{"id":92,"date":"2021-10-30T14:13:52","date_gmt":"2021-10-30T14:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpdarko.com\/blog\/?p=92"},"modified":"2021-11-08T10:54:15","modified_gmt":"2021-11-08T10:54:15","slug":"best-wordpress-plugins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpdarko.com\/blog\/best-wordpress-plugins\/","title":{"rendered":"Best & Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites in 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you’re building a WordPress site for your business and need to add new features to it, you’ll inevitably need to use plugins<\/strong>. This sounds like a pretty easy task but choosing the right ones for the task isn’t as simple as it seems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing about plugins is that there is a considerable amount to choose from; WordPress.org<\/strong><\/a> counts about 60,000 plugins<\/strong> in its official directory, but this isn’t everything. There are other platforms to source them from, including for instance, CodeCanyon<\/strong>, with around 6,000 premium plugins<\/strong> (we do not <\/strong>recommend CodeCanyon<\/strong>, for reasons we will discuss in a future article).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many plugins from the official directory have premium versions<\/strong> that bring new features to the free ones; it is the case for several of our plugins<\/a> at WordPress.org<\/strong>. Note that you don’t necessarily need to upgrade to the premium version when using a free plugin. At WP Darko<\/strong>, we have over 100,000 people<\/strong> using our free plugins as we speak (and way over a million downloads).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is to say that choosing a particular WordPress plugin over another isn’t always an evident task, especially for beginners who haven’t yet tried any of the available options. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WordPress, being as popular as it is, benefits from a vast community of developers<\/strong>. While this is an advantage over other frameworks (there’s probably nothing you can’t achieve with WordPress today), it also opens the door to unmaintained, sluggish, and scammy plugins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We won’t talk about scams and how to check for abandoned and slow plugins in this article, but we’ll go over several great options<\/strong> that your business can rely on when building your website. We have sorted these plugins by category to make things easier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note that we are not <\/strong>using affiliate links; we make recommendations because we believe they will help you<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Form plugins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Every business (or even personal) site will have to collect data<\/strong> from its users at some point, whether it’s in the scope of online shopping, feedback gathering, inquiries about a product or just a simple contact form<\/strong>. There are several plugins that allow you to do just this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We recommend: Gravity Forms<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Gravity
Gravity Forms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Gravity Forms<\/strong> is, in our view, one of the best options to create forms<\/strong> on your website. It comes with literally anything you can imagine in a form plugin and several things you won’t expect, too, such as partial entries, dynamic fields, polls, conditional logic, paginated forms, and much more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This plugin comes with many great add-ons from certified (and other) developers and is backed by a vast community of users helping each other online every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Various other plugins can help you create contact forms too. One of the most popular ones is Contact Form 7<\/strong><\/a>. While we have used it on countless websites in the past and still value it today, it isn’t the most straightforward to use anymore, and there are more user-friendly options<\/strong> (do give it a try if you want, though).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You could also give WP Forms<\/strong><\/a> a try. It is feature-packed and highly intuitive. This one compares with Gravity Forms<\/strong> and has tons of add-ons to help you achieve what you want. A minor downside, in our opinion, and why we do not recommend it as much as other options is that they remind\/push you to upgrade<\/strong> to their premium version on every page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ninja Forms<\/strong> is another interesting option worth trying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

SEO plugins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Yoast,
Yoast SEO<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Search engine optimization<\/strong> is by far one of the most important aspects of running a successful business website. This isn’t unique to WordPress, but the framework benefits from full-featured, ready-to-use solutions for this task. Let’s go over the main ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We recommend: Yoast SEO<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yoast SEO<\/strong> is our go-to SEO plugin for WordPress; it is super intuitive and easy to get started with. You can find this plugin on the official directory, and it is free to use. They have a premium version that brings new features such as structured data, dead-link checker, third-party integrations and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we love about Yoast SEO is their philosophy<\/a>, as well as the fact their free version has enough features to be the only SEO tool you’ll ever need<\/strong> for your WordPress website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AIOSEO<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>is another all-in-one solution that you could try. Note that many ads inside the plugin<\/strong> will try to sell you the premium version <\/strong>(not the case with Yoast SEO<\/strong>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You may wonder why we even bother talking about premium versions and upsells, and this is because we believe that the first thing a plugin should do for you is “help you achieve<\/strong> what you installed it for”. You can always check out the premium features and decide for yourself if you’d like to upgrade<\/strong>. We personally only upgrade if we’ve been using the plugin for a while and need additional functionalities, not because we were repeatedly prompted to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other options worth trying are SEOPressor<\/strong><\/a> & Squirrly SEO<\/strong><\/a> (we have not checked them in detail yet).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Email marketing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Mailchimp,
