The Best WordPress Plugins

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As the end of 2020 gets ever closer we're taking a look at the top WordPress plugins for 2022. There exists a plugin for almost any purpose on the WordPress platform, be it for security, analytics, backups, forms, affiliates, RSS feeds; anything you need. We've gone through those plugins that firstly, were of most help to us, and secondly, were of most help to the rest of the WordPress community. That's you.
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As 2022 gets underway, we’re taking a look at the top WordPress plugins for this year.

There exists a plugin for almost any purpose on the WordPress platform, be it for security, analytics, backups, forms, affiliates, RSS feeds; anything you need.

We’ve gone through those plugins that firstly, were of most help to us, and secondly, were of most help to the rest of the WordPress community – that’s you!

So here’s our list of WordPress plugins that we feel will be of most value this year (in no particular order).

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Yoast

WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize everything from your pages’ content, images’ titles, and meta descriptions to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

It’s got a long list of features including the ability to use the snippet preview to see a rendering of what your post or page will look like in the search results, page analysis functionality, technical WordPress search engine optimization, XML sitemaps, RSS optimization, social integration, Elementor integration, and multi-site compatibility among others.

Get WordPress SEO by Yoast

WP Migrate DB Pro

WP Migrate DB Pro

WP Migrate DB exports your database as a MySQL data dump (much like phpMyAdmin), does a find and replace on URLs and file paths, then allows you to save it to your computer. It is perfect for developers who need to update their local install with fresh data from the production site, or copy their locally developed site to a staging or production server.

It even takes into account serialized data (both arrays and objects) and updates the string length values. Upgrading to the Pro version gets you a lot more features and email support. These features include the following:

  • Select the tables you want to migrate
  • Pull production db down and replace local db
  • Push local db up and replace production/staging db
  • Multisite support
  • Media files migration
  • More frequent bug fixes and improvements
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WP Migrate DB Pro
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New Customer Offer — Save up to 50% on your first year of WP Migrate DB Pro for individual use.WP Migrate DB Pro allows you to copy your entire WordPress site from one environment to another with...Show More
New Customer Offer — Save up to 50% on your first year of WP Migrate DB Pro for individual use.WP Migrate DB Pro allows you to copy your entire WordPress site from one environment to another with one click in your dashboard. Show Less
Get WP Migrate DB Pro

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms provides one of the simplest and cleanest interfaces for generating dynamic forms and managing the form data. Form creation acts as the core functionality of Gravity Forms while other features are built around the form creation to add more power.

Among these features you have drag and drop field sorting, a fully featured interface for form validation and configuration, import and export abilities, multi-step forms and more.

Gravity Forms also allows you to quickly and easily integrate with a variety of third party services such as PayPal and provides for even deeper integration with WordPress through their collection of optional Add-Ons.

Toolset

Toolset

Toolset is a set of WP plugins devised especially to make the non-coder’s life easier.  There are multiple plugins in the entire collection, with some of the most notable ones being:

Types: Types lets you define custom post types, taxonomies and various other special fields. It is an extremely useful plugin if you wish to extend your WP site using custom post types and taxonomies, but do not really want to be bound by post types defined by a WP theme.

Views: Views lets you modify the appearance of pages, lists and widgets. All in all, if used properly, Views can help you tweak the look and feel of your entire WordPress website within minutes. The interface surely requires some level of ‘getting used to’, but once you get the hang of it, Views can make your life really simple.

CRED: CRED allows you to create and edit content for front page. Yes, we are also talking about building web apps using WordPress.

Spotlight PRO

Spotlight

Spotlight is a WordPress Instagram feed plugin that allows you to add your Instagram feed anywhere on your WordPress site. Displaying an Instagram feed can be beneficial for a number of different reasons, including:

  • Creating a better connection with your visitors
  • Increasing your Instagram followers
  • Displaying testimonials in the form of hashtag feeds
  • Linking to WooCommerce products using your Instagram posts
  • and many more!

Spotlight PRO presents you with all the features you need to create beautiful feeds. What’s more, you can easily moderate and filter your feed to ensure you have full control over what your visitors see.

You can now create multiple Instagram feeds with different layouts and display them in your footer, sidebar, or page. Spotlight was designed with beginners in mind, so its user-interface is one of the strongest in its field.

WP All Import 

WP All Import

WP All Import’s simple drag and drop interface makes it extremely easy to map the data in your XML or CSV file to the appropriate fields in WordPress.

The plugin works with any theme, any plugin, and supports images, Custom Fields, taxonomies, Custom Post Types, dates, and pretty much every other WordPress field.

WP All Import is designed to be efficient with large imports – it splits large import files into smaller chunks – making it possible to import files with hundreds of megabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of records, even on shared hosting.

WP RSS Aggregator

WP RSS Aggregator

WP RSS Aggregator lets you create a feed reader/aggregator on your WordPress site. The core plugin provides simple and useful features but if you are serious about your feeds, you definitely would want to check out the add-ons.

Here’s the complete list of add-ons currently available for WP RSS Aggregator:

  • Feed to Post – an advanced importer that lets you import RSS feeds into posts or custom post types. Populate a website in minutes (autoblog). This is the most popular extension.
  • Keyword Filtering – filter imported feeds based on keywords, so you only get items you’re interested in.
  • Excerpts & Thumbnails – display excerpts and thumbnails together with the title, date, and source.
  • Categories – categorize your feed sources and display items from a particular category at will within your site.
  • WordAi – WordAi allows users to take an RSS feed and turn it into new content that is both completely unique and completely readable.
  • Full Text RSS Feeds – connectivity to our Full Text Premium service, which gives you unlimited feed items returned per feed source.

