List of top 50 best WordPress plugins to enhance productivity.

List of some best WordPress plugins that will enhance your blog, news website, and e-commerce websites. A list of top 50 plugins is provided, which everyone should use in 2021. Since there are a variety of websites and each type of website function differently but uncertainly majority of the WordPress websites requires same and common WordPress plugins.

So not matter, that what type of website you are running- a blog site, news websites, or e-commerce websites, the plugins which are discussed in this article will surely help you to find the best way to make and optimize the UI, UX, and SEO of your website.

Note: All plugin discussed in this article are present on wordpress.org website, so there is no need to worry about, all the plugin are safe to download.

List of the top 50 WordPress plugins in 2021.

Simple author box

Simple author box is a plugin designed to show about the author in posts and pages. Since after the rollout of google’s EAT search rankings matrix, it becomes more important for website SEO to have a proper description of the author of web content. This plugin will add the author box description anywhere in your post and pages.

WP Table builder

WP table builder is a free all-in-one table builder for wordpress. This plugin will help you to create any type of table in wordpress. This plugin will provide you the drag and drop feature to bring any element inside the table and also have some other features like: search box for the table and also have it is cross-device responsive compatibility.

Arena Product Store

Arena product store is an excellent plugin which can help you to make an e-commerce and product review website without changing your theme. This plugin can convert your website to a product-based website and can be used with any kind of theme. This plugin have all the required features for an e-commerce website, like: product swatches, price range, popular products, and product filters.

Content views

Content views can be the best option for wordpress developers to show their posts in the grid form on any page of the website. The best part of this plugin is that it can be designed by an elementor page builder. This plugin comes as a free version also and provides you various features like: post grid layout, pagination feature, page filters, category and tags filters.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the best SEO plugin in its segment. This plugin is highly recommended to automate your SEO workflow. This plugin can help you to add Meta descriptions, headings, tags, and focus key phrases in your posts and it provides some more features in the free version like: Schema and structured data, automatic SEO tips, Robots.txt file generation, and can generate sitemaps also.

Elementor page builder

Elementor is a page builder plugin and have the topmost position in the race of page builders. This plugin can help you to design your- posts, pages, contact page, header & footers, and woocommerce product pages. In the free version of this plugin, you can design your posts and pages with all the necessary elements and can help your website to increase the user experience.

WPvivid Backup plugin

As we all know that taking website backup is a necessary part of wordpress developers as sudden updates in wordpress and its plugins & themes can cause an error and can take your site completely down. This backup plugin is free and can offer you the following features: backup & restore, schedule backup, site migration, and clone & backup.

Ultimate addons for Gutenberg (UAG)

Ultimate addon for Gutenberg is an amazing plugin to increase and add extra features to the Gutenberg editor. This plugin can help you to gain some extra block type in Gutenberg editor to increase your productivity. This plugin have features like: advanced columns, image galleries, schema, FAQ schema, how to schema, search box, advanced headings, contact for 7 stylers, and many more.

Elementor header footer blocks

Since elementor does not allow customizing header and footer in the free version and because of this we have header & footer block plugin. By using this plugin, you can easily design both headers and footers for your website for free. Not only header and footer, but this plugin can help you to design some templates also, which can be later imported into the posts and pages.

Ivory search

Ivory is one of the best and unique search bar plugin which can help you to increase the search experience on your website. This plugin can help you to apply filters in the search bar to search from specific posts, pages, categories, and tags. This search plugin can also provide the searched terms data in the wordpress dashboard. This plugin can also be integrated with FAQ and product pages.

Contact form 7

There is various contact form plugin on wordpress but most of them have problems and are unable to send messages, but the contact form 7 plugin is a kind of plugin that will never miss your messages. This contact form plugin helps you to do make a contact form with all the required features, like: form security with Recaptcha, basic form tools, and is elementor compatible.

Table of contents

All web developers have sometimes may have seen the problem of increasing bounce rate, since no user wants to read the entire big article and that is why the table of contents plugin comes into play. This plugin can help you to automatically add a table of contents in your posts and pages and can automatically detect the H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 headings used in your posts and makes all of them clickable. 

Q2W3 Fixed widgets

Have you ever wondered that how some websites have fixed advertisements showing in the sidebar while scrolling? You can also do the same by having a fixed widget plugin to make any sidebar widget fixed while scrolling. This plugin can help you to make a widget maintain its original place while scrolling or you can make your entire sidebar fixed while scrolling.

Jetpack

As we all web developers are using google analytics for tracking our user’s behavior and their location on wordpress website, but you can experience that google analytics can make your site slow and that is why we have jetpack plugin, this plugin was developed by wordpress and have features like: site backup, user tracking, page views, image optimization and many more like this.

