Best WordPress Plugins for Business to Drive Great Sales

by Vijay Vaghela
Posted on February 7, 2024

WordPress is the most trusted and widely used CMS. It provides a simple website-building platform. Its core code and a diverse collection of free WordPress themes and plugins add real power to your websites. However, it can be difficult to research the best WordPress plugins for business.

Many of the best WordPress plugins are free for you to explore before you buy them. There are more than fifty-five thousand of them, and the number is growing each day.

You can customize your website with the best WordPress plugins for businesses to grow and streamline operations and generate more revenue.

If you are having multiple WordPress websites it’s recommended to have multisite plugins as well. Multisite plugins help you monitor all your websites under one dashboard. we have created a list of 20+ best WordPress multisite plugins. Check them out and reduce your effort.

Every business has unique needs, and some of the premium WordPress plugins for small businesses can help you grow it.

Table of Contents

Importance of WordPress Plugins

There are over 55,000 plugins listed in the official WordPress directory. You have domain expertise in your area of business, but little technical knowledge in web development. This makes it difficult to find the best WordPress plugins and themes for eCommerce websites.

Recently, we’ve been receiving requests to research the best WordPress plugins for business websites. These include their questions for the best WordPress plugins for SEO, social media, data compression, backups, speed, etc.

As plugins are separately added to the code, they can be easily updated or removed.

With the help of this article, you can find top free WordPress plugins for business applications to boost your online presence.

Best WordPress Plugins for Business

These plugins can come in as free, freemium, or premium versions and all have their benefits and limitations.

Yoast SEO

More than 80% of internet users access Google. That’s how important the search engine is.

As a business owner, you want the search engine to rank your website higher. For that, you need to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

With the Yoast SEO plugin, on-page SEO efforts reduce significantly as it analyzes and helps you optimize web pages.

Yoast SEO is one of the best free plugins for website SEO. It is a must-have for online businesses, bloggers, review websites, and product listings.

It also lets you optimize the title, the meta description, and the URL. Yoast SEO can analyze the readability of your page and give suggestions to improve it using a color-coded system.

With it, you can create instant XML sitemaps to have full control over breadcrumbs and set canonical URLs to prevent duplicate content.

The Yoast SEO premium comes for only USD 89 for 1 website, including 1 year of free updates and support. Yoast provides you:

Word-form recognition in more than 12 languages, including English
Intelligent word forms recognition
Analyze the readability and calculate the Flesch Reading Ease score
Get suggestions for links to other pages
Add internal links to improve your site structure

WPForms

The best way to get qualified leads is by creating a contact form in WordPress.

WPForms plugin is extremely user-friendly, allows you to get unlimited responses, and can send responses by email.

It has several templates to choose from, of the most used ones – registrations, login, contact, feedback, and many more. You can then customize the form by dragging the fields and dropping them as per your needs.

The WPForms inherits the styling from the page around it and does not stand out as a haphazard piece of code. They are responsive and hence mobile-friendly by default.

The WPForms allow you to create as many forms as you need with built-in automatic spam prevention.

With the premium version of WPForms, you get more powerful features like smart conditional logic, file uploads, multi-page forms, customizable email notifications, post submissions, and much more.

The basic premium version of WPForms can be yours for USD 39.50/ year for unlimited forms on 1 website. you get unlimited Entries, advanced fields, form templates, multi-page forms, file uploads, and many more features with it.

With the 199.50/ year Pro pack, you get

All the features of the Basic and Plus packs
Support for PayPal & Stripe
Customized form landing pages
Conversational forms
Surveys and polls
Support for Zapier

Jetpack

It is a kind of pack of cards where you get all the aces to yourself! Jetpack is one of the most downloaded plugins with over four million active installations.

It can help you design your website, track its usage statistics, improve social media integration, and prevent attacks on it. With the premium version of the Jetpack plugin, you can add advanced features like spam protection, daily backups, and SEO tools.

Multiple important reasons to install Jetpack make it the most versatile premium WordPress plugin for small businesses. With jetpack, you can secure your website, speed up load times, manage it, and even boost conversions.

It does not require any setup, just install and activate the plugin. Other features include summarized real-time stats, blog post tracking, timelines of your users’ visits, mobile optimization services, and website monitoring.

