Looking for the best WordPress plugins to help your business grow in 2021?
There are more than fifty eight thousand+ WordPress plugins to choose from. This makes it extremely difficult for new users to find the appropriate plugin for their website.
Readers frequently ask us for the best WordPress plugin recommendations for SEO, social media, backups, speed, and so on.
As the largest WordPress resource site, our experts test over a thousand best paid and free WordPress plugins each year so that our users (you) can easily find the best solutions.
Having the right WordPress plugins and tools can assist you in growing your online business. We’ve shared our expert picks for the must-have WordPress plugins for business websites in 2021 in this article.
Please keep in mind that these are the plugins that our team installs when we start a new blog or create a new website for one of our own businesses.
Every website should have a contact form because it allows visitors to easily contact you. WPForms is by far the most user-friendly WordPress contact form plugin.
With just a few clicks, you can easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, surveys, polls, and virtually any other type of online form.
WPForms connects with all major marketing and payment platforms, allowing you to create powerful forms in under 5 minutes.
It includes powerful features that other form builders simply do not have, such as conversational forms, form landing pages, user journey tracking, form abandonment, geolocation tracking, GDPR compliance, custom WordPress user registration and login forms, and so on.
WPForms is used on the Your Blog Master website as well as all of our other websites. But we’re not on our own. WPForms is being used by over four million websites and has consistently maintained a 4.9 out of 5-star rating average for over 4 years.
For those looking for a simple solution, there is a free WPForms Lite version available.
If you are serious about growing your business, we recommend purchasing the Pro version, which includes all of the powerful features you need to boost your lead generation efforts.
Use this WPForms coupon to save fifty percentec off your purchase.
Formidable Forms is a great alternative for building advanced solution-focused WordPress forms.
2. MonsterInsights
The ideal Google Analytics wordpress plugin is MonsterInsights. It enables you to “properly” connect your website to Google Analytics, allowing you to see how people find and use your website.
The best part is that it displays all of the important statistics right inside your WordPress dashboard.
Then, you can optimize your website to increase traffic, subscribers, and revenue. We have detailed guides on installing Google Analytics in WordPress, using Google Analytics to enable eCommerce tracking, and tracking user engagement.
MonsterInsights has a free version, but the true power of it becomes available only after you upgrade to the premium version.
You can save 50% off your purchase by using our MonsterInsights coupon.
Over 2 million websites use MonsterInsights.
3. All in One SEO
SEO assists you in increasing the number of visitors to your website from search engines. While WordPress is SEO-friendly out of the box, there is so much more you can do to increase your website traffic by implementing SEO best practices.
One of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time is All in One SEO (AIOSEO). Over 2 million websites use it.
AIOSEO is the most comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin, with all of the features and tools you need to improve your on-page SEO.
It assists you in adding meta tags, creating sitemaps, connecting your site to Google Search Console, optimizing it for social media, and more.
Their team is constantly innovating and adding new SEO features to assist you in improving your SEO rankings.
Follow our complete AIOSEO setup guide and then our ultimate WordPress SEO tutorial for beginners for complete SEO setup on your website.
AIOSEO is also available in a free version. The pro version, on the other hand, includes more powerful features such as WooCommerce SEO, local SEO, smart schema, and much more.
See our All in One SEO coupon for a 50% discount on the pro version.
Alternative: Yoast SEO is another good AIOSEO alternative.
4. Constant Contact
As a business owner, email is the most effective and dependable marketing tool at your disposal. It enables you to communicate with your users even after they have left your website. This is why we advise every business owner to begin building an email list as soon as possible.
Constant Contact is one of the world’s most popular email marketing service providers.
You can use their platform to build an email list and send beautiful email newsletters to your subscribers.
It provides a quick and simple setup for non-technical users. It also operates well with common WordPress lead generation plugins like OptinMonster and WPForms.
Alternatives: If you want something more advanced, SendinBlue and ConvertKit are good options, but they are more expensive.
5. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the market’s most popular conversion rate optimization software. It enables you to convert website visitors who have left your site into email subscribers and customers.
This WordPress plugin and application will help you quickly increase your email subscribers and sales.
To capture users’ attention, you can use their hundreds of high-converting templates to create WordPress popups, slide-ins, announcement bars, gamified spin a wheel, and full-screen welcome mats.
With their drag-and-drop builder, you can easily customize each opt-in form or campaign template.
The powerful display targeting features of OptinMonster allow you to personalize campaigns for each user, allowing you to show the right message at the right time.
It’s an excellent choice for bloggers, business websites, and eCommerce sites. Basically, OptinMonster is required if you want to make more money from your website traffic.
