Top WordPress Plugins of 2016
Today, we are assorting useful WordPress plugins of 2016 which are a must-have for your WordPress-powered website or blog. Let’s have a look at them.
1. Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO by Yoast tops our list of WordPress plugins of 2016. It is one of the most useful plugins for a WordPress website. This plugin helps you to improve your SEO significantly. It ensures that you have a fully optimized WordPress website. A must-have plugin for any WordPress powered website or blog, it comes with an easy to use interface.
Some useful insights about Yoast SEO:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.1 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Yoast SEO
2. W3 Total Cache
Here comes another useful WordPress plugin that helps you to optimize your web performance. The plugin has been designed to improve user experience and page speed. It increases server performance, reduces the download times and provides transparent content delivery network integration.
Some useful insights about W3 Total Cache:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.3 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.3.2
Download W3 Total Cache
3. Jetpack
Jetpack helps you to comfortably manage your WordPress website. It provides you visitor statistics, security services, and helping you to get more traffic with tools such as Related Posts, Publicize, Enhanced Distribution, and Sharing. It also optimizes and speeds up images using global WordPress.com content delivery network.
Some useful insights about Jetpack:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Jetpack
4. Google XML Sitemaps
Download this plugin and it will generate a special XML sitemap to help search engines better index your blog. Such sitemaps make it easier for cralwers to see the complete structure of your website to retrieve it more efficiently. It supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages and custom URLs.
Some useful insights about Google XML Sitemaps:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.2.6
Download Google XML Sitemaps
5. WP-Optimize
This plugin cleans up your WordPress database and optimizes it without need of doing any manual queries. It is an extensive database cleanup and optimization tool that cleans and optimizes your database tables as well. Also, it does automatic cleanup of all integrated options. It reports which database tables have overhead and wasted spaces to help you get rid of them. It is among popular WordPress plugins of 2016.
Some useful insights about WP-Optimize:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.2.6
Download WP-Optimize
6. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular contact plugins for WordPress. It allows you to manage multiple contact forms and one can also customize the form and mail contents flexibly. This WordPress plugin supports Ajax-powered submitting, Captcha, Akismet spam filtering and more.
Some useful insights about Contact Form 7:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Contact Form 7
7. WP Smush
Here comes WP Smush, a free image Smusher that is incredibly powerful and useful. It strips hidden, bulky information from your images, reduces the file size and that too without losing quality. By helping you reduce image file sizes, it boosts your SEO significantly. It helps you to load site faster and thus, the more search engines will like it.
Some useful insights about WP Smush:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download WP Smush
8. Akismet
This useful plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if the comments look like spam or not. It lets you review the spam it catches under the blog’s Comments admin screen. It automatically checks all comments and filters those that look like spam. URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
Some useful insights about Akismet:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.8 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Akismet
9. Wordfence Security
Among useful WordPress plugins of 2016, this WordPress security plugin provides enterprise-class WordPress security by protecting your website from all kinds of malware. It does a deep server-side scan of your source code and secures your site. This free and open source plugin makes a website up to 50 times faster as well.
Some useful insights about Wordfence Security:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Wordfence Security
10. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a must-have in our list of top WordPress plugins of 2016. It allows you sell anything beautifully over the internet. It seamlessly integrates with WordPress and provides endless flexibility and access to hundreds of free and premium WordPress extensions. WooCommerce allows you to sell both physical and digital goods.
Some useful insights about WooCommerce:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download WooCommerce
11. Google Analytics
Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your website using latest Google Analytics tracking code. You can also view key Google Analytics reports. The plugin provides in-depth reports and in-depth post reports allow further segmentation of your analytics data as well. Download this free plugin and get performance details for each post or page.
Some useful insights about Google Analytics Dashboard for WP:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
12. BuddyPress
BuddyPress plugin allows you to run any kind of social network on your WordPress site. It is a suite of components common to a typical social network and allows for great add-on features via WordPress’s extensive plugin system. It is deliberately powerful yet unbelievably simple social network.
Some useful insights about BuddyPress:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.3 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download BuddyPress
13. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker plugin checks the broken links on your website so that you can fix those. This free quality plugin allows you to fix the SEO related issues like finding broken links, fixing themes and more. It checks your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notifies you if any are found.
Some useful insights about Broken Link Checker:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.1 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.3.2
Download Broken Link Checker
14. BackWPup Free
This is your WordPress backup plugin that lets you schedule complete automatic backups of WordPress installation. It can be used to save your complete installation and push them to an external backup like Dropbox, FTP etc. The free version checks and repairs database as well as optimizes it.
Some useful insights about backWPup Free:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download BackWPup Free
15. Theme Check
Theme Check is a simple and easy way to test your theme for all latest WordPress standards and practices. The plugin makes sure that the theme is according to the spec with the latest theme review standards. You can also run the same automated testing tools on the theme that WordPress.org uses for theme submissions.
Some useful insights about Theme Check:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.8 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Theme Check
16. Duplicator
Duplicator WordPress plugin gives you the ability to migrate, copy or clone a site from one location to another. The plugin serves as a simple backup utility as well. It is great to move or backup WordPress websites and for pulling production sites down to local machine for testing and validation.
Some useful insights about Duplicator:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Duplicator
17. Nextgen Gallery
NextGen Gallery is a must-have in our compilation of best WordPress plugins of 2016. It is one of the most popular gallery plugins. It provides a powerful engine for uploading and managing galleries of images along with the ability to batch upload, import meta data, edit thumbnails, group gallery into albums and more.
Some useful insights about NextGen Gallery:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 3.2 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download NextGen Gallery
18. Soliloquy Lite
Soliloquy Lite is the best responsive WordPress slider plugin. It features easiest to use and most performance optimized code for a WordPress slider plugin. With this plugin, you can create as many as number of responsive sliders as you want with an infinite number of images in each slider.
Some useful insights about Soliloquy Lite:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 3.6 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download Soliloquy Lite
19. Mailchimp for WP
MailChimp for WordPress helps you to add more subscribers to your MailChimp lists using various methods. Using this plugin, you can create good looking opt-in forms or integrates with other forms on your website.
Some useful insights about MailChimp for WordPress:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download MailChimp for WordPress
20. Tablepress
Last but not the least, here comes TablePress in our assortment of top WordPress plugins of 2016. It is a popular plugin to embed beautiful and feature-rich tables to your posts and pages. You don’t have to write codes for table data. Tables can contain any type of data and they can be imported and exported from/to Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON files.
Some useful insights about TablePress:
Cost: Free
Ratings: 4.3 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 4.4.1
Download TablePress
Didn’t find your favorite WP plugins in our assortment of WordPress plugins of 2016? Let us know about them in the comments!
