20+ Best WordPress Plugins For Beginners | (Free & Paid)

Searching for the best WordPress plugins to take your site to the next level in 2025? Well, the problem is solved. I have provided a list of 20+ best WordPress plugins for a website.

Searching for the right plugins for your website could be a heavy task and this is why I’m sharing this information.

Depending on my research and experience, I have created a full list of plugins that can give boost to your site.

With the help of this list, you will know which plugin is best for your website according to your need whether it is an e-commerce website or a blog.

WordPress directory have over 55,000+ Plugins you can choose from according to your need. Which makes it extremely friendly for new users to find the right plugin.

My readers also often asked for the best WordPress plugin suggestion for SEO, social media, backups, speed, email marketing.

Being an expert about WordPress, I’ve tested many paid and free WordPress plugins. I want my users to get the best solutions.

Remember, I change plugins when any new and better plugins came out, so I suggest you bookmark this page and keep checking to see the updated list of plugins.

If you just started with WordPress, you should first read: How to install WordPress Plugins.

Quick List of Must-Have Best WordPress Plugins:

• MonsterInsights — The best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. See how visitors find and use your website, so you can keep them coming back
• WPForms Lite — The best WordPress contact form plugin. Drag & Drop online form builder that helps you create beautiful contact forms.
• WP Mail SMTP — The most popular WordPress SMTP and PHP Mailer plugin. Trusted by over 1 million sites.
• OptinMonster — The best WordPress popup and marketing plugin.
• Visualizer — Best Tables and Charts WordPress Plugin
• Yoast SEO — Leading WordPress SEO Plugin
• W3 Total Cache — Best WordPress Caching Plugin
• Smush — Top WordPress Image Optimization Plugin
• Lazy Load by WP Rocket — Great Page Speed Booster
• Insert Headers and Footers — Easily Changes Headers & Footers
• Duplicator — Best WordPress Site Migration Tool
• Shortcodes Ultimate — Top Shortcodes Plugin
• Broken Link Checker — Great Broken Link Check Software
• Easy Google Fonts — Best WordPress Google Fonts Plugin
• Autoptimize — Great Minifying Plugin for WordPress
• Login Lockdown — Popular Login Security App
• WordPress Importer — Best WordPress Import Tool
• Disable Comments — Easily Disable Comments
• WP-Optimize — Best WordPress Database Cleanup Plugin
• Code Snippets — Simple WordPress Code Snippets
• Redirection — Best Redirection Tool
• Advanced Custom Fields — Great Custom Fields App
• WP Product Review — Best Product Review Plugin
• Add Expires Headers — This plugin will help to decrease page loading time and optimize your website by adding expires headers of various file types.
• Easy Table of Contents — Adds a user friendly and fully automatic way to create and display a table of contents generated from the page content.
• Jetpack by WordPress.com — The ideal plugin for stats, related posts, search engine optimization, social sharing, protection, backups, security and more.
• Social Snap Lite — The best social sharing plugin. Share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. Click to Tweet and more.
• WP Fastest Cache — The simplest and fastest WP Cache system
• ThirstyAffiliates — Best Affiliate link management & cloaker tool. Easily manage, shrink and track your affiliate links in WordPress.
• MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress — Mailchimp for WordPress, the #1 unofficial Mailchimp plugin.

Here’s detailed explanation on some of the most listed plugins:

MonsterInsights – Google Analytics Plugin

MonsterInsights gives you an easy way to connect your WordPress website to your Google Analytics account. With the help of MonsterInsights, you can see and analyze traffic on your website.

The best part about the MonsterInsights is it shows you every important stats that matter for your WordPress site

With the help of MonsterInsights, you can optimize your website to increase more traffic, subscribers, and revenue. I have given detailed guides on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

MonsterInsights comes with a free version with limited features, to unlock its true power you need to upgrade to the premium version.