It aids in the recovery of abandoned cart sales, the conversion of website visitors, and the expansion of your email list. Read these case studies to find out how much success other businesses have had with OptinMonster.
On Your Blog Master and our other websites, we use OptinMonster.
If you sign up from within the WordPress plugin, you can get a free version of OptinMonster.
6. SeedProd
SeedProd is the best WordPress drag-and-drop page builder. It enables you to easily customize your website’s design and create custom page layouts without having to write any code.
It is popular among business owners because it allows them to create completely customized landing pages in minutes without having to hire a developer.
You can choose from over 100+ beautifully designed templates or use their drag-and-drop WordPress page builder to create a completely custom layout from scratch (no coding needed).
Pre-made templates are available for landing pages, sales pages, thank you pages, webinar registration pages, coming soon pages, maintenance mode pages, 404 pages, and more.
SeedProd includes a smart design system that allows you to save time by reusing elements rather than doing repetitive work. Color schemes, font combinations, page templates, custom blocks, sections, and other features are available.
It includes all of the blocks and features you’d expect from a powerful page builder, such as optin forms, social profiles, countdown timers, contact forms, buttons, and various content blocks.
It also includes built-in subscriber management as well as seamless integration with third-party email marketing and CRM software.
Beaver Builder and Divi page builder plugins are excellent alternatives with powerful features. You can also use CSS Hero to customize your theme.
9. MemberPress
MemberPress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create online courses, communities, and membership sites. It is the market’s best WordPress membership plugin.
Subscriptions can be created, and users’ content access can be restricted based on their subscription plans. It is compatible with all popular payment methods and works well with WooCommerce-powered websites.
Other powerful features of MemberPress include drip content, course management (LMS), group memberships, powerful access rules, automation features, and more.
See our guide on how to create a membership website in WordPress for more information.
To communicate with your customers, you can integrate MemberPress with any email marketing platform.
Every year, MemberPress assists creators in generating over $500 million in revenue.
8. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus has been the most widely used WordPress backup plugin. It enables you to schedule automatic backups and securely store them in locations such as Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Rackspace, FTP, email, and others.
It also makes restoring your website from a backup a breeze. Their basic plugin is free, but they also offer a paid plan that includes additional features and priority support.
BackupBuddy and VaultPress (Jetpack Backups) are also excellent alternatives, but they are only available for a fee.
9. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the most effective WordPress caching plugin available. It allows you to instantly improve the speed and performance of your WordPress website with no technical knowledge required.
It enables recommended WordPress caching settings such as gzip compression, page caching, and cache pre-loading. To further improve page load times, you can enable optional features such as lazy loading images, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, minification, and more.
Most importantly, WP Rocket does not wait for a page to be requested before saving it in the cache. It crawls and builds your website cache automatically, resulting in an immediate performance boost.
WP Rocket also provides Imagify, a free image optimization service that can help you speed up your website even more.
This is by far the most user-friendly and beginner-friendly caching plugin. The only disadvantage is that it is only available for a fee.
WP Super Cache is a free alternative, but it is not as powerful or as simple.
10. Sucuri
All online business owners should prioritize security. Sucuri provides a WordPress security plugin and web application firewall that is likely to provide the best protection for your site.
They monitor and protect your site from DDoS attacks, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, and pretty much any other type of attack. If your website does not have a firewall, you should install one right away.
See our ultimate WordPress security guide with step-by-step instructions for beginners to learn more about how to strengthen the security of your website and protect your business.
Every month, Sucuri assists us in blocking hundreds of thousands of attacks on Your Blog Master.
11. RafflePress
RafflePress is the most effective WordPress giveaway plugin available. With viral giveaways and contests, you can instantly increase your website traffic, social media followers, and email subscribers.
RafflePress includes a simple drag-and-drop giveaway builder as well as tried-and-true giveaway templates to help you create a giveaway that will pique the interest of your visitors.
Visitors to the website must enter the giveaway using their email address. This assists you in increasing the number of subscribers to your email newsletter.
RafflePress encourages users to follow your social profiles and share the giveaway with their friends in order to gain more contest entries. This assists you in increasing social media engagement.
Word-of-mouth marketing allows you to get more traffic, FAST! This leads to an increase in followers, sales, and revenue!
Connecting your social profiles, WordPress form plugins, and all popular marketing platforms and CRMs is simple.
RafflePress has a free version known as RafflePress lite that you can use to get started. If you want more powerful features to help your business grow faster, you should use RafflePress Pro.
Your Blog Master can get an extra 20% off with our RafflePress coupon code: Your Blog Master20.
12. PushEngage
PushEngage is the best WordPress web push notification plugin. Using browser push notification technology, you can send targeted messages and announcements to your website visitors.
