Wondering what are the most popular WordPress plugins in 2020? Looking for the most loved ones for your site? Good thing that we’ve prepared a list of the most popular free and premium WordPress plugins on the web.
There are tons of free and premium WordPress plugins on the web. WordPress plugins directory provides you with more than 58,000 free plugins whereas you can find even more premium and free plugins from other third-party providers. This makes the process of choosing the plugin for your site harder and slower.
To tackle this problem, going with the most popular and most loved plugins with good ratings can seem a very great solution to this problem. So, keeping that in mind, we’ve got the list of most popular WordPress plugins based on the total number of downloads, popularity, and ratings.
10 Most Popular Free WordPress Plugins for 2020
We’ve selected this list of popular free plugins primarily based on the number of active users. In WordPress’s official plugin repository, there are thousands of free plugins for any niche. From the various category, we have picked the most popular plugin.
Most of the below listed free plugins are also available in its premium version. You can purchase their premium plan and get more features, dedicated support, and timely updates.
Let us begin with the list.
1. Yoast SEO
Having an SEO plugin is a must for every site. And among huge choices of SEO plugins, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. It helps you easily optimize your website content for better ranking in search results. And that eventually helps your site get more recognition and gather more traffic.
Yoast SEO offers real-time analysis of your website content for keywords, metadata, title, and other optimizations. It comes with different features to improve your content’s readability and makes it more scalable. It also comes with an indication feature to indicate what your content is lacking and how you can improve it.
Yoast SEO helps you to easily optimize your content and pages so that you can rank higher in search engine results. It offers real-time analysis of your content for keywords, title, meta, and more. With more than 259 million total downloads and great reviews, it’s seen as the most popular free WordPress SEO plugin.
Features of Yoast SEO:
- Highlight any weakness in SEO for your content.
- Suggestion to optimize your content further according to keywords.
- Analyzes content for keywords density, passive voice density, transition words, and many more.
- Helps breakdown content for much better readability.
- Constantly updated and provides great support.
| Active Installation: | 5+ million |
| Rating: | 5 out of 5 from 27,277 reviews |
Are you looking for the complete SEO Guide? We’ve prepared a detailed guide on what is SEO? Check it now!
2. Jetpack
With over 186 million total downloads, Jetpack is one of the most popular WordPress plugins on the WordPress plugin directory. Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that offers a wide range of extensions. It offers you site security, social sharing, performance optimization, and other more features.
One of the important features that the Jetpack plugin provides is security services to protect your site from cyberattacks. It guards you against brute-force attacks and unauthorized logins. It also provides performance optimization which speeds up page load page and optimizes images for a faster site.
Along with performance optimization and security services, Jetpack offers you an effortless site management feature. It’s one of the most popular security and performance plugins for WordPress which has great reviews from its customers.
Features of Jetpack:
- Easy to use and set up.
- Brute-force protection and spam filtering.
- Secure login and malware scanning.
- Optimizes your site speed and performance.
- Site stats and analytics.
| Active Installations: | 5+ million |
| Ratings: | 3.9 out of 5 from 1,538 reviews |
3. WooCommerce
Powering more than 29% of the online stores on the web, WooCommerce is one of the most popular plugins in WordPress. With over 100 million total downloads, it’s the best WordPress eCommerce plugin.
WooCommerce is an open-source platform with a wide variety of features that helps you make a featureful eCommerce website. It’s very versatile and comes with a huge library of feature extensions. You can include a wide range of different features like categories sorting, product rating, and more.
You can add many different add-ons to your WooCommerce and extend it with different features like live chat, currency converter, and more. It’s basically a single solution for all your eCommerce needs.
Features of WooCommerce:
- Has a clean and easy to use user interface.
- Easy to customize and design.
- Built-in shipping and customs tax calculation.
- Comes with pre-installed payment gateways.