The complete Jetpack pricing starts at INR 6,240 for 1 year and includes the full Jetpack suite with real-time security, enhanced search, CRM, marketing, growth, and design tools.

You can boost your performance with the search capability for searching up to 100k records and unlimited video hosting.

Jetpack’s premium real-time security provides real-time backup, scan, and anti-spamming tools.

The Jetpack CRM is one of the simplest and most powerful WordPress CRM. With it you can, easily view leads & sales funnel, create proposals & invoices, and track transactions.

Google XML Sitemap

A sitemap helps crawlers to find and index web pages on your site properly. Without an updated and correct sitemap, your ranking will suffer, and search engines may display outdated information.

Even for a moderate website, like a blog, the number of web pages becomes too large to maintain the sitemap manually. That is where the Google XML Sitemaps plugin comes to your rescue.

This plugin creates, updates, and maintains a dynamic XML sitemap of your WordPress website. This XML sitemap is compatible with all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Any updates to your website – publishing new blog posts or adding new products – will trigger auto-updates of the sitemap.

Also, the Google XML Sitemap plugin automatically notifies search engines about changes in your sitemap. This makes it one of the best WordPress plugins for eCommerce websites.

The upgraded account for Google XML Sitemap will let you index up to 1.5 million pages, automatically update the sitemap, create Images, Videos, News sitemaps, and RSS feed, detect and list broken links on your site, and many other features. You can get all these features for just USD 3.49/month.

SmushPro

Images are vital to make your website appealing to the user. As the cliche goes, “An image is worth a thousand words.”

Your website’s speed and performance depend on how compressed and optimized your images are.

Smush is another WordPress plugin that can improve your website’s performance by doing exactly this.

It can automatically compress and resize the images uploaded to your WordPress website. Smush compresses images using the advanced lossless compression technique. It preserves their sharpness while reducing their size.

You can optimize an unlimited number of images for free. The only restriction is that the tool will compress only a max of 1 MB per image.

Smush Pro plugin removes many restrictions like file size limits, bulk smush limits, and delivers better compression with customized options.

For only USD 5/month, you get:

2x compression
Auto backup of original images
Optimize photos up to 32MB in size
Compress unlimited images with single click with 45 point image CDN,
Automatic resize and scale capabilities

MonsterInsights

Data tracking is vital to the continuous growth of your website. You can track your website metrics by installing a stats dashboard in WordPress.

Google Analytics can inform you of how each web page is performing. It also shows exit pages and the efficiency of social media campaigns. But it is complex and not user-friendly.

MonsterInsights plugin for WordPress can manage Google Analytics for your website from the WordPress dashboard.

With this plugin installed, tracking your website with Google Analytics becomes much easier. It shows all the primary statistics like unique visitors, number & time of sessions, and bounce rate.

Use it to set up track outbound links, internal links, and downloads. Checking out your highest performing content, and demographic of visitors is easy with the MonsterInsights plugin.

The premium version allows you eCommerce tracking through apps and includes WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads plugins.

With pro, receive eCommerce stats like most sold products, most visited offers, and revenue generated. Get all this for USD 199.50/year in the Pro package or USD 99.50/year in the Plus package.

Install Google Analytics with MonsterInsights now and enjoy the privileges with this premium plugin.

Akismet

The use of bots and automated agents for posting comments is not limited to social media but has started with websites and blogs. If you scroll through any of the expert-written articles on free WordPress plugins for business owners, you would find Akismet.

But the free version won’t do much help. You need to go for the paid version to enjoy all the privileges.

Akismet anti-spam plugin can automatically screen all comments for spam and weed them out. Akismet is the official WordPress anti-spam plugin developed by WordPress’ parent company Automattic.

Online businesses that need contact form submissions and comments to track new leads, use Akismet extensively.

The plugin can directly remove spam comments from the webpage or can flag them for manual review.

You can upgrade to the premium version for higher security and more features. The premium offers benefits such as the number of approved comments per user, viewing comment history, and displaying URLs in comments.

The most popular premium version Plus goes for USD 8.33/month, billed annually and the more feature-rich, Enterprise version goes for USD 41.67/month, billed annually.