WP News and scrolling

This plugin is primarily been used for news websites and also comes in handy at showing important scrolling announcements on wordpress websites. This plugin can show scrolling news and notice from specific posts, pages, and categories. This plugin can automatically insert new posts in the grid form to make it look like current news.

WP sitemap page

Since we have primarily two sitemaps; XML sitemaps for search engines and HTML sitemaps for the website human visitors. This WP sitemap plugin will help you to add the HTML sitemap pages to your wordpress website. The HTML sitemaps are useful for new and lost visitors to your website. This plugin can help you to increase the User experience for your website.

Widgets options

This widgets options plugin provides you full control over your website widgets. By using this plugin you can specify some important rules for your wordpress website widgets like: on which devices widgets will be shown, widgets alignment, page and posts filters to show and hide widgets. In its premium version, this plugin can help you to change the original design of widgets.

Yoast duplicate Post

Sometimes there arises a need to duplicate some posts and pages since sometimes we just want to write multiple posts and pages with the same design and this is why there is a need arises for this plugin. With this plugin, you can easily duplicate your WordPress posts and pages. You can design a draft post and can duplicate it multiple times to write posts on the same design.

Cookie notice compliance (GDPR)

Since as a web developer, we all know that in order to show your websites in European countries, you will need to follow some special norms of the European laws, so this plugin can help your site to become EU GDPR compatible by generating cookie notice, link to the privacy page, and user approval on click. This plugin is user-friendly and also SEO-friendly.

Manage WP worker

Manage WP worker is a plugin designed to manage multiple websites from one dashboard. By using this plugin the problem of login on multiple sites will be over, as the data of multiple sites can be imported and linked into one single dashboard. By using this plugin you can do the following things: update multiple sites at once, managing multiple sites, multiple site updates, and site analytics at one place.

Optin monster Popups

Optin monster plugin is basically a marketing tool plugin. This plugin can provide you the features like: popup messages for email subscription, contact popups, timer popups, and many more. This plugin is helpful to convert visitors into subscribers and also to maintain the visitor’s email list for further marketing.  This plugin is cross-device compatible and responsive. You can design your popups forms by drag and drop feature or you can just import the prebuild templates for popups.

WP maintenance mode

Sometimes we as web developers just do some posts and modifications for testing purposes and because of the current visitors and even search engine crawlers can get confused and may feel bad experience. So to come out of trouble you can use maintenance mode plugins to restrict visitors and even search engines are also restricted to index the testing changes. This plugin can help you to make and design the “404” pages with the countdown timer, email subscription, and important messages.

Woocommerce

Woocommerce is all about an e-commerce website. By using woocommerce, you can convert any website having any theme to a product selling website. This plugin is highly compatible with amazon affiliates and can import bulk products and dynamic product prices with the help of other plugins like “Content eggs”. This plugin have some amazing important feature for product based website like: Filtering products by attributes, product search, new product category, and product by reviews, top-selling products and many more.

WP SMS

WP SMS plugin is helpful for sending SMS messages right from your wordpress dashboard. You will not need any mobile number to send messages to your visitors. You can bulk import contacts or just can send messages to anyone you want. By using this plugin, you can send activation passwords for some password-protected posts and contents to your premium users. The best part of this plugin is that it can be connected and integrated with the contact form 7 plugin to receive user’s contact details and also to send messages.

SVG support

SVG stands for “scalable vector graphics”, and this image format is one of the best suitable for web pages because this image format rather of being uploaded like normal image SVG images are implemented inside the CSS and JavaScript inline codes. Since this image format is in the form of codes, hence it makes your web pages fast to load. But wordpress originally do not support the SVG image format, so this is why we have to use this plugin. “SVG image can also be animated and modified with CSS and JavaScript codes”.

Bb press

If you are willing to make a forum and discussion websites like quora then you have to use plugins like Bb Press. BbPress plugin can help you to make and design forum pages and you will be having full authority for posting answers, questions, and even you can also delete questions and close the question threat. This plugin also provided you the option for making the forum pages with different categories and also you can add descriptions to each separate category.

A3 Lazy load

Click here to read more about “lazy loading”. Lazy loading helps you to increase the loading speed of your web pages by loading contents of the visible screens only. All the rest of the contents get loaded when they came on the visible screen. This plugin helps you to lazy load the images, videos, and embeds them in your posts and pages. By using this lazy loading plugin, you can also assign a unique image or gravatar for the unloaded images and contents.

Menu image icons made easy

This plugin can help you to integrate the icons with your desktop menu or mobile menu of your website. This plugin have a lot of prebuild icons in its library and also you can use font awesome icon with this plugin. By using this plugin you can assign the icon for the menu in its left, right, above, and bottom areas.

