10 Must-Have WordPress Plugins List 2020 (Free & Paid)

WordPress Plugins are just like a dramatic play!

Yes, you’ve heard it right! Just like the right type of instruments are essential for a successful play – the same is the case with WordPress websites. You can’t make your WordPress site more efficient without the incorporation of the right kind of WordPress plugins into your backend.

With the use of best WordPress plugins, you can demonstrate the improved functionalities, features and stunning designs to your WordPress site and bring it to the next level!

To do so, Just Stay Tuned!

First off, you would not only require to install the right plugins but instead, you have to make the right choice there as well! 

“Handy Tip: Sometimes a wrong WordPress plugin installation may drop down your site performance and for sure that’s a downside for any business as well.”

As there are multiple WordPress plugins available in the marketplace! Choosing the right one can make your site efficiency to new heights.

Further, there’s no need to worry as we have got you covered for all your WordPress site things which seem impossible to make it possible in every aspect.

After a dwell time analysis and backend check for the bucket-full of WordPress plugins and their performance, we have hand-picked this must-have WordPress plugins list that can outshine your WordPress site!

Besides, the list includes both free and premium WordPress plugins. 

So, without any further ado, let’s jump to the best WordPress plugins list 2020.

1. Wordfence Security

Our first focus on the top of the list is Wordfence Security. Security should be the first concern for any website, especially if it’s a business site. 

Wordfence Security can make your WordPress site more secure as it includes malware scanners and an endpoint firewall.

So, by installing this plugin you can monitor the visits and hack attempts in real-time including the Geo-location, IP address and the time of a day.

With over 100 million downloads worldwide, Wordfence Security offers a more powerful set of features like:

• Country Blocking – To prevent from end malicious activity from a geographic region. (Block countries where most logins are failed attempts)
• Live Traffic – It helps you to show real-time traffic such as Google crawl, hack attempts, and content thieves which Google Analytics doesn’t show. 
• Two-Factor Authentication – Adds a second layer of security, so at the time of log in a user requires to enter OTP (One Time Password)
• Repair Files – Shows and repairs the corrupted files from the core files, theme files, and plugins files.
• Email Alerts – Notifies the warnings and critical issues via emails.
• Leaked Password Protection – Block logins for the administrators that use a known compromised password.

There are more comprehensive features included in the Wordfence Security premium version. Besides, you always have an option to install the free version of this amazing WordPress plugin.

2. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO plugin is second to none when it comes to implementing a better On-Page SEO for a WordPress site. 

With the increasing use of internet users, it’s important to show the presence of a site on Search engines.

So, as they say, Yoast SEO is the #1 WordPress SEO plugin to better optimize your site pages and posts content at its best.

Yoast SEO checks for the keywords, keywords density, H1 to H6 tags, outdated content, internal linking suggestions and readability check as well. With this awesome plugin, you can opt for both free as well as the premium option is also available that allows the accessibility of the extra features.

The number of features Yoast SEO plugin offers varies from Free v/s it’s premium version: Check out some of them below:

• Keyword Optimization – To better optimize the key phrase, synonyms and related keywords.
• Warns for the old and outdated content – Content that’s been older than six months or so.
• Readability Score: Checks the ease of your written copy and calculate the readability score by analyzing your content.
• Checks for canonicalization – So that no duplicate URL’s are there.
• Checks for technical SEO aspects like robot.txt, sitemaps, and permalink URLs.
• Suggests for internal linking to other pages of your WordPress site.

Like that there are many more advanced features in the premium version that will help boost your site performance and rank on Search engine results.

3. ARForms

ARForms is an all in one WordPress form builder plugin that fits perfect for any kind of online business and it’s easy to grab visitor’s information. It’s such an effective plugin that helps you build a variety of web forms for your WordPress website.
The best thing about ARForms is the real-time editor with a simple drag and drop facility. Proves to be a game-changer when it comes to its powerful features that allow you to create and build forms like contact forms, popup or newsletter forms, online survey forms, signup/login forms, and even more in a matter of minutes.

Not only that, ARForms customers love the forms that come up with stunning designs, styles, and are faster to load giving a great UX (User Experience) to the site visitors.

This plugin is a one-stop solution that can further help you to drive more sales and conversions simultaneously. ARForms has shown its benchmark on Envato having thousands of booming sales, the customer’s response is incredible (Mostly 5 Star ratings). 

