Do you want to take your business to the next level in 2023 with the best WordPress plugins.
It is extremely overwhelming for new users to choose the right WordPress plugins because there are over 60,000+ WordPress plugins available.
WordPress plugins suggestions for SEO, social media, backups, speed, and more are frequently requested by our readers.
Every year, our experts test over a thousand of the best paid and free WordPress plugins, making it easy for our users (you) to find the best ones.
The right set of WordPress tools and WordPress plugins can help you grow your online business. In this article, we share our list of the must-have WordPress plugins for 2023.
Note: Our team installs these WordPress plugins when we create a new blog or website for our own business.
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In order to make it easy for your visitors to contact you, every website needs a contact form. WPForms is the most user-friendly plugin for WordPress.
You can quickly build contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, and more when you use this drag-and-drop online form builder.
Their over 500+ prebuilt form templates make it easy to create surveys, polls, and other types of online forms.
It takes less than 5 minutes to build a powerful form with WPForms, which integrates with all popular marketing and payment platforms.
A number of powerful features are available within, such as conversational forms, lead forms, form landing pages, form abandonment tracking, geolocation tracking, GDPR-compliant, custom WordPress login and registration forms.
In addition to WPForms on the Perfect Web Solutions website, there are over 5 million websites using WPForms, and over the last 5 years they have maintained an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars.
Over 5 million websites use WPForms, and they have maintained a 4.9 out of 5-star rating average for over 5 years
Over 5 million websites use WPForms, and they have maintained a 4.9 out of 5-star rating average for over 5 years% off your purchase.
Alternative: With Formidable Forms you can create advanced WordPress forms focused on solutions.
With SEO, you can increase the traffic to your website from search engines. WordPress is SEO-friendly right out of the box, but there is so much more you can do to increase website traffic.
AIO SEO (All in One SEO) is a popular WordPress plugin that is used on over 3 million sites.
The best WordPress SEO plugin for improving on-page SEO is AIOSEO, which includes all the features and tools you need.
In addition to adding SEO titles, meta descriptions, and keywords, it also generates XML sitemaps, connects your site with Google Search Console, and optimizes it for social media.
Their team of SEO experts is constantly innovating and adding new features to their SEO product such as the content optimizer with TruSEO score, headline analyzer, and custom schema generator to add FAQ schema, reviews schema, and other schema markup to your website.
You can follow our complete AIO SEO setup guide and our beginner’s guide to WordPress SEO to set up your site completely for SEO.
A free version of AIO SEO is also available. In addition to WooCommerce SEO, local SEO, smart schema, video sitemap, news sitemap, smart redirection manager, 404 error detection and fixation, advanced breadcrumbs, and more, the pro version includes more powerful features.
No other SEO plugin includes an internal link assistant that helps you automate the process of internal linking to boost SEO.
Use our All in One SEO coupon to save 50% on the pro version.
Alternative: You can also try Yoast SEO as an alternative to AIOSEO.
When you connect MonsterInsights properly with Google Analytics, you will be able to see exactly where your website visitors find it and how they use it.
Right inside your WordPress dashboard, it shows you all the important statistics you need to know.
We have detailed guides on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress, how to enable eCommerce tracking, and how to track user engagement using Google Analytics.
A free version of MonsterInsights is available, but its true power is unlocked only when you upgrade to the premium version.
You can save 50% on MonsterInsights by using our coupon.
Currently, MonsterInsights is used by more than 3 million websites.
As a business owner, email is your best marketing tool. It allows you to stay in touch with your users even after they leave your website. This is why we recommend you start building your email list today.
There are many email marketing service providers in the world, but Constant Contact is one of the most popular.
Send beautiful newsletters to your subscribers using their platform.
Non-techies can easily set it up, and it integrates with popular lead generation WordPress plugins, such as OptinMonster and WPForms.
Alternatives: You might want to consider HubSpot, Omnisend, Sendinblue, and ConvertKit, but these are more expensive.
It converts abandoning website visitors into email subscribers and customers. OptinMonster is one of the most popular conversion rate optimization programs available on the market.
You can quickly increase your email subscribers and sales with this WordPress plugin and application.