Lasso

Lasso

Lasso is a full suite of affiliate marketing tools in one plugin. It helps you track and manage all your affiliates in one dashboard and increase your conversions and affiliate revenue.

When you sign up to Lasso you’ll get:

  • Personalized links through link cloaking.
  • Affiliate link health statuses.
  • Product stock alerts.
  • Performance tracking.
  • Suggested link placements.
  • An Amazon affiliate integration.
  • Personalized eye-catching product displays (as seen below and on their demo page), among other features.
Lasso Product Display

Lasso costs $29/month or $289/year. That’s pretty reasonable considering the increased conversions it will help you achieve. If you’re still unsure, try it out with their 14-day free trial.

BlogVault

BlogVault

Whenever you’re working on a website, you need to ensure that should anything happen, all your hard work is safely backed up. You never know what could cause your site to crash – it could result from a specific plugin being installed to a hacker forcing their way into your site.

It is therefore essential that you always have a recent backup of your entire WordPress site. This is crucial to the recovery of lost data.

BlogVault is one of the most reliable and trusted plugins out there and it is our backup plugin of choice, here at WP Mayor.

JetPack

JetPack

Jetpack is a single plugin that gives you the most powerful WordPress.com features, hooking your self-hosted WordPress site to WordPress.com’s infrastructure to take advantage of robust stats, easy social sharing, and a whole lot more.

With Jetpack, you can:

  • Install over two dozen popular plugins with one click (and update them all the same way).
  • Engage millions of WordPress.com users, allowing them to interact with your site.
  • Boost your site’s performance by taking the load of these features off your servers.
  • Count on regular updates, enhancements, and troubleshooting from the same folks who build WordPress.com.

MailPoet

MailPoet

MailPoet lets you create newsletters, post notifications and autoresponders. You can drop your posts, images and social icons in your newsletter, change fonts and colors on the fly and manage all your subscribers. It’s a simple newsletter solution for WordPress.

Among it’s long list of features you’ll find:

  • Drag & drop newsletter editor
  • Send your latest posts automatically
  • Autoresponders, i.e. “Send email 3 days after someone subscribes”
  • Selection of over 30 themes. Photoshop files included
  • Get stats for your newsletter: opens, clicks, unsubscribes
  • Send emails to your WordPress users
  • A beautiful statistics dashboard to compare your newsletters, and subscribers
  • Detailed stats for each subscriber and newsletter

WooCommerce

WooCommerce

WooCommerce allows you to transform your WordPress website into a thoroughbred eCommerce store. It delivers enterprise-level quality and features, backed by a name you can trust.

Among its many features you’ll get strength & flexibility since WooCommerce is built using WordPress best practises both on the front and the back end, smart dashboard widgets & reports, customizable themes, several popular payment gateways and shipping methods such as PayPal Standard, Simplify Commerce, BACS, Cash on Delivery, flat rate shipping, and free shipping.

There are also a number of premium extensions including Product Addons, Table rate shipping, Product CSV Import Suite, WooCommerce Subscriptions, Dynamic Pricing and Bookings.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin. However, besides your normal page caching function, WP Rocket introduces cache preloading. Here WP Rocket use their own robot to simulate a visit to your site, preloading the cache and hence improving speed as well as the indexing of your site by search engines.

It also uses minification; a process whereby the plugin reduces the weight of your HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These lighter files mean less load on your server and even faster loading times. Besides all this, the developers smartly incorporated an images on request function. This cool feature loads only the visible images on your page, with the rest appearing as the user scrolls down.

It’s so easy to configure that any novice can use it and get his/her site to perform that much better.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy

Say goodbye to the endless options, confusing interfaces and bloated messes of other WordPress slider plugins. Soliloquy is different by design because it is focused on efficiency, usability and reliability. It is crafted in a way that moulds simplicity and functionality into a powerful yet usable slider engine.

It offers unrivalled performance and security, a fully responsive design, endless flexibility, scalability and performance. Soliloquy is built on a solid foundation that is able to adjust wherever and whenever you need it. With over 100+ configurable hooks and filters inside of the plugin, Soliloquy can be turned into any type of WordPress slider you can dream of.

Summary

Those are our selection of WordPress plugins to look out for in 2022. There’s a variety of plugins for most of the major requirements of a WordPress site.

What are your thoughts? I’m sure there are others worth a mention too, so if you have anything to add you can do so in the comments below.

Note: Some of the links above are affiliate links, but rest assured that this had no bearing on our judgment of these plugins. All plugins were included based on their performance and functionality.

Mark Zahra

Mark is the CEO behind the WP Mayor project. He has been using WordPress since 2012, joining the WP Mayor team in 2014. Since then, he has helped to review, test, and write about hundreds of WordPress products and services; educating the community of millions of WordPress users around the globe.

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10 Responses

  1. Great list just make sure you don’t lose any file. I would recommend to have BackupGuard – a powerful backup and restoration plugin. If things go wrong, you can always restore your website with
    BackupBuard. Check it out

  2. For EU websites owners: EU cookie policy law says you have to show a banner on every page informing users about the cookies your website is using. We developed a useful WP plugin that does just that, stylish and with some other useful options and multiple language support natively included. Check it out here: if you please!

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    was researching on Askjdeve for something else, Regardless I am here now and would just like to say thanks a lot for a tremendous post and a all rouhnd thrilling
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    1. You’re welcome! Feel free to sign up to our newsletter too if you’d like to keep up to date with all our latest content.

  4. Although it’s not good to load a site with tons of plugins, these are some great ones! Especially JetPack, WordPress SEO by Yoast, and Gravity Forms.

  5. Thanks for the feedback Joshua!

    You’re right. In fact the idea here isn’t to use all of them, but these are the ones that we feel offer the most in their respective areas.

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