Personal or consumer-based installations have contributed to the popularity of some WordPress plugins. What about business? We’ve compiled a list of our favorite WordPress plugins that enable business users to capitalize on their content and drive results through search engines and social media via mobile, tablet, or desktop… and fully integrate their social and video strategies.
Having developed some popular WordPress plugins, I’m always enthusiastic about finding and sharing plugins that do an amazing job of enhancing, optimizing, and automating tasks within WordPress. WordPress plugins are both a blessing and a curse, though.
WordPress Plugin Issues
- Plugins sometimes leave security holes that hackers can exploit to install malware on your site.
- Plugins often fail to adhere to WordPress coding standards fully, introducing unnecessary code that can lead to other issues.
- Plugins are often poorly developed, which can cause internal data or performance issues.
- Plugins are often not supported, leaving users dependent on code that may become outdated and render their sites unusable.
- Plugins can leave a significant amount of data in your database, even after you uninstall the plugin. Developers could fix this, but often don’t worry about it.
WordPress has stepped up, expiring old plugins from view in their plugin repository and then approving new plugins manually to ensure they’re not poorly written. Since self-hosted WordPress instances allow you to install any plugin, you must do your homework or consult a trusted resource for recommendations.
Additionally, many of the Best WordPress plugin lists are tailored to personal blogger and don’t focus on businesses and their unique efforts in designing and developing content strategies that help to promote their business.
Below is a tried-and-true set of WordPress plugins for businesses that we believe are the best in the vast landscape of WordPress plugins.
Best WordPress Plugin for Site Backups and Migrations
- WP Migrate: There are quite a few great plugins out there for doing easy backups and migrations, but when you need to get granular on what files, themes, and plugins to backup or migrate, this plugin exceeds every expectation. You can also easily move sites between one another – even ratcheting down permissions on which sites can push or pull to one another.
Best WordPress Plugins to Engage and Convert Visitors
- Formidable Forms: Formidable Forms offers all the features you need to build powerful WordPress forms and data-driven web applications, including calculators, event registrations, payment forms, digital signatures, and more.
- Highlight & Share: A plugin for highlighting and sharing text via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email, Xing, WhatsApp, and more. It also has a built-in Gutenberg block that allows your users to Click to Share.
- OptinMonster: Create attention-grabbing opt-in forms that turn visitors into subscribers and customers. Choose from pop-ups, floating footer bars, slide-ins, and more to create your opt-in form in just 60 seconds.
- SearchWP: Enhance the default search functionality by indexing and making searchable all content types—including custom fields, documents, taxonomy terms, and more—offering highly customizable, relevant search results for site visitors.
- ShopWP: Unfortunately, WooCommerce doesn’t match Shopify’s features. This incredible plugin and integration bring the power of Shopify to WordPress, offering a seamless and enhanced user experience.
Best WordPress Plugins to Enhance Your WordPress Administration
- Advanced Admin Search: If you’ve ever tried to search for a specific title, tag, slug, or content, in your posts, you’re out of luck. This simple little plugin adds the ability to search for each using a qualifier. Eg.
slug:ai - AnalyticsWP: A privacy-first WordPress analytics plugin that reveals complete user journeys, real-time behavior, and conversion paths with unmatched accuracy—no setup, no third-party scripts.
- Better Search Replace: Sometimes, you need to run a search/replace on the database for content, links, or other settings. This plugin is an excellent option for doing that.
- Disable Comments: Comments were once very beneficial for search rankings and for engaging your site’s visitors; however, in recent years, spam comments have become almost unmanageable, and the conversation has shifted to social media channels. This plugin will disable all comment-related features and remove comment sections from being published on your site. You can also delete all published comments.
- Duplicate Page: If you ever need to duplicate your pages, posts, or other content, this plugin is a straightforward and effective option.
- Post List Featured Image: Adds the Featured Image column in the admin posts and pages list. It allows administrators to view which posts or pages have a featured image assigned.
- Quick Drafts Access: Are you managing a lot of drafts? If so, this plugin puts a great shortcut in your admin menu that will bring you directly to your drafts (as well as display a count).
- Regenerate Thumbnails Advanced: If you’re migrating to a new WordPress theme or using a plugin that displays images in different sizes, you may need to regenerate each thumbnail size to ensure they’re shown at the proper resolution and clarity. While many regeneration plugins work great, this plugin also offers additional features to remove files that are no longer needed or remove attachment references that no longer exist.
- Site Kit by Google: the one-stop solution for deploying, managing, and getting insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free. You can also integrate your Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google Reader Revenue Manager into your WordPress instance.
- Temporary Login Without Password: Sometimes you want to provide a theme or plugin developer with temporary access to your WordPress instance… but you can’t go through the process of having them register and get passwords via email. This plugin provides a direct, temporary link that they can use to log in to your site and assist you. You can also set the expiration time.
- WP All Import: An incredibly flexible collection of plugins for importing and exporting data from XML and CSV files into and out of WordPress and several popular plugins.
- One User Avatar: WordPress currently only allows you to use custom avatars uploaded through Gravatar. This plugin enables you to use any photo uploaded to your Media Library as an avatar.
Best WordPress Plugins for Layout and Editing
- Advanced Rich Text Tools for Gutenberg: This simple plugin provides all the capabilities you need for additional styling in the default Gutenberg editor with WordPress, including code, subscript, superscript, inline text, and background color editing.