Create gamified spin wheels, full-screen welcome mats, popups, slide-ins and announcement bars using hundreds of high-converting templates from their library.
With their drag-and-drop builder, you can easily customize any opt-in form or campaign template.
Your campaigns can be personalized with the Display Targeting feature of OptinMonster, so the right message is shown at just the right time for each user.
If you’re a blogger, business owner, or owner of an eCommerce site, OptinMonster can help you make more money from your website traffic.
Learn how other businesses are using OptinMonster to grow their email lists, recover abandoned cart sales, and convert website visitors.
Our other websites and Perfect Web Solutions use OptinMonster.
If you sign up from within the WordPress plugin, you’ll get OptinMonster for free.
Alternatives: WordPress popups can be created using Thrive Leads.
Without writing a line of code, SeedProd allows you to create custom page layouts and design your website.
It lets businesses create fully customized landing pages without hiring developers in minutes.
NEW: SeedProd’s builder now allows you to create fully customized WordPress themes.
The drag & drop WordPress page builder allows you to create a completely custom layout from scratch, using over 200+ beautifully designed templates (no coding needed).
A variety of pre-made templates are available, including landing pages, sales pages, thank you pages, webinar registration pages, coming soon pages, maintenance mode pages, 404 pages, and login pages.
Besides reusing elements but defining color schemes, font combinations, page templates, custom blocks, and sections, SeedProd provides a smart design system that saves you time and money.
There are all the blocks, widgets, and features you would expect from a powerful page builder, including optin forms, social profiles, countdown timers, contact forms, buttons, pricing pages, and various content blocks.
Additionally, it integrates seamlessly with third-party email marketing services and CRM systems.
You don’t have to change your existing theme to create a custom design with SeedProd since it works with all WordPress themes.
Alternative: If you are looking for page builder WordPress plugins with powerful features, try Thrive Architect, Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Divi. When it comes to theme customization, you can also try CSS Hero.
Creating online courses, communities, and membership sites is made easy with this WordPress membership plugin.
Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and many other popular payment solutions are supported.
MembershipPress offers several features, including drip content, course management software, quizzes, certifications, group memberships, and paid forums.
We have a detailed guide on how to set up a WordPress membership website.
You can communicate with your customers through MemberPress using email marketing platforms like MailChimp, ConvertKit, and others.
Creators generate over $600 million in revenue each year through MemberPress.
Alternative: If you are looking to sell digital downloads, such as eBooks, you can use Easy Digital Downloads or Thrive Apprentice, which are both WordPress plugins.
The most popular WordPress plugins for backup is UpdraftPlus, which lets you configure automatic backups and store them in places such as Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Rackspace, email, and other systems.
Their free plugin makes restoring your website from a backup really easy. They also offer a paid version with extra features and priority support.
Backups are an essential tool for every WordPress blog and website, and this plugin provides a great backend for them.
Alternative: There are also excellent solutions available for free, such as Duplicator, BackupBuddy, and VaultPress (Jetpack Backups).
You can improve the speed and performance of your WordPress website by downloading WP Rocket, one of the best WordPress plugins for caching on the market, without having to learn any technical skills.
Integrated caching features include gzip compression, page caching, and cache pre-loading. To further speed up your site, you can also enable lazy loading images, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, and minification.
The most important thing is that WP Rocket does not wait for someone to request a page before caching it. It crawls and builds your website cache automatically, giving you instant speed boosts.
You can also speed up your website even more using WP Rocket’s Imagify image optimization service.
For better caching configuration, they also integrate with Cloudflare API and Sucuri.
There is no doubt that WP Rocket is the easiest and most beginner-friendly caching plugin out there. However, it is a paid plugin.
Alternative: W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and SiteGround Optimizer are free, but they aren’t as powerful as WP Super Cache.
A common problem with WordPress hosting companies is that either they don’t implement this feature properly or they block it in order to prevent abuse.
Your WordPress site may not send you or your users important email notifications.
We have an article on how to fix WordPress not sending emails that explains how WP Mail SMTP solves this problem.
The WP Mail SMTP plugin is used by over 3 million websites, and we use it here at Perfect Web Solutions as well.
