WordPress powers about 26% websites on the internet. It is the most useful and popular Content Management System for developing fully functional websites or blogs. Plugins are the piece of code that can install in your dashboard(in plugins area). Every plugin has its specific functionality that you want to include on your website.
Let’s have a look on some of the top plugins that make your WordPress site functional.
Tips While Selecting Plugin for Your WordPress Website
Before proceeding further, first look at the tips while selecting appropriate plugin for your site.
The plugin must be more relevant to the functionality; it should not involve any additional functionality that is not required by you.
There are many plugins available for one functionality. Like, for example, if you want to add functionality to sign in with Facebook, then you will find a number of plugins. Make sure your selected plugin is from the real developers and have real reviews and source of your download package is authenticated.
Compare two to three plugins for the same functionality and the decide which one should be added to your website.
It is advisable to install plugins that are added in the list of wordpress.org. Don’t download it from other sources.
Check, Is the plugin safe, verify for any malware before adding into your website.
1: BuddyPress
If you want really functional social network, then go for this plugin. It provides you the most robust, the latest and well-designed social networking software.
Its contributors focussed on better user experience and response to use it with extensibility. Believe me; it is the simplest and more extensive plugin that helps you to integrate profile management in your website.
To integrate into your site, simply you can add its plugin. Once you activated, you can adjust its settings, components, and pages as you want.
It is free and requires WordPress version 4.1 or higher. BuddyPress also offers ‘Buddypress Resume’ plugin; that helps in building a resume page to BuddyPress Member Profile.
Features
You can:
Make member profiles.
Manage their activity streams.
Have private conversation via the chat feature.
Build user groups.
Create connections to interact in groups.
Can interact with any of the users via comments.
In short, it provides a comprehensive package having all the functionalities that are expected in any social networking solution software.
2: JetPack
JetPack is an open-source plugin to manage your website by exploring visitor stats, optimizing performance, analyzing and managing the site traffic on its dashboard.
It is the most efficient plugin for boosting up your site performance in just easy steps. Moreover, it will make sure to protect your site from any hacking attempt.
It gives you a complete package to enjoy your site performance with no pain. More specifically, it will show the relevant post on the side of your homepage to engage users. In result; it will reduce the bounce rate of your visitors and your session results will improve.
Jetpack offers you the facility to include custom CSS and many other widgets that can be customizable.
It is free and easily available. All you need to do is, download it, and activate it. JetPack will appear on the left panel on your dashboard. From there, you can customize it according to your requirements.
Features
Some of the important features are:
You can customize your site that includes CSS, contact form, galleries, carousels, notifications, and subscriptions, etc.,
It provides you a centralized management dashboard, where you can manage your posts, view and enhance them accordingly.
It automatically optimizes your content that includes images and speed up the site performance.
It protects your site from any malicious attack by any external source.
The authors of JetPack welcome any contributor to suggest, report, code or any idea.
3: WordPress ReCaptcha Integration
WordPress ReCaptcha is one of the very useful plugins for your WordPress site. It provides the box integration in any form or in your project directory.
You can include it to any form, i.e., signup form, login form, or in comment or text area where you need to verify the real audience.
The main purpose of integrating this plugin is to make sure that your site is visited by the real audience/ human. For any robot the form will not be submitted, in result, you will trace your desired audience stats from analytics.
You can download it for free and include or integrate into your plugin area. After, activation, you can customize features of recaptcha and its layout in setting panel of Recaptcha.
Most interestingly, you can disable it for your logged-in users and many other relevant field options are there in your form. Like, ReCaptcha let you disable Submit button until you enter correct captcha.
Features
WordPress ReCaptcha Integration will provide you many features as well as the known limitations. Like,
It secures your forms from any bot program.
It works with WP multisite and many other plugins like bbpress, Ninja Forms, Awesome Support, BuddyPress and WooCommerce.
You can also integrate into your custom code where you return the boolean value to validate reCaptcha. It is different for every form i.e., signup, login, comment section or any custom form.
It has support for Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and German.
