Top 10 Best Plugins for WordPress Website

WordPress powers about 26% of websites on the internet. It is the most useful and popular Content Management System for developing fully functional websites or blogs. Plugins are the piece of code that can install in your dashboard(in the plugins area).

Every plugin has its specific functionality that you want to include on your website. Let’s have a look at some of the top plugins that make your WordPress site functional.

Tips While Selecting Plugin for Your WordPress Website

Before proceeding further, first look at the tips while selecting the appropriate plugin for your site.

1. The plugin must be more relevant to the functionality; it should not involve any additional functionality that is not required by you.
2. There are many plugins available for one functionality. Like, for example, if you want to add functionality to sign in with Facebook, then you will find several plugins. Make sure your selected plugin is from real developers and has real reviews and the source of your download package is authenticated.
3. Compare two to three plugins for the same functionality and then decide which one should be added to your website.
4. It is advisable to install plugins that are added to the list of wordpress.org. Don’t download it from other sources.
5. Check, whether the plugin is safe, verify for any malware before add into your website.

1: BuddyPress

If you want a functional social network, then go for this plugin. It provides you with the most robust, latest, and well-designed social networking software.

Its contributors focussed on better user experience and response to use it with extensibility. Believe me; it is the simplest and more extensive plugin that helps you to integrate profile management into your website.

To integrate into your site, simply you can add its plugin. Once you activated it, you can adjust its settings, components, and pages as you want.

It is free and requires WordPress version 4.1 or higher. BuddyPress also offers a ‘Buddypress Resume’ plugin; that helps in building a resume page for BuddyPress Member Profile.

Features

You can:

1. Make member profiles.
2. Manage their activity streams.
3. Have private conversations via the chat feature.
4. Build user groups.
5. Create connections to interact in groups.
6. Can interact with any of the users via comments.

In short, it provides a comprehensive package having all the functionalities that are expected in any social networking solution software.

2: JetPack

JetPack is an open-source plugin to manage your website by exploring visitor stats, optimizing performance, and analyzing and managing the site traffic on its dashboard.

It is the most efficient plugin for boosting your site performance in just easy steps. Moreover, it will make sure to protect your site from any hacking attempt.

It gives you a complete package to enjoy your site performance with no pain. More specifically, it will show the relevant post on the side of your homepage to engage users. As result; it will reduce the bounce rate of your visitors and your session results will improve.

Jetpack offers you the facility to include custom CSS and many other widgets that can be customizable.

It is free and easily available. All you need to do is, download it, and activate it. JetPack will appear on the left panel of your dashboard. From there, you can customize it according to your requirements.

Features

Some of the important features are:

1. You can customize your site that includes CSS, contact form, galleries, carousels, notifications, subscriptions, etc.,
2. It provides you with a centralized management dashboard, where you can manage your posts, and view and enhance them accordingly.
3. It automatically optimizes your content that includes images and speeds up the site performance.
4. It protects your site from any malicious attack by any external source.

The authors of JetPack welcome any contributor to suggest, report, code, or any idea.

3: WordPress ReCaptcha Integration

WordPress ReCaptcha is one of the very useful plugins for your WordPress site. It provides box integration in any form or your project directory.

You can include it in any form, i.e., signup form, login form, or in the comment or text area where you need to verify the real audience.

The main purpose of integrating this plugin is to make sure that your site is visited by a real audience/ human. For any robot the form will not be submitted, as result, you will trace your desired audience stats from analytics.

You can download it for free and include or integrate it into your plugin area. After, activation, you can customize the features of Recaptcha and its layout in the setting panel of Recaptcha.

Most interestingly, you can disable it for your logged-in users and many other relevant field options are there in your form. Like, ReCaptcha let you disable Submit button until you enter the correct captcha.

Features

WordPress ReCaptcha Integration will provide you many features as well as known limitations. Like,

1. It secures your forms from any bot program.
2. It works with WP multisite and many other plugins like bbpress, Ninja Forms, Awesome Support, BuddyPress, and WooCommerce.
3. You can also integrate into your custom code where you return the boolean value to validate reCaptcha. It is different for every form i.e., signup, login, comment section, or any custom form.
4. It has support for Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and German.
5. It works together with WP multisite, where you can activate it for a single site or set up a captcha for network-wide needs( that need an API key and setup where you require Recaptcha).
6. WordPress ReCaptcha Integration has a limitation of old-style reCaptcha. This means you can not use the old site reCaptcha on a page, more than one time.
7. On making it disabled for logged-in users, ReCaptcha fields keep on showing in its place, this is one of the known limitations, reCaptcha has. Although you can handle this issue using filters in recaptcha_disable.html. For more information about how to hide the fields, see here.
8. For any new version launch with the built-in Recaptcha, you have to reconfigure the settings to make reCaptcha functional.

