The best WordPress plugins: according to 20 veteran WordPress experts

As of today (October 2016) there are 47,374 WordPress plugins in the official WordPress plugin directory.

With so many plugins available, you can easily improve the efficiency and performance of your WordPress site.
Want to make your site load faster? There are several plugins that handle this – W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, & WP Rocket.
Want to improve your site in terms of SEO ? On this topic as well there are several plugins – WordPress SEO by Yoast, All In One SEO Pack & Premium SEO Pack.
In practice, it can go on like this – There is a WordPress plugin for almost every topic you will ever need.

WordPress plugins: a collection of tools that add features to a WordPress website. Original Hebrew article artwork.

If we had to decide What are the 5 most useful WordPress plugins / that every WordPress site must have, this is without a doubt a very complex question to answer.
Therefore, we decided to ask 20 WordPress and social media experts to share their 5 favorite plugins.

The favorite WordPress plugins (according to 20 veteran WordPress experts)

Yoast SEO (11)
Contact Form 7 (8)
WP Smush Pro (5)
WP Rocket (7)
Advanced Custom Fields (6)
Text Me (3)
Header And Footer (3)
Elementor (3)
Wordfence (2)
Redirection (2)

 

Below is a list of all the people who took part in the article and shared their 5 favorite plugins.
You can click on the names of your favorite experts to jump to their section on the page, or sit down with a cup of coffee and read the whole article.

Omer Menashe, Hai Mondo, Barak Levi, Itiel Avraham,Shahar Gilad,
Amit Matatof, Avi Ezra, Matan Moalem, Guy Yitzhak, Dor Ben Zaken,
Yehuda Hassin, Omer Herzog, Maoz Lustig, Eyal Rachamim, Yogev Avitan,
Maya Lieberman, Or Zeltzer, Nitzan Ben Ner, Yaniv Weiner.

 

What are your 5 favorite WordPress plugins?

 

Omer Menashe – Emojo Omer Menashe – Emojo Emojo Digital Marketing is, among other things, an SEO company that works on hundreds of projects simultaneously each month. WordPress plugins of all kinds make our lives, and our customers' lives, much easier. The plugins I chose are ones that will be installed on almost every site we work on, and it is hard for us to imagine life without them. And after we talked about SEO, how can you start the list without…

1. Yoast SEO
Emojo is, among other things, an SEO company that works with hundreds of clients, so almost all my choices for this article stem from needs that came up in the field during our work.
In light of the above, it is not surprising that my first plugin is Yoast.
This is the most comprehensive and leading organic SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress sites. The plugin combines e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, from a snippet editor to a real-time monitoring system for pages on the site that lets the site owner optimize the content, titles, meta descriptions and more.
One of the system's great advantages is that it forces the site owner to choose a single phrase to promote for each page, and then analyzes the level of work done toward this goal by the SEO specialist or site manager. The analysis is provided, as mentioned, in real time and gives a score for the level of optimization performed on that page. This feature saves those involved in SEO a great deal of analysis work and manual testing, and consequently allows more time to be invested in other promotion activities.
Another advantage is the level of sophistication and complexity of the XML sitemap generation module. The system lets you, at the push of a button, automatically generate a comprehensive sitemap and send it to Google through Search Console. The sitemap will even include the images on the site, so that they too will be indexed (a word that, without checking, has surely not been written much on Hebrew pages to date) optimally in the search engine.
Space does not permit us to cover all the system's options in depth, so we will end with a short grocery list of the important features that exist in the plugin: a recommended site-improvements wizard, full control over meta elements and links, RSS feed optimization, breadcrumbs, convenient access to editing the HTACCESS and ROBOTS files, control over integration with social networks through Open Graph and others, support for WordPress multisite, and of course the ability to import settings from other SEO plugins.

2. WP Smush Pro
A great way to capture visitors' attention is to incorporate attractive images on your site. On the other hand, those same images also weigh your site down much more than plain text and therefore slow it down. The good news is that the WP Smush Pro plugin allows the site owner to compress images and significantly improve load times.
The plugin was tested and chosen as the best image compression and optimization plugin today. Not only that, the technology behind it makes it possible both to reduce the size of images and to hardly harm the quality of each image. Did you know that every image file also embeds information that is irrelevant to the image's appearance itself? When what matters most to us is image size and loading speed, we can certainly trim information from the file such as the location where the photo was taken, the date it was taken, and more.
For users' convenience, the plugin lets you compress images automatically, manually or in bulk. Another advantage is its ability to integrate with other gallery / image plugins, including NextGEN and WP Retina, so even site owners who take photography seriously don't have to worry that the images won't be displayed to visitors in a high-quality, impressive way.

3. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a plugin whose whole purpose is to speed up the site for visitors. A site that loads as fast as possible mainly affects two things:
A. Browsing experience – in an era where a delay of even a second or two can make a visitor give up the pleasure of browsing your site and move on to the next stimulus.
B. Your site's position in Google search results and other search engines. Google gives great weight to the quality of your site, and its loading speed is a leading parameter. In fact, it is so important that Google allows an independent check of the score its system gives each site.
The plugin includes several features that help site loading speed, such as deferring the loading of images and JavaScript files, minifying HTML code and combining many files into a single file, which reduces the number of requests from the browser to the server, and the option to use browser memory to prevent re-downloading of elements that do not change (for example, there is no reason to download the site's logo again and again on every load; chances are it changes very rarely, if at all).
The advantage of this plugin is that although it offers a great many technically complex options, using and operating it is very simple, even for users with only a basic level of knowledge. Its admin panel explains the options in plain language and makes it very easy to decide which options to use and which to skip.

4. Sucuri
Sucuri is an information security company that specializes in securing WordPress sites. Its plugin protects the site from hackers, malware and denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
When a WordPress site uses the Sucuri system, all of the site's traffic passes through their firewall before it reaches the server that hosts the site. As a gatekeeper, this process allows Sucuri to block attacks and malicious traffic while at the same time letting legitimate traffic through to the site. The system uses universal blacklists that aggregate huge lists of IP addresses that have been proven malicious. This method allows your site to "ride on the coattails" of other sites that were attacked in the past.
Another functionality of the system is scanning the site code every so often to detect whether it has been hacked and whether malicious code has been planted in it. In case you don't know, there is a whole industry of hackers who break into websites and plant code in them that doesn't affect how the site looks to the regular visitor, but rides on the site in order to advance the hackers' goals.
For example, one fine day a customer of ours discovered that thousands of hidden pages had been added to their site, to which porn sites were linked and from which the intruders made money. Sucuri's system performs periodic scans of the site and makes sure that even if a hacker has already managed to get past the firewall, break into the site and plant code in it, this will be discovered and handled as quickly as possible.
Another minor advantage is that since the system prevents "junk" traffic to the site, it may save you traffic expenses on a server where your hosting plan is limited.

5. Contact Form 7
CF7 is by far the leading forms plugin for WordPress sites. The consensus is so broad that it comes built into almost every theme you will purchase.
For those who haven't come across it yet, it allows you to create an unlimited number of contact forms of all kinds. No programming knowledge is needed, because all the options of the form itself and of the email it sends are configured very easily through the plugin's admin panel.
The plugin allows building forms in any language, with full RTL support. A significant advantage is that since it is so widespread, it is easy to get support from the community if you want to produce some customization.
Contact Form 7 also supports submitting the form via Ajax and CAPTCHA, and integrates with Akismet to filter spam.

 

Chai Mondo – Mondo Branding & Design Here at Mondo, we have great respect for the technical and technological side, always try to be ready for the next trend, and maintain maximum functionality and clean code, but we have no less respect for appearance. Everything starts with the visual: the graphic language, the flow, the emphasis, the proportions. Appearance is the main player at the stage of getting to know the visitor. That is why I chose to recommend plugins that deal more with appearance and user experience.

1. WiPi page editor
Although WiPi is more of a theme that comes with a page-editor plugin, I chose to open my recommendations with it. WiPi's page editor is an enormous force when it comes to designing and building websites, landing pages, content pages – and all this without writing a single line of code. It's unbelievable! The flexibility of the system, the real-world performance, and most importantly – how things look at the end of the day – simply recommended!

2. WP Smush Pro
An excellent and very useful plugin that essentially makes the way you use the site more efficient. The plugin makes images consume less disk space without affecting their visible quality, and that is where, in my opinion, it really wins. In other words: great-looking images, a fast site, a free server – at no charge.

3. Envira Gallery
One of the best gallery plugins there is. The plugin makes it easy to create friendly, responsive galleries that look nothing short of amazing. Great user experience, search-engine-friendly galleries – who needs more than that?

4. Soliloquy
The slider plays a central and important role on our site, and if we're doing it, we really want the WOW effect, and not a bit less. A professional slider plugin with endless options, fully responsive, suitable for a home page, a post or a content page. It keeps the site fast and in top shape.

