Best WordPress Plugins 2021

Best WordPress Plugins:- I will tell you the best WordPress plugins for 2019. This is my guide to the essential plugins for plugins, and these are plugins that I use on pretty much every single website that I set up.

As I said, I think they’re pretty much essential if you want to get the best from your WordPress website. Let’s get started.

Let’s jump into the plugins. I’ve got 16  best WordPress plugins free. I will tell you today. There could be a couple of premium plugin too.

You’re probably not going to use every single plugin on every single site that you set up. Maybe a few you will use on every single site definitely because they’re essential.

You also want to keep in mind when you’re adding plugins that the more plugins you add, the slower your site can run. Just be careful with the number of plugins running and only use the plugins that you need. Let’s see the WordPress plugins list.

Best WordPress Plugins

1. Duplicate Post

The first plugin I want to share with you is a simple little plugin, but it’s beneficial. It’s called Duplicate Post, and basically, it allows you to duplicate your post and pages and possibly some other stuff too.

I find it useful when you’ve got an existing post that you like, and it’s got a beautiful layout and format and whatever, and you want to create another post or page that’s got a similar layout and format.

You can use this plugin, make a copy of it, and it’ll even allow you to create a copy and make it as a new draught, and then go for it.

Edit the text, edit the images, and you’re ready to go. It’s a lot easier sometimes doing that than starting with a blank screen entirely from scratch.

I use this plugin on pretty much all of my sites because I find it useful and I’m surprised why they haven’t added this functionality to the WordPress core because it is beneficial.

2. Google Analytics

The next plugin is for Google Analytics, which is a service I recommend. If you’re not aware of Google Analytics, it allows you to track all the users and visitors to your website.

You can see what they’re doing, see where they’re coming from so that you can make some informed decisions around your website and your marketing and all that kind of stuff.

3. Happy Forms

The next plugin is a forms plugin. Most websites need a form. If you want to be able to kind of get in touch with you that kind of stuff, it’s good to have a form, especially on your contact us page.

I’m going to recommend a couple of plugins for this depending on how much money you’ve got and what sort of thing you’re looking to do.

For a straightforward essential sort of form, I would recommend HappyForms Plugin, which is as I said a free form plugin and easy to build some cool forms and add them to your pages and posts.

A premium plugin that I’m gonna recommend is Gravity Forms which is a plugin I use a lot. I’ve got a developer license which is a great value because you can then use it on as many sites as you like.

Now you might want Gravity Forms if you’re looking to do something a little bit more complicated. If you’re going to build a multi-page form where people have to fill a form and go to the next page, and you get that kind of status across the top.

It’s good at doing that Or maybe you want to integrate it with something like MailChimp or Constant Contact or do some other funky stuff with your forms.

The good thing about Gravity Forms is that it’s got a whole load of extensions that are available with a developer license I think. And you can add those gravity forms in it.

It does some cool technical advanced stuff. If you’ve got some complex form requirements, then go for Gravity Forms. If you just want a simple contact form, then HappyForms will probably do it just fine.

4.  Yoast SEO (best SEO plugin for WordPress)

So the next Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is for SEO. Now, as WordPress comes when you install, it is pretty good at SEO. It does most of the stuff right because it puts page titles in the right places, that kind of thing.

But if you want a little bit more control and you want to take your SEO to the next level, then you’re going to need a plugin. The plugin I’ve been using for quite some time is Yoast SEO.

It’s one of the more popular SEO plugins out there. It’s had millions of installs and I find it useful. A couple of things that I like about it is it makes it easy to optimize your content.

You add the keywords that you’re focusing on, and it will read all your content and it gives suggestions on how you can improve it.

It also generates an XML sitemap which you can then submit to Google, tell Google about the post and pages you’ve got on your site, how often you update them.

All kinds of stuff really and that can help your SEO and help you get indexed by Google and hopefully come up in the search results.

5. WP Fastest Cache

The next plugin is all around website speed. Now when it comes to website speed, the main factor is going to be your hosting funnily enough.

But if you got the best hosting but you want to go even faster, or maybe you’ve got rubbish hosting, and you can’t afford to change, and you want to squeeze a little bit more speed out of it then you’re going to want a performance plugin.

And then the one that I’m going to be recommending today is called WP Fastest Cache. It’s a free plugin, but there is a premium version available although I’m not quite sure if you need the premium version.

I’ve got both and not seen a lot of difference. You’re pretty okay with the free one. What does this plugin do? Is it sets up a caching system on your website?

Now without getting into too much techie stuff. A caching system is generally a good thing to have because what it will do is create the pages on your website.