It works together with WP multisite, where you can activate it for the single site or setting up captcha to network wide( that need API key and setup where you require recaptcha).
WordPress ReCaptcha Integration has a limitation of old style reCaptcha. Means, you can not use old site reCaptcha on a page, more than one time.
On making it disabled for logged-in users, ReCaptcha fields keep on showing at its place, this is one of the known limitations, reCaptcha have. Although you can handle this issue using filters in recaptcha_disable.html. For more information about how to hide the fields, see here.
For any new version launch with the built in recaptcha, you have to reconfigure the settings to make reCaptcha functional.
4: Option Tree
Option Tree is the UI Builder for Theme option for WordPress. It is the simplest way to create and save Theme Options and Meta Boxes for your website.
It is sponsored by Theme Forest that is the largest WordPress Theme marketplace on the internet.It is a unique plugin that works smoothly regardless any of your selected Theme options.
It is equally applicable to free and premium themes. It actually works as a bridge between your WordPress designer, developer, and the end user by facilitating them with the dynamic control over UI.
You can easily build your own theme options panel locally with drag and drop.
After embedding your relevant theme options, you have to export a functioning file theme-options.php, with automatically added custom text domain.
It saves the overall settings in databases with unique array ID. In this way, your own Theme Options will not be affected by any other change by you using Option Tree.
Option Types in Option Tree
It offers you to have wide variety of all the available option types like:
Background Border
Box Shadow
Category Checkbox
Category Select
Checkbox
Colorpicker
Colorpicker Opacity
CSS
Custom Post Type Checkbox
Custom Post Type Select
Date Picker
Date Time Picker
Dimension
Gallery
Google Fonts
JavaScript
Link Color
List Item
Measurement
Numeric Slider
On/Off
Page Checkbox
Page Select
Post Checkbox
Post Select
Radio
Radio Image
Select
Sidebar Select
Slider
Social Links
Spacing
Tab
Tag Checkbox
Tag Select
Taxonomy Checkbox
Taxonomy Select
Text
Textarea
Textarea Simple
Textblock
Textblock Titled
Typography
Upload
5: WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin. It is the way to build a customizable business online in few steps.
It is the top leading e-commerce plugin which powers over 37% of all online stores. It will let you about the basic review of what is the time to restart it over.
WooCommerce enables you to add functionality to your e-commerce store from cart to checkout with the support of any 3rd party/credit card integration. So, everytime you use it, it will grow with you.
It is advisable for any scale business whether you have a shop (small scale) or you have large scale enterprise architecture. It will manage your sales in an organized fashion.
It is Opensource and free. Just download it and a add plugin to your wordPress website. It requires WordPress 3.8 or higher, PHP version 5.2.4 or higher, MySQL version 5.0 or higher.
Features
Some of the main features are:
It shows the basic stats of your sales and purchases and presents it in visual graphical form.
You can use it to anywhere, anytime.
You can enable different sizes and colors of your product by just enabling its feature.
You can sell any physical and digital goods and make up the marketplace.
They are providing you a facility to ship your product anywhere, any time. WooCommerce even supports drop shipping.
They are giving extensive payment options like PayPal credit cards, cash on delivery and Bank transfer.
It will give you great control over the store checklists to your sales,
It gives you a way to style up your store as you want. You can define your style with Storefront.
WooCommerce offers you to grow with them by joining their community and GitHub Repository.
6: WordPress Social Login.
WordPress Social Login plugin allows your audience to connect via social media. It provides you a way to interact you via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or WordPress accounts. You can comment anywhere using Social Connect.
It adds social media login buttons on login or signup pages. It acts like a third party software, through which you can login into your social accounts.
It is the best alternative to any other social account plugin that enables you to register on using their existing id. In result, it gives you control over user accessing your website through any social accounts.
It is free to download, just add and use it. Trust me; it’s very easy to configure this plugin into your site. You can enable your desired social network account where you need it.
Features
It gives you endless options to configure your social account like:
You have a wide variety of options i.e., more than 25 social media platform integration.
You can leave a reply/comment using your social account.