To increase customer engagement and website traffic, we use push notifications in addition to our email newsletter.
Your Blog Master’s top 5 traffic sources are always push notifications.
Drip campaigns, a/b testing, dynamic user segmentation, opt-in reminders, powerful analytics, goal tracking, and other features are included in PushEngage.
It can automatically trigger cart abandonment notifications, price drop alerts, inventory alert notifications, and other features for eCommerce websites.
It can begin sending out latest blog article updates to every one of your users for bloggers and publishers.
PushEngage seamlessly integrates with all website builder platforms, including WordPress, Shopify, Bigcommerce, and others.
They have a WordPress plugin called PushEngage that makes it simple to enable web push notifications on your website.
The best thing about PushEngage is that, unlike every other provider in the space, they DO NOT SELL YOUR DATA.
Alternative: Another popular option is OneSignal, but they only sell data on free plans.
13. Uncanny Automator
The best WordPress automation plugin is Uncanny Automator. It enables you to connect your existing WordPress plugins to work together without writing any code, allowing you to automate routine administrative tasks and save time and money.
It integrates seamlessly with the majority of popular WordPress plugins and third-party platforms, allowing you to create automation recipes without hiring a developer.
To create “if this then that” style recipes on your WordPress site, simply select from over 90 triggers and actions (no code needed).
In layman’s terms, it allows your WordPress plugins to communicate with one another, allowing them to work better together. Consider it similar to Zapier, but for WordPress.
What’s more, you can connect two separate WordPress sites to work together without writing any code. This is extremely beneficial for online stores and membership sites.
Here are some examples of use-cases:
Some example use-cases include:
Allow two WordPress sites to communicate with each other – sell products on one while creating users and setting up access on the other.
Create buttons in WordPress that can automatically create user accounts and perform other actions.
Custom user attributes can be added to user profiles based on the user’s actions.
Trigger automation recipes in one plugin based on an action performed by another plugin (for example, a submission of WPForms can be used to create an order in WooCommerce).
Using a single Zapier integration, you can connect your WordPress site to over 1000 external services.
… and much, much more
14. LearnDash
LearnDash is the best WordPress LMS plugin for creating and selling online courses directly from your WordPress site. It includes a drag-and-drop course builder that allows you to quickly add lessons, quizzes, and assignments to your course.
See our guide on how to create online courses in WordPress using LearnDash for detailed step-by-step instructions.
Alternative: As part of their membership plugin, MemberPress now includes a robust course creator.
15. Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is a collection of web applications such as email, documents, spreadsheets, and so on. This powerful suite of office applications, developed by Google, is less expensive, easier to deploy, and less troublesome.
It enables you to save money on software licenses, hardware, IT staffing, backup management, and other expenses. Most importantly, it enables you to use professional email addresses with your own business domain name directly from Gmail.
You can also get a free business email from your WordPress hosting provider or use Microsoft Office365 as an alternative.
16. SEMRush
SEMRush is a comprehensive marketing toolkit for digital marketers and business owners. It includes powerful tools to help you improve your SEO, paid traffic strategy, social media, and content and public relations strategy.
It also assists you in gathering competitive intelligence on your competitors, allowing you to outrank them and dominate your industry.
We use their tool for keyword research, backlink auditing, tracking brand mentions, spying on competitors, discovering best-performing social media posts and pages, ad strategy analysis, keyword rank tracking, and more.
These few paragraphs are insufficient to convey SEMRush’s true power. It’s on our list of must-have tools for serious business owners.
17. LiveChat
LiveChat Inc is the leading provider of live chat support software for businesses and e-commerce websites. It is extremely simple to use and allows you to quickly integrate live chat into your WordPress website.
It has a plethora of customization options and comes with a mobile app that allows you to provide real-time support.
It works with your current support software, CRM, email marketing, and other tools. Most importantly, it loads quickly and provides an excellent user experience.
The LiveChat team also created ChatBot.com, the best AI-powered chatbot software. You can use it in conjunction with LiveChat to ensure that your users always receive the quickest response possible, thanks to AI and human assistance.
Sendinblue Chat is another popular service that combines chat, CRM, SMS, Facebook, and email into a single platform.
18. Pretty Links Pro
Pretty Links Pro is one of the best WordPress link management plugins. It enables you to easily manage affiliate links while also making it simple to create short and memorable affiliate links for sharing.
It’s ideal for affiliate marketers, podcasters, business owners, and anyone else who wants to quickly create short URLs in WordPress.
Alternative: ThirstyAffiliates is a fantastic affiliate marketing platform with a plethora of powerful features.