Mailchimp<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As you may have noticed, if you’re using any of WP Darko’s premium plugins<\/strong>, we are not big on emails, newsletters and the like. We do not fancy receiving tons of promotional emails ourselves, and for this reason, we’re not sending weekly\/monthly communications to our users. Instead, we will reach them if we have something important to tell<\/strong> them (not to sell<\/strong> them).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This being said, many businesses need to send emails to promote their services and communicate with their users, and there’s nothing wrong with that! There is an infinite amount of options available to you if you are, for instance, starting a newsletter<\/strong>. Let’s talk about one<\/strong> (that we have used before).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note that this one isn’t a plugin; instead, it’s a third\/party platform that allows you to manage email marketing campaigns. You will need a plugin to make the connection between your WordPress site and this email service<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We recommend: Mailchimp<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mailchimp <\/strong>has been here forever and is a very reliable email marketing tool<\/strong>. It has all you need to run successful email campaigns. Some great features are the new Creative Assistant, customer journeys, content optimizer, and a lot more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As said above, Mailchimp <\/strong>isn’t a WordPress plugin, but at some point, you’ll want to gather email addresses from your visitors to be able to communicate with them via Mailchimp<\/strong>. You can achieve this with a plugin like MC4WP<\/strong><\/a> (it has over 2 million active users and excellent reviews).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some other popular tools like Mailchimp<\/strong> worth checking out are SendInBlue<\/strong><\/a> and Constant Contact<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMTP plugins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you don’t know already, SMTP<\/strong> (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an application used by mail servers to send, receive, or relay outgoing mail between senders and receivers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long story short, we are talking about your website’s transactional emails<\/strong> here. Transactional emails include registration emails, password reset emails, purchase receipts, etc. By default, WordPress sends these emails using PHP’s mail() function<\/strong>, which isn’t reliable, and if you ever had complaints about communications ending up in the spam folder, look no further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An SMTP plugin (along with a plan with a third-party provider) will fix this and increase your emails’ deliverability<\/strong>. These plugins are just connectors, making the bridge between WordPress and the actual SMTP service. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We recommend: SendInBlue<\/strong><\/a> and SendWP<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SendInBlue<\/strong> is a well-known multi-feature digital marketing tool that can handle transactional emails. They have a free plan<\/strong> that allows you to send up to 300 emails per day<\/strong>, which is more than enough in most cases (see their pricing page<\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Setup is pretty easy; you can use their own WordPress plugin<\/a> or any other SMTP plugin compatible with their service (e.g., FluentSMTP<\/strong><\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SendWP<\/strong> is another option that we recommend because it is the simplest out there. Just install a plugin and purchase a plan (no free plan, unfortunately, see pricing page<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maintenance mode plugins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When something goes wrong on your production site, and you wish to temporarily disable it to prevent visitors from seeing broken pages, you can use a “maintenance page<\/strong>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These plugins are pretty straightforward, and we won’t go into many details here; we recommend having one ready if something happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maintenance<\/strong><\/a> and WP Maintenance Mode<\/strong><\/a> are simple options. SeedProd<\/strong><\/a> is the most popular maintenance plugin in the official WordPress plugin directory. It was one of our go-to tools in the past but has become more complex and is often overkill if you only need to show a temporary page while fixing\/working on your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Backup plugins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Any serious WordPress site owners know that having a solid backup strategy<\/strong> is essential to ensure maximum uptime and be able to react promptly if something doesn’t go as planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many ways to back up a WordPress site, and we won’t cover them all in this article (there’s a good piece about this over at FalconStack<\/strong>, see this article<\/a>). We recommend having your hosting provider manage backups and restore for you; it is safer and more reliable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can also use a plugin if you are more comfortable with this, and because this article is about plugins, here are a few great options you can use for backing up and restoring your site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We recommend: UpdraftPlus<\/strong><\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"UpdraftPlus,
UpdraftPlus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

UpdraftPlus<\/strong> has been here forever and is very reliable; we recommend that you give it a try first. Other reliable options are Jetpack Backups<\/strong><\/a> and BackWPup<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sweepstakes plugins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Sweepstakes and giveaways are great ways to engage your audience and increase brand awareness. We have not personally run sweepstakes on WordPress-based sites before, but RafflePress<\/strong><\/a> seems to be a good option for this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Make sure you also take a look at Kickofflabs<\/strong><\/a>. It isn’t a WordPress plugin but looks simpler than RafflePress<\/strong> to integrate into your website and comes with tons of fantastic features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once again, remember that we are not<\/strong> using affiliate links. We only recommend the things we trust or that we deem helpful for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Search plugins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Any WordPress website has a search functionality<\/strong> built-in. Although it can be enough in many cases, sometimes you will need to take it to the next level<\/strong>, for instance, if you wish to accomplish one or several of the following things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n