Most popular WordPress plugins to use

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) for making a new website. One very popular feature of WordPress is its plug-in architecture, which allows users and developers to extend its abilities beyond the core installation. WordPress plugins are available to help your WordPress site when it comes to SEO, Security Usability, and functioning better. There are  tons of WordPress plugins which makes it hard to pick one among them. Check out this list of top WordPress plugins and find out which plugins to be used to improve your website efficiency.

Akismet:

Akismet is possibly the best way to protect your website from web Spam. Akismet filters comments and tracks the Spams, so that you can focus on other important things. It runs on autopilot and provides 24 hour protection.

All in One SEO Pack:

This is one among the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. It’s incredibly easy to use and works with most WordPress plugins by automatically generating META tags and optimizing your titles for search engines.

WordPress SEO by Yoast:

This will improve your WordPress SEO. It will help you to optimize your pages with suggestions that will ideally help you to climb up the search engine rankings. Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plug-in by Yoast.

Google XML Sitemaps:

If you want to quickly generate an XML sitemap for your website so that major search engines have an easier way to index your site, use this plug-in. In addition to organizing your sitemap, this plug-in will notify search engines every time you make a new post so that your new pages gets indexed fast.

Contact Form 7 or Cforms II:

Contact Form 7 or Cforms II, can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and make the contents flexible with simple markup. Many users of the Contact Form 7 or Cforms II plugins have claimed that it’s the best contact form because of its unique design, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, great support, consistent updates, easy installation and implementation.

Gravity Forms:

This plug-in handles all kind of form generation and management from basic contact forms to complete content management. With the help of Gravity Forms we can implement, Contact forms and integrate with CAPTCHA, Contact forms with email routing, MailChimp integration, Creating content and so on. There is so much you can do within Gravity Forms.

NextGEN Gallery:

This is the most popular WordPress gallery plug-in and one of the most popular plugins of all times. This plug-in provides a powerful engine for uploading and managing galleries of images with the ability to upload, import, add, delete, sort, rearrange images, edit thumbnails, group galleries and many more.

Easy WordPress Parallax Slider:

Sliders add a great looking featured area on your website but can be very simple. It can also be difficult to have multiple sliders on your website at the same time. The Easy WordPress Parallax Slider gives you numerous options for every slider that you create.

Google Analytics for WordPress:

This plug-in gives you an easy way to connect your Google Analytics account to your WordPress site. Track your site easily with lots of data i.e Website Clicks, Page views, statistics, number of visitors and lots more.

WordPress.Com Stats:

It is a simple, clear and concise plug-in that tracks statistics for your WordPress blog with no additional load on your server.

WP Polls:

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress blog post or page.

TinyMCE Advanced:

TinyMCE is the name of the visual editor that comes with WordPress, which can be used to edit post and page content. It comes with a variety of buttons for standard HTML tags like Strong, Emphasis, Blockquote and Lists. In addition to these defaults, TinyMCE has an API that can be used to define custom styles that can be inserted into post content from the Visual editor. It includes 15 plugins for TinyMCE that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen. Some of the features by this plug-in includes support for creating and editing tables, options when inserting lists, Search and Replace in the editor, ability to set Font Family, Font Size and many others.

W3 Total Cache:

W3 Total Cache helps to increase the performance of your website by making it run much more quickly. This means your users will have a better experience on your site and will be more likely to return. Caching methods: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.

WP Super Cache:

WP Super Cache is a very fast WordPress caching plug-in that generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress Site. So instead of loading the heavy PHP scripts of your blog, your visitors will be served with these static HTML files which will make your blog appear to load faster.

WP Smush.It:

This plug-in reduces the file sizes of the images by using the Smush it API from WordPress. The images are compressed almost without any loss and automatically in WordPress. It also has features to compress multiple images in bulk.