5. Yoast SEO
True, I promised I would pick plugins that relate to visibility, but I admit, I had to. Yoast is without a doubt a permanent plugin in Mondo's website-building department. It is the world's most popular search engine optimization plugin, and not by chance.. Easy installation, does the job like a pro and even more.

 

Barak Levi – Tween-id Tween-id Studio is a design house. When creating a website we put the emphasis on concept and message, and build around the site a graphic language that knows how to evolve from a home page to inner pages. As part of building the site we also see content entry as a design process that incorporates design and marketing decisions. Unlike print, this is a medium that is constantly changed by us or by the client himself, so when the site is released to the client we give him guidance on how to continue and develop with the language we created for him; therefore I focused on 5 plugins that make the client's life easier.

1. Visual Composer
A plugin with endless extensions that allows entering content on a page in a much more creative way than the basic WordPress editor allows.

2. Toolset (wp-type + wp-view)
2. Toolset (wp-type + wp-view)
A pair of plugins from a whole suite that make it easy to create CPTs, with unique fields, taxonomies and filters. They also let you design and edit how all of these are displayed, whether as a list, a grid or a slider, with control over every single component of the object in the list: from title, date, category, links, excerpts and so on. You can also create conditions, filters and content templates for unique posts. For example, if a business site needs to set up areas such as: News, Press releases, downloadable media and projects. For each of these we create a CPT; with the plugin we create a list (for example, a list of all the news items), a list item (how a single news item looks within the list) and a template for the page of the news item itself. By the way, this plugin works great with Visual Composer, so we create templates with a fairly rich interface.

3. Gravity Forms
Create forms of many different and highly varied types by drag-and-drop alone. The plugin comes with a very wide range of possible modules for creating complex interactive forms. Including form design options, splitting into columns, creating conditions, etc. The plugin is very popular and has quite a few extensions that allow connecting it to various popular systems.

4. Admin menu editor pro
A great tool for editing the admin menu, including granting permissions to user types. Usually a client gets an Editor role, and it is important to us that the range of options doesn't distract them. We go through the menu and leave them only what is truly relevant to their needs.

5. Header and Footer
an interface that allows entering scripts without touching the code. We do quite a bit of work on premium themes that are updated frequently.
That is why we increasingly work with child themes and do not make code changes in the original themes. This plugin lets us enter scripts through a convenient interface and not directly in the PHP files, so that if a theme is updated, the scripts we added are preserved.

 

Itiel Avraham – MMG

1. Yoast SEO
One of the best-known and most widely used plugins for SEO purposes in WordPress. This plugin makes life easier both for me and my team as part of the WordPress SEO we do for our clients, and for site owners for performing On Page optimization of their site and adapting it to the standards required for SEO.
Perhaps the main secret of this plugin's success compared to its many competitors in the SEO field lies in the UX – the convenience, simplicity and intuitiveness of using it. I have store-owning clients aged 60+ who learned to use it and who are delighted with how they handle their site's content optimization on an ongoing basis thanks to the plugin's convenience and ease of use.

2. Header and Footer
I like making life easy for site owners after handing over a finished site. I also really like clean work. This excellent and very useful plugin gives you both of these important capabilities in a single installation.
The plugin allocates areas for embedding various codes and scripts in different areas of the site, including a split between desktop and mobile, a split of the code embedding by specific areas of the site (header, footer, sidebar) and the various site files (home page only, split by posts, categories, specific pages), and even a split by scripts (PHP, Javascript) and more.
Above all, it lets the site administrator embed code without depending on a developer and without needing access to, or having to deal with, the source files.

3. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Another SEO plugin you should not skip, which contributes significantly to CTR and organic promotion on Google. It lets you embed rich snippets in our site for organic promotion purposes. Rich snippets are essentially the ability to build a custom summary to display in search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other well-known search engines. True, it is a less developed mechanism in Israel in the SEO field, and the options are more varied abroad, but I found that it directly affects and significantly improves CTR for the sites where we used it for promotion.

4. Loco Translate
A translation plugin that allows translating all the strings on the site, including strings of installed plugins, strings from themes and strings of the WordPress core files. But we have that with its competitors too, so what is its advantage? First and foremost, its weight. WPML, by contrast, is a very heavy plugin that requires in-depth familiarity and tinkering, with dozens of options, and therefore it is also very heavy and significantly affects the site's loading time. When it comes to e-commerce sites or large sites, the implication is highly problematic in terms of organic promotion.

