WordPress plugins are powerful tools designed to extend the features and abilities of the highly popular content management system WordPress. At present, there are around 19,000 free plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Directory, which account for millions of downloads from around the world. If you are wondering what plugins to install, you’re not alone!

If you ask med what plugins to use and how many you should install, I’m afraid you won’t get a straight answer. The truth is, you should not install a plugin unless you truly need it. Also, you have to make sure that the plugins you install are created by professionals and recently updated. Therefore, you should always have a strategy, do good research and know what you want the plugin to do for you before you install anything. It is also wise to backup your WordPress site before going into action. This can be easily done if you have a backup plugin.

Below you will find more than 50 of the best WordPress plugins. Use this list for inspiration or to find exactly what you are looking for and please give us feedback in the comment section. Don’t forget to share this post with your friends, as well. While checking each of the items I have compiled for you, remember that WordPress is faster with lesser plugins so avoid the temptation of downloading them all. If you want more useful plugins check out this article on tripwire magazine.

SharePlus – A Beautiful Way To Share – MORE INFO

Share+ is a very powerful & highly customizable social sharing WordPress plugin which creates a new social sharing experience for your site users. It comes with five pre made themes which allows for high customisability with the power of CSS. Replace the long list of unusable sharing buttons on your webpage with a neat, simple and organised sharing experience.

Captcha For WordPress (free) – MORE INFO

Implementing security Captchas into web forms will be possible with this plugin.

MyMail – Email Newsletter Plugin for WordPress – MORE INFO

This is a simple, but feature rich Email Newsletter Plugin for WordPress. It is a powerful solution to create, send and track your Newsletter Campaigns.

UberMenu – Top WP Megamenu – MORE INFO

UberMenu is a user-friendly, highly customizable mega menu ( or mega drop down menu ) – among the very best WordPress plugins. It works out of the box with the WordPress 3 Menu Management System, making it simple to get started but powerful enough to create highly customized and creative mega menu configurations.

Paid Downloads (free) – MORE INFO

This plugin will allow you to market digital content and receive payments through InterKazza, Payza or PayPal. After payment is completed, the plugin will deliver the download link.

Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin – MORE INFO

Create a responsive (mobile friendly) or full width slider with awesome animation effects. Customize this slider with our convenient drag&drop backend to your very needs. This plugin features tons of unique transition effects, an image preloader, video embedding, autoplay that stops on user interaction and lots of easy to set options to create your own effects.

BackUpWordPress (free) – MORE INFO

This plugin will back up your whole site, including your files and database according to a specified schedule.

Highlight Search Terms (free) – MORE INFO

This plugin is a super lightweight jQuery script, which wraps search terms in HTML5 tag if the referrer is within the WP search results or a search engine.

uSquare – Universal responsive grid for WordPress – MORE INFO

uSquare is a wordpress responsive squared grid that can display your content in a unique and interesting way. You can use it for displaying team members, products, services, designs, blog posts or anything else that comes to your mind. In our live preview we have included 3 modifications of the original file in order for you to see how uSquare can serve your purpose.

Social Slider (free) – MORE INFO

Social Slider will add links to social networking site profiles in a box that float on the left side of the screen.

ROYALSLIDER – MORE INFO

RoyalSlider for WordPress is a cross-device jQuery content slider with touch-based navigation and fluid layout. It has user-friendly admin area where you can manage slides, change slider settings, customize interface and add blocks-captions using custom WYSIWIG editor.

Sponsors Carousel (free) – MORE INFO

Sponsor Carouse displays thumbnail banners or images using jQuery jCarousel.

CSS3 Responsive Web Pricing Tables – MORE INFO

This is a pack of pure CSS3 Web Pricing Tables Grids For WordPress with 2 table styles and 12 predefined color versions including hover states.

Erident Custom Login and Dashboard (free) – MORE INFO

This plugin will allow you to customize your WordPress dashboard and login screen easily. You can change the background image, colors, dashboard footer, styles, add a logo, etc.

Quform – WordPress Form Builder – MORE INFO

If you use WordPress, require custom forms and don’t like wasting time or simply don’t want to touch any code then this is the must have tool for you. Quform WordPress is a plugin that allows you to build multiple forms in WordPress easily and quickly with total control. If it’s a complex quote or booking form or just a simple contact form, Quform plugin will allow you to do this without touching any code. In a few clicks you will have a fully functional form. It’s that simple.