Before a visitor comes to see them and when the visitor arrives, he can view this page straight away that’s already been generated without WordPress having to create the page every single time.

This plugin has also got a load of other performance-enhancing features including GZIP and optimizing your HTML and CSS and JavaScript all that kind of stuff.

Go check this plugin out. When you get it to install it, tick all the boxes and see what effect it has on your speed.

6. Elementor Page Builder

So 2019 is the year of the WordPress page builder. End of last year we had WordPress version five released and with that came the Gutenberg editor.

Now Gutenberg is a page builder, post builder type of thing. It’s got blocks, and you can drag and drop them. Add elements that kind of stuff.

However, Gutenberg is a bit basic, and if you want something a little bit more convincing that allows you to create some beautiful pages and home pages and service pages and landing pages, you’re going to want Elementor plugin which is my preferred page builder right now.

There are others available, and they’re beautiful as well like Visual Composer and Cornerstone. But right now I’m just loving Elementor. It’s so easy to use, so powerful. You can drag and drop things onto your pages and your post.

It comes with a whole load of templates which they are quite a few included with the free version, but if you want some more, you need to upgrade to pro.

I find it makes web design with WordPress so much easier and quicker and better. So if you haven’t seen Elementary, go check it out. Go and install it now.

It works best with themes that I think are designed for it, but I’m pretty sure it will work with any theme that you’ve got. Get it. Install it I think you’re going to like it.

7. Updraft

The next plugin certainly is an essential one. You’re pretty going to want to install this on every single WordPress website you create. It’s called Updraft, and it does backups.

Not exciting or anything like that but something that needs to be done because bad things can happen to your WordPress website. Things could go wrong when you run an update; you can break it yourself.

I mean that pretty easy. I’m breaking websites all the time. You can get hacked. There’s a lot of bad stuff that can happen to a WordPress website. So you want a safety net and that safety net is a backup.

The reason why I’ve chosen Updraft is it’s easy to use. You install it, and then you can generate a backup just by clicking a button. You can save the backup automatically to remote storage like Dropbox, Google drive, or something like that.

You can also download the backup to your computer for safekeeping too. Then when it comes to restoring the site, it’s pretty easy. You go to upload the backup files or restore them straight from within the plugin.

Makes the whole backup process easy. The plugin is free. I think there may be a premium version if you need some extra bells and whistles. If you’re not currently doing the backup of your WordPress website, then you need to start doing them today ideally.

Go and install this plugin, generate your backup, and you can sleep sound in the knowledge that your website is going to be okay.

8. Akismet

The next plugin often gets overlooked. I think it’s been included in pretty much all of my best plugins guides ever since I started doing WordPress and YouTube and all that kind of stuff. The plugin is Akismet.

Generally, it’s installed by default when you install WordPress. Although I think you need to turn it on and you do also need to go and get an API key. What Akismet free does is it’s get rid of all that horrible comment spam that is a bit of a problem with WordPress blogs.

You’ve probably noticed that on your site when you start adding content and you leave your comment forms on because obviously, you want some comments on your content .you to start getting loads of weird stuff coming through that comment form.

Trackbacks, pingbacks, other random comments often linking to dodgy drug sites. That kind of thing. You don’t want any of that, and it’s too much to do it manually going for every single comment and clicking the spam button. It’s too much.

Akismet does it all for you. It’s powered by servers that look at all the dodgy messages across all the WordPress websites. So they have a good idea in terms of which comments are spam or which ones are legit.

I’ve never seen this plugin spam a legit comment. So no problem is on that front. I install it on every single site. I activate it on every single site because as I said it’s generally installed by default.

It just gets rid of all the spam, and you don’t even notice it. It just does it in the background, and that’s how it should be. If you’re not running Akismet log in to your dashboard now, turn it on, get an API key, and say goodbye to comment spam.

9. Redirection

This plugin is handy as it allows you to create 301 redirects easily. If you don’t know what a 301 redirect is it allows you to redirect a visitor from an old URL to a new URL.

This is useful if you are creating a new website, for example, and the structure of the site has changed. You can repoint the old pages to the new page’s posts and products as well.

That way if a visitor follows an old link from somewhere on the internet they don’t hit your page and get a page not found. They’re seamlessly moved on to the new page, and they don’t even notice it.

I can’t stress how vital 301 redirects are if Google comes in and finds a page not found error 404 pages. Maybe Google followed a link on the internet somewhere, you’re going to get a bit penalized, and it’s going to start de-indexing your site and generally play have it with your SEO.

If you do create a new site and change structure you are going to wanna use this plugin to create your 301 redirects. Other cool features with this plugin are that if you change the URL on a post-it will automatically create a 301 redirect for you to the new URL.