The Enterprise version gives you spam protection, 60K API calls per month, unlimited websites, and priority support.

Schema Pro

Schema markup is used by websites for automatically marking up content and highlighting its most exclusive points. It can be statistics present on the web page, sections in a book, or FAQs on your website.

With the Schema Pro plugin, you can set up a markup for any type of page in minutes. Any markup configurations set by you are automatically applied to all selected pages & posts.

You can markup schema for articles, books, courses, events, frequently asked questions, how-to pages, blogs, job postings, and many more.

For a small online business listing their products, jobs, reviews, and services with proper markup can generate added revenues. Check out our guide on how to add schema markup for your website.

Schema Pro supports mapping required fields with existing values or adding new custom values to them. It is easy to use filters, add fields, and extend the markup with details that you wish to display.

This is all you can get for USD 63 a year or the special USD 199 for a lifetime one-time subscription. You also get display rules freedom, advanced schema types, article guidelines, 100% ACF compatible support, and live schema testing.

If you think the price is high, apply our exclusive Schema Pro discount code.

Elementor Page Builder

Designing a WordPress website and its pages is easiest with the Elementor plugin for page building. It is a drag-and-drop page builder to let you design complicated-looking pages without writing a single line of code.

Being a front-end editor, Elementor lets you edit the actual page, as it displays live, and does away with the need for preview. It implements the “What You See Is What You Get” design principle.

This makes Elementor the best WordPress plugins to design websites as they can save on designer and programmer costs. For more details on features, pricing, pros, cons, and more check out our detailed Elementor review.

The premium version of Elementor is the need of the hour for every website builder with no code. That’s why it has a special place in any list of the best WordPress plugins for business.

It comes with added features for designing responsive websites and allowing editing from smartphones directly. The Plus version comes for just USD 99 a year. You can get up to 30% off by applying our exclusive Elementor Pro discount codes.

In this, you will get 50+ pro widgets, 300+ pro templates, 10+ full websites, template kits, theme builder, popup builder, and support & updates for 1 Year.

Really Simple SSL

websites hosted on HTTP do not have push notification capabilities and do not offer a reliable exchange (without retry logic).

Also, clients are not required to close the connection when all the data they need have been received. Therefore, if you are logging into your bank or entering credit card information in a payments page and the URL is HTTP, your sensitive data is at risk.

HTTPS, on the other hand, adds S for security in HTTP and makes it safe for users to access their important and confidential information online. It establishes a secure connection to encrypt the data before transmission, making it safe throughout the connection path.

Also, making the website SSL compliant and hosting it on HTTPS is now compulsory for search engines to rank them.

Moving from HTTP to HTTPS hosting requires making changes to the sitemap, and inbound and outbound external links. Installing the SSL certificates can be tricky for novice programmers or non-coders.

Really Simple SSL does exactly that for your websites. It is a one-click solution that redirects URLs, updates old links, and installs your SSL certificate.

You can activate the plugin and enable your SSL certificate with one click. You can also redirect all incoming requests to secure HTTPS connections.

Fixing mixed or insecure content by assigning HTTPS URLs and database integrity is maintained while carrying out the changes.

The Professional edition comes for only USD 59 a year. It provides support on 5 domains with extensive scans, premium email support, HTTP only and secure flags for encrypted cookies, improved security for your site, and mixed content fixer for the back-end.

Popular WordPress Plugins

Here are the top 3 popular plugins, from our top 10:

Yoast SEO provides title and meta description templating, schema implementation, dynamic XML sitemaps, control over breadcrumbs, and canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content. Yoast does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine bots.
Jetpack is packed with multiple functionalities and features such as usage statistics, social media integration, preventing attacks, spam protection, daily backups. With some features it works wonders, and in some there is room for improvement. But, it gives too many goodies.
Elementor Page Builder is a front-end web page builder with support for sections, modules, and widgets. Even non-programmers can use it to make great looking websites and blogs. Web pages designed using this plugin are responsive, and it allows editing from mobile.

Conclusion

Our curated list of best WordPress plugins for business is recommended across the WordPress developer community. The list of all the excellent and efficient plugins you have at your disposal can be dizzying.

Therefore, identifying your website’s needs and finding the best plugins to meet them is a job for experts.