4: Option Tree

Option Tree is the UI Builder for the Theme option for WordPress. It is the simplest way to create and save Theme Options and Meta Boxes for your website.

It is sponsored by Theme Forest which is the largest WordPress Theme marketplace on the internet. It is a unique plugin that works smoothly regardless of any of your selected Theme options.

It is equally applicable to free and premium themes. It works as a bridge between your WordPress designer, developer, and end user by facilitating them with dynamic control over UI.

You can easily build your theme options panel locally with drag and drop.

After embedding your relevant theme options, you have to export a functioning file theme-options.php, with an automatically added custom text-domain.

It saves the overall settings in databases with unique array IDs. In this way, your Theme Options will not be affected by any other change by you using Option Tree.

Option Types in Option Tree

It offers you to have a wide variety of all the available option types like:

1. Background Border
2. Box Shadow
3. Category Checkbox
4. Category Select
5. Checkbox
6. Colorpicker
7. Colorpicker Opacity
8. CSS
9. Custom Post Type Checkbox
10. Custom Post Type Select
11. Date Picker
12. Date Time Picker
13. Dimension
14. Gallery
15. Google Fonts
16. JavaScript
17. Link Color
18. List Item
19. Measurement
20. Numeric Slider
21. On/Off
22. Page Checkbox
23. Page Select
24. Post the Checkbox
25. Post Select
26. Radio
27. Radio Image
28. Select
29. Sidebar Select
30. Slider
31. Social Links
32. Spacing
33. Tab
34. Tag Checkbox
35. Tag Select
36. Taxonomy Checkbox
37. Taxonomy Select
38. Text
39. Textarea
40. Textarea Simple
41. Textblock
42. Textblock Titled
43. Typography
44. Upload

5: WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin. It is the way to build a customizable business online in a few steps.

It is the top leading e-commerce plugin that powers over 37% of all online stores. It will let you about the basic review of what is the time to restart it.

WooCommerce enables you to add functionality to your e-commerce store from cart to checkout with the support of any 3rd party/credit card integration. So, every time you use it, it will grow with you.

It is advisable for any scale business whether you have a shop  (small scale) or you have large-scale WordPress and e-enterprise architecture. It will manage your sales in an organized fashion.

It is Opensource and free.  Just download it and a add plugin to your wordPress website. It requires WordPress 3.8 or higher, PHP version 5.2.4 or higher, MySQL version 5.0 or higher.

Features

Some of the main features are:

1. It shows the basic stats of your sales and purchases and presents it in visual graphical form.
2. You can use it anywhere, anytime.
3. You can enable different sizes and colors of your product by just enabling its feature.
4. You can sell any physical and digital goods and make up the marketplace.
5. They are providing you the facility to ship your product anywhere, at any time. WooCommerce even supports drop shipping.
6. They are giving extensive payment options like PayPal credit cards, cash on delivery, and Bank transfer.
7. It will give you great control over the store checklists for your sales,
8. It gives you a way to style up your store as you want. You can define your style with Storefront.

WooCommerce offers you to grow with them by joining their community and GitHub Repository.

6: WordPress Social Login.

WordPress Social Login plugin allows your audience to connect via social media. It provides you a way to interact via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or WordPress accounts. You can comment anywhere using Social Connect.

It adds social media login buttons on login or signup pages. It acts like third-party software, through which you can log in to your social accounts.

It is the best alternative to any other social account plugin that enables you to register on using your existing id. As a result, it gives you control over users accessing your website through any social accounts.

It is free to download, just add and use it. Trust me; it’s very easy to configure this plugin into your site. You can enable your desired social network account where you need it.

Features

1. It gives you endless options to configure your social account like:
2. You have a wide variety of options i.e., more than 25 social media platform integration.
3. You can leave a reply/comment using your social account.
4. It is very easy to customizable.