Pro tip: WP Mail SMTP Pro, a paid version with white glove setup, offers detailed email logs and more functionality. The support team basically sets it up and connects it to your SMTP server.
It is also possible to connect to popular SMTP services like Sendlayer, SMTP.com, Mailgun, and Gmail with the free version of WP Mail SMTP.
One of the best ways to protect your WordPress site is with Sucuri’s security plugin and web application firewall.
Firewalls protect your website from DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, spam comments, and basically everything else.
Check out our ultimate WordPress security guide with step by step instructions for beginners if you want to learn more about securing your website and protecting your business.
Every month, Sucuri prevents Perfect Web Solutions from being attacked by hundreds of thousands.
In addition, Sucuri automatically adds a CDN layer that allows your site to run much faster.
Sucuri offers a much better level of protection than WordFence, WP Activity Log, and other similar plug-ins. The only real alternative is Cloudflare, which can be rather expensive if you get the premium version.
Your website visitors can receive targeted messages and announcements using PushEngage’s web push notification plugin.
Our website traffic and customer engagement are increased by using push notifications alongside our email newsletters.
Perfect Web Solutions consistently ranks top 5 in traffic sources from push notifications.
With PushEngage, you can set up drip campaigns, conduct a/b tests, segment users dynamically, track goal progress, and more.
A cart abandonment notification, a price drop notification, an inventory alert notification, and more can be automatically sent to eCommerce websites.
Your subscribers will receive notifications when a new blog post is published automatically.
You can use PushEngage on any website builder platform, including WordPress, Shopify, Bigcommerce, and more.
Website push notifications can be enabled easily on your website with the PushEngage WordPress plugins.
Unlike every other provider in that space, PushEngage does not sell your data.
Alternative: There is also OneSignal, but their plans are free.
With Uncanny Automator, you can automate routine admin tasks without having to write a single line of code, so you can save time and money.
Without hiring a developer, you can build automation recipes using most popular WordPress plugins and third-party platforms.
You can create “if this then that” style recipes on your WordPress site by selecting from over 500 triggers and actions.
This plugin allows your WordPress plugins to communicate with other business tools so you can use them more effectively.
This makes it easier for online stores and membership sites to connect two separate WordPress sites without writing any code.
Some example use-cases include:
- Have 2 WordPress sites talk to each other – sell products on one while create users & setup access on another.
- Create buttons that can automatically create user accounts and perform other actions in WordPress.
- Add custom user attributes to user profiles based on user’s actions.
- Trigger automation recipes in one plugin from the action taken by another WordPress plugins (for example, a submission of WPForms can be used to create an order in WooCommerce).
- Connect your WordPress site to business apps like Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, Zoom, etc.
Note: There’s also a free version of Uncanny Automator available that comes with basic automation features.
SearchWP is the most advanced WordPress search plugin in the market. It helps you improve your site search, so your website visitors can easil, including WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), Meta Box, Toolset, BigCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, bbPress, and others
As opposed to WordPress’ default search functionality, SearchWP indexes everything on your site, including custom fields, ACF fields, text files, PDF document content, custom tables, custom taxonomies, custom post types, and WooCommerce product attributes.
The algorithm can also be adjusted without writing code if you want to create your own relevance scale.
You can improve your content discoverability by looking at search metrics, which let you know what your visitors are searching for.
It integrates seamlessly with all major WordPress plugins, including WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), Meta Box, Toolset, BigCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, BbPress, and more.
You can use professional email addresses within Gmail with your own domain name, saving money on hardware, licensing, software, hiring IT staff, and managing backupsloy, and hassle-free.
With Gmail, you can use professional email addresses with your own business domain name right inside Gmail, saving you money on software licenses, hardware, hiring IT staff, and managing backups.
Alternative: Use Microsoft Office365 or your WordPress hosting provider’s free business email.
A digital marketing toolkit including search engine optimization, paid advertising, social media, and content & PR tools, SEMRush is your one-stop shop for all your digital marketing needs.
It also helps you gather competitive intelligence on your competitors, so you can outrank them and dominate your industry.