MonsterInsights Features:

• Dashboard Reports: Can see real-time stats of the website in the dashboard of WordPress.
• Universal Tracking: You will get every visitor’s information. In other words, if your site visitors switch from mobile device to a desktop or changes its country, you’ll still get accurate data counts.
• Awesome Pro Features: The premium version helps you track your eCommerce stats, traffic sources, ads efforts, MonsterInsights Forms addon. MonsterInsights Forms lets you see your form conversion rates so you can increase more site traffic and grow your online business.

Yoast SEO – For WordPress

Yoast SEO is one of the best and most used plugin for WordPress. It helps you to make great SEO compatible content. This is a free WordPress plugin, it works like a powerhouse for a blog.

Yoast SEO optimize your site SEO, On-Page SEO & Social SEO. This is a must-have a plugin for any WordPress user, and you can learn how to setup Yoast SEO for your site.

Yoast SEO comes with two options ( Free & Paid) Free version gives you most of the features. But if you want more features like, more keywords to add, Internal linking suggestions, Redirections, then you have to upgrade to the premium version.

Yoast SEO Features:

• Web Previews: You can see your content’s search snippet. You can see How your snippet will look like on search engines.
• Indicator help: Yoast SEO gives you green light and red light either your content is SEO optimized or not.
• Other Helpful Tools: You can set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content and Google penalities and other tools.
• It helps you add meta tags, automatically generate sitemaps, verify your site on Google Search Console, Bing webmaster, etc. Optimize it for Social media, and more

Smush – For WordPress

Smush is one of the best WordPress image optimization plugins, doing image optimization bring speed to your website. Images take up the majority of your website’s page load. Without image optimization makes your website loading times suffer.

Smush takes the hassle of image optimization for your website automatically, And, optimizes the images so your website can load faster on the browser. The faster loading website helps to reach more visitors.

It comes with many more features like minimizing the Js & CSS and other kinds of stuff. You can use it if you have problem with large images.

Smush Features:

• Uses Own Servers – Smush uses its own server to do the work, not yours.
• No Quality Loss – It does everything without losing the image quality, and helps to perform your website at optimal speeds and continues to rank in search results.
• Automatic Optimization: As being a free plugin it works more than a premium plugin, it automatically resizes, optimizes, and compresses all of the images.

Insert Headers and Footers – Plugin

Insert Headers and Footers is one of the coolest plugin, sometimes you need to add some extra codes into your site’s header, body, and footer sections to enable certain functionality like Google Analytics tracking, site verifying codes, Google Adsense codes, or custom CSS.

With the help of this plugin (Insert Headers and Footers), you can do it easily. Because sometimes adding extra codes directly through your theme editor can cause serious troubles, It can really make something bad with your theme. I really recommend you not do this if you are not familiar with coding, but if you are familiar with coding you can do it.

Insert Headers and Footers Features:

• Flexibility – You can insert any code or script, including HTML and Javascript easily.
• Installation – Easy to install plugin, just search and install.
• Easy to Use – You have a simple interface to insert any codes and let the plugin do the rest for you. You’ll never have to worry about messing with your themes and breaking your site.

Autoptimize – For WordPress

Autoptimize works great with your site and speeds up your site. It helps to increase your site’s speed dramatically, which helps with SEO, drive more traffic to your site, and boosting conversions and sales.

Autoptimize makes the optimization in your site really easy. It minifies and cache scripts and styles, Auto inject the CSS in the page head. Inlines the critical CSS in the site. It can also optimize and lazy-load images, optimize the Google Fonts, async non-aggregated Javascript, removes the WordPress core emoji cruft, and many more.

Autoptimize Features

• Helps: Helps with minifying, which means it removes any unnecessary characters from your websites, it combines multiple separate files into one.
• Automatic optimization – It automatically optimizes your site’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.
• Performance – It helps in increasing website performance.

WP Product Review – Best WordPress Plugins

If you are an affiliate marketer and regularly add product reviews on your website, then you’ll definitely love the WP Product Review plugin.