Responsive menu

By using the responsive menu plugin, you can design the premium menu area for your mobile devices, you can also design an off-canvas menu for the desktop version also. This plugin can render a mobile-friendly responsive menu and you can also select your custom menu background for the menu areas. Options like adding images, custom HTML, and logos are also provided.

Structured data for WP and AMP

As we all know that schema and structured data is very important for our website as it helps search engines to understand our contents better. This plugin can auto-generate schema data for your products pages, article pages, and how-to pages. This plugin can also make custom schema types and it is also compatible with amp for wp plugin.

Gravity PDF

Have you ever seen that some websites can automatically generate PDF to download after payments and subscriptions? You can also do the same by using the gravity PDF plugin, this plugin provides you the built-in PDF generation and editing features and the PDF can be sent to any users you want. This plugin also have gravity form payment for payment gateways and this PDF plugin can be easily integrated with the payment modules. You can also generate PDF with your logo and branding and can publish it anywhere on your website.

Ultimate FAQ

The ultimate FAQ plugin is the best option to make FAQ pages, FAQ categories, and FAQ tags. This plugin works easily with Gutenberg block and can also be placed with the help of shortcodes. This plugin have better looking customizable accordion that is cross-device responsive. This plugin is compatible with woocommerce products and provides features like: user comments on FAQ answers, structured data, and question schema for indexing the FAQ.

Add to any share button

If you want your posts, pages, images, and contents to be shared by visitors then this plugin will surely help you. This plugin is mobile responsive and can provide options to share your posts and pages to various social media like: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and various others. The best part of this plugin is that it can be integrated with google analytics to track the number of shares done by your website visitors.

Child theme configurator

As we all know that the child theme is very important for our website. Child theme helps you to create a duplicate copy of your theme and it acts as a secondary theme. Since when we update our wordpress website and theme then some elements of our website such as design and some custom codes get changed, so this is why we have a child theme which have all the mirror elements of our theme and helps our website to sustain its design. With the help of this plugin, you can easily create a child theme and can customize your site with a child theme without touching the original codes.

Big File uploads

Since we all know that wordpress originally provides us the capacity of uploading the maximum file limit of 512 MB. But sometimes we have some special task, such as uploading the previously taken website backup which is more than 512 MB, and then, in this case, there arises a situation to remove the file upload limit of wordpress. This file limit can be increased by using the “big file uploads plugin” any limit size.

Kadence blocks for Gutenberg

Gutenberg is a very new editor of wordpress and can provide many useful features when compared to previous editors. But Gutenberg editor also have some limits and this limit can be removed by having a Gutenberg block extension which is “Kadence blocks”. Kadence block can do all the things which Gutenberg fails to do. With the kadence blocks, you can have advanced features like: advanced heading, columns, rows, tabs, accordion, icons, and boxes. In fact, the article you are reading right now is also designed in the Kadence blocks.

Simple custom post order

Since we have lots of articles and pages in wordpress and sometimes there a need arises to bring some old articles at the top, so to do this we have this “simple custom post order plugin” and by using this plugin, you can easily drag and drop any articles and can change their original position.

Advanced adds

We all have lots of articles and pages and it becomes nearly impossible to insert Adsense ads in each post & pages headings. So to clear this trouble, we have this plugin which will help you to automatically insert ads in the following places: before header, after the header, before footer, after the footer, in between comments, before images, in excerpts, inside the sidebar and many more.

Monster Insights

This plugin provides all the tracking features of google analytics inside your wordpress dashboard. In fact, this plugin helps you to install google analytics to your wordpress website so that you can easily manage everything from one single place. This plugin is best for companies, bloggers, and marketers. By using this plugin you can easily integrate a google analytics look-alike dashboard inside your wordpress dashboard to see: user behaviors, page views, user geography, and site speed report, add campaigns, and many more.

Sitekit by google

Site kit by google is an all-in-one google product integration with your wordpress website. By using this plugin you can have all the important google services in your wordpress dashboard like: Google Adsense, google analytics, google page speed, and google tags manager. This plugin is officially launched by Google itself and helps you to increase your overall workflow.

Learn Press

Learn Press is a Learning management system developed for wordpress. By using the learn press plugin you can easily create learning and course selling sites like udemy. By using this plugin you can make learning websites and can make courses in the videos, text, and audio formats and can sell it with woocommerce and various other payment gateways like PayPal. You can also use the youtube videos for the courses and can embed them on the course page. By using this plugin you can also provide assignments, track progress, and can also allot marks and certificates to the students.

Font awesome

Font awesome plugin is basically made for providing a vast amount of icon libraries on the web. Font awesome uses its own CDN (click here to read about CDN) to provide free fonts and icons that can be used on the website just by pasting the URL of the fonts and icons. Since you do not have to install anything and also the fonts and icons will be provided by CDN and hence your web page load faster.