Start building your website with Elementor page builder and use Really Simple SSL to make it HTTPS ready from the go.

Now, activate Jetpack to gain in-depth website analytics data and tracking features.

Use Google XML Sitemaps to build an updated dynamic sitemap and boost your SEO with Yoast.

Block spammers with Akismet in comments that you made using WPForms along with registration and login forms.

Use Smush to compress and optimize your images to ensure your page load quickly.

Use Schema pro to build relevant and SEO-friendly markups for all pages and blog posts on your website.

Finally, track all campaigns, social media posts, and user activities right from the WordPress dashboard using MonsterInsights.

As you can see, by installing these core plugins, you can be confident on the website front and focus on your revenue generation models.

FAQs

1. What are the best WordPress plugins for eCommerce?

Ans: Out of more than fifty-five thousand WordPress plugins, a website should use not more than I0 or 15 core plugins.

If you use more than that, then instead of improving the performance, they will degrade it.

Selecting the right plugin for an eCommerce website is important as it directly affects your business.

If we must still choose the best WordPress plugins for eCommerce websites, then we nominate Jetpack, MonsterInsights, Akismet, and WPForms.

You may need plugins for payment solutions, store design, third-party integrations, and customer support.

2. What are the best free WordPress plugins?

Ans: We have experience and can suggest the best WordPress plugins for your websites.

We can divide plugins into the following categories:

Content creating and designing plugins
Analytics, marketing, and SEO plugins
Optimization, performance, security, and maintenance plugins

The best freemium plugins are – Jetpack, MonsterInsights, and Elementor page builder.

3. What are the most popular WordPress plugins and their functions?

Ans: On the official WordPress page for listing popular plugins, the following of our top 10 best free plugins appear:

Plugin	Rating	Number Reviews	Active Installations(in millions)
Yoast SEO	5	27,265	5+
Akismet	4.5	910	5+
Elementor Website Builder	5	5,527	5+
Jetpack	4.1	1,555	5+
Really Simple SSL	5	5,931	5+

5. Are all WordPress plugins free?

Ans: No, not all plugins are free. Some plugins are premium, and most plugins use the freemium model. Once the user pays the subscription, all the premium features are available.

You can build and host your WordPress website with free plugins. However, the free version of many plugins may not be your best choice.

For example, with free Smush installation, you cannot compress images of size more than 1 MB. If you need compression of images with a larger size, you need to buy its license.

5. What plugins do I need for WordPress?

Ans: WordPress provides many tools and features for you to build your dynamic website. But, there is a limitation of the CMS in providing all you need. Plugins fulfill that.

The plugins, recommended by us in this article, are those that provide you the add-on capability bare WordPress may be missing or something extra you needed.

For example, to build a web page design, you may need the Elementor page builder plugin even if you don’t know to program and don’t want to learn it either.

If Google analytics reports confuse you with large data sets, install MonsterInsights into your WordPress to get targeted website metrics.

6. Does WordPress premium allow plugins?

Ans: WordPress comes in two editions. WordPress org is an open-source installation, and WordPress, which is the de-facto installation for commercial websites.

WordPress websites cannot use plugins unless they upgrade their plans to the business category, costing USD 299/year.

If you use the free, personal, or premium plans of WordPress, then third-party plugins are not allowed. If you need plugins free of cost, then you can move your website from WordPress to WordPress org.

7. What are premium plugins?

Ans: Paid or premium plugins are free for users to explore. Once the users are convinced of their capabilities, then they can purchase a license from WordPress developers.

Prices for such paid plugins can range from $20 to $500 depending on the business challenges the plugin solves.

Plugin developers can customize them for your unique needs.

8. What are the best plugins for WordPress?

Ans: There are some limitations of using free plugins, especially for complicated and sensitive processes like payment gateway.

Free plugins are carefully checked by the WordPress community before uploading to the public directory. They typically come on without any technical support, tutorials, and guidance.

Some plugins may not be secure and can open a backdoor for hackers to exploit your website.

Usually, a providing free plugin is also a marketing technique. It encourages users to upgrade to its premium version. With the premium version, users get access to the full range of features.

We hope that this article on the best WordPress plugins for business was beneficial for you. Do share it across social media and tag us @reviewsnguides.