19. Shared Counts
Shared Counts is the best WordPress social media plugin for adding beautiful social sharing buttons to your website.
It also displays share counts, which aids in the addition of social proof to your website.
While there are many paid solutions, this free plugin outperforms them all in terms of code quality and performance.
We use SharedCount on many of our websites because it provides a simple out-of-the-box solution for both beginners and developers.
If you want to show more social proof on our site by automatically showing your latest Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube content, check out the Smash Balloon plugins. They are used by 1.4 million websites and are the most popular WordPress social media feed plugin.
20. WP Mail SMTP
WordPress sends emails by default using the PHP mail function. The issue is that WordPress hosting companies either do not have this feature properly configured or block it to prevent abuse.
This means that you and your users may not receive critical email notifications from your WordPress site.
WP Mail SMTP addresses this issue by sending WordPress emails via an SMTP mail server. See our article on how to fix WordPress not sending email for more information.
Pro tip: The paid version, WP Mail SMTP Pro, includes white glove setup and additional features. Essentially, their support staff will configure it and connect it to your SMTP service provider.
21. Insert Headers and Footers
When managing your WordPress site, you may need to add code snippets to your WordPress header or footer for verification, insertion of ad retargeting scripts, and so on.
Insert Headers and Footers lets you easily add code snippets to your WordPress site without having to edit your theme files. Check out our guide on how to add header and footer code to WordPress.
This free plugin is very useful for business owners.
22. WPML
WordPress does not allow you to easily create a multilingual website by default. This presents a challenge for businesses that serve a multilingual customer base in various geographical locations.
This is where WPML comes in handy. It is a WordPress multilingual plugin that makes it simple to create multilingual websites with WordPress.
It is simple to use, SEO friendly, and allows you to easily create content in multiple languages.
Alternative: TranslatePress is a great option that is rapidly expanding.
23. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin, with over 5 million websites using it.
It includes all of the powerful features required to set up an online store.
WooCommerce has established itself as the most dominant eCommerce plugin for WordPress over the last few years. There is even a WooCommerce ecosystem that includes dedicated WooCommerce hosting, WooCommerce themes, and WooCommerce plugins.
Pro Tip: Try Bluehost’s new eCommerce plan if you want to start an eCommerce store with WooCommerce. It includes over $1000+ in free premium WooCommerce extensions such as subscriptions, bookings, and more.
TrustPulse, a companion plugin, helps you instantly win customer trust through social proof and FOMO.
BigCommerce is a fully-hosted headless eCommerce platform for WordPress that can be used as an alternative. For serious store owners, it provides high scalability and low maintenance.
24. Nextiva
In terms of features and ease of use, Nextiva is the best business phone service. They will provide you with a business phone number for your website, as well as advanced call routing, unlimited free domestic calling, voicemail to email or text, online faxing, and other features.
The best part is that calls from your business phone number can be routed directly to your cell phone, which is ideal for small businesses. You can also set business hours so that you are not interrupted during holidays or non-working hours.
CRM, live chat, online surveys, and other communication features are also available on their platform. You can manage it all through a simple web-based admin panel, making it simple for small business owners to manage everything like a pro.
We use Nextiva VOIP for our business because it is one of the most cost-effective and dependable business phone services that scales with your needs.
RingCentral is another highly rated phone service and business VoIP provider.
Extra Tools
In addition to the top 24 WordPress plugins and tools mentioned above, we use and recommend the following tools to better manage our WordPress sites:
- Grammarly – is an excellent grammar checking tool that also includes a plagiarism detector, vocabulary enhancement, and other features.
- PublishPress – this plugin simplifies the management of our editorial workflow in WordPress.
- Antispam Bee – An excellent plugin for improving your website’s comments section and reducing spam. It works especially well when combined with Akismet.
- Smash Balloon – is the most popular social feeds plugin for WordPress, with over 1.4 million installations. It allows you to easily display custom Instagram feeds, Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, YouTube feeds, and even an entire social wall. You can also try out the free Smash Balloon plugins.
- Adobe Photoshop – allows us to easily create blog thumbnails and other images for our articles.
- MaxCDN – this helps us speed up our website by geographically distributing it across multiple servers (see: what is a CDN)
- Envira Gallery – We also use plugin to help us develop higher album galleries.
- Codeable – is a platform that allows you to collaborate with vetted WordPress developers to troubleshoot issues and make changes.
This brings us to the end of our list of the best WordPress plugins for business websites.
Depending on your business, you may not need to use all of the WordPress plugins and tools mentioned in our list, but it is common for our readers to use at least 15 to 18 of the solutions we have mentioned.
You may also be interested in our article on how to increase your website traffic now that you have the best WordPress plugins (27 proven tips).
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