What are the most important WordPress plugins 2021?

One of the most shining aspects of WordPress is its rich plugin collection, which allows users and developers to extend the websites’ functionalities and abilities beyond the core installation, so users can tailor their sites to meet their specific needs with custom functions and features. As estimated, there are over 26,000 WordPress plugins available on the web, so finding the most useful one for your website might not be an easy task.

In this circumstance, our editors have come across a bunch of plugins that have been downloaded millions of times, and listed the most popular plugins for you to choose.

Better WP Security

• Ratings:
• Downloads: 1,033,651
• Last Updated: 2013-8-24
• Download

There is no system that can be completely safe and secure. Even WordPress that takes security issue seriously has some bad security track record. So you need to take some precautions to protect your WordPress powered site away from hackers and malicious attackers, and the plugin called Better WP Security can be the best choice for you.

Better WP Security combines WordPress security features and techniques, tracking almost all the loopholes and vulnerabilities at one time, without the need to worry about feature conflicts and the missing of anything on your site.

Besides, you don’t need to learn too much about WordPress and your site, Better WP Security will automatically keep dangers caused by vulnerabilities, weak passwords, and obsolete software away from sensitive areas like login and admin panel.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

• Ratings:
• Downloads: 5,875,524
• Last Updated: 2013-8-22
• Download

The number of your visitors and your page views are greatly influenced by the rankings on the search engine, so you have to improve the SEO of your website. Here, we highly recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast.

WordPress SEO by Yoast has a special snippet enabling you to preview teh look of your post or page in the search results, so you will know whether your title is adoptable, and whether your meta description is appropriate or not. Besides, it offers Page Analysis for careless webmasters, checking whether all the images have a keyword-rich alt tag, and whether the meta description make sense.

WooCommerce

• Ratings:
• Downloads: 1,322,642
• Last Updated: 2013-8-12
• Download

If you want to set up a WordPress based eCommerce store, then you’d better use the WooCommerce plugin to further enhance your shop front, after all, you need to make your online store be unique and attractive. This plugin works well with any theme, so you can choose any WordPress eCommerce theme to beautify your site.

If you want to know the daily sales, customer feedbacks, stock levels and some other statistics, you can simply make use of its smart dashboard widget or the report section, which allow you to view all the stats in an easy and detailed way.

Besides, WooCommerce comes with all the necessary features for any online stores, including PayPal standard gateway, Mijireh Checkout, offline gateways, flat rate shipping, Google Analytics, ShareYourCart, and much more.

Contact Form 7

• Ratings:
• Downloads: 12,483,107
• Last Updated: 2013-8-19
• Download

This plugin allows you to add contact form to your WordPress website in an easy manner, as well as make up the form and its contents flexibly. It supports many other features like Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, file uploading and Akismet spam filtering, so you can get your form as powerful as you like.

Contact Form 7 is very easy to customize, so if you think the default form is too simple and you want to add more fields, you can simply edit the form template Edit section to insert as many as you want. Besides, you feel confused to generate tags which are needed to add fields to a form, you can use the Generate Tag tool offered by Contact Form 7 to help you.

NextGEN Gallery

• Ratings:
• Downloads: 7,965,452
• Last Updated: 2013-8-27
• Download

To be frank, a beautiful and attractive gallery which full of amazing photos can be a strong reason for your visitors to come back to site and stick around. Here, we recommend you using NextGEN Gallery, which is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin with more than 7.5 million downloads.

With it, you can easily upload, delete, and manage your galleries, batch uploads, add meta description with key words, edit thumbnails, and group galleries into albums. Besides, NextGEN Gallery offers 2 front-end display styles for you to choose: slideshows and thumbnail galleries. And both of the two allows you to control the site, style, timing and light box effects freely.