The best WordPress plugins for 2024

Millions of users worldwide use WordPress, a website content management system that empowers you to build and customise your online presence. While WordPress is chock full of amazing features, the real power lies in the thousands of plugins that further elevate a website’s functionality and appearance.

As we venture into 2024, the role of plugins in shaping your customer’s User Experience (UX) and enhancing your website’s capabilities is more important than ever. There’s a plugin for everything!

Whether it’s adding specific features, streamlining processes, or simply improving the overall performance of your website, there are so many plugins in the market that you can choose from.

Unfortunately, there’s also a big difference in the quality of plugins. Plus, the ever-changing nature of the World Wide Web has created so many new plugins, making it more difficult to sort through the duds to find the diamonds.

Well, we’re taking the headache out of the research for you! Our team has sat down, chosen the top plugins, and compiled a list of the best WordPress plugins for 2024. These plugins are high-quality, reliable, and the best in their respective categories.

Read on to discover the best plugins for your WordPress website.

Here are the Best WordPress Plugins for 2024

What are WordPress plugins?

Before we dive into the best WordPress plugins on the market, here’s a quick overview of what plugins actually are and how they factor into your website’s performance.

You can think of WordPress plugins as apps for your website. They are software containing little tools or features you can add to your website to add more functionality. Plugins can help you optimise your website for Google, design your website using easy-to-use website builders, prevent spam comments, or simplify backing up your website content. If a feature is useful on a website, there’s sure to be a plugin for it!

The appeal of plugins is that they can help you customise your website without needing to be an expert in coding or website development. So whenever you’d like to add a cool new feature to your website, all you have to do is find the right plugin, install it, and enjoy your improved website without requiring a lot of technical know-how.

How we chose the best WordPress plugins for this list

The criteria that we used to select the plugins to put on this ‘Best Of 2024’ list include the following:

Purpose & Functionality: We identified the most useful functionalities and features for small business websites.
Reviews & Ratings: We checked the reviews and ratings of the plugins on The WordPress Plugin Directory and looked for plugins with mostly positive reviews and a high rating.
Active Installations: The number of active installations is a good indicator of how popular a plugin is. High numbers also generally indicate trustworthiness. Simply put, if this many people continue to use it, it must be pretty good!
Developer Reputation: We included plugins made by established and reputable developers. These developers are also more likely to provide ongoing support, updates, and bug fixes for their plugins, which is a huge plus.
Frequency of Updates: Regular updates usually mean the developer actively maintains and improves the plugins. It’s worth noting that outdated plugins often have compatibility issues or even security vulnerabilities, so we’ve listed plugins that receive regular updates.
Security Features: We also prioritised plugins that have strong security measures. Unsecured plugins can leave your website vulnerable to cyber attacks, which happens to small businesses more often than you’d think.
Ease of Use: We’ve chosen user-friendly and easy-to-install plugins. There are no overly complex plugins here!

Here’s a tip: Use our criteria above as a checklist for choosing a WordPress plugin for your website.

Overview of the Best WordPress Plugins for 2024

Best SEO Plugin for WordPress
Yoast SEO

Best Popup Plugin for WordPress
OptinMonster

Best eCommerce plugin for WordPress
WooCommerce

Best Contact Form Plugin for WordPress
Ninja Forms

Best SEO Plugin for WordPress

While everyone knows the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), most would also readily admit that it’s trickier to master than you’d think.

First, let us briefly explain what SEO is all about. SEO is defined as a set of practices and strategies designed to improve a website’s ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Simply put, a website that prioritises SEO will be more likely to rank higher on search engines like Google and will then be more likely to have higher traffic than its lower-ranking competitors. In fact, according to research, over two-thirds (68.7%) of all clicks go to the top three organic search results.

It’s safe to say that SEO is an important factor in determining the success of your business! SEO plugins are a useful way to monitor your website’s SEO performance, ensuring you’re always on top of it.

Among the myriad SEO plugins available for WordPress websites, one plugin stands out for us as our SEO plugin of choice for all our WordPress websites: Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is the Best SEO plugin for WordPress in 2024 because of its user-friendliness and array of useful tools. As an SEO plugin, Yoast SEO really goes beyond the basics, offering a whole heap of features to help you elevate your SEO.

With this WordPress plugin, you can easily add SEO titles and descriptions to all your posts and pages using a simple form at the bottom of your WordPress editor. It doesn’t stop there – you can add things like Open Graph metadata (the images and details you see on a link when sharing it on social media).

We also use the Yoast SEO plugin to help us improve our content’s readability and optimise the meta titles and descriptions (what you see on a search engine result page for a website).

The plugin also creates an XML sitemap for all your content, which means that it creates a website map for search engines to navigate your website, making it quicker and easier for these search engines to explore and rank your website. Almost like a train network with different stations and lines.

While we recommend purchasing the paid Yoast SEO Pro version, which contains all the top-notch features you’ll require for your website’s SEO, we’ve found that the free version does a good enough job for smaller websites.

Best Popup Plugin for WordPress

Did you know that the average popup conversion rate is 11.09%? That’s 110 conversions gained per 1000 website visitors. It’s clear that popups are a pretty impressive lead-generating tool! But there are variables at play here, especially when it comes to the intention of your popups and even the design of it.