- Has a huge library of extensions and add-ons to add.
| Active Installations: | 5 million+ |
| Ratings: | 4.5 out of 5 from 3,598 reviews |
4. Akismet
Having good security against spam comments is very crucial for your WordPress site. It’s a wise move to get a trustworthy anti-spam plugin to manage all spam on your site. Akismet is the one for that. It’s one of the most popular Anti-spam WordPress plugins that protects your site from spammers. It comes with the core WordPress and you don’t have to invest your time in installation.
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that checks every comment and filters out the spam from them. It also provides a log for each comment so that you can check which comment was found as spam and choose to either approve or deny it.
Akismet checks comments and contact form submissions against the global database of spam and filters out any suspicious and malicious content. It recognizes spams more accurately and grows over time.
Features of Akismet:
- Checks out each and every comment for spam.
- Provides a detailed log for comments.
- It grows over time to recognize more accurately.
- Runs on background and hassle-free for setup.
- Removes suspicious links automatically.
| Active Installations: | 5+ million |
| Ratings: | 4.7 out of 5 from 894 reviews |
5. Wordfence Security
As the number of malicious attacks that are happening over the internet is on the rise, it’s important to have a trustworthy security plugin. Wordfence Security is one of the most popular WordPress security and firewall plugins. It’s a great solution for the problem and offers features like login security, traffic monitoring, spam protection, and more.
With over 100 million downloads, Wordfence is loved by many. It comes with firewall protection that takes care of malicious attacks, malware, brute force attacks, and prevents from getting hacked.
Features of Wordfence:
- Scans for malware, malicious attacks, and viruses.
- Provides malicious network blocking feature.
- Real-time traffic monitoring.
- Brute force protection.
- Two-factor authentication (2-FA) login security.
With increasing cyber-attacks, it’s very important to keep your site secure and free from attacks. Wordfence Security plugin is the best and most popular WordPress Security Plugin.
| Active Installations: | 3+ million |
| Ratings: | 4.8 out of 5 from 3,568 reviews |
6. Elementor
As the #1 top free WordPress page builder plugin, Elementor is a very powerful design tool. It comes with an easy to use drag and drop editor too. You can easily design and create any kind of page without any need for coding knowledge.
With total downloads of over 63 million, Elementor is a simple and flexible tool and has a very fast and responsive design. It comes with 30 widgets and pre-made templates to help you design. You can easily create custom designs for your site.
Being an open-source project, many developers have contributed to building themes, add-ons, and functionality to the Elementor plugin. You also get great support for any obstacle you might come across.
Features of Elementor:
- Has an easy drag and drop builder tool.
- No coding knowledge required.
- Comes with more than 300 designer templates.
- Has 50+ widgets to choose from.
- Responsive design.
| Active Installations: | 5+ million |
| Ratings: | 4.8 out of 5 from 5,338 reviews |
7. UpdraftPlus
Popular backup plugin, UpdraftPlus is the most used free plugin in WordPress for backup. It helps you protect your website from data loss by backing up your data. It comes with great auto-backup features which allows you to create a backup of your site and store it to cloud servers easily.
With more than 37 million total downloads, UpdraftPlus is a very feature-rich backup plugin. You can use its schedule backup feature to back up your data. You can also selectively back up your data or selective pages or posts from your site.
UpdraftPlus direct restoration process from the dashboard is a hassle-free process to restore your backed-up data and requires no additional effort.
Features of UpdraftPlus:
- Provides an easy to use interface.
- Features like scheduled and automatic backups.
- Easy restoration process.
- Fast backup process and selective backup features.
- Can store backups directly to cloud services.
| Active Installations: | 3+ million |
| Ratings: | 4.8 out of 5 from reviews 3,601 reviews |
8. Contact Form 7
Your audience and visitors might require to contact you for different issues. For different inquiries or different problems, your site should provide your audience with the ability to contact you. That’s where Contact Form 7 comes in.