5. Redirection
I found a wealth and variety of redirect plugins for handling 404 errors, but a decade of experience in WordPress and SEO led me to the conclusion that this plugin contains the holy trinity that WordPress site managers need:
A. Convenience / user experience
b. Good support from the plugin's authors, with no glitches or compatibility issues with this or that theme
C. And significant savings of time, and therefore money, thanks to the built-in logging and error monitoring it has.

 

Shahar Gilad – PRM Internet Marketing

1. Yoast SEO
Every SEO professional, marketer and site owner knows that the Yoast plugin is one of the essential plugins on a WordPress site.
The plugin lets us conveniently control all the site-wide settings in meta tags and manage XML sitemaps easily, but in my opinion the plugin lacks just one thing: the ability to edit the Robots.txt file, and more.

2. Wordfence
When it comes to websites, and WordPress sites in particular, site security is, and always will be, of the utmost importance. Some very convenient features that exist in the plugin are:
Firewall – blocks intrusion attempts from known malicious sources before they try to break into the site.
IP blocking – a convenient and lightweight option for blocking an IP identified as a hacking attempt.
Login security – the plugin makes it easy to implement two-step login.
and a variety of other interesting features that you can read about on the plugin's page.

3. WP Smush Pro
As most SEO professionals know, site speed is important throughout the entire process; to be honest, it is already clear to everyone that site speed determines whether visitors will stay on your site or abandon it. In the past I used TinyPNG to compress image sizes, but after I discovered how convenient the Smush plugin is, I became addicted. The plugin optimizes image sizes quickly and site-wide, with (almost) no loss of image quality.

4. Responsive lightbox
Bounce rate on a site is caused by many reasons, one of which is an inconvenient display of images on the site. For example: you know the feeling when you uploaded a well-crafted article with good images that add value to the article to your site? You entered the article from a mobile device and saw that the image was too small and you can't read the content? Then this plugin will solve the problem for you.

5. Tawk.to
Your customers browse your site, want to leave a message, ask something. Nothing is more convenient than a human response that gives them attention. Many studies have been conducted showing that chat plugins on sites increase conversion. Install the plugin, and you will be surprised by the number of conversations that reach you through it.

 

Amit Matatof – Experienced PHP Developer

1. CMB2
A PHP library for developers for building metaboxes, custom fields and admin pages.

2. Contact Form 7
A form-building plugin that is very easy to customize and connect to any API.

3. Text Me
a plugin I developed for WooCommerce stores for sending SMS messages with parameters from the order and the buyer's details – after order status changes, new order, order completed and abandoned cart,
You can also receive submissions from contact form 7 forms via SMS.

4. Duplicate Post
A plugin that makes development much easier for those who need to duplicate content on the site; pages can be duplicated with the click of a button.

5. WP-PageNav
This plugin makes it easy to create pagination between pages.

 

Avi Meir Ezra – CEO of RESITE.pro There were many plugins I thought of writing about, but my choice focused on a view of speed and efficiency together with quality. I always want to build a site that is stable, reliable, easy to navigate and easy to use, that also thinks and acts for the client/content editor, and does so in as little working time as possible. It may sound as if saving time comes at the expense of quality, but that is not always so, and that is what I am here to recommend.

1. Advanced Custom Fields
When I first got to know the plugin, I called it the "magic plugin", even though back then it was slow and lacked advanced options.
From that moment until today, this plugin has been a cornerstone of all my work, since it saves (very valuable) work time, number one in every WordPress project.
The flexibility and simplicity of the plugin are amazing. With a basic tool called 'post association' you can link posts and solve advanced search problems that would otherwise take a lot of time to figure out how to implement.
The ability to export and import settings shortens the process and is faster than copying and pasting code from site to site, so you can maintain consistency across different parts of the site.
The opinion of the content people (those who enter content on the site) is among the most important in deciding whether or not to work with a plugin. In my experience, people find it convenient to see the default form that the plugin provides.
Over the years the plugin has stabilized and matured and become very fast and stable; it undoubtedly earned first place on my list.

2. Contact Form 7
This plugin is the most popular among the contact options in WordPress.
It is fast and has huge support, so if you get stuck or just want to design or build something on it, there will always be information about the desired action on Google that is good enough for any beginner to understand.
Its extension options are amazing and hit the mark with simplicity, directness, and clean, quiet work. Even a person with no programming background can, with a little faith and will, do nice things such as redirecting to a thank-you page or sending a form to an external system (integrating with a CRM, for example).
The extensions of CF7 are one of the things that make it so successful. Add-ons such as CF7 DB (saving forms and export options), custom errors, and IP capture (honeypot) are usually extensions that, if you don't use this plugin, you will have to write yourself, because every site owner asks for at least one of them.