Gravity Forms – MORE INFO

Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building. Select your fields, configure your options and easily embed forms on your WordPress powered site using the built-in tools.

Readers from RSS 2 Blog Lite (free) – MORE INFO

Turn your Blog RSS feed into a marketing machine to increase your audience and sales through this plugin.

Broken Link Checker (free) – MORE INFO

 

Broken Line Checker will check all your contents for missing images and broken links, and inform you if one is found.

Ninja Popups for WordPress – MORE INFO

Ninja Popups is a professionally designed popup plugin that will help convert visitors on your website into taking an action. Whether it is subscribing to your newsletter, locking content until they share etc. you can increase your subscriber count and social signal of your site with this plugin. It is indeed a powerful tool, but use it with caution! Some people find popups very annoying.

Design Approval System (free) – MORE INFO

This is a plugin that will help you streamline the task of acquiring photos or designs that were approved by clients.

Sidebar & Widget Manager for WordPress – MORE INFO

With this premium WordPress plugin you’ll get full control over Page Content, Sidebars (Widget areas) and Widgets. When you “widgetize” a page you can drop and drag widgets in page content area with vertical or Horizontal widgets alignment. And you can create custom sidebars so you can display relevant content on different pages.

WP Feedback, Survey & Quiz Manager Pro – MORE INFO

FSQM , is a WordPress plugin which can help you collect Feedbacks, Surveys or host Quizes on your WordPress website. Using it, you can create unlimited forms with custom themes and collect user submissions. All user submissions are stored inside the database which you can analyze, edit and/or print. The user can also track/see their submission (obviously if you wish to) through a page.

Global Gallery – WordPress Responsive Gallery – MORE INFO

Create fully responsive galleries fastly and with ease on your website. Global Gallery comes with three gallery layouts, four lightboxes ready to use and is designed to be visible on each device – whether you are using a retina MacBook or an Android phone. Choose if display your images with a classic gallery layout, a masonry one or with the new PhothoString one. Sort images, set the author, description and title. Finally, set the thumbnail center to display images always correctly. With Global Gallery you can make everything in few seconds!

The Countdown Pro – MORE INFO

The countdown functionality can easily be added to a content or sidebar area and let your users know the counts. With counting down and up functionality, gives you a full control to your counter. This plugin comes with shortcode generator and a mutli instances sidebar widget, packed with bunch of options. All styles and scripts area pulled in the header section. Every each counter have their own selector that enables you to create specifics style or script to the selector.

Security Ninja – MORE INFO

This plugin combines years of industry’s best practices on security in one plugin. It has been featured on CodeCanyon – check it out.

Magic Members – Plugin WordPress – MORE INFO

A premium WordPress membership plugin that allows you to create a closed site that’s only available to paying members. It offers lots of great features to totally customize your WP site and transform it into a professional premium content members-only website that’s easy to use. Magic Members best WordPress plugins also allows you to sell your posts and downloads separately.

WordPress SEO by Yoast (free) – MORE INFO

This SEO plugin is very powerful and a real favourite among WordPress users. It is an “all in one” SEO plugin with a variety of options that are just awesome! The features include a snippet preview that will show you how your page will appear in the search results; as well as page analysis that helps you keyword optimize the content, images titles, meta descriptions and more. This feature is great for SEO learners as it provides SEO best practice as you write within the post edit page. Further it inserts a visual overview of how well posts are optimized using traffic light coloring in the posts list.

WordPress SEO plugin is a great plugin that will help you get your on page SEO right. Search engines are an important source of traffic for many websites. Having a good SEO plugin will help you get their attention and provide the content in a way search engines are expecting it.

Menu by User Role for WordPress – MORE INFO

Menu by User Role for WordPress is a great little plugin that gives you the ability to create a Public Menu, a menu for users Logged in and menus for each User Role defined in your WordPress website. The plugin gives you complete control over the menus in your WordPress powered website.

Interactive World Maps – MORE INFO

This is a WordPress plugin to create as many maps as you want, with interactive and colored markers, countries or regions.

attentionGrabber: WordPress Notification Bar – MORE INFO

This is not directly a Facebook plugin, but it allows you to grab the attention of your visitors by placing a simple, fully customizable banner on your site. attentionGrabber is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to add a notification bar in your website or blog. With this plugin you can easily display Facebook Like button, custom texts, Twitter posts and even Feed RSS.

