WordPress is one of the most well-known Content Management Systems (CMS) to build robust and attractive sites. It has many features, among which is the availability of numerous plugins. To extend the features of a WordPress site, you do require some plugins that fit your needs. A lot of free as well as paid plugins are available for a particular task to increase the functionality of a website. So today we are going to list up the best and the must-have WordPress plugins that are useful for building a good WordPress website.
Photo Gallery Plugins
NextGen Gallery:
NextGen Gallery is one of the most popular and useful photo gallery plugins for WordPress. It is responsive and has many gallery styles, built-in lightboxes, eCommerce support, social sharing and commenting for images, image proofing, meta data, tags watermarking and more.
WP Easy Gallery:
WP Easy Gallery is a user-friendly WordPress gallery plugin helping users to create and manage multiple photo galleries together. It ensures quick display of images on the websites. It allows social sharing for images, uploading and styling of thumbnails, setting sort order, pop-up preview, multiple languages and much more.
Video Gallery Plugins
Video Gallery:
This video gallery plugin enables easy viewing of Vimeo and YouTube videos. You can upload videos, give title and add description of the video on your site. It is completely responsive, consists of five different views, allows uploading unlimited videos, integrates with Widgets, allows design and lightbox customization and more.
WonderPlugin Gallery:
This WordPress plugin is useful in showing your images and videos on your sites. It is fully responsive, has an intuitive UI and works across multiple devices and web browsers. It supports images, YouTube, Dailymotion & Vimeo videos including mp4 & webm videos.
Security Plugins
iThemes Security:
iThemes is an easy and effective way to secure your WordPress websites from attacks. It also protects your sites from Malware and spammers. It is a wonderful plugin to stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. It has features like user action logging, 2-factor authentication, Google reCAPTCHA, user banning and system scans to list a few.
All In One WP Security & Firewall:
This all-in-one security and firewall plugin provides security to your WordPress site. It ensures user account’s security, user login security, user registration security, database security and file system security. It blacklists users, runs security scan, gives firewall protection to your site, blocks Brute Force Login Attacks, saves from SPAM comments and more.
eCommerce Plugins
WooCommerce:
WooCommerce is considered to be the best plugin to extend your WordPress site to eCommerce store. It is a powerful tool with enterprise-level features, is customizable, consists of a wide range of eCommerce themes, has smart reporting, integrates with several payment gateways and shipping methods, allows managing your inventory efficiently, helps to run marketing campaigns effectively and much more.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plugins
All in One SEO Pack:
This WordPress plugin is helpful in optimizing your site for search engines. It gives XML Sitemap support, Google Analytics support, SEO support, provides SEO integration for WordPress eCommerce sites, optimizes title for search engines, auto-generates META tag, avoids plagiarism, adds Canonical URLs and much more.
WordPress SEO by Yoast:
Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin makes your site SEO friendly. It can show the preview of your page, increase the clicks through organic search results, analyzes your page for SEO, automatically adds SEO friendly meta tags and links elements, helps you to control the pages Google shows in its search results, creates XML sitemaps and notifies it to search engines, adds links to your RSS feeds and more.
Social Media Plugins
ShareThis:
You can promote your WordPress site from 120 social channels through this plugin. It offers many social media icons and designs, social analytics reports and helps you to track visitors who copy your site’s URL or copy and share the content through CopyNShare. It allows you to display a floating bar with buttons of social media on your web pages on any of the sides for easy sharing.
Social Media Feather:
It is a lightweight, simple, sophisticated and efficient social media plugin that easily and quickly adds social sharing and following features to your website. It supports Retina and high resolution displays, helps sharing on all major social platforms, allows customization for titles and URLs for all providers, enables quick social bookmarks for you site and much more.
Multilingual Plugins
qTranslate:
qTranslate WordPress plugin helps to manage a multilingual website efficiently. It comes with numerous built-in languages and allows you to manage multilingual content, changes the language easily, customizes languages without changing the .mo files, manages one URL for one language and makes URL SEO-friendly to list a few.
Opinion Polls Plugins
WP-Polls:
WP-Polls is one of the best polls plugins that can help you to connect and engage with your users. You can ask them questions and gather their opinions easily. It is an Ajax-based poll system, allowing users to vote by being on the same page. Users can choose one or multiple answers. It has the capability to block users trying to vote more than one time. It is compatible with CSS Hero, allowing customization without any code.
Contact Forms Plugins
Contact Form 7:
Contact Form 7 allows you to manage multiple contact forms and customize them easily. It is simple, user-friendly and flexible and is available in more than 60 languages. It supports Ajax-powered submission, CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering. It has options for quick tweaking and has a lot of extensions to add features to the plugin.
Contact Form 7 to Database Extension/Contact Form DB:
This plugin saves the data submitted in the form to the database and is accessible through the admin panel. It stores the submissions from Contact Form 7 and various other forms. The form data can be exported to Excel, CSV and others. You can display the saved data in pages or even delete the
submissions.
Registration & Login Plugins
Theme My Login:
This plugin helps you to set the theme of your WordPress registration, login and forget password pages as per your current theme. It has a customizable widget, quickly redirects users after login and logout, displays gravatar (globally recognized avatars) of logged in users, customizes user emails and sends user emails in HTML format, allows users to set password, sends mail after registration for users approval/confirmation and more.
Website Caching Plugins
WP Super Cache:
It is an extremely fast caching plugin for WordPress, generating static html files instead of processing comparatively heavier and more expensive PHP scripts, thus speeding up a site’s speed. It has the capability to change how or when pages are cached. It consists of a wide range of features to help increase the performance of WordPress sites.
Database & File Backup Plugins
BackUpWordPress:
This plugin is very useful to backup your complete website including your files and database as per the schedule convenient to you. It requires no setup, is easy to use, also works on low memory, ‘shared host’ environments, manages multiple backup schedules, allows excluding files and folders from your backups and more.
This plugin displays pages or posts related to your current entry, helping site visitors read other related content. It gives you a thumbnail or list view, helps you to customize thumbnail layout through the UI, displays sponsored content to help you earn revenues, allows you to control how your results are displayed, gives you detailed reporting and more.
Mailpoet Newsletters:
Mailpoet Newsletter enables sending newsletters, automated emails, post notifications and autoresponders to your users easily for marketing and promotion. It helps you to customize your newsletter through its editor, gives you detailed stats, displays newsletter in the same way everywhere, imports subscribers easily, send your latest posts automatically and much more.
We are sure that the above listed plugins will be helpful to WordPress Developers to customize WordPress site and enhance its features!!
Semaphore Software has rich experience in WordPress development and customization, WordPress responsive website development, custom WordPress template design and WordPress module, plugins & component development. Get in touch with us through info@semaphore-software.com to get world-class WordPress development services!!