default option for WordPress eCommerce is this.
7. Jetpack
With over 5 million active installations, Jetpack is the most popular security, backup, speed, and growth plugin for WordPress. Jetpack for WordPress performance, marketing, and design WordPress professionals created Jetpack to speed up and secure WP sites while also increasing traffic.
Your site is protected by Jetpack, so you can manage it or your business. Jetpack Security offers simple, all-encompassing security for WordPress sites, including automatic real-time backups and simple restores, malware scanning, and spam defense. Free features include downtime/uptime monitoring and brute force defense.
Jetpack is a powerful, user-friendly plugin that combines key website management capabilities. Additionally, it is created by WordPress creators, who are experts on the platform.
8. Really Simple SSL
With over 5 million active installations, Really Simple SSL is another popular WordPress plugin. True to its name, Really Simple SSL is the simplest method for securing your WordPress website.
A crucial security component for any website is Secure Sockets Layer encryption or SSL. Sensitive information can be delivered to and from your website safely thanks to the encrypted connection it establishes between the server of your website and the devices of your customers. Use an SSL plugin like Really Simple SSL for assistance configuring SSL in WordPress.
This plugin works by examining your website to see if your server has an SSL certificate loaded. If it does, it switches all HTTP queries to HTTPS requests (the “S” stands for secure, meaning SSL encryption is used to secure that page). If not, Really Simple SSL’s plugin allows you to obtain a free SSL certificate. Essentially, this tool saves you the time and effort of manually redirecting your pages from HTTP to HTTPS, which is especially helpful for larger websites.
9. WPForms
With over 5 million active installations WPForms is the popular form builder plugin for WordPress. With WPForms, you can quickly and easily design stunning contact forms, feedback forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your website.
One of the best drag-and-drop form builders available for WordPress is WPForms. It allows users to create lengthy, entirely unique forms for collecting contact information. You can create a survey, a newsletter signup form, a registration form, and much more with the aid of WPForms.
The fact that WPForms has over 300 templates to choose from for almost any type of form is a big factor in how powerful it is. Additionally, WPForms offers notifications following the completion of a form, conditional logic, integrated spam protection, integration with email marketing tools, and contact management programs like HubSpot CRM.
10. Wordfence
With over 4 million active installations, Wordfence is the most popular firewall and security scanner plugin for WordPress. Wordfence effectively manages possibly the most crucial component of your website and offers some of the best value you’ll find in a free security plugin.
WordPress websites were the target of more than 2,800 attacks per second in 2020. The Wordfence team, who also happens to have created the next plugin on our list, conducted research to support this. Themes and plugins are included in the Wordfence audit of your entire website for suspicious code, spam, and vulnerabilities. It regularly examines your website and notifies you of any issues or risks.
Along with security scans, Wordfence guards against password-guessing brute-force attacks and supports two-factor authentication, CAPTCHA, traffic monitoring, and IP blocking. Another remarkable feature of Wordfence is that its free edition includes a firewall. These characteristics make Wordfence one of the top WordPress security plugins when combined.
11. All-in-One WP Migration
With over 4 million active installations, All-in-One WP Migration is the best migration plugin for WordPress. Using this plugin is the simplest approach to migrating a WordPress site. Install it on both your old and new websites, then migrate your data by clicking a few buttons.
The All-in-One WP Migration plugin seeks to simplify the complicated process of migrating a WordPress website. Millions of website owners have used this plugin to easily move their sites to different locations without having to read countless instructions or write any code.
To export your website’s files, including themes, plugins, and media, simply click a button. It’s as simple as dragging the file into the plugin on your new WordPress blogs. Additionally, All-in-One WP Migration features a library of premium extensions that allow you to import from and export to additional sources, as well as working with many of the top WordPress hosting companies.
12. Yoast Duplicate Post
With over 4 million active installations, Yoast Duplicate Post is another popular WordPress plugin. Users of this plugin can copy posts of any type to new drafts for additional editing or clone posts of any type. Yoast Duplicate Post offers a service that many users, particularly bloggers and publishers, will find indispensable on a daily basis and integrates seamlessly with the WordPress interface.
In addition to its SEO plugin, the Yoast team also provides a well-liked plugin for duplicating pages and posts. This is beneficial in a variety of situations. For instance, you may create a replica of a page to test a design or content update without affecting the original or base a new page on an existing template.
