WordPress is so much more than a blogging tool. This flexible, easy-to-set-up web publishing platform has served as the foundation for more than 64 million websites since its launch more than a decade ago. Its popularity has spawned an incredibly rich plug-in ecosystem that helps webmasters improve their sites in many ways. From search engine optimization (SEO), to article enhancement, to comments management, you’ll find an amazing number of ways to trick out your WordPress installation’s base functionality, whether you’re hosting your own website or using a managed WordPress hosting service.
There are more than 54,000 WordPress plug-ins available as of this writing. The upside? You’ll never run out of of plug-ins to choose from. The downside? You don’t even know where to start. As with the Android and iOS app stores, the WordPress plug-in catalog houses countless goodies mixed in with even more duds. Our goal is to highlight those that will most benefit your website. You can, of course, visit WordPress’ Most Popular Plug-in Directory to see the most downloaded plug-ins of the moment, but you’ll miss many great potential additions by not digging deeper. That, however, is a potentially massive time sink, so we’ve done the digging on your behalf.
These top WordPress plug-ins will help your site perform like a champ. And they do it without costing you a cent because these plug-ins are all free (although some offer premium tiers with additional functionality). We’ll regularly refresh this list to ensure these plug-ins are all freshly updated. An out-of-date plug-in may work with your recently updated WordPress installation, but it’s not guaranteed to do so. Every plug-in featured here has been updated within at most the past two months as of this writing. Many were updated last week.
Oh, one more thing. Now’s the time we should mention that plug-ins can be installed only on self-hosted WordPress sites or sites using managed WordPress hosting services; if WordPress.com is your host, this article isn’t for you. If you are self-hosting a website, and ready to enhance your WordPress-powered site, continue to our list of excellent plug-ins below.