You can import your contact list from your social accounts like Gmail, Facebook etc.

7: W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is the speed optimization plugin for your WordPress site. It speeds up your page load time, even faster than before.

For example, the site without the W3 Total Cache plugin enabled takes a 10x faster load than the site that has enabled the ‘W3 Total Cache plugin’.

It minifies your object to almost 3 times more than before. For example, it minifies your objects by 27 from 65 just by using this plugin.

At Vizteck, we use W3 Total Cache Plugin, and believe me; its results are tremendous. Your page will load very quickly then than you can expect.

It is trusted by many good companies like AT&T, Smashing Magazine, mattcutts.com, mashable.com, lockergnome.com, johnchow.com, and thousands of others.

All you need to do is, just install and activate it. Before activating it, make sure your design is finalized.

Features

It  provides you with blazing features like:

1. You can enjoy page caching using this plugin.
2. Your files will be minified so, it will quickly launch your page.
3. Caching of the object on memory or disks.
4. It is compatible with shared hand-ting, virtual pri, private or dedicated servers.
5. It gives you additional security features too.
6. It has SSL support.
7. It has the support of Smushit and YSLow (plugins you can download along with this plugin); which crunch your images or any data file by around 10%.
8. The most exciting thing is, you can enjoy Amazon S3 services with Cloudfront enabled. Which results in incredible results and at a reasonable cost.
9. It gives you insights to cache performance statistics with details.

8: All-in-One SEO Pack

All in One SEO was created in 2007. It is one of the most WordPress wordpWordPressins (almost 30 million downloads). It automatically does basic SEO on your site pages and ranks them higher on Google.

It will optimize your site for Search Engines like Bing, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Youtube, Netflix, and many others.

All in One SEO Pack has Google Analytics support by which you can view your site’s insights with just a few clicks away.

It is available in free and pro versions. Just download and install it, and you will see, how efficiently it will SEO your page and results in a higher rank in search results.

Features

They offer tremendous features to rank your site like:

1. Canonical URL is generated for every page.
2. For each page, it will automatically SEO and generate meta tags for you.
3. It supports for CMS type WordPress installation
4. It also offers XML sitemap support, just submit your sitemap and improve your SEO.
5. You can extend the functionality because of its built-in API
6. It is translated into up to 57 languages.
7. You can use it with any other plugin.
8. This plugin is 100% compatible with PHP 7.

9: Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is one of the most used plugins that can manage your contact form and make it functional on both ends (from sender to receiver).

You can easily customize your form and mail content with wide flexibility with the additional support of a captcha. Moreover, it does Akismet spam filtering.

Contact Form 7 is just another contact form plugin that is simple but flexible. It has support for many other plugins which work in parallel with this plugin. Like, Flamingo through which you can save your messages directly into databases. Postman that assists with the delivery of your mail by SMTP Mailer. Moreover, Bhat is a multilingual plugin.

It is available in the WordPress plugin directory official WordPress site. Download it for free, and include its shortcode on anywhere you want.

10: iFlyChat

iFlyChat is the perfect real-time chat plugin for your websitewell-suited for community and social networking websites. Now, you can engage your users by embedding chat feature in your website.

It allows your users to discuss in public or private chat. You can add support service features to your website. So you allow your users to interact with you in flexible time, with no involvement of any other channel.

This plugin is also very effective for your blog or any problem-solving website where you want people to interact with each other via chat in private rooms.

Get your iFlyChat plugin and add it to your site or simply add it from your WordPress dashboard plugin area. It has free or paid plans. After installing the plugin, get the API key and add it to the plugin setting tab. It has automatic integration with the BuddyPress plugin. It automatically gets any avatar/profile plugin to integrate if you have installed it on your website. 

Features

The main features of iFlyChat are:

1. Interactive one-to-one chat.
2. You can embed different chat rooms.
3. It offers you facility of group chat.
4. Any unknown user can also interact in your chat without registration.
5. iFlyChat gives you quick responses because of cloud implementation.
6. Not just text, you can also share images or video files on chat.
7. It offers single sign-on. There is no restriction logging in again, once you logged into your site.
8. It has support for any mobile device also.
9. The iFlyChat plugin has the support for  WordPress Multisite feature. So, you can configure chat across your WordPress Network too.