10 Useful Plugins

10 Useful WordPress Plugins

Plugins have so much to do with making your WordPress site and your experience using WordPress great. I’m often asked which plugins I recommend people use on their sites so here’s a list I’ve put together of 10 useful WordPress plugins. The list has been growing so there are now more than 10 useful WordPress plugins. As with any list like this, some plugins may fit your site’s needs and some won’t, so feel no obligation to use them all.

 

GDPR Cookie Consent

GDPR compliance is a must for all entities that deal with the personal data of European Union citizens. This GDPR cookie consent plugin is one of the best tools to assist your WordPress website in the process with regards to cookies used.

Using this plugin, you can enable automatic cookie scan and add the cookies present on your website to the cookie list. You can display the cookie list on your website using a shortcode. It also allows you to enable automatic script blocking of third-party cookies until the visitors grant consent.

It comes with a fully customizable cookie banner to blend with your website’s design. You can also choose from pre-built templates and customize it as per your preference. The option to display a cookie banner solely to the visitors from the EU (based on their IP address) is one of the major features of the plugin.

In addition to the above features, the plugin makes cookie management easy by categorizing cookies based on their purpose. You can enable granular control for cookies and allow your visitors to give consent only for selected cookies based on their category.

It also lets you keep a log of all the visitors’ consent and details like cookies consented to, timestamp, anonymized IP of the user, among others.

Buy GDPR Cookie Consent

 

Free Live Chat Plugin

EngageBay’s Free Live Chat software is a live chat service which allows your on-site visitors and customers to communicate with you easily straight from your website. Take customer service experience to the next level with their free live chat software! It is designed specifically for the WordPress community. Boost customer service and grow sales instantly.

Download EngageBay’s free Live Chat plugin

 

Simple Page Ordering

WordPress has the ability to set the order of pages (and other hierarchical post types) in your dashboard, but it’s really tedious. You have to enter an order number for each one individually or it won’t work. That may not be a problem when you have 3 or 5 items, but many more than that and it’s a huge pain. Updating the list order after it’s been set can also be a chore.

To make setting the order easy, use the Simple Page Ordering plugin. It allows you to drag and drop your pages to set them in the order you’d like to have them. Best of all it doesn’t require a special order screen like many other plugins do. You can simply re-arrange them directly from the listing screen.

It’s one of those spots where seeing is easier than describing,so here’s a quick video showing how you can use it to set the order of slides in our Foundation theme.


That’s all there is to this plugin. It doesn’t even have a configuration screen. I’d love to see this functionality added to the WordPress core. This wonderfully simple plugin is brought to you by the nice folks at 10up.

Download Simple Page Ordering

 

Grid Columns

Sometimes the best way to display content on a page is with columns, but adding them can be rather tricky. I personally believe the best way to add them is with a plugin that lets you use “shortcodes” to insert columns on the fly. Some themes include these shortcodes, but it’s better to use a plugin so you don’t loose all your columns when changing themes. You’d also be left with random shortcodes that would then be visible in your posts which would look bad.

There are a lot of plugins out there that can do this, but I happen to like Grid Columns by Justin Tadlock. This plugin is much less complicated than many of the other alternatives out there and it works well too. You can use it to set up multiple columns of various widths all in the same page.

Download Grid Columns

 

Twitter Widget Pro

Once upon a time, Twitter was very developer friendly. It was simple to incorporate your latest tweets just about anywhere. That time has passed and many of our old favorite Twitter widgets, no longer work reliably. I spent a good deal of time exploring options that use Twitter’s new API and discovered Twitter Widget Pro by the nice people at Range.

One of the great things about Twitter Widget Pro is the plugin is made to pick up the styling from your theme instead of inserting it’s own thoughts on how a Twitter widget should look. Too many widgets stick out like sore thumbs because of the bundled styling. If you’d like to, you can style the Twitter Widget Pro feed to look just about any way you want. It’s well made and reliable.

Download Twitter Widget Pro

 

The Events Calendar

Not all that long ago, the state of calendars for WordPress was abysmal. Most didn’t work and the ones that did required so much tweaking to fit in with the rest of the site, you would be better off creating something from scratch. It was awful.

Then, Modern Tribe created The Events Calendar plugin. I started using the “Pro” version when it was first released on Code Canyon on every site that needed a calendar. It’s been my go-to solution ever since.

Now they have a free version with an optional paid extension. Unlike many freemium products, the free version of this calendar is loaded with features. It plays nicely with most themes and doesn’t overload them with it’s own styles either. That way you don’t end up with a calendar that looks like it belongs someplace else in the middle of your site.

This plugin is also regularly updated. Very soon, version 3 will be released which is bringing some really amazing new features.

Bottom line, you can start and stop your search for a calendar plugin with The Events Calendar.

Download The Events Calendar

 

Gravity Forms

Most every site needs some type of form. Gravity Forms can easily handle everything from a simple contact us to a lengthy, multi-page registration. It’s rare that I’m involved in a site that doesn’t use this handy plugin.

On Organized Themes, it runs our Contact Us form and also the registration for our theme demos. They have numerous add-ons which can extend the functionality of Gravity Forms into donations, product sales, registration forms, polls, and integration with third-third party services like MailChimp.

It is a paid plugin, but it is such an amazing value.

Download Gravity Forms

 

WordPress SEO by Yoast (Yoast SEO)

Search engines can generate serious traffic for your site and the WordPress SEO plugin can help tremendously with your SEO plans. For me, WordPress SEO not only does a good job of supplying the titles and descriptions of my pages and posts, but it helps me think through creating them.