They help us research keywords, do backlink audits, track brand mentions, spy on competitors, analyze ad strategies, track keyword rankings, and more.
These short paragraphs are not enough to describe the true power of SEMRush. It’s a must-have tool in our list for serious business owners, and it integrates seamlessly with AIOSEO mentioned above.
LiveChat Inc is the best live chat support software for businesses and e-commerce websites. It is super easy to use and allows you to quickly add live chat on your WordPress website.
It has tons of customization options, and it comes with a mobile app, so you can provide real-time support.
It integrates with your existing support software, CRM, email marketing, and other tools. Most importantly, it loads fast and offers a great user experience.
The team behind LiveChat also created ChatBot.com which is the best AI powered chatbot software. You can use it in combination with LiveChat to ensure your users always get the fastest response with the help AI + human.
Alternative: HubSpot and Sendinblue Chat are other popular services that let you connect chat, CRM, SMS, Facebook, and email in one platform.
It allows you to easily manage affiliate links while making your affiliate links short and memorable for sharing. Pretty Links Pro is one of the best WordPress plugins
for linking management on WordPress.
In WordPress, it is the perfect tool for affiliate marketers, podcasters, and business owners.
Alternative: For affiliate marketers, ThirstyAffiliates is an excellent alternative. TastyLinks is another great option for food bloggers.
Your website can be easily customized with social sharing buttons thanks to Shared Counts, one of the best social media WordPress plugins.
You can also add social proof to your website by showing share counts.
The code quality and performance of this free plugin are superior to those of many paid solutions.
SharedCount is used on many of our websites because it offers an easy out-of-the-box solution for both beginners and developers.
Take a look at Smash Balloon plugin if you want to show your latest Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube content on our site. They’re used by 1.6 million websites, and it’s the top social media feed plugin in WordPress.
For verification or to insert ad retargeting scripts, you may sometimes need to add code snippets to your WordPress header or footer.
With WPCode (formerly Insert Headers and Footers), you can easily add code snippets to your WordPress site without editing function.php.
You can also add custom PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and text code snippets using WPCode.
With one click, you can insert all of the most common WordPress code snippets from the built-in code snippet library.
Using tags, you can organize all your code snippets from one central screen.
As part of WPCode Pro, you can control code snippets (Code Revisions), target code based on device, add code snippets for specific posts and pages, and integrate WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and other popular WordPress plugins even better.
You can easily increase your website traffic, social media followers, and email subscribers with viral giveaways and contests using RafflePress.
To create a giveaway that attracts visitors’ attention, RafflePress comes with a drag and drop giveaway builder and proven giveaway templates.
Visitors to your website must provide their email address to enter the giveaway, which helps you increase your email newsletter subscriptions.
By incentivizing users to follow your social profiles and share your giveaway with their friends, you can increase social media engagement.
By using word-of-mouth marketing, you can increase your traffic, sales, and revenue FAST!
It is easy to connect your social profiles, WordPress form plugins, and all popular marketing platforms and CRMs.
There is a free version of RafflePress called RafflePress lite. If you want more powerful features to skyrocket your growth, you need to upgrade to RafflePress Pro.
There is no easy way to create a multilingual website in WordPress by default. This presents a challenge for businesses that serve a multilingual customer base across multiple geographies.
This is where WPML comes in. It’s a multilingual WordPress plugin that makes it easy to create multilingual sites.
You can easily create multilingual content with this tool, which is very easy to use and SEO friendly.
Alternative: A fast-growing alternative is TranslatePress.
WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress used by over 5 million websites.
It comes with all the powerful features that you need to create an online store.
WooCommerce has become one of the most popular eCommerce WordPress plugins in recent years. It was created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, and other popular services.
The WooCommerce ecosystem now offers dedicated WooCommerce hosting, WooCommerce themes, and WooCommerce WordPress plugins.
Pro Tip: You can start an eCommerce store with WooCommerce with SiteGround. Alternatively, you can try Bluehost’s new eCommerce plan which includes over $1000+ premium extensions for free, including subscriptions, bookings, and more.
To grow your WordPress eCommerce site, we also recommend the following WordPress plugins:
- TrustPulse – helps you instantly win customer trust with social proof and FOMO.