It is very easy to customizable.
You can import your contact list from your social accounts like gmail, facebook etc.
7: W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is the speed optimization plugin for your WordPress site. It speeds up your page load time, even faster than before.
For example, the site without W3 Total Cache plugin enabled takes 10x faster load than site having enabled ‘W3 Total Cache plugin’.
It minifies your object to almost 3 times than before.Like for example, it minifies your objects by 27 from 65 just by using this plugin.
At vizteck, we use W3 Total Cache Plugin and believe me; its results are tremendous. Your page will load very quick than you can expect.
It is trusted by many good companies like AT&T, Smashing Magazine, mattcutts.com, mashable.com, lockergnome.com, johnchow.com and thousands of others.
All you need to do is, just iinstall and activate it. Before activating it, make sure your design is finalized.
Features
It provides you with blazing features like:
You can enjoy page caching using this plugin.
Your files will be minified so, it will quickly launch your page.
Caching of the object on memory or disks.
It is compatible with shared hosting, virtual private or dedicated servers.
It gives you additional security features too.
It has an SSL support.
It has the support of Smushit and YSLow (plugins you can download along with this plugin); which crunch your images or any data file by around 10%.
The most exciting thing is, you can enjoy Amazon S3 services with Cloudfront enabled. Which results in incredible results and with reasonable cost.
It gives you insights to cache performance statistics with details.
8: All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO was created in 2007. It is one of the most popular wordPress plugin (almost 30 million downloads). It automatically does basic SEO your site pages and ranks them higher on Google.
It will optimize your site for Search Engines like Bing, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Youtube, Netflix, and many others.
All in One SEO Pack has Google Analytics support by which you can view your site’s insights in just a few clicks away.
It is available in free and pro version. Just download it and install it, you will see, how efficiently it will SEO your page and results in a higher rank in search results.
Features
They offer tremendous features to rank your site like:
Canonical URL is generated for every page.
For each page, it will automatically SEO and generate meta tags for you.
It supports for CMS type WordPress installation
It also offers XML sitemap support, just submit your sitemap and improve your SEO.
You can extend the functionality because of its built-in API
It is translated up to 57 languages.
You can use it with any other plugin.
This plugin is 100% compatible with PHP 7.
9: Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is one of the most used plugins that can manage your contact form and make it functional on both end(from sender to receiver).
You can easily customize your form and mail content with wide flexibility with additional support of captcha. Moreover, it does Akismet spam filtering.
Contact Form 7 is just another contact form plugin that is simple but flexible. It has support for many other plugins which work in parallel with this plugin. Like, Flamingo through which you can save your messages directly into databases. Postman that assist your delivery your mail by SMTP Mailer. Moreover, Bogo that is a multilingual plugin.
It is available on WordPress plugin directory on official WordPress site. Download it for free, and include its shortcode on anywhere you want.
10: iFlyChat
iFlyChat is the perfect real-time chat plugin for your website. It is well suited for community and social networking websites. Now, you can engage your users by embedding chat feature in your website.
It allows your users to discuss in public or private chat. You can add support service features on your website. So you allow your users to interact with you in flexible time, with no involvement of any other channel.
This plugin is also very effective for your blog, or any problem-solving website where you want people to interact with each other via chat in private rooms.
Get your iFlyChat plugin and add into your site or simply add it from your WordPress dashboard plugin area. It has free or paid plans. After installing chat plugin, get the API key and add it into the plugin setting tab. It has automatic integration with BuddyPress plugin. It automatically gets any avatar/profile plugin integration if you have installed on your website.
Features
The main features of iFlyChat are:
Interactive one to one chat.
You can embed different chat rooms.
It offers you facility of group chat.
Any unknown user can also interact in your chat without registration.
iFlyChat gives you quick response because of cloud implementation.
Not just text, you can also share images or videos files on chat.
It offers single sign-on. There is no restriction to login again, once you logged into your site.
It has support for any mobile device also.
The iFlyChat plugin has the support for WordPress Multisite feature. So, you can configure chat across your WordPress Network too.
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