12 Most Popular WordPress Plugins in 2022
Introduction
WordPress has been offering a great service to web developers over the globe. WordPress is an excellent platform for developing your blog, portfolio, or website.
It comes with many tools to help you build an amazing website and track its performance, and you can improve it even further by adding WordPress plugins to add new functionalities.
Some WordPress plugins are free, while others are premium items with a high price. You may find free plugins by visiting WordPress’s Plugin Directory, which you can access from your dashboard. Paid plugins can be installed by selecting Add New from the plugins menu.
If you host your site yourself using WordPress.org software, then only you can add the plugins to it. You can know more about why WordPress is a preferred platform for creating a website
What is a WordPress Plugin?
WordPress plugins allow you to add new features and functions to your WordPress website. There are nearly around 55,000 plugins in the WordPress directory.
Plugins add to WordPress’s present condition as an easy-to-use, adaptable, and feature-rich content management system.
Every WordPress user should have a basic understanding of plugins, and we’re here to help. You’ll discover what WordPress plugins are, how to utilize them, and what different types of plugins are available.
According to WordPress.org, the most popular page builder plugin is, Elementor with over 1.2 million active installations. It provides a basic free edition that allows you to create complicated designs with simple drag and drop and alive, visual preview.
The paid version, Elementor Pro, allows you to build your whole WordPress theme using the same drag-and-drop interface. The plugin also includes over 100 pre-made page templates to help you get started with any type of website.
This tool allows you to build a theme from the ground up by effortlessly modifying important aspects such as the header, footer, and even product pages.
The backlinks will also amplify the site’s domain authority and expertise. The more trustworthy, authoritative, and expert search engines, especially Google, consider your website, the higher the site will rank in the SERPs. Better rankings mean more website traffic!
Adobe fonts help in the integration of high-quality fonts for your WordPress site.
If you want to make your WordPress site look attractive, you need to look beyond basic fonts and explore a wider variety of typography. Adobe Fonts (formerly TypeKit) is a service provided by Adobe that allows you to obtain high-quality customized fonts.
The fonts are applied to your website by the font-face standard, ensuring that they are web standards-compliant, fully licensed, and available. There are many fonts accessible, and to get started, you’ll need a Creative Cloud account/subscription.
It is one of the best WordPress plugins to build a subscription list for your Mailchimp account. Its user-friendly interface has a multitude of pre-made fields.
All you have to do is choose which ones to show on the form. It will offer you a form preview, but you may also use the code view to modify its structure or change the prebuilt texts.
The free version allows you to personalize the appearance of the form by utilizing basic or preset form themes.
Alternatively, the form might inherit the styles from the active theme of the site. You’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan if you want to use the style builder.
It is one of the most versatile pop-up plugins. It helps in creating pop-ups for email marketing or eCommerce optimization. Let’s look at some of them.
Basic pop-up — a simple pop-up that opens in the center of the screen.
Smart bar — a pop-up bar that always appears at the top of the page.
Scroll box — a pop-up box that is fixed at the bottom of the page.
Inline form — is a form box that is integrated into the page’s content.
A click-trigger pop-up box — emerges when a user clicks on a certain link.
Welcome mat — a full-page pop-up box that displays a welcome message in addition to the form.
The pop-up choices are used to display anything from a subscriber form to a social sharing button, and starter templates for email and social share pop-ups are available.
WooCommerce is the world’s most popular and free e-commerce website plugin. It helps you convert your WordPress site into a fully functional online store.
It was founded in 2011 and was purchased by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) in 2015, thus its future development is certainly in good hands.
The free version calculates the costs of shipping and taxes and allows major credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers, and cash on delivery.
The premium version includes more advanced options, such as a one-page checkout and a cart abandonment email add-on. Hundreds of add-ons and themes are available to further increase WooCommerce’s functionality.
MetaSlider is the most well-known slider plugin for WordPress, as well as one of the simplest to use. Its slider builder has a handy UI and includes a slider preview so users can review their work before saving and putting it on the website.
There are four slider types to choose from: flex, responsive, nivo, and coin sliders. You can customize the slider’s dimensions, transition effect, and navigation.
The slider takes several sorts of content, such as pictures, videos, and post feeds. It also allows you to add image alt texts, which is important for accessibility and SEO. If you upgrade to the paid version, you can also integrate YouTube and Video videos into the slide.
It is the most helpful plugin as it allows automatic backups and stores data at a remote location like Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, and Email and quickly restores them.
Backing up a WordPress site is vital to avoid data loss in the case of a system crash, hard drive failure, or malicious program. UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress backup management plugins.
UpdraftPlus Vault is only available on the premium plan. It backs up and restores website data flawlessly. Database encryption is another excellent premium feature that ensures the security of your website’s data.
Whether you have your personal blogs or deal with some online business, you want it to rank higher in search engines. It works for your On-page SEO.
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that optimizes your pages’ content, graphics, titles, meta descriptions, and keywords. You may also use the plugin to instruct Google not to index a particular page or set of URLs.
Yoast SEO can also construct URLs automatically, create legible XML sitemaps, and give you more control over breadcrumbs. The premium edition of Yoast SEO has more complex features, but even the free plugin can help you improve your website’s ranking.
It is the smoothest social sharing plugin that provides a user-friendly solution for sharing website content over Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, etc.
And the best part is that it doesn’t require third-party registration. One click and the job is done. And all these services like are available free of cost.
Every website needs a contact form to fill out so that people can message you. WPForms is by far the most popular WordPress contact form plugin. You may collect payments, run surveys, and establish new job opportunities with a job application form using this plugin.
All forms created with this plugin are responsive, which means they will function properly on mobile devices. They also include anti-spam features such as hCaptcha and reCAPTCHA.
There are times when some comments on posts need to be managed or eliminated. And here is a strong spam blocker like Akismet plays a major role.
The plugin displays URLs in the comment body to detect misleading links common in spam comments.
Akismet also works well with contact form plugins to prevent spam from being submitted via contact forms.
It helps your website to speed up by clearing the cache. This caching plugin serves as it gets paid. Within no time of installation, it does a wonderful job by immediately speeding up the slow loading pages.
It’s simple to set up and can be installed and adjusted in a couple of minutes, resulting in an immediate speed boost for your WordPress website.
Conclusion
You know there are more than 55,000 plugins that can enhance your WordPress website. A website can use multiple plugins based on business needs and solutions. It is better to check the number of installations and user reviews of a particular plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. Considering the updated and trustworthy plugins is a wise choice.
It can be of great help if you hire a WordPress developer that helps you with plugins and optimization. You should not activate too many plugins to avoid slowing down the loading time and security risks. Otherwise, the collection of plugins above is a good list of WordPress plugins that can enhance your business website. It is the safest option to directly download these WordPress directories or to get them separately from the official websites.