- FunnelKit (formerly WooFunnels) – helps you build sales funnels and add eCommerce automation to WordPress.
- Advanced Coupons – helps you add loyalty program, gift cards, and other advanced coupon features in WooCommerce.
- Stripe for WooCommerce – this free plugin helps you easily accept credit card payments as well as add Google Pay, Apple Pay, and others to WooCommerce.
For more suggestions, see our complete list of best WooCommerce WordPress plugins.
Alternative: Easy Digital Downloads is the best WordPress eCommerce plugin if you’re looking to sell digital downloads.
If you’re looking for a WordPress payment solution without setting up a shopping cart, then WP Simple Pay is an excellent WooCommerce alternative.
In terms of features and ease of use, Nextiva is the best business phone service. They offer advanced routing, unlimited free domestic calling, voicemail to email and text, online faxing, and more.
It is also possible to set business hours so that you won’t be disturbed during holidays or non-working hours. You can receive calls straight to your cell phone from your business phone number.
A simple web-based admin panel makes it easy for small business owners to manage everything like a pro, including CRM, live chat, online surveys, and other communication features.
Our business uses Nextiva VOIP because it is the most affordable and reliable business phone service.
Alternative: RingCentral and Ooma are also highly recommended VoIP providers.
Aside from the top 24 WordPress plugins and tools that we mentioned above, we also use and recommend the following tools to better manage our WordPress sites:
- WP Simple Pay – A simple WordPress payments plugin that lets you accept credit cards without setting up a full eCommerce cart. You can add Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH debit, and more. There’s also WP Simple Pay free plugin that you can use to get started.
- Smash Balloon – It’s the #1 social feeds plugin for WordPress used by 1.6 million websites. You can easily use their shortcode to display custom Instagram feeds, Facebook feed, Twitter feed, YouTube feed, and even a full social wall. You can also try the free version of Smash Balloon plugin. The best part is that it makes your social media feeds customizable.
- Thrive Quiz Builder – powerful lead generation plugin for WordPress that helps you create viral quizzes to get more email subscribers and boost user engagement.
- Grammarly – Excellent grammar checking tool that comes with a plagiarism detector, vocabulary enhancement, and more.
- PublishPress – This plugin makes it easy for us to manage our editorial workflow in WordPress.
- Antispam Bee – An excellent plugin to improve the comments section with reduced spam on your website. It works particularly well when used alongside Akismet to combat spam comments.
- Adobe Photoshop – this makes it easy for us to create blog thumbnails and other images for our articles.
- AffiliateWP – we use this plugin on some of our eCommerce sites to add a referral program. It works seamlessly with WooCommerce and other eCommerce platforms (Alternative: Easy Affiliate).
- FunnelKit (formerly WooFunnels) – Sales funnel builder, eCommerce marketing automation, and light-weight CRM for WordPress. It’s a great ClickFunnels alternative for WordPress.
- Thrive Comments – powerful WordPress comments plugin that help you super charge user engagement with features like upvoting, user badges, subscribe to comments, post from social sites, and more.
- Sugar Calendar – A light-weight event management plugin for WordPress. Easily syncs with Google Calendar, allows you to sell tickets / accept payments, and more.
- WP 2FA – This plugin helps you add two-factor authentication to your WordPress sites. It helps improve WordPress security and is a very good plugin made by the same people behind WP Activity Log.
- Envira Gallery – We use this plugin to help us create better WordPress galleries with photo albums, tagging, and other advanced gallery features.
- Codeable – A platform that helps you work with vetted WordPress developers to troubleshoot problems and make customizations.
This concludes our list of the best WordPress plugins for business websites.
Depending on your business, you may not need to use all the WordPress plugins and tools mentioned in our list, but it’s pretty common for our readers to end up using at least 15 to 18 solutions that we have mentioned.
We highly recommend that you either download the WordPress plugins straight from the WordPress.org plugin directory or by using the links in our articles which take you to the official plugin websites. Please avoid all nulled WordPress plugins and theme websites because they can put your site at risk.
Now that you have the best WordPress plugins.