Easy social feeds

Have you ever tried to paste the links of Facebook posts, Instagram posts, and twitters tweets? The era of the old method of copy and pasting has gone, since in the normal copy and paste the feeds and contents associated with it are not visible, so you can use this plugin to make your shared links look smarter. By using this plugin you can easily make to show the contents of the URL in a boxed area so that it could look professional.

3D Flipbook by iberezansky

This plugin is designed to play PDF content like books in 3D. By using this plugin you can easily make 3D books and can have custom colors and you can attach your PDF pages to make a 3D book. This plugin also provides you the features like: animation control, resolution control, cross-device responsiveness, and PDF search function. If you are willing to make a PDF book-selling website then you can integrate this plugin with woocommerce and learn press also and can make money by selling the PDF.

HTML 5 audio player

This plugin comes very useful when you are willing to add audio files to your posts, pages, and courses. By using this plugin, you can easily add an option to play audio on your web pages with play, pause, back, and forward buttons. You can also change the appearance and color code of your audio player to match your website’s color theme.

CP Media Player

CP Media layer is one of the best plugin to play audio and videos. This plugin can play audio and video of any format and also supports subtitles features for the videos. This plugin is cross-device compatible and also support by most of the browsers. The best part of this plugin is that it allows you to add a payment method to the media player itself. You have an option to add a PayPal payment method to sell your videos with this media player plugin.

Embed Press

This is an all-in-one plugin, which can be used for embedding various file types like: youtube videos, google maps, google docs, PDF, and PPT’s. This plugin can help you to embed most of the online documents with a few clicks. This plugin is compatible and have support for elementor, classic editor, and Gutenberg editor.

Embed plus for youtube

If you have a youtube channel and want to double your money then this plugin can help you. By using this plugin you can add your entire youtube channel videos to your website and also you can make a video gallery, channel, and playlist. This plugin also provides you some important features for making a video hosting-like site, such as: live streaming, YouTube premiers, playback control, and audio control.

Smart slider 3

This plugin is designed for adding responsive image sliding features to your wordpress site. Since we all know that Gutenberg editor currently do not support responsive image slider but by using this plugin, you can easily add image slider with lots of customization like custom slider background, and 11 prebuild slider templates, and also this plugin provides cross-device responsive image sliders and also it is SEO friendly.

WP Data table

This plugin is not only designed for adding tables but the main features of this plugin are to add various kinds of data charts like: Line Chart, Column Chart, Pie Chart, Area Chart, Stepped Area Chart, Histogram, Bar Chart, Stacked Bar Chart, Bubble Chart, Donut Chart, Gauge Chart, Scatter Chart, Candlestick Chart, Waterfall Chart. You can add your data from excel sheets directly into this plugin and can show your data in tabular or pictorial formats.

Some bonus Plugins

IP2 Location country blocker

If your site is prone to hacking attacks from some particular countries or regions then you need to block the accessibility request from those countries or regions. By using this plugin you can block an IP address, proxies, IP ranges, web browser crawlers, and the IP address from multiple countries. There are various plugins to let you know the IP addresses of your website visitors and by using this plugin you can easily block any user whose behavior is suspicious.

Tidio live chatbot

Have you ever seen an option of “chat with us”, on some websites? These features are provided by chatbots and when you ask some questions, the chatbot answers you; this is because the chatbot is introduced with some most frequently asked questions and can answer that questions. This plugin can do the same, once you install it you can place it anywhere you want and can insert some frequently asked question and their answers and that’s it, your chatbot is ready.

Material design for contact form 7

If you have a contact form on your website then you must have heard of the contact form 7 plugin. But the problem arises is that the original contact form 7 look is very classic and simple and since we as a web developer wants to make every element of our site have the same color code as of our theme, so this is why you should use this plugin to design your original contact form 7 appearance.

Mobile view for responsive web design

If you have a wordpress website and it is not mobile-friendly then you are going to feel the real problem of UI and UX and also the crisis of traffic. Currently, many wordpress themes come with a mobile-friendly layout but if you are not satisfied with your theme design on mobile devices then you can use this plugin to manually design the mobile appearance of your website. This plugin provides you the WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) environment to see the live preview of the changes done by you.

Conclusion

So above were the top 50 wordpress plugins which can be used to enhance your writing, designing, UI, and UX workflows. The above-discussed plugins can be used with any kind of site like: blog, news, magazine, and even with e-commerce websites. One thing I would like to share with you all is that you should only try to install those plugins which are trusted, popularly used, and are really needed by you. If you will install lots of plugins on
your wordpress website then your site may feel slow and even may experience downtime.

I hope you really enjoyed this article, thanks for reading this article.