Wordfence Security:

Two other concerns for WordPress users are the security and speed of their site. Thanks to the Word-fence Security plug-in, those issues should be revolved. Word-fence Security is a free enterprise class security and performance plug-in that makes your site faster up to 50 times and more secure.

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security):

Better WP Security has changed its name. This plug-in provides security and protection to your site.  it’s features are:

• Obscurity:  Changes the URLs for WordPress dashboard areas including login and admin
• Protect:      Scans your site to instantly report where vulnerabilities exist and fixes them in seconds
• Detect:       Detects bots and other attempts to search for vulnerabilities
• Recover:     Makes regular backups of your WordPress database

Jetpack by WordPress.com:

Jetpack is a wordpress plug-in that supercharges your WordPress site with powerful feature, previously which were available only to WordPress.com users. If you’re looking to give your self-hosted WordPress site a little boost, then look no further. This is an easy to install plug-in that is frequently updated.

• Through Notifications in the Toolbar you can Monitor and manage your site’s activity.
• There are Email subscriptions for your blog’s posts, as well as your post’s comments.
• A social networking enabled comment system.
• The CSS editor allows you to customize your site design without modifying your theme.
• A mobile theme will automatically streamline your site for visitors on all mobile devices.
• After the Deadline, which is a proofreading service that can improve your spelling, style, and grammar.

Sociable:

Sociable adds a bar of icons of different social networking and bookmarking sites that you can choose for your articles. If they see what they like, your readers can easily share the contents to many bookmarking sites. You can choose to display the sites you want for sharing from the control panel.

 Digg Digg:

This plug-in makes it easier for readers to share your posts on social media. It is important to make it easy for readers to share posts because it helps to drive your content marketing strategy and makes readers an evangelists of your brand.

 Share Buttons By Lockerz:

Share Button makes sharing articles very easy and simple. It provides a drop-down menu with more than 100 social networking and bookmarking sites to choose from and share to.

Share This:

Share This plug-in allows the sharing of content from your site through email and 50 different social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and many more. This plug-in also has facebook’s Like button and Google’s +1 button for easy sharing of articles.

WP DB Manager:

This plug-in allows you to repair, backup and restore your core WordPress database tables. It also supports automatic scheduling of backups and optimization.

BackUpWordpress:

BackUpWordpress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you.

WooCommerce – excelling eCommerce:

Looking to transit your website into an eCommerce store? Here is another popular plugin that deserves your download. Because, Woo Commerce is a powerful, extendable eCommerce plugin that helps you sell anything and everything.

• Easily View Sales, Reviews, Stock Level & Other Vital Statistics
• Customizable Online Store Design
• Access to Popular Payment Gateways and Shipping Methods
• Wide Variety of Free and Premium Extensions

Wp e-Commerce:

This is a WordPress shopping cart plugin that lets customers buy your products, services and digital downloads online.

WP-PageNavi:

This Plugin provides the wp_pagenavi() template tag which generates fancy pagination links.

GTrans:

This plugin makes your website available to the world using Google Translate.

WordPress Popular Posts:

WordPress Popular Posts is a highly customizable widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog.

WordPress Importer:

Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file.

MailPoet Newsletters:

Newsletters are a major consideration when running a blog or website. So, it would be convenient to have just one plugin where you can create, send newsletters, post notifications or opt for auto responders.

404 Redirected:

Business owners don’t monitor their broken links nearly as much as they should. Broken pages present a business and SEO problem for your website. On one hand, your potential customers might leave your website immediately when they see a 404 error. 404 Redirected plugin shows all URLs which returns 404 errors and allow you to 301 redirect those to actual pages on your website. This will redirect traffic to the appropriate content as well as pass Page Rank to the correct pages.

Conclusion:

WordPress is a very customizable CMS system, which means you can accomplish almost anything you want with it. It also has a lot of developer support with thousands of plugins available. So, it is very hard to narrow it down to just a few plugins. We know, we missed some plugins, but we wanted to provide the topmost widely used WordPress plugins for your websites that we consider to be essential.