WordPress SEO Preview

The snippet preview that shows how your title and description will look in search results is such a simple, but powerful tool. When I switched to using the plugin, I saw an immediate jump in my search engine traffic.

Download WordPress SEO

 

WooCommerce

So many sites need the ability to sell items directly to their visitors. Like calendars, this was once an area that WordPress really didn’t do well. Thankfully we have plugins like WooCommerce that make running an online store with WordPress pretty simple.

I’ve been using it on our store since last summer and have had a really good experience so far. I purchased extensions for PayPal Pro, Kissmetrics and the Dynamic Pricing one. You can extend it in so many ways with all they have to offer.

My only complaint would be that they don’t have as easy a way to integrate the store into themes as The Events Calendar does. That plugin lets you choose a page template that will be used for your calendar pages. WooCommerce requires you to either have a theme with a specific structure or for you to add in some custom functions to your theme to adjust the layout. That’s not a problem that’s unique to WooCommerce, but I do think it’s an spot where a change could help many user’s experience.

Download WooCommerce

 

W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache

Both of these are great plugins, and can speed up your site tremendously. But one of them may work significantly better than the other depending on your server environment. When I hosted my site at VPS.net, I test both of these plugins with Pingdom Tools and discovered that W3 Total Cache was by far the fastest option.

A few months later, I ended up switching to Cloud Sites by Rackspace and ran the same test again (we now have our own hosting company). This time around, WP Super Cache was the fastest by a wide margin (770 milliseconds vs. 4+ seconds). That’s why I don’t recommend a specific caching plugin. Try them out, one at a time and test them. Find the best settings for each plugin on your site and then go with the one that ultimately gives you the fastest response.

Download W3 Total Cache
Download WP Super Cache

 

Content Aware Sidebars

Many users want the ability to add widgets to their sidebars and have them appear only in certain situations. To fill that need, many plugins have been created, but my favorite is Content Aware Sidebars. This plugin has such a nice interface where you can quickly and easily pick where the sidebars will be visible.

Content Aware Sidebars

Just choose your options and create a new sidebar. You can add widgets to it like just like any other sidebar, but the plugin will control when that one is visible and when it isn’t. And you don’t even have to edit your theme to make it work either.

Download Content Aware Sidebars

 

So, those are some of my favorite plugins that I routinely count on. If you have any favorites, share them with us in the comments.

13 Comments

Brenda Smith April 7, 2016

There is no doubt that These are the must have WordPress plugins for every blogger.

Currently I am using few of them like Yoast SEO, Jetpack, W3 Total Cache, Redirection, Wp Smush.it.

For WordPress security, I am using ” iThemes security ” also known as ” Better WP Security “.

Thanks for sharing this list with us.

Reply

Zahid June 18, 2015

Best list of wp plugins please add some live chat plugins also in the list thank you.

Reply

10 useful WordPress plugins | Post Status January 31, 2015

[…] These plugins are quite handy for someone that makes websites for clients. Most of these are in my default setup, but I hadn’t seen Content Aware Sidebars before, so I’ll need to check it out. […]

Reply

Ananya Dixit November 22, 2014

I just wan’t to configure it.

How can I do this?

Reply

Brian Schweitzer April 25, 2013

New plugin for WordPress / BuddyPress titled Toolbar Remixed. This easy to use plugin allows users to take control of their WP Toolbar and is one of the most important plugin releases thus far in 2013. You can control the style and layout of the Toolbar right from the Admin section of WordPress.

Here is a link to the free version on WordPress –
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/toolbar-remixed-free/

Here is a link to the Pro version –
http://siteguru.biz/downloads/toolbar-remixed/

Reply

Kristen Hanna April 9, 2013

A good collection of wordpress plugins. Everywhere people list down the most common wordpress plugins, but here I found some new wordpress plugin which are Gravity Forms and Content Aware Sidebars. These are something new which I wish to try if am in need of this plugin. Thanks for the list.

Reply

Paul April 9, 2013

Nice list of plugins….from my own i can recommend using Yoast SEO plugin against any other because of it’s reach opportunities….but why do we need to build a commercial site on WordPress using the Woocommerce? Maybe WordPress is just a blogging CMS and is not useful for electronic sales?

Reply

    Bill Robbins April 9, 2013

    Sometimes you just have to sell a product or two (or even thousands). Since I run a WordPress based business, I really wanted to set up my shop using WordPress and Woocommerce lets me do that rather easily. I used a service called e-junkie for years and while it works, it’s actually Flash based which means I could never access my account from my phone. Before Woocommerce and Jigoshop, I thought about switching to Shopify, but I’m glad this can all be done rather nicely in WordPress now. Eveyone doesn’t need to sell, but for those of us who do, it’s a great option.

    Reply

Emily Williams April 8, 2013

Thanks for sharing, I’ve already heard about some of them. Now waiting for the realease of the new one http://www.getmotopress.com/

It helps to simplify work with WordPress websites, adds drag and drop functionality to the site and enables to structure the content right in the visual editor.

Hope it helps and supplement your showcase with useful data!

Reply

    Bill Robbins April 8, 2013

    I’ll be curious to try your plugin once it’s released. Looks interesting.

    Reply

Lorenzo April 4, 2013

Also recommend BackupBuddy. A new version just came out and they have even raised the amount for the off-site storage from 512MB to 1GB.

Reply

Leave a Reply to Paul Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Get all themes with lifetime updates for 95 USD.View All Promotions
+ +