Plugins are actually software that enhances the capabilities of a website by adding specific features to it. They simplify complicated tasks, enabling web owners to manage content on their websites easily.

A key reason behind the worldwide popularity of WordPress is that you will find a huge collection of plugins (around 60,000) in its repository. Using them, you can add almost any kind of functionality to your website, from designing and content management to technical aspects.

Today, we’ll talk about the 10 most popular WordPress plugins of all time, listing their key features and functionalities. If you are thinking of creating a website in WordPress and looking for plugin ideas, this article will come to your needs. Start reading!

1. Elementor

Elementor is one of the most popular plugins for designing websites from scratch without any technical or coding skills. This is a drag-and-drop page builder by which you can design every single part of your website, from header to footer.

Its intuitive user interface enables even newbie users to comprehend the ecosystem and usage process of the plugin in a short time. Elementor comes with a wide range of pre-design kits and templates in its library. 

You can use these templates to prepare your web pages overnight. This plugin also has a vast collection of powerful features and widgets. Using them, you can quickly customize these templates and make them unique to visitors.

Elementor is equally useful to personal and agency users. If you are an agency that has to design tons of websites regularly, Elementor will be a viable solution. Because it can help you create countless websites without even writing a single code.

Below are the key features and benefits of the Elementor page builder plugin.

• A drag-and-drop editor for quick design and easy customization.
• Has 100+ design widgets and a dozen of functionality features.
• A robust library with 300+ customizable readymade templates.
• Creates fully responsive design for all devices.
• Shows live editing to see changes in real-time.
• Developer-friendly allowing you to add CSS codes.
• Easily integrates with all the popular WordPress plugins.
• Has dozens of addons that can further power up this plugin.

2. Yoast SEO 

Yoast is a highly recommended SEO plugin widely used for ranking websites on search engines. It provides enormous tools and features for optimizing content so that they are quickly indexed and organically appears on search engine result pages.

It offers you the necessary fields and options to add meta descriptions, URLs, and SEO titles for every post and page. You can also add canonical URLs if you have multiple similar contents. 

Its on-page analysis tool delivers real-time reports on how well your posts, pages, and contents are working. Yoast can take care of many technical aspects. For example, robots.txt, breadcrumbs, XML sitemaps, redirection, schema control, and more.

Yoast works finely with WooCommerce and headless WordPress. Take a look at the key features and benefits of this plugin.

• Provides real-time feedback and suggestions for content optimization.
• Shows readability score based on target audiences.
• Automatically generates XML sitemap.
• Integrates with Google Search Console and other top plugins.
• Manages broken links and redirections.
• The Stale Cornerstone filter reminds you to update the important content.
• Helps find out the orphaned content and fix them.

Explore the 7 best call-to-action plugins for WordPress.

3. Akismet

Akismet is a powerful anti-spam plugin used by millions of websites worldwide. It has advanced algorithms that automatically scan every single comment and form submission to check if there is any spam.

Once Akismet comes across spam, it instantly moves to the spam folder. You don’t have to check and moderate every comment manually. This can save you a good amount of time. This is extremely useful when your website experiences huge traffics.

Akismet maintains a global database of spam. So it always stays updated about the new types of spam coming into the market. Take a look at the key features of this plugin.

• Powered by machine language and keeps learning about spam every day.
• Customization settings let you configure the level of spam filtering.
• Never slows down your website as built on the cloud.
• It can be used in other web applications via an API.
• Easily integrates with all the other plugins.
• Allows to view and manage spam comments and forms submitted.

4. Jetpack

Jetpack is a comprehensive plugin offering performance, security, design, backup, and growth solutions all in the same package. It comes with 100+ starter themes by which you can tweak your website design.

It includes Content Delivery Network that can speed up your website and image loading from their global servers. Jetpack maintains daily backups and prevents your site from malware, spam, and brute-force attacks.

Jetpack can be helpful a lot for WooCommerce stores. It adds extra layers of security in payment processing as it has integrations with Stripe. Lazy loading saves bandwidth consumption in shop and product category pages.

In addition to that, Jetpack has many other exciting features. Have a look over some of them in the list below.

• Provides a detailed report on web traffics and visitors.
• Makes it easy to share content on social media.
• Automatically generate XML sitemaps.
• Has options to add meta description and content analysis.
• Fastens page loading through CDN and image optimization.
• Scans all the content regularly to prevent spam and malicious attacks.
• Compatible with other WordPress plugins.

5. Wordfence Security

If you are worried that your site may be hacked anytime, Wordfence Security is always ready to help you. Its super strong security firewall analyzes every incoming traffic to your website and blocks them if the plugin detects any suspicious activity.

So potential hackers lose their access to the site before they reach the server. This plugin also prevents SQL injections, cross-site scripting attacks, and more. If your website is already infected with malware, we recommend you install this plugin immediately.