With over 148 million total downloads, Contact Form 7 is the most popular free WordPress contact form builder plugin. It allows you to build a contact form for your site. You can easily customize it or choose the best one for you from different templates available.
Contact Form 7 provides great integration and comes with a number of different extensions. It comes with everything you need from a form builder like predesign forms and CAPTCHA support.
Features of Contact Form 7:
- Add CAPTCHA fields and radio buttons.
- Supports quizzes and file submissions fields.
- Comes with extensive FAQ pages and support forums.
| Active Installations: | 5+ million |
| Ratings: | 4.0 out of 5 from 1,786 reviews |
9. Really Simple SSL
SSL certificate encrypts all your shared website data and makes it secured. It’s an industry-standard that signifies that your website connection is secured and the ‘https’ in your website link signifies it. This also means that your site can’t be accessed and data can’t be retrieved by anyone outside the system. SSL is very important if your site has sensitive data and information.
It is easy to misinterpret Really Simple SSL name but it’s not an SSL certificate nor does it provide you any. Its main function is to help you configure and optimize your website to work on https, without any issues.
With more than 33 million total downloads, it’s loved by many as this plugin helps make this process hassle-free and easy.
Features of Really Simple SSL:
- Shows you what you have to do if you don’t have the secure lock yet.
- enable HTTP Strict Transport Security
- configure your site for the HSTS preload list
- Certificate expiration check
| Active Installations: | 5+ million |
| Ratings: | 5 out of 5 from 5,171 reviews |
Download Really Simple SSL Now!
10. WP Super Cache
W3 Super Cache is the best and most popular caching and performance plugin for WordPress. It increases your website speed. It creates HTML files for dynamic pages which greatly increases the page speed.
With more than 33 million of total downloads, W3 Super Cache is a performance plugin of choice for many WordPress users. It loads the created HTML file for dynamic pages to improve load time. As it doesn’t have to process heavier PHP scripts, it significantly improves the speed of the site. It can also compress pages more efficiently for further optimization.
Features of WP Super Cache:
- Has a simplified user interface to access its features.
- Supports Content Delivery Network (CDN) which reduces crash chances and boosts speed.
- It has great compression features that help decrease the page load time.
- Turns your dynamic pages to HTML files to increase load time.
| Active Installations: | 2+ million |
| Ratings: | 4.3 out of 5 from 1,252 reviews |
10 Most Popular Premium WordPress Plugins for 2020
Most of the below-listed premium plugins are from CodeCanyon. Besides that, we’ve also included from independent plugin authors store. It is the most popular plugin marketplace. We’ve prepared this list based on the sales number and user rating.
Let’s start the list of most popular premium WordPress plugin for this year.
1. Slider Revolution
With more than 412,701 sales, Slider Revolution is one of the most popular WordPress plugins available on the market. It’s a responsive slider builder plugin that lets you add different exciting and colorful visual effects. It helps to make your site more interactive and elegant to look at.
Slider Revolution has a powerful visual editor which allows you to create elegant and modern designs in no time without any coding knowledge. You can easily and effectively work to make your design using its user-friendly and optimized editor.
Slider Revolution comes with numerous templates that you can choose from to design your site. It also offers fully customizable templates to create unique designs each and every time.
Features of Slider Revolution:
- Easy to use and set up.
- Comes with thousands of templates to choose from.
- Responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Improved loading times and user-friendly interface.
| Total Sales: | 412,701+ Sales |
| Average User Ratings: | 4.7 out of 5 from 10079 reviews on CodeCanyon |
| Pricing: | $59 for Regular License |
2. WPBakery Page Builder
With more than 4 million users, WPBakery Page Builder is the best-selling premium WordPress page builder plugin on the web. It’s an awesome page builder plugin that allows you to take full access over the customization of your site.
WPBakery has all the things you need to start making your business or company website. You can use its easy and intuitive drag and drop builder tool to design your website and it requires no coding experience.