Justified Image Grid – Premium WordPress Gallery – MORE INFO

This WordPress jQuery plugin aligns your thumbnails into a responsive and justified grid. Flickr and Google+ both featured images by their own implementation of this idea. This plugin behaves similarly. Let WordPress present your galleries in an eye-catching and unique new way! You have the control over every aspect: appearance, on the fly desaturation, color overlays, captions with details, lightboxes, animation. It’s easy to install and setup and it comes with 9 pre-sets out of the box.

Media Grid – WordPress Responsive Portfolio – MORE INFO

Media Grid allow you to create unlimited responsive and filterable portfolios with ease. The plugin uses the latest CSS3 and jQuery technologies to adapt each portfolio to its container. No matter if is wide or short, the grid will be always displayed correctly. Also in responsive themes, you can choose if use the automatic resizing system or set a relative width to keep the grid items always on the same size, they will be placed in the best way possible to ensure the best layout. Lastly, Media Grid integrates each item with Pinterest , the new popular social network.

Thumbnail Scroller – MORE INFO

This Plugin will help you to easily add a thumbnail scroller to your WordPress website or blog. The scroller is completely customizable, resizable and is compatible with all browsers and devices (iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones). You will be able to insert it in any page or post you want with an inbuilt short code generator.

LayerSlider – MORE INFO

This is the WordPress plugin of LayerSlider! You can create as many layers and sublayers as you want. You can use unlimited images with links. The script is very user-friendly, you can add global settings or local (per slide) settings to each layer or sublayer. You can change delay times, easing types, durations and much more.

Fanciest Author Box – MORE INFO

Fanciest Author Box is a WordPress is a very feature-rich author bio plugin automatically added before or after (or both!) your posts, pages and custom post types. It has widgets for Major Social Networks: Twitter bio, latest tweet, Facebook Subscribe, Google+ Add to Circles button. This will make you instantly recognizable and easy to connect with your audience.

Ether Content Builder WordPress Plugin – MORE INFO

Ether Content Builder WordPress Plugin is a powerful tool for building custom content pages. It is equipped with many commonly used widgets that can be laid out via interactive drag&drop interface.

WP Ajax Grid – MORE INFO

“WP Ajax Grid” is a WordPress Plugin which allows you to create dynamic grids of wordpress posts loaded with AJAX technology using a simple shortcode controlled by several parameters.

Easy Restaurant Menu Manager (free) – MORE INFO

The Easy Restaurant Menu Manger plugin is great news for restaurant managers who want to display their eatery’s menu online and also want easy editability. Quite simply, this plugin has everything you need to create beautiful menus that display right on your WordPress restaurant site. Add categories, name them whatever you want, set their order, and add food titles and descriptions. Choose whether or not to display the prices.

This plugin is well-supported and highly versatile. It could be used for any kind of pricing menu, from spas, salons and boutiques to auto service stations and contracting companies.

Social Network Tabs For WordPress – MORE INFO

Combine all of your favorite social networks profiles & feeds into slick slide out or static tabs with Social Network Tabs for WordPress. Fast loading with each social network feed loaded using AJAX only when required!

SLIDER PRO – WordPress Slider Plugin – MORE INFO

Slider PRO is one of the most powerful slider plugins for WordPress on the market (some buyers have been saying that it’s actually the best). The slider offers you 100+ customizable properties, 100+ possible transition effects, 10+ skins and much more. Also, the slider’s administration area is very powerful and uses the default WordPress design, which WordPress users are already familiar with. This slider plugin is carefully coded, using WordPress development best practices, to avoid conflicts with other themes and plugins that are well coded. Please take a look at the list of features at the feature page.

WPSequencer – CSS3 slider constructor for WordPress – MORE INFO

WPSequencer is truly unique WordPress slider plugin. With simple to use drag and drop slider builder you can create stunning animation in minutes. 40+ predefined animation presets and Google fonts support – out of the box!

WordPress Post Planner – MORE INFO

Post Planner makes running a multi-author blog a breeze. You can easily set a due date for posts and assign a post to an author. You can also gather research without cluttering up your post drafts and easily insert references, files, and even images into your post.

It’s easy to configure Post Planner to exactly your needs with a comprehensive settings section. There’s also plenty of actions and hooks built into the code for use by developers.

WP Best Tree – WordPress Plugin – MORE INFO

This plugin improve usability for categories meta boxes on the post editing screen. In WordPress, after a post is published, the selected categories are no longer displayed in a hierarchical and climb to the top of the list. This plugin maintains the hierarchy of categories even after the post was published.