- Elementor Pro: The native WordPress editor leaves much to be desired and can be quite frustrating. Elementor has come of age with a fantastic WYSIWYG editor, forms, integrations, layouts, templates, and dozens of other options, accompanied by several plugins to extend its capabilities. I’m not sure I will ever build a site without it!
Best WordPress Plugins to Power Up Your Content and Its Reach
- ARVE Advanced Responsive Video Embedder: Embedded videos can be a nightmare for maintaining responsive layouts on your site. WordPress natively embeds dozens of platforms but doesn’t ensure they’re responsive.
- Easy Social Share Buttons: This plugin enables you to share, monitor, and increase your social traffic with a slew of customization and analytics features.
- YaySMTP: Sending WordPress notifications, alerts, and automated emails from your hosting provider is asking for trouble. Using SMTP to send an email via your authorized service provider is far more secure and has a higher probability of being delivered. YaySMTP also provides a dashboard widget that informs you of the emails sent. We have articles showing how to set this up for Google or Microsoft.
- FeedPress: FeedPress automatically handles feed redirections and updates your feed in real-time each time you publish a new post.
- MailPoet: An all-in-one email marketing plugin for WordPress that allows users to create, send, and automate emails, including newsletters, welcome emails, and abandoned cart reminders, with a focus on ease of use, customization, and reliable delivery.
- Meta Box: A framework and collection of extendible plugins that make it easy for administrators, authors, and editors to customize WordPress by simplifying its administration. Meta Box is simple to implement and highly customizable. Purchase the additional licensed add-ons for access to incredible features.
- Push Monkey: Mobile push, web browser push, email, and in-app messages. Notify subscribers through browsers and push notifications with every post published.
- Podcast Feed Player Widget: This is a widget I developed that has gained considerable popularity. If you’re hosting your podcast elsewhere, you can enter the feed and insert your podcast in your sidebar or use a shortcode within a page or post. It utilizes WordPress’ native HTML audio player.
- GTranslate: Utilize this plugin and service to automatically translate your content and enhance your WordPress site’s international search visibility.
- Publish to Apple News: This enables your WordPress blog content to be published to your Apple News channel.
- Recently: Add a widget to your footer with your most recent content to provide valuable internal links and increased engagement. This plugin has a ton of design customization options.
- WP LinkedIn Auto Publish: This plugin is a must if you want to publish your posts to personal and company LinkedIn pages. Most others limit personal sharing.
- Revive Social: Why share your content just once when you could share great content repeatedly, driving engagement and realizing your content investment?
- WPPDF: Embed mobile-friendly PDFs easily in WordPress – and prevent your viewers from downloading or printing your original files.
Best WordPress Plugins to Optimize Your WordPress Site
- BunnyCDN: Achieve faster page load times, better Google rankings, and more conversions with BunnyCDN. Setup is simple and only takes minutes.
- Kraken: Optimizes images and thumbnails on the fly, allowing you to reduce image size and load times without compromising quality.
- Lazy Load for Videos: Embedded videos can significantly slow down your WordPress site. Lazy loading only embeds the video when a user opens the page and scrolls to the video, saving page load times.
- Object Cache Pro: A premier object caching solution for WordPress using Redis. This plugin is provided for free with Rocket managed WordPress hosting.
- String Locator: This plugin enables you to search for code within your themes and plugins when troubleshooting or optimizing your code.
- Video Link Checker: If you’ve a lot of videos embedded throughout your site, you’ll want to know if the videos have been removed or made private.
- WordPress SEO: Rank Math is a lightweight SEO Plugin that includes on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps, rich snippets, redirections, 404 monitoring, and a ton more features. The pro version has incredible support for rich snippets, multi-location, and more. Best of all, the code is incredibly well-written and doesn’t slow down your site as much as other WordPress SEO plugins.
- WebP Express: A free plugin that adds webp support to your WordPress site if your host has the appropriate libraries installed.
- WP Rocket: Make WordPress load fast in a few clicks. This is recognized as the most powerful caching plugin by WordPress Experts.
Best WordPress Plugin for Cookie and Data Compliance
As a business, you must comply with international, federal, and state regulations that govern how you track and store your visitors’ data. I utilized the Jetpack widget for cookie permissions, but it often loaded multiple times and lacked customization options.
- GDPR Cookie Consent (CCPA Ready): The GDPR Cookie Consent plugin helps you make your website GDPR (GDPR, RGPD, DSVGO) compliant. In addition to compliance with the GDPR, the WordPress plugin also supports cookie compliance per the LGPD of Brazil and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a state statute intended to enhance privacy rights and consumer protection for California residents.
Best WordPress Plugins to Protect Your WordPress Site
- Akismet: WordPress’s most popular plugin, Akismet is possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. Don’t just install it, report those jerks!
- CleanTalk: CleanTalk is an anti-spam plugin that works with the premium Cloud Anti-Spam service. It doesn’t just protect your site from comment spam; it also integrates with all major form plugins.
- iThemes Security Pro: Comprehensive protection against cyber threats, including brute force attacks, malware, and vulnerabilities, while providing essential features like user authentication and automated security actions.
- VaultPress: Protect your content, themes, plugins, and settings with real-time backup and automated security scanning.
- WP Activity Log: The most comprehensive WordPress activity log plugin to keep a record of user changes, ease troubleshooting, and identify suspicious behavior early to thwart malicious hacks. If you subscribe to Jetpack Security or Jetpack Professional you get a comprehensive Activity Log as well.
Need More Plugins?
Some excellent, paid plugins are fully supported on Themeforest that you won’t find elsewhere. Envato’s parent company does a great job of ensuring plugins are supported and updated often.
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