Plus, ARForms added new email marketers like Hubspot, Convertkit, and Sendinblue along with button shadows, hide/show popup forms for logged in users, adding multi-column forms on the widget and cloning multiple fields in its latest version. 

It offers a premium version with all the advanced features useful to draw visitors and customer’s attention.

Take a glimpse on some of the great features of ARForms are:

• 30+ form elements and 50+ completely customizable sample designs.
• Real-Time Editor – Allows to build form and preview it on the same screen all at once. 
• Stunning style options – Standard, rounded and material styles.
• Online Survey Forms – Creating multi-steps survey forms for your customers.
• Site-Wide Pop-ups/Newsletter Forms – Displayed on any of your WordPress site pages or posts. You can also set full-screen popup, small popup, on-timer, on-click, on-exit, on page-scroll and on-ideal popup as well.
• Built-In Powerful Analytics – To measure the performance of your built forms, analytics will help you to see daily, monthly or yearly views, and entries in graphical and chart form.
• Setting custom images in radio buttons – Facilitates to show custom images in radio buttons (Helpful to display in survey or products option)
• Multi-Step Form – To set multi step-style tabs, just split the form and make it shorter and easy for your site visitors.
• Maths calculation and Conditional Logic – Helps to sum up the total of products with the math calculation and with the conditional logic a user can show/hide fields so that the form can show/hide fields as per your site visitors behavior.
• Add-On Integrations – Add ons of payment gateways like PayPal pros, email marketing automation, PDF Creator and plenty of other Add on options are available to purchase individually or in a bundle.

We will stop here as the list is non-stop! One thing is assured that – ARForms will leave no stone unturned to catch your site visitor’s utmost attention with its all in one WordPress form builder plugin. 

4. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus has gained its popularity as the most trusted WordPress restore, backup and clone plugin.

With more than 2+ million active installations, this wonderful plugin has a comprehensive set of features that are performance-driven and easy to use.

In short, your WordPress backups and restores are worth the complete investment that you have made on your website.

So, if anything went wrong on your WordPress site, you should rely on a trusted plugin like UpdraftPlus for safer backups in a faster way.

Luckily, UpdraftPlus has the availability of a mind-boggling feature like:

• It allows setting backup schedules on hourly, daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
•  Facilitates manual or scheduled backups for all your WordPress databases, plugins, themes, and files.
• Restores backups from the cPanel of your WordPress.
• The migrator in UpdraftPlus can easily clone and migrate your WordPress site to a new WordPress site.
• Allows backups of files and databases that are other than WordPress.
• Facilitates detailed reporting by sending backup reports via emails.
• Supports cloud backups to Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, Rackspace, Microsoft OneDrive, Openstack Swift, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, FTP servers and many more.
• Backups for the databases can be encrypted for security.

The best part is that it has a free and premium version both. Besides, UpdraftPlus customers ratings are amazing (almost 5 stars) 

5. ARMember

ARMember is a WordPress membership plugin that offers seamless features that are useful for any WordPress business site that wants to earn revenue from the members of their site. With ARMember, you can create and show an affiliate program to the existing members or new signups as well, so they can learn and earn at the same time! 

Apart from that, the ARMember WordPress membership plugin allows the Grace Period for late-payments and provide them an extended time to make payment till the grace period time expires.

Let’s dive into the amazing features and functionalities of ARMembers:

• Drip Content – To schedule the content immediately after the members subscribe or on the future date after a certain time.
• Content Access Rules – To show your site premium content to the paid members of different levels of plans and hide content for free/other members.
• Conditional Redirection – To redirect members of different levels to a specific page.
• Badges and Achievements – Helps to identify the members and to grow better opportunities for them.
• Payment Gateways – PayPal, PayPal Pro, Pagseguro, PayStack, mollie, PauUMoney, and Online Worldpay.
• IP and Location-Based Restriction – Allows banning access related to users, IP address restrictions, and emails.
• Recurring or one-time payment – To select an annual pay period or monthly/quarterly pay.
• Social Connects Login – No need to signup, directly login from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, VK and Google+.
• Multi-Level Membership – Offers multi-levels of plans with various payment cycles options (Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly or custom)
• Email Notification – Set standard email responses for the signup members, confirmation of payment completion, change or forget the password, and much more.
• Selling Subscription via Woocommerce – Helpful to sell your membership plans as Woocommerce digital products with the payment gateway supports in Woocommerce.

Furthermore, ARMember WordPress membership plugin is filled with extravagant features and offer free and premium version both.

