WordPress plugin provides a simple and quick way to implement advanced features on your WordPress site without writing any PHP. If you have no idea about which WordPress plugin suit for your site and this post might be helpful.
Here is a hand-picked list of 20 most popular (top rated) and full free WordPress plugins in the past year (2017). All of these WordPress plugins are hosted on Github and are sorted by star count.
20. WP Super Cache
This is a feature-rich cache plugin that converts your WordPress posts and pages into static HTML pages for faster site speed. Also has the ability to compress generated pages and compatible with CDN.
19. MultilingualPress
A site management plugin designed for your multilingual WordPress sites.
Features:
- Set up unlimited site relationships in the site manager.
- Language Manager with 174 editable languages.
- Edit all translations for a post or page from the original post editor without the need to switch sites.
- Show a list of links for all translations on each page in a flexible widget.
- Translate posts, pages and taxonomy terms like categories or tags.
- Add translation links to any nav menu.
- No lock-in: After deactivation, all sites will still work.
- SEO-friendly URLs and permalinks.
- Support for top-level domains per language (via multisite domain mapping).
- Automatic
hreflangsupport. - Support for custom post types.
- Automatically redirect to the user’s preferred language version of a post.
- Duplicate sites. Use one site as template for new site and copy everything: Posts, attachments, settings for plugins
and themes, navigation menus, categories, tags and custom taxonomies. - Synchronized trash: move all connected post to trash with one click.
- Change relationships between translations or connect existing posts.
- Quicklinks. Add links to language alternatives to a post automatically to the post content. This is especially useful
when you don’t use widgets or a sidebar. - User specific language settings for the back-end. Every user can choose a preferred language for the user interface
without affecting the output of the front-end. - Show posts with incomplete translations in a dashboard widget.
18. TablePress
The TablePress is a great plugin that lets you insert beautiful, customizable, sortable, filterable, paginatable data table into WordPress posts.
More features:
- Easy to create your own table with a pretty easy generator UI.
- Allows import and export tables.
- Fully customizable CSS styles.
17. Download Monitor
Download monitor is a WordPress plugin used to insert and manage downloadable files (e.g. Zips, images, EXEs) on your site.
Key features:
- Add, edit and remove downloads from a familiar WP interface; Your downloads are just like posts.
- Quick-add panel for adding downloads / files whilst editing posts.
- Add multiple file versions to your downloads each with their own data like download count and file links.
- Define alternative links (mirrors) per download version.
- Categorize, tag, or add other meta to your downloads.
- Display download links on the frontend using shortcodes.
- Change the way download links get displayed via template files.
- Track downloads counts and log user download attempts.
- Member only downloads, requires users to be logged in to download your files.
- Customisable endpoints for showing pretty download links.
16. WP Migrate DB
The plugin allows you to migrate your database by finding and replacing data with just one click.
Advanced features:
- Replace GUIDs.
- Exclude spam comments.
- Exclude temporary cached data.
- Compatible with old Mysql.
- Exclude post revisions.
- Allows to set maximum request size.
15. All in One SEO Pack
Yet another generic, multi-functional, and commonly used WordPress SEO plugin. It is a great alternative to the Yoast SEO plugin that is easy and works out of the box for WordPress beginners.
Key features:
- Google AMP.
- Google XML Sitemap.
- Google Analytics.
- Image XML Sitemap.
- Automatically notifies search engines.
- Site performance optimizer.
- Automatically generates Meta tags.
- 57+ languages.
- Much more…
14. Attachments
Attachments is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to simply append any number of items from your WordPress Media Library to Posts, Pages, and Custom Post Types.
The plugin gives developers the ability to directly associate Media items with any post. This is accomplished by adding a meta box to post edit screens as determined by the developer. Once Media items have been associated with a post, you’re able to retrieve those Attachments and include them directly within your template files using any specific markup you wish.
13. Stream
The Stream plugin is designed for multi-user WordPress site that displays all logged-in user actions in an activity stream and organizes them for easy filtering by User, Role, Context, Action or IP address. Also support 3rd plugins such as Jetpack, WooCommerce, WordPress SEO by Yoast and more.