Each page and post displayed in your lists will now have a “Clone” button, thanks to Yoast Duplicate Post. When you press this button, the plugin makes a duplicate for you to edit right away. Additionally, you can copy several posts or pages at once. Yoast Duplicate Post, like the other plugins on this list, offers a straightforward fix for a feature that the default WordPress installation lacks.
13. All in One SEO
With over 3 million active installations, All in One SEO is another best SEO plugin for WordPress. All in One SEO, often known as AIOSEO, is the second on-page SEO plugin on our list and a great approach to increasing traffic to your WordPress website.
Small WordPress websites that want to increase their search engine visibility can benefit from using AIOSEO’s free edition because it is easy to comprehend and explains how its enhancements benefit your site’s SEO.
Similar to Yoast SEO, AIOSEO audits your website for elements that affect your page ranking and either fixes them or offers recommendations for how to do so. Additionally, it has the ability to create sitemaps, implement schemas for rich snippets, and integrate with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages Plugin for faster loading times on sluggish connections.
Yoast and AIOSEO’s user flows differ while having identical goals. In particular, AISEO has a very user-friendly interface that makes it especially suitable for novices. Even so, if you’re unsure which to pick, it’s worthwhile to test out the free versions of each.
14. UpdraftPlus
With over 3 million active installations, UpdraftPlus is the top-rated and most used scheduled backup plugin in the world. Backup your database and files to the cloud, then restore with only one click!
Backups for your website are often not necessary, although they may come in handy one day. Don’t put off backing up your website until a server crash, hack, or unsuccessful update. We advise creating routine backups with an automatic backup plugin like UpdraftPlus to prevent data loss.
Users may schedule website backups with UpdraftPlus, and it also allows backup restoration. You may send your backups at no cost to numerous cloud storage services, including Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Dropbox. You get automatic backups when you upgrade to the pro version. This plugin lives up to its reputation as being simple to use, easy to configure, and reliable.
15. MonsterInsights
With over 3 million active installations, MonsterInsights is the number one Google analytics plugin for WordPres. By adding metrics directly to your dashboard, MonsterInsights supports the growth strategy for your website. Your most important data is just a click away, and the tool’s abundance of visualizations makes it even simpler to uncover insightful information.
It’s impossible to understand how your website is attracting users and generating conversions without website analytics. Because of this, a tool like Google Analytics is really useful. Additionally, you may integrate Google Analytics directly into your WordPress dashboard by using the appropriate WordPress plugin. MonsterInsights is responsible for this.
The most well-known analytics plugin for WordPress, MonsterInsights, enables you to examine your main metrics inside WordPress and combine Google Analytics with your dashboard. Additionally, it assists you in installing Google Analytics on your website and presents your data in user-friendly charts that you might find more understandable than Google’s user interface. Finally, MonsterInsights collects your data into reports that provide you with a detailed insight into how your site is doing and how it may improve.
16. WP Mail SMTP
With over 3 million active installations, WP Mail SMTP is the most popular WordPress SMTP and PHP mailer plugin.
You can increase the deliverability of your WordPress emails by using the WP Mail SMTP plugin. The plugin causes your website to use SMTP settings rather than the built-in wp mail() function. Simply put: You can send emails using any email deliverability service provider, including Gmail. On that, however, later.
Some of the largest email deliverability problems in WordPress are eliminated by using WP Mail SMTP. Email sent using WordPress sites’ default email-sending configuration may be marked as spam. And that’s assuming they are actually delivered.
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of our list of what we think are the top WordPress plugins for 2022. those that can be considered essential, at least. You are able to turn your WordPress website into a war machine by taking care of its performance, security, SEO, backups, and marketing.
We hope you have enjoyed this article about the most popular WordPress plugins in repository. If you liked this blog post, then please subscribe to the WPinLearn YouTube channel for WordPress video tutorials. And join the WPinLearn community and follow us on Twitter.
FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions
How many plugins for WordPress should I have?
Install as many WordPress plugins as required to manage your website and expand your company. On average, a business website has between 20 and 30 plugins. This number can easily reach 50 or more if you’re using WordPress to its fullest extent and have access to a number of sophisticated features.
WordPress plugins are free?
The majority of the approximately 60,057+ plugins that WordPress offers are free to use. Even expensive plugins typically come with a few features you can utilize on your website without paying a penny.
What vital WordPress plugins are there?
We consider a few WordPress plugins to be absolutely necessary. A form plugin, a security and/or firewall plugin, a cache plugin for WordPress, and an SEO plugin. These, in our opinion, are the very minimum requirements for any website to operate at its highest level.
