There are over some thousands of plugins in the official WordPress plugin repository and from third party developers. That’s, like, a lot, and you ever wonder which plugins get used the most? Of course, not all of them receive regular updates and use, but the ones we are going to talk about are categorized as popular among all time.
Below you’ll find the data-based backed list (i.e. this is not an opinion list) from different analysis.
WooCommerce
In the E-Commerce world, WooCommerce stood as most popular plugin ever that is being used by over 5+ million websites. This stat comes straight from the official wordpress (dot) org.
Anyway, this is mostly a marketing stat for them because downloads don’t always mean people keep the installation. But it still is an impressive number and we can see there are more than 3,000 Plugins built for it. That’s right, most third party developers have featured over WooCommerce, and are making the most of it. There’s close to 350 of them available on official WooCommerce online store, at least 2,000 of them on CodeCanyon, and 980 on the WordPress.org plugin directory, also on some proprietary websites. Now it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all great, by any means, but it goes to show how popular WooCommerce is in E-Commerce.
Among all these extensions WooComerce subscriptions from its official are a common payment plugin for recurring payments out of the box. That’s where WooCommerce subscriptions also come into play as most used plugin.
Download WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin (with GPL License at cheapest)
Yoast SEO
One of the plugins that most of people eye on for off-page search engine optimization is, without a doubt, Yoast SEO. This plugin is used by (almost) everyone who has a blog or site on WordPress. In fact, it is hard to find websites that DON’T have Yoast SEO plugin installed.
So, if you’re one of those people who doesn’t use this plugin… well, it helps you improve the overall SEO score of your articles and pages. With it, you can set your main keyword, the meta description, slug, SEO title, the alt attributes of your images, XML sitemaps, and it also recommends the best practices for good readability. It’s nice because the plugin offers stats and actionable advice on how to improve your SEO score for GOOGLE and other search engines.
Who can use Yoast SEO? I think it’s for everybody because we all want to rank better in the search engines, don’t we?
Wordfence Security
As you can see above of most popular WordPress plugins are diverse that provides certain range of features for wordpress website. Now, In terms of site security, Wordfence is a plugin that keeps your site safe from threats like malware and other vulnerabilities.
Wordfence puts a firewall on your site to keep it away from malicious traffic. Apart from that, it offers a malware scanner which blocks suspect external attempts and provides a secure login system.
What’s nice about this plugin is that it provides alerts every time something fishy happens on your site. By means anything that shouldn’t happen in terms of security. For instance, when a plugin that you use gets closed or abandoned or when a vulnerability issue takes place.
People developing websites using WordPress for the past 14 years but since the past 5 years, hack attempts have increased by many folds. Wordfence has come up with offering some good features for site security over almost every new threats with their spectacular updates.
Now Wordfence has been installed on some millions of websites and it always has been a life-saving choice from hackers. In specific with the in-built firewall rules, Wordfence ensures that unauthorized access to your site is completed blocked. With more blacklisting and whitelisting options – it gives more control over to who can access and who cannot. The premium version has a powerful Web Application Firewall (WAF) that acts as the frontline of the website that blocks potential threats that comes to your website.
Elementor
Now every WordPress user has known it, that Elementor is the most popular page builder plugin. This plugin is being taken place by most popular Visual Composer in 2020’s, you can enjoy the experience of creating a beautiful page in a visual way using Elementor with an option to upgrade to the pro version to unlock more advanced features.
A beautiful landing page is essential for a website, so it’s no surprise this plugin lets you build dynamic custom pages of what your current theme allows you to do. How does it work exactly? It gives you a visual design interface where you can craft your page from scratch or use one of the available templates.
This plugin is one of those that you must install on your website because it helps you big time, especially if you want full control over your design. There are a lot of free templates in the Elementor library that you can use for creating a page straight away from free version.
Download Elementor Pro License Activation
Akismet
Not far from above all plugins, when it comes to the number of downloads Akismet Anti-Spam is by default installed in WordPress installation. Akismet is a tool developed by Automattic, made to automatically block spam comments. Every day, we are spammed by either promotional links, irrelevant stories, malicious content or simply by mistake. And it’s very hard to filter them all by yourself, especially if you own a business that gets hundreds of comments per day.
Many old domains which are circulated on web are facing spam from bots. This plugin is good for them not only for automation but also for security purposes since it won’t allow malicious or problematic content to be published on your site.Akismet also checks all your contact form submissions against their global database of spam, so you’ll be sure only the good and relevant information gets to you. The plugin is mandatory for blog and business owners who receive at least tens of comments daily.