For example, popups with incentives (like a discount code or free eBook) do better than popups that don’t have incentives. And popups with countdown timers perform better than popups without. That’s why we’ve chosen a popup plugin that makes it easy for you to customise your popups!

Our choice for the best popup plugin for WordPress in 2024 is OptinMonster.

This plugin’s intuitive drag-and-drop builder allows you to easily create attention-grabbing popups that’ll turn your website visitors into subscribers. With over 100 popup templates, you won’t have to start from scratch. Plus, all their popup templates are responsive, meaning they are optimised to look great no matter the device.

OptinMonster also offers a variety of campaign types, from unobtrusive lightbox popups to more attention-grabbing popups that cover the entire screen. You can also choose from a variety of trigger options that determine when and how popups are displayed, including specific actions such as scrolling, inactivity, time-based triggers, and exit intent (which is triggered when a user is about to leave your website, offering a last-minute opportunity to engage or convert the user).

Another OptinMonster feature we like is the advanced targeting options that allow you to deliver the perfect message to the right person at precisely the right moment. For example, you can display a popup offering a lead magnet about branding just as your website visitor reads a blog post about it. That’s the power of precision targeting.

Some website builders, such as Elementor, also offer pop-ups built into the site builder plugin itself. We also enjoy this one and use it for our website.

Best eCommerce Plugin for WordPress

Did you know that Australians spent a whopping $56.2 billion online in 2023? On average, 5.6 million households shop online every month. We are a pretty savvy bunch when it comes to eCommerce!

eCommerce is set to grow even more in the coming years, so it’s vital that businesses optimise their website’s eCommerce strategy to ensure they’re getting a piece of the pie. Integrating an eCommerce plugin lets you offer customers a streamlined shopping experience and helps drive more sales while making your online business easier to manage. It’s a win-win!

When it comes to choosing the best eCommerce plugin for WordPress, there’s one clear winner: WooCommerce.

Over 3 million live websites currently use WooCommerce, and it’s incredibly popular on WordPress websites specifically – 93.7% of all WordPress eCommerce websites use the WooCommerce plugin.

Whether offering physical or digital products, you can use WooCommerce to manage all your eCommerce needs.

This plugin stands out as the top eCommerce plugin for WordPress for multiple reasons, but the main factor is the vast array of extensions and themes, allowing you to customise your website’s eCommerce experience to suit your exact needs.

You can use WooCommerce add-ons and extensions to add functionality to your WordPress eCommerce website, including selling subscriptions with recurring payments, managing bookings, including payments for appointments, creating customisable product bundles or packages, and even implementing a loyalty program for your business. The options are almost endless!

WooCommerce also makes it really easy for you to manage your inventory and has seamless integration with all the popular payment gateways, so you can effortlessly simplify all your eCommerce website processes.

The best part is that WooCommerce itself is free! However, remember that all the additional extensions and add-ons will require payment, and the costs can vary greatly for each one. Make sure to do your research!

Best Contact Form Plugin for WordPress

We reckon this is the best WordPress plugin for contact forms

Contact forms play a crucial role in directly connecting your business with potential customers. They provide a convenient way for people to reach out, ask questions, or request information. It makes sense that a carefully crafted contact form is essential to your lead generation efforts.

However, despite their simplicity, contact forms are frequently overlooked or not optimised to reach their full potential, resulting in low conversion rates. Research shows that only 9% of individuals who encounter a contact form choose to submit it.

You can do several things to maximise your lead generation through your contact forms, but the easiest way to get started is with a good contact form plugin. If you want to create engaging contact forms that get people clicking, you need a form builder that gives you all the tools to make that happen.

Our pick for the contact form plugin for WordPress in 2024 is Ninja Forms.

While the premium version features all the bells and whistles we’ll be describing here, you can try a free version. It’s a risk-free way to experiment with this plugin, so we reckon it’s a good idea to download it and have a go!

We love that Ninja Forms features a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy for you to whip up really effective contact forms. Plus, there are no limitations on the number of forms, fields, or email addresses you can receive, so you can keep creating as many forms as you’d like.

What makes this plugin really special is its wide array of add-ons. With over 40 of them to choose from, you can hone in on many special features to maximise your contact form’s efficiency.

For example, the conditional logic add-on allows you to show or hide certain form fields based on specific conditions. Let’s say you include a drop-down menu asking users to select their preferred contact method (email vs phone). With the conditional logic add-on, you can make it so that if they choose email, you can display a field for their email address. Features like this will help your users and increase the chance they won’t leave your form before they press submit.

Another reason we chose Ninja Forms as the best contact form is the integration with multiple platforms, including MailChimp and Campaign Monitor for email marketing and Stripe and PayPal for accepting payments. Plus, with Zapier integration, you can access over 4000 other integrations across several platforms. Very useful!

Power Up Your WordPress Website With Plugins

Leveraging the power of plugins is the key to unlocking the full potential of your WordPress website. From improving SEO to capturing leads and running a streamlined eCommerce business, plugins like Yoast SEO, OptinMonster, WooCommerce, and Ninja Forms offer a big boost for your WordPress website.

When it comes to how to choose a WordPress plugin, we hope our list of the best WordPress plugins for 2024 can help you narrow down the best ones for your business. Consider it a go-to guide as you shop for the best plugins to elevate your website experience.

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