When you create a website or a blog on the WordPress.org platform, you have the opportunity to use a massive amount of plugins and tools. Some of them are free, while others cost some money.
As of October 31, 2022, there are over 60,141 WordPress plugins in the WordPress repository. In this article we have come up with a list of the best WordPress plugins in 2022.
Best WordPress Plugins – 2022
1. Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet Anti-Spam is one of the most popular and the most useful plugins in the world for blocking spam in comments. It’s a free plugin that is also available in a paid version. The free version is good enough to solve the problem with spam.
Contrary to appearances, spam comments on the blog start appearing very quickly (even before it reaches any popularity), and also, as its popularity increases, this number can grow exponentially.
Akismet Anti-Spam will help you solve the problem quickly and effectively. This plugin does not work as an anti-spam system for WordPress contact form (it’s for comments only).
2. Rank Math SEO
Rank Math SEO is by far the best free WordPress plugin for SEO. Rank Math has a great handful of features that should satisfy every blogger and webmaster.
It allows you to add your social media URLs to your website, set and check previews for two most prominent social media networks (Facebook and Twitter), create amazing XML sitemaps, find broken links, and much more.
Rank Math will quickly help you bring more website visitors from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.
3. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO can help you get more website visitors from search engines like Google.
This plugin has a few useful features such as Google Analytics verification tool, integration of your social media profiles, XML sitemaps, etc.
If you want this plugin to find 404 errors on your website automatically, you have to use its premium version.
Although the plugin of my choice is Rank Math, Yoast SEO is also quite good, and it’s still trendy among bloggers and websites’ owners.
4. WP Rocket
Although there are many caching plugins in WordPress.org directory (such as WP Fastest Cache and W3 Total Cache), WP Rocket is the best plugin for WordPress speed optimization.
5. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
ShortPixel Image Optimizer is the best WordPress plugin created to compress images uploaded to your site.
Although it’s not a search engine optimization plugin per se, it can improve your site speed and attract the attention of search engines to your website.
In my case, this plugin managed to reduce the sizes of images by 30% even though I had compressed them using tinyjpg.com and WP Smush before.
6. WPS Hide Login
WordPress has a default login path to the admin panel. This path follows the format of domainname.extension/wp-admin or domainname.extension/wp-login.php.
Often, this path is the main target of attacks. If the administrator of the website/blog additionally has a password that is relatively easy to guess, there is a quite high risk that the site will get hacked.
The WPS Hide Login plugin changes the default login path to the WordPress admin panel to an individual path defined by the site administrator, which should quite effectively hinder attempts to hack the site.
Also Read: Amazing Free Lead Tracking WordPress Plugins to Grow Your Business
7. BlogVault
BlogVault is by far the best plugin for automatic incremental backup, which can be stored externally.
Even if you have any plugin for preventing brute force attacks, SQL injection, and other scenarios (you’ll find the best plugins for this purpose in this article), it’s highly recommended to make sure that you use a service that allows you to store a backup of your site outside of your web server.
Apart from creating backups, BlogVault has an excellent firewall to prevent attacks on WordPress websites and one of the most effective malware detection systems, which is named MalCare.
Besides, BlogVault is one of the most effective and most comfortable to use plugins for migrating websites.
8. Better Click To Tweet
This plugin was released to allow bloggers to create tweetable quotes like the one on the screenshot above.
So how to use this plugin? After you install and activate the plugin, go to its settings.
Enter or paste your Twitter handle (without the ‘@’ symbol), check the “Use Short URL?” option, and click “Save Changes.”
In order to create a tweetable quote, you need to select and copy a block of text you are interested in. Then you should click the blue Twitter icon, which is available on the bar located above the text window.
9. iThemes Security
iThemes Security is one of the most effective and most popular plugins that enhance the security of the WordPress platform. This plugin is available in both free and paid versions. The free version offers, in my opinion, an appropriate number of available options.
If you use this plugin, you should add Google robots’ IP addresses to the whitelist for more accessible and more efficient indexing of your site.
10. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is probably the best WordPress plugin to grow your email list.
Email lists usually require their prospective email subscribers to put in things like their first name, email address, and sometimes the last name.
When it comes to the best email marketing platforms, I recommend using Mailchimp, AWeber, and GetResponse.
11. Migrate Guru
Migrate Guru is the best free plugin for WordPress site migration. It is very easy to use, and it allows you to transfer your site to almost every hosting provider.
What’s interesting, it is based on a perfect WordPress backup solution called BlogVault.
12. Google Analytics for WordPress
This is a great Google Analytics plugin that allows you to connect Google Analytics to your website easily.
13. Wordfence Security
This is the second one of the best WordPress security plugins in 2022. You can use it together with iThemes Security exactly as I do.
14. WP File Manager
It’s a file manager with options of copying, moving, deleting, renaming, editing files, and extracting archives.
This free plugin is not necessary in case of hosting offering server management via cPanel. On the other hand, it is mandatory for customers of majority hosting providers, such as Cloudways, Kinsta, or SiteGround.
15. Contextual Related Posts
This plugin adds an area with related posts at the bottom of every article.
There’s a chance that this feature could slightly improve user experience on your site, but bear in mind that this feature can be incompatible with some WordPress themes.
16. Simple Author Box
If you scroll down to the end of this post (or any other on this blog), you will surely notice an interesting author bio box at the bottom of my article.
If you’d like to create a similar box on your blog, I can recommend you using the Simple Author Box plugin.
17. Elementor
Elementor is recognized as one of the best and the most popular page builder plugins for WordPress. It has more than 4 million active installations.
This plugin has a lot of features such as drag & drop, which makes it easy to use for everyone and allows you to get started quickly. Elementor works with almost every WordPress theme.
18. WPForms
If you want to find the best contact form plugin for WordPress, you should definitely give WPForms a try.
From my point of view, this is a way better solution than Contact Form 7, which is also one of the best free WordPress plugins of this type.
WPForms works in a visual mode and is very user-friendly. It has a built-in effective anti-spam filter that works even better than that from CF7 Honeypot.
Furthermore, WPForms is an easy to use plugin, which makes it easy to create any contact form using its fantastic drag and drop feature!
Also Read: Best WordPress Two-Factor Authentication Plugins For 2021
19. Companion Auto Update
Companion Auto Update is a fantastic WordPress plugin that will help you update WordPress plugins, themes, and the WordPress platform automatically.
In the settings of the plugin, you can change the frequency of searching for available updates.
With this amazing plugin, you don’t need to log into your WordPress dashboard every few hours and check for updates on and on.
20. Block Bad Queries (BBQ)
Block Bad Queries is an excellent plugin for blocking requests that may be associated with attempted attacks on your website. It prevents, among other things, the SQL injection attack.
The plugin is available in the free and paid version. In conjunction with other plugins presented in this article and other recommendations that you can find on my blog, all you need is a free version of this plugin.
21. Classic Editor
Classic Editor is a plugin designed to restore the classic WordPress editor that had been used for many years in many versions of the platform.
This plugin is mandatory for those who are not able to get used to the Gutenberg editor introduced with the 5.0 version of WordPress.
22. WP Maintenance Mode
With this plugin, you can temporarily display a screen informing readers of maintenance work. It’s useful, for example, if you change your site’s theme. Access to the website can be restored at any time once you feel everything is working correctly.
23. My Simple Space
It’s a very interesting plugin that displays information about the current version of PHP and the amount of space used on the server’s disk by particular components – plugins, themes, photos, databases, etc.
Unfortunately, this plugin doesn’t work on sites hosted with Kinsta and WPX Hosting.
24. Disable Comments
Disable Comments is a handy and popular plugin used to block the ability to write comments on WordPress-based sites.
This plugin has over 1 million active installations and hundreds of reviews with an average score of 4.9/5.0.
25. Display PHP Version
This amazing free plugin displays the PHP version currently used on your server.
26. Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is a perfect WordPress plugin that allows you to sell digital products such as ebooks in PDF format and online courses.
27. Easy Table of Contents
This plugin creates a table of contents similar to the one on the screen above.
28. Envato Market
This plugin helps to receive updates of the themes purchased on ThemeForest.
29. Insert Headers and Footers
Allows you to add entries to the <head></head> and <body></body> sections of the site code.
30. iQ Block Country
This plugin blocks visitors from the countries of your choice to access your website.
31. Ivory Search
As you might have noticed, some WordPress themes have a search box implemented by default. If your theme is not offering that option, you can add the box to your theme using the Ivory Search plugin.
32. kk Star Ratings
This is a plugin created for implementing the reader rating mechanism. These ratings can be displayed in Google search results in the form of stars.
There is also another type of star displayed in Google’s results. These are ratings of services or products.
33. Mongoose Page Plugin
This plugin allows you to easily create a widget that increases the reach and popularity of your blog.
The widget includes a link to the fan page on Facebook and allows you to like it instantly using the included button.
In case if nobody from your friends has liked it before, it shows a sentence like: “Be the first person among your friends to like this fan page.”
Furthermore, this widget has the option of displaying the fan-page timeline, thanks to which your visitors can quickly review entries, like them, comment on them and share them on their own profiles.
Also Read: Best Instagram WordPress Plugins
34. Redirection
Redirection is an excellent plugin that allows you to create redirects from one URL to another one easily. This option is useful if you change the URL of one of your articles or delete an old article, and you want to create a redirect to another article or to the homepage to avoid a 404 error and pass some link juice to it.
You don’t need this plugin if you use a premium version of Yoast SEO or Rank Math SEO plugin.
35. Sassy Social Share
It’s not a secret that nowadays there are a few very popular social media platforms on the market. This plugin allows you to add social icons (with the links to your social media profiles) to your website.
Obviously, it’s not supposed to work as social proof of your site, but it’s good to let your visitors click and check your social media profiles.
36. Schema
Adds schema.org markups to the webpage. This is one of the quite important elements of SEO. However, if you use Rank Math SEO, you don’t need any other plugin for this purpose.
37. Search & Replace
It is a handy and valuable plugin that allows you to solve quite often occurring mixed content problems.
You don’t need this plugin if your site is hosted at Kinsta since they have implemented their own, similar to this plugin, but even a much better solution.
38. Simple Lightbox
This plugin allows you to create an effect of zooming in images when clicked.
39. SiteOrigin CSS
This plugin allows you to modify the appearance of some elements of the site by adding the appropriate custom CSS code. It’s possible not only with the built-in code editor but also in visual mode.
40. Social Warfare
Social Warfare is an excellent plugin (available in free and paid version), which allows you to place social sharing buttons on your blog.
With this functionality, your visitors will be able to share your content easily, and your blog has a chance to become more popular on each social media platform. And I’m sure you know that the number of social shares is a great social proof for your business.
Also Read: Migrating From Wix to WordPress Hosting
41. TablePress
It’s a great plugin that allows you to create tables.
42. ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates is a perfect plugin for managing affiliate links.
43. Top 10
Some WordPress themes have the option of displaying the most popular posts. If your theme doesn’t, you can add this functionality to your site using the Top 10 WordPress plugin.
44. Webcraftic Clearfy
Clearfy is a fantastic WordPress optimization plugin, and an excellent complement for WP Rocket. Clearfy and WP Rocket are two best WordPress plugins for those who want to improve their site speed.
Quick Summary
Most of the plugins mentioned are completely free. Few of them have both a free and paid version.
The only two must-have WordPress plugins, which you should definitely pay for, are ShortPixel Image Optimizer (its cost depends on the number of published photos) and WP Rocket.
Besides, I recommend everyone to use the excellent BlogVault service to create real-time incremental backups and to protect WordPress sites against viruses and hackers. This plugin also proves to be one of the best if you need to transfer your website from one hosting company to another one.