Giving reviews with this plugin makes more engagement with the visitors. You can give a star rating to any products and many more features.

WP Product Review Feature:

• Simple Import – With the import option, you can save your time by getting the product name, picture, price, and affiliate link directly from Amazon.
• Tables – Automatically generate or create comparison tables with data from previous reviews.
• Stars – Provides a star rating to the product.
• Price – WP Product Review costs $59/year or a one-time payment of $236.

Add Expires Headers

Adding Expires Headers can improve your website loading speed by caching various types of static files in the browser of User. This plugin is very lightweight but it impacts loading speed for the site.

Add Expires Headers Features:

• Loading Time: It reduces the page loading time of the website. Decrease the total data-size of the page..
• User Experience: Have an improved user experience as page loads very quickly than before.
• Increasing Bandwidth: A larger band of predefined file types are covered types are covered so it will increase the bandwidth of files that can have expiry headers.

Easy Table of Contents

Easy Table of Contents if one of the most popular plugins ever with over 200,000+ Installations. Having more features than any other plugins, super smooth scrolling. This plugin is completely free to use, you can see my table of contents for example.

Easy Table of Contents Features:

• Auto-insertion- This plugin auto-insert the table of content into the page, or post.
• Easy Method – Having easy to understand options to configure when and where to insert the table of contents.

Jetpack – Best WordPress Plugin By Automattic

This is the most used plugins by any WordPress user, even I’m using this plugin right now. This is a multi-purpose plugin for WordPress plugin.

Jetpack plugin comes in two versions Free & Premium. You’ll get most of the plugin feature for free, but if you need more advanced features you need to upgrade to the premium version.

This plugin is power-packed. Some free features like site stats, contact form, mobile theme, social sharing button, and many more.

To use this plugin you need to have a free account on WordPress.com to use this plugin.

SocialSnap For Social Sharing

SocialSnap is also one of the best plugin to increase social engagements. It lets you add social sharing buttons &social follow buttons anywhere on the blog. This plugin gives a great look to the social sharing buttons, it provides many options such as floating sharing buttons, after post , fixed bar, and few other options.

If you need a single plugin to do all social work then this plugin would be a great choice. This plugin will cost you about $39 only for a yearly license.

This plugin also have a Analytic feature which is also highly useful and with the help of this, you can get stats right inside your WordPress dashboard.

WP Fastest Cache

This is the best cache plugin for WordPress websites. It automatically cleans the cache for you and optimizes your site for fast performance, this is a free plugin. ( Also have Premium Version)

Setting up this plugin is very easy. You don’t need to modify your .htaccess file, it modified automatically.

The free version gives you limited features, to use full features you need to upgrade in the premium version, Premium version have many features like many features such as Minify Html, Minify CSS, Enable Gzip Compression, Leverage Browser Caching, Add Expires Headers, Combine CSS, Combine JS, Disable Emoji.

Thirsty Affiliates – (Affiliate link Manager)

Thirsty Affiliates gives bloggers the tool to monetize their WordPress website with affiliate links. It works as an affiliate link manager for your website. It changes long affiliate links into an easy to understand links, (Like bit.ly & tinyurl.com).

Having great features in this plugin, there’s also a downside of this plugin which is sometimes it skips spam trackback and comments or legit comments land in the spam folder.

If you are completely frustrated with spam comments, them you can use Akismet, to use you need an API key. You can get one by following this article.

Bonus Information:

Besides from these 20+ Best WordPress plugin that I mentioned above, I also use and recommend these following plugins to make your website more creative.

• Adobe Photoshop – It helps me to create blog thumbnails and other images for my article.
• Cloudflare – It helps to speed up my website by geographically spreading my content to multiple servers. ( What is CDN )
• Contact Form by BestWebSoft – Best contact us form maker.
• Merge + Minify + Refresh – Easy Js,CSS minifier

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