3. Eggplant 301 Redirects
There are many 301 plugins on the web; this isn't the most popular among them, but it is the best of them all.
Why? It is the only plugin that supports data import!
In the (not so distant) past I tried to find a solution for a revamped site with 3500 old links that I received from an SEO person.
I sat down and searched for a solution on how to do this without ruining the site with slowness or crashes.
With every single file into which I insert such a list of 301 rules, the site will respond very slowly, so the challenge is great.
After I found this plugin with the import option, the solution was to create one redirect in the plugin and export it.
First attempt = boom, it worked! 3500 pages in less than a minute of work!
What amazed me is that there is no slowness problem; in fact, the site works nicely and fast.
The advanced options are better and more effective than in the other plugins.
In addition, the interface itself is nice and tidy, as it should be. It doesn't steal the show and isn't too boring. It has everything in the right dose.

4. Slider Revolution
A heavy plugin, a cumbersome plugin, a (formerly) hackable plugin – but anyone who wants a beautiful, impressive site that can make anyone say "wow" needs to use this plugin.
The number of options inside Revolution is not something that can be written up in a few paragraphs. In fact, it looks like every programmer's dream to sit down and write such an interface.
You can work with much lighter sliders, but it is hard to maintain the level of impression that you can make on a site with Revolution Slider.
In addition to being a slider, it also provides a YouTube streamer. Even live broadcasting. In one of my projects we streamed live, on a fashion site, from the YouTube channel, a broadcast recorded at a fashion event. People were amazed at how it happens; average users still aren't familiar with such technology.
The level of visual polish is high and very detailed. Those who can appreciate the work can take a look at options such as fade-in/fade-out timings within a slide.
Writing something like this without this interface takes hours to get a good (but not amazing) result, while here you get it ready-made, in visual form.
Whoever really knows me knows that me and working with visual builders is not a love story. Nevertheless, Revolution did a very good job and fixed the security vulnerabilities they had in the past (version 4 for those who remember), and all that's left is to pray that they manage to solve their last problem – slowness – to make the plugin perfect.

5. WP Smush
I talked in the introduction about ease of use, and I am thinking about it from the perspective of the client / content editor.
Which of us hasn't heard a customer say something like "But why do I need to do this?"
Go tell the client that he should upload an image only after opening it in Photoshop and arranging it according to some rules.
In addition to the plugin working immediately when a user uploads a new image, you can run the plugin manually whenever you want (after purchase) in order to also optimize images that were uploaded before the plugin was installed in the system.
So this plugin is effective also for a site that is already live and has suffered the "damage" of uploading images with weights and resolutions that are unreasonable for web pages.
The essential difference in this plugin compared to the competitors is the fact that it can be run whenever you want on images uploaded in the past. This option does not exist in other plugins as of the last time (a very few months ago) that I checked everything I found.

 

Giving a teacher – MMW Website Development and Design

1. Advanced Custom Fields
The plugin for creating custom fields – there is almost no project in which I don't use it, along with thousands (not to say millions) of other developers and programmers around the world. The plugin even lets you, at the end of the work, "take" all the code it generated and paste it into the functions file (similar to Generate-WP) and turn off the plugin – very convenient, and highly recommended.

2. WP Rocket
We all know how important it is that the site we develop loads fast. This is the most powerful plugin on the market; after installation you can enter the management interface in the dashboard and enable minification and compression of HTML, JS, and CSS code, as well as inline CSS and JS.
Important note: it is very important to know that incorrect work with the plugin can cause forms not to be sent and various parts of the site to stop loading properly, so you should immediately check how the site responds to the plugin and fix accordingly. The fix is done by adding an Exclude for the JS file in the plugin.

3. English WordPress Admin
The plugin lets you work with the WordPress dashboard in English, so when working with plugins/themes the dashboard stays LTR and is more comfortable to work in.

4. Text Me
A plugin written by my good friend Amit Matatov. The plugin lets any WooCommerce-based store send an SMS to the end customer about an order being placed or changed, and it also lets you receive SMS about inquiries/leads from the popular Contact Form 7 plugin.

5. Contact Form 7
A popular forms plugin. The plugin lets you create forms and connect them to an API easily and simply; it comes with the ability to build fields at the click of a button, to redirect the submission to another page using ready-made codes, and a variety of other great options.