FontPress – Font Manager Plugin – MORE INFO

Personalize your wordpress website with customized fonts. With FontPress you can do that without put your hands on any file or writing any line of code. Forget wasting time in editing your CSS or JS files to test a single font, with FontPress it’s all very simple.

Usernoise Pro advanced Modal Feedback & Debug – MORE INFO

Usernoise Pro is a WordPress plugin for gathering and discussing public feedback using a modal window. Users can leave their thoughts, comments and rate them. Also, deep debug info can be gathered every time feedback is submitted.

Subscribers Magnet – MORE INFO

Created by MaxBlogPress, these best WordPress plugins allows you to easily integrate email list sign-up forms into nearly every section of your current WP site. Doing so helps you grow your email based newsletter subscription and earn more revenue from your website. Growing a well targeted email subscription list is highly desired by online publishers because it’s one of the best marketing tools available, it increases the probability of additional purchases, and it encourages customer loyalty.

Multipurpose Bookshelf Slider – MORE INFO

Multipurpose Bookshelf Slider – WordPress Plugin is useful for displaying products such as books, magazines, dvd, cd and others. It’s a way to showcase products in an attractive manner. Features of “lightbox” to display images, videos (Youtube and Vimeo) and any html content (WordPress editor). Can be added detailed content to each product. Easy to add into WordPress using widgets or shortcodes.

After The Deadline – WordPress Grammar Plugin (free) – MORE INFO

The use of good writing skills and grammar is important to get good ranking in search engines and also to leave the right impression with your readers. Your WordPress installation has a spell checker already, but this plugin will give you a quick proofreading assistant. I checks your content against bias language, clichés, double negatives, jargon, hidden verbs, and more. do some proofreading really quickly.

Pretty Link (free) – MORE INFO

Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. Unlike other link shrinking services, this plugin allows you to create shortlinks coming from your own domain! Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host.

VidEmbed Video Plugin – MORE INFO

VidEmbed is a powerful simple to use solution to adding videos inline within your WordPress posts, pages, and widget areas. With support for both self-hosted videos as well as YouTube and Vimeo you can quickly add videos from many sources. With the explosion of media on the web it is important to be able to easily and quickly provide video content to your site visitors.

Elegant themes Drag & Drop Plugin – MORE INFO

Never touch a line of HTML again and never deal with tons of messy shortcodes. With the Elegant Themes Builder, you can create beautiful layouts through our advanced visual editor. The Elegant Themes Builder is a plugin that provides some incredible tools for structuring the content on your page. The plugin creates a visual drag-and-drop canvas where you can add, arrange and re-size advanced elements on your page. This builder appears below the normal text editor when you create a post or page, creating a unique canvas for each. The builder allows to you quickly create columns, sliders, tabs, buttons, toggles, boxes and so much more.

Sticklr WP – Sticky Side Panel WordPress Plugin – MORE INFO

Stickr WP, a sticky side panel menu WordPress plugin. Inspired by Envato site-switcher, after released as CSS3 +jQuery, due to popular demand I decided to create this WordPress plugin version. The features are similar with jQuery version, only WordPress version has an intuitively easy administration panel, so you don’t have to know the coding behind it.

Menu Management Enhancer for WordPress – MORE INFO

The WordPress 3 Menu Management System is excellent, but it can be a bit cumbersome if you’re managing many menu items. The Menu Management Enhancer for WordPress aims to improve the menu management user experience.

Admin Menu Tree Page View (free) – MORE INFO

This WordPress plugin adds all your pages to the admin menu, so all your pages will always be available within just one click, no matter where you are in the admin area. You can also add pages directly in the tree and you can quickly find your pages by using the search box.

CMS Tree Page View (free) – MORE INFO

Adds a CMS-like tree overview of all your pages and custom posts to WordPress – much like the view often found in a page-focused CMS. Within this tree you can edit pages, view pages, add pages, search pages, and drag and drop pages to rearrange the order. I personally use this plugin on some site where I have many pages.

Facebook Likebox Slider for WordPress – MORE INFO

This is a powerful social sharing plugin for Facebook and other social sites.

Vaultpress – MORE INFO

Vaultpress is premium backup service for WordPress, brought to you by Autommatic, creator of WordPress. Vaultpress backups your blog’s database, theme files and plugins, keeping multiple revisions (real time) so you can always revert back to any prefered copy.