WPBakery page builder provides you with various shortcuts to improve your website building experience. It also has a professional support team to guide you through any problems you might come across while building your site.
Features of WPBakery Page Builder:
- Easy to use and set up.
- Easy and intuitive drag and drop design tool.
- Requires no coding knowledge to create a responsive design.
- A professional support team and system.
| Total Sales: | 394,740+ sales |
| Average User Ratings: | 4.6 out of 5 from 10,760 reviews in CodeCanyon |
| Pricing: | $64 for Regular License |
Get WPBakery Page Builder Now!
3. Bookly PRO
A small yet very popular WordPress plugin, Bookly Pro is a simple bookkeeping plugin that keeps track of your appointments and bookings. It supports various add-ons to further extend its functionality.
With more than 31,000 sales, Bookly Pro is an automated online booking and appointment scheduling plugin. It offers you a fully customizable booking form with features like online payments, notification, and Google sync.
With Bookly, the customer themselves will make the appointment. It provides the customer ability to file the appointment by creating schedules for each employee. It also lets the customer pick a time when the employee will be free.
Features Bookly Pro:
- Fully customizable booking forms.
- Various templates for customizable email and SMS notification.
- Integration with PayPal Express Checkout.
- Built-in booking statistical analysis.
- WooCommerce compatible.
| Total Sales: | 33,544+ sales |
| Average User Ratings: | 4.5 out of 5 from 976 reviews in CodeCanyon |
| Pricing: | $89 for Regular License |
4. WP Rocket
Everyone loves snappy and faster load time while on the web. We all know the importance of good speed optimization for a better experience. You would also prefer a fast loading site, right? That’s where WP Rocket excels.
WP Rocket is one of the best speed optimization plugins for WordPress. It makes your website load faster by storing frequently accessed data on the user’s local computer temporarily. This allows the user to access the website data faster and helps load the site easily and faster.
WP Rocket also provides features like database cleaning, lazy loading, Domain Name System (DNS) perfecting, and many more to further optimize your site performance.
Features of WP Rocket:
- Easy to set up and use.
- Page Caching to load the page faster.
- Static file compression.
- Images are loaded only at request i.e when scrolling to a particular image.
| Total Use: | 13,41,868+ Websites |
| Average User Ratings: | 4.9 Out of 5 Stars on Trustpilot review |
| Pricing: | $49 for Single Website |
5. MemberPress
Many websites have an authority or membership system where visitors with certain clearance or contributions are able to consume more premium content than others. That is made possible on WordPress by different membership plugins and MemberPress is one of those.
MemberPress is a powerful and easy to use WordPress membership plugin. It allows you to create, revoke, and manage membership subscriptions and sell or provide member-specific products. It also allows you to completely control the level of access that different types of members get.
MemberPress allows you to specify what posts, articles or content is accessible by members of different levels. You can also make the membership available by payment which allows you to make money off those. You get full control over the content you share with different levels of members and the cost of it.
Features of MemberPress:
- Ridiculously easy to set up.
- Full control over content access rules.
- Secure and stable plugin.
- Track, create, revoke, and edit membership.
- Allows you to sell membership and member specific products and content.
| Average User Ratings: | 4.8 Out of 5 Stars on Trustpilot review |
| Pricing: | $149 for 1 Website |
6. Jetpack VaultPress
One of the most popular real-time backup plugins for WordPress, VaultPress, backs up all your website data automatically for you without any hassle. It offers an automated cloud backup solution so that you can backup and restore your data on the fly.
VaultPress takes daily backups and archives it effortlessly for easy access and restoration in the future. In this increasing time of cyber-attacks, it’s important to backup your site regularly and VaultPress is a great plugin for that. It also allows you to restore your site easily and change it to how it was.
Features of VaultPress:
- Daily and real-time backups.
- Scan your entire site.
- Restores backup automatically with a simple button click.