It will start scanning each file, including the theme and plugin. Once it catches the malware, it will provide detailed information about this. But it often fails to detect database-based malware, which is its major weak point.

However, this plugin is still good from various angles. Read out the top key features of this plugin below.

• The firewall and real-time IP checker block suspicious traffic and malicious IPs.
• Limited login attempts prevent potential brute-force attacks.
• Caching feature reduces loading time and improves page speed.
• Two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security.
• You can even block traffic from specific countries.

6. LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed Cache is a server-side caching plugin. It works with almost any server like Lite-Speed, Apache, NGINX, etc. This plugin takes snapshots of web posts and pages when someone visits them for the first time.

If these posts and pages are visited again, this plugin serves the static HTML snapshots it created and stored before. This reduces page loading time considerably, as posts and pages don’t have to be curated from scratch.

Take a look at the features of this plugin.

• Lazy loads images and videos.
• Minifies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
• Supports multiple CDNs.
• Works perfectly with single and multi-sites.
• Has built-in features for image and database optimization.

7. WPForms

WPForms is a renowned contact form plugin. It allows you to create various contact forms, starting from simple to payment, quiz, survey, and complex forms. It has a built-in drag-and-drop editor by which you can create wonderful forms without coding.

WPForms also offer you a good collection of pre-built templates. You can use them or start from scratch. If you are running an eCommerce website or selling digital products, you can use this form for creating payment forms.

The built-in honeypot spam protection, CAPTCHA, and reCAPTCHA integrations provide additional security, coming with this plugin. Explore the key features of this plugin below.

• Advanced analytics allow web owners to monitor form submissions over time.
• Forms are mobile-responsive and work on any device.
• Conditional logic allows to hide and show form fields based on user input.
• Has integrations with all the popular email marketing plugins.
• The Smart Form Abandonment feature stimulates users to complete partial form submissions.

8. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a completely free plugin to create and manage contact forms on WordPress sites. You can create as many contact forms as you want and publish them to your desired content using shortcodes.

This is an intuitive and flexible plugin that anyone can use with limited skill sets. Contact Form 7 uses a markup by which you can easily add and remove fields. It includes some additional features that automatically detect spam forms submitted.

The features of this plugin have been pointed out below.

• Supports Ajax-powered submitting option.
• Integrates Google reCAPTCHA to prevent bots.
• Works with all the popular email marketing plugins.
• Akismet spam filter prevents suspicious forms.
• Offers a good number of form fields.

9. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is a backup plugin. You can back up a variety of your web files, including themes, plugins, and databases, to local and cloud storage using this plugin. You can easily restore these files again in case your website crashes and losses data.

You can choose to upload your web data to a wide range of cloud storage. They are Google Drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Rackspace Cloud, pCloud, and more. It supports both manual and automated backups.

To enable automated backups, you have set a schedule, which can be 4/8/12 hours or daily, weekly, monthly, fortnightly, and monthly. See the top features of this plugin below.

• Has an easy-to-understand user-friendly interface.
• Lets you migrate websites to new hosts and servers.
• Backup files are encrypted to ensure security.
• Compatible with WordPress multi-site installs.
• Restores files directly from the WordPress control panel.

10. Site Kit by Google

Site Kit by Google is a free but robust WordPress plugin. This plugin simplifies the process of connecting your website to various Google services, like Analytics, Search Console, AdSense, Tag Manager, PageSpeed Insights, and more.

So you can check the 360-degree views of your website performance and user data from one place. You can monitor website traffic, user engagement, top-performing content, keywords picked, ad revenue, and more.

These enable you to make data-driven decisions. You’ll get these reports available in real-time for 24 hours. It offers you tips and recommendations so you can optimize your web performance.

Site Kit also includes some security features that ensure user authentication and data encryption to keep web data safe. This is a must-have plugin on any WordPress website. Here’re the key features of this plugin.

• Easy to install and has an intuitive user interface.
• Integration with Search Console detects and fixes issues affecting web ranking.
• Integration with PageSpeed Insights shows how to speed up page loading.
• Integration with Tag Manager shows user behavior and conversion tracking.
• Allow to check the performance of individual posts and pages.
• Offers data encryption and user authentication for extra security.

Final Words!

Apart from the WordPress repository, there are many marketplaces where you will find no shortage of plugins. Obviously, you won’t need all of these on your website. But to properly manage a website, you need at least one plugin from certain categories.

This blog post presents at least one popular plugin from each category. Together they can help you with web design, building pages, SEO optimization, backups, and security protection.

We highly recommend you take a closer look at these plugins. At least you explore them in the local host to understand their features, functionalities, and usability. This will help you make a viable decision in the end.