So you don’t have to worry about that kind of thing and visitors getting lost and getting 404 pages and that kind of thing. Excellent plugin. It’s free and just useful.

10. Simple Sitemap

The next plugin is one that I use on pretty much every single WordPress site I create. It’s not very exciting, not interesting but it’s useful. It’s called Simple Sitemap (sitemap WordPress), and it allows you to create a sitemap page for your website.

That’s what it does. It does it well. It’s pretty flexible in terms of what you can show on the sitemap. I think that having a sitemap page is a good thing to have in terms of SEO and visitor experience.

You can create this page with the plugin. You can add a little link to it and to your footer. It makes your site look all legit and professional. I think it’s perfect for Google.

11. AddToAny Share Buttons

My next essential plugin is called AddToany Share Buttons. It allows you to add social sharing buttons to your post and your pages. The reason why I love this particular plugin is that it’s got so many options and so many features.

It’s really easy to set up. It gives you all that flexibility and allows you to add the social buttons that you want in the style that you want and in the location that you want. So highly recommend it.

12. Efficient Related Posts

The next plugin is a related posts plugin. If you want to add some posts to the bottom of your existing posts that are related. Does that make sense? Anyway, I think you get what I mean.

The reason why I like this plugin is that it’s effortless and straightforward. If you go, take a look at that post. Scroll down to the bottom.

You’ll see it in action. Add some excellent text links at the bottom of your posts to other related posts on your site. Related posts for WordPress is suitable for your internal linking, which is good for SEO.

It just kind of points visitors on to other content that they might be interested in and hopefully increases engagement and page views and all that kind of thing.

One thing to be aware of with related posts plugins is that they can be resource intensive and slow down your site. The good thing about this one is it doesn’t do that. It’s efficient, it works really, and it’s speedy. Check out the below Plugins as well.

1. Contextual Related Posts
2. Jetpack by WordPress.com
3. Inline Related Posts
4. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

13. Iubenda (Privacy Policy Generator)

The next plugin I’m going to recommend is attached to a service, and that service is Iubenda. Now what Iubenda offer is an easy way to create your privacy policy and your cookie policy and all that kind of stuff.

This plugin then enables you to add those things to your WordPress website easily. If you’re not running a privacy policy or a cookie policy on your site.

Then you really should, especially if you’re in Europe because those bureaucrats in Europe, they love coming up with laws where you need to add all this stuff to your site to stay legal.

if you’ve got a straightforward website without too much going on, then you could probably get away with just using that free version and create a very simple cookie and privacy policy.

That way if you’ve got a more advanced website maybe an e-commerce site, that kind of thing, Amazon affiliate site then you may need to upgrade to the paid version, but it only costs like seven dollars a month or something.

14. Maintenance

The next plugin is useful if you’re setting up a new site or you need to do some work on your site and you want to kind of take it offline, stop visitors looking at it while you’re doing some significant changes, that kind of thing.

The plugin is called Maintenance(maintenance WordPress plugin), and it does what it says. It allows you to put up a cool looking maintenance screen so that when visitors come to your site, and you’re doing some work, or maybe it’s a new site that’s not quite launched yet you usually have a nice with your phone numbers and your social network links.

That kind of stuff. You can turn it on and off as and when you need it. Simple, free, but useful.

15. TablePress

There’s a lot of plugins in this article, isn’t there? We’re nearly there. I’ve only got two more to share with you. Let’s get on with that. The next plugin is called TablePress.

I don’t use this on every single website because not every single site needs a table. But if you do need a table, then this one is pretty good. Allows you to add your data quickly.

You can import from Excel using CSV files that kind of stuff. You can see action on my WordPress hosting post. I mentioned it earlier. On that post, I’ve got tables with data, and I’m using this plugin.

It has a free version and a premium version. The basic version allows you to create necessary tables. I said a lot there. It’s pretty going to be excellent for most peoples needs.

If you want to add a few extra bells and whistles, maybe you want to make the table more responsive or add the functionality so that people can sort the data within the table then there are few extensions that available.

They’re only a few dollars, and you can just kind of pick and choose the ones you need. It’s a great plugin for tables. So go check out TablePress.

16. Really Simple SSL

Final plugin I want to share with you today is called Really Simple SSL. Most hosting companies nowadays provide you with a free SSL certificate, which is a perfect thing to have.

For those of you that don’t know, an SSL certificate allows people to connect to your site over a secure encrypted connection. That makes them feel beautiful and safe when they’re filling in forms or going for a checkout.

Now even though hosting companies provide you with a free SSL for WordPress, you do need to configure your WordPress website to make use of it. You install the plugin, turn it on, and the job’s done.