12. Custom Field Suite
Yet another custom field plugin that lets you create and manage custom fields on your WordPress site. The plugin currently includes over 12 field types, including text, date, WYSIWYG, file upload, relationship, user, and loop (repeatable fields), and much more. It also features an elegant, lightweight API for loading (and saving) field values.
11. Members
Members is a plugin for WordPress based CMS that makes it possible to control over your blog users with ease.
Features:
- Role Editor: Allows you to edit, create, and delete roles as well as capabilities for these roles.
- Multiple User Roles: Give one, two, or even more roles to any user.
- Explicitly Deny Capabilities: Deny specific caps to specific user roles.
- Clone Roles: Build a new role by cloning an existing role.
- Content Permissions: Gives you control over which users (by role) have access to post content.
- Shortcodes: Shortcodes to control who has access to content.
- Widgets: A login form widget and users widget to show in your theme’s sidebars.
- Private Site: You can make your site and its feed completely private if you want.
- Plugin Integration: Members is highly recommended by other WordPress developers. Many existing plugins integrate their custom roles and caps directly into it.
10. WP Discourse
This plugin allows you to use Discourse as the community engine for a WordPress blog.
Features:
- Automatically creates a forum topic for discussion when a new blog post is published.
- Associates WP author accounts with their respective Discourse accounts. Does not require SSO.
- Replies from the forum discussion can be embedded in the WP blog post. Select which replies to display based on post score and commenter “trust level”.
9. SiteOrigin Page Builder
A drag and drop page builder for WordPress. Implemented as an easy-to-use plugin.
8. WordPress Plugin Update Checker
This is an unofficial plugin update checker for WordPress plugins. It is useful to automatically update WordPress plugins which are NOT hosted on the official WordPress plugin repository.
7. Query Monitor
Query Monitor is a debugging plugin for WordPress performance that has the ability to monitor database queries, hooks, conditionals, HTTP requests, query vars, environment, redirects, and more.
6. S3-Uploads
The WordPress plugin automatically uploads and stores your media files on Amazon S3 to reduce page load time and improve SEO rankings.
5. Jetpack
A powerful toolkit to enhance, socialize and secure your WordPress plugin with just one click install.
What’s included:
- Free SEO and Traffic tools.
- Securiry and Backup tools.
- Easier content creation.
- And much more.
4. Yoast SEO
This stands as one of the most popular WordPress plug-ins currently for bloggers and it’s one of the best ways that you can optimize every post on your blog. Yoast SEO can turn almost anyone into an SEO expert with ongoing alerts on how every post can be improved. Yoast recognizes elements in posts such as how to write a proper meta-description, how to identify various keywords or improve keywords and how you can format your post with full custom titles, sitemaps, image tags and more.
Main Features:
- Snippet preview
- Page Analysis
- Technical WordPress SEO
- XML Sitemaps
- Customizable Meta and Link elements
- RSS Optimization
- Breadcrumbs
- Social integration
- Multi-site compatible
- Multi-languages
3. meta-box
A powerful and extensible plugin that helps you manage and handle custom fields and meta boxes in your WordPress site.
Features:
- Supports 40+ custom field types.
- Useful options for custom fields.
- Easy to extend with API & hooks.
- Easy to customize the look & feel.
- Lightweight and well coded.
2. AMP
Yet another WordPress plugin that automatically adds Google Accelerated Mobile Pages functionality to your WordPress site. AMP makes your website faster and more readability for mobile users.
1. Woocommerce
The Woocommerce plugin might be the best and most popular WordPress plugin for eCommerce websites and online stores.
The plugin allows you to sell anything (both physical and digital goods) in all shapes and sizes, offer product variations, multiple configurations, and instant downloads to shoppers, and even sell affiliate goods from online marketplaces.
More features:
- Ship wherever you like.
- Extensive payment options: Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, BACS (bank transfers), and much more.
- Fully controllable and customizable.
- Can be integrated with virtually any service via REST API.