- Store your backup history and easily download selective backups.
| Total Active Installs: | 70000+ Websites |
| Average User Ratings: | 4 Out of 5 from 72 reviews |
| Pricing: | $19.95 per Month for Security Daily Plan |
7. Premium SEO Pack
With more than 8,000 sales, Premium SEO Pack is a very famous WordPress plugin. It comes with a number of important features for proper site optimization and to help your site rank higher in search engines.
Premium SEO pack comes with features like social sharing, SERP tracking, image optimization, and more to optimize your site and gather a good amount of traffic. It also has features like W3C validator, SEO friendly images, page speed insights, and many more.
This is a feature-rich plugin to help your site grow in a better place and rank higher in search engine results.
Features of Premium SEO Pack:
- On-page optimization.
- SERP keyword rank tracking and W3C validator.
- Page speed testing and reporting.
- SEO friendly image formatter and easy compressor.
| Total Sales: | 8300+ Sales |
| Average User Ratings: | 3.97 out of 5 from 873 reviews |
| Pricing: | $44 for Regular License |
8. WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML)
WPML is a must-have WordPress plugin for translation and multilingual features. As the internet is globally accessible, it’s important for your site to support multi-language translation to cover a wide audience. The language barrier should not be the problem in this internet-based world.
To help with this, the WPML plugin is a great extension for your WordPress site. This translates all your content for users in different languages. It supports more than 40 languages and you can even add more to it. This can easily translate your posts, pages, menus, and more and make your site really multilingual.
This multilingual aspect of the site can help you widen your range of audience and search engines also rank your site higher in the search results. WPML also provides plenty of other backend options which gives you more control over how it operates.
Features of WPML:
- Supports more than 40 languages.
- Allows you to add more languages.
- Loved by Search engines.
- Translates your whole site including menus, posts, pages, and more.
| Active Sites: | 1 Million+ Websites |
| Pricing: | $29 for Basic Plan |
9. Smush Pro
It’s important to grab attention and attract your viewers and images do a fine job of it. But if you have to upload images without compressing, then it can cause your site to eat up large space and load slower. That is where Smush is important.
With more than 2 million total downloads, Smush Pro is one of the most popular WordPress Image Optimization plugins. It compresses your website image size to help decrease your site load time. It helps you improve your site performance and operate much smoother and faster.
Smush Pro automatically compresses your images without much of a hassle. It doesn’t reduce the quality of your images and optimizes it using advanced compression algorithms.
Features of Smush Pro:
- Compresses and retains the quality of the image file.
- Increase the speed of your site decreasing load time.
- It also backs up your images.
- Optimization is done via a smush server, so it doesn’t require your resources.
- It can bulk compress up to 50 attachments at a time.
| Active Installations: | 1.3 Million+ Websites |
| Average User Ratings: | 5 Out of 5 from 5300+ reviews |
| Pricing: | $5/month for Basic Pack |
10. Essential Grid
Popular WordPress plugin, Essential Grid, lets you build great images, videos, and audio galleries from various sources. It allows you to display media and information into a beautiful and customizable grid pattern.
Essential Grid comes with dozens of example skins and templates to try out. You can also customize and design your own grid layout for your site. You can also add animations to make it more interactive and user-friendly.
Features of Essential Grid:
- Responsive and mobile-friendly.
- Fully customizable grid layout and allows you to design your own layout.
- Add different media to a grid layout to make a media gallery.
| Total Sales: | 45607+ sales |
| Average User Ratings: | 4.71 average based on 1419 ratings. |
| Pricing: | $69 for Regular License |
Conclusion
We hope that this article helped you learn about the most popular WordPress plugins and extensions on the web in 2020. We hope that you learn what type of plugins people love and why they are popular from the article.
Although they’re some of the most popular WordPress plugins, choosing plugins for your site should depend on your needs rather than other factors. Still, this article works as a great reference for what plugins to get.
You may also want to check our article on the most popular WordPress themes.
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