6. WPSmush

Nobody wants to access the sites that load slower and mostly the key reason behind the slow down of a website can be the oversized and unoptimized images.

On the other hand, optimizing images certainly takes a lot of time and effort. 

WPSmush can be your go-to option for your WordPress site which is easy to use and optimize images on the fly.

It is a free and pro (Smush Pro) version both available for WPSmush. 

Keep an eye on it’s easy to use features:

• Bulk Smush – Optimizes bulk images at a time
• Image Resizing – Auto resizes images by setting up the max-width and height so the large size images can be compressed and scale down.
• Lazy Loading – Puts off the offscreen images when lazy loading is enabled.
• Directory Images – Optimize the images even if they are not located in the media library.
• Supports all file formats – Processes PNG, JPEG, and GIF files and delivers the best results.
• Backup Original Files – Saves and stores original images as a backup so they can be restored anytime.

The features of the free and Pro version differs. So depending on your site pages and images quantity you can opt for your required version of WPSmush.

7. Easy Social Share Buttons

Easy Social Share Buttons is a real trendy WordPress plugin that can help you revive your social shares, grow a mailing list and even increase the social followers with the use of this single plugin.

It’s entirely easy to use even for a newbie to set up a correct social message. This plugin will analyze the input data in real-time and gives a solution with a green OK signal for your social media messages

It is only available as a “premium version” with its great set of features such as:

• Easy to implement amazing social share buttons with customization options
• Wonderful Social share buttons that can be placed anywhere on your WordPress site pages/posts or custom pages.
• Easily add Pro Pinterest button for images, pinnable quotes inside the content or galleries with the use of shortcodes.
• Recover your previous shares when you make URL changes.
• Preview your social share message with a hint for optimal results.
• 40+ ready to use social share designs
• Supports social share buttons for your Woocommerce store.
• Powerful social media buttons like followers counter, subscribers counts, fans counts and more.
• Facilitates after share actions for effective user engagement.

There is also an analytics feature to deep dive into how your social sharing strategy is working.

8. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet helps to avoid millions of spam comments from the web every day. 

Once you have installed and activated this awesome plugin on your WordPress website, then you need not have to worry about the spam anymore.

With that being said, filtering all the spam comments takes a lot of your valuable time and is indeed a hefty process by itself.

Have a look at some of the stunning features that Akismet Anti-spam plugin facilitates:

• automatically filter out the spam comments from your WordPress site
• Supports spam protection for personal and blog sites both.
• Shows advanced stats (premium plan)
• Priority support available for the premium plan users.

Additionally, the plugin comes with free and its paid version cost you just a few bucks.

9. Google XML Sitemaps

If you have checked the list of our Top plugins from the starting point where we mentioned the Yoast SEO plugin. Well, here’s another useful SEO plugin for WordPress site – Google XML Sitemaps.

To better index a site you have to implement an XML sitemap for any website. But if you are a novice and don’t know how to create an XML site map, then worry not! 

You can easily install and activate this easy to use plugin which will create the XML sitemap automatically. So the next time Google bots can crawl, index and view your site which in turn helps to rank your web-pages better on SERP.

The great thing about Google XML sitemaps plugin for WordPress is that it’s completely free of cost. 

Here’s are some of the detailed features:

• Creates XML sitemaps for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
• Allows fetching the web-pages easily for the crawlers.
• Supports all types of WordPress created pages/posts or custom pages.
• More than 2+ million active installations with better customer ratings.
• Has translated into more than 27+ languages with the help of translation contributors and editors.

10. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a WordPress plugin that helps you to display tons of images at once.

The plugin interface is quite user-friendly and easy. This means you don’t have to choose images one by one from your WordPress media library. Instead, simply create great-looking galleries on the go!

Have a look on the Envira Gallery features;

• Simple and easy to use drag and drop gallery builder.
• It allows you to add Gallery Blocks in your WordPress site pages.
• Mobile Ready, Optimized for speed and SEO friendly.
• Sharing photos via social media integration. 
• Autoplay beautiful slideshows.
• Woocommerce integration to sell your photos instantly.
• Automatically sync photo galleries from Adobe Lightroom.

Furthermore, Envira Gallery is available for free and premium download both, but the premium version can prove to be worth it option!

Final Thoughts

As mentioned earlier, the list of WordPress plugins is seamless. Keeping that aside, you can share your thoughts and ideas on the WordPress plugins lists above. 

Feel free to share your personal experience in the comment box below if you have used any of the plugins from the list!