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12 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites
Looking for the best WordPress plugins to take your business to the next level? There are over 58,000+ WordPress plugins that you can choose from. This makes it extremely overwhelming for new users to find the right plugin for their website. We are often asked by readers for the best WordPress plugin suggestions for SEO, social media, backups, speed, etc.
Being the largest WordPress resource site, our experts test over a thousand best paid and free WordPress plugins every year, so we can make it easy for our users (you) to find the best solutions. Having the right set of WordPress plugins and tools can help you grow your online business. In this article, we have shared our expert pick of the must-have WordPress plugins for business websites in 2021.
12 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites
Note: these are the plugins that our team installs when we start a new blog or make a new website for our own businesses.
1. WPForms
Every website needs a contact form because it makes it easy for your visitors to get in touch with you. WPForms is the most user-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag & drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms, surveys, polls, and basically all other types of online forms with just a few clicks.
WPForms integrates with all popular marketing and payment platforms, so you can build powerful forms in less than 5 minutes. It comes with powerful features that simply don’t exist in other form builders such as conversational forms, form landing pages, user journey tracking, form abandonment, geolocation tracking, GDPR friendly, custom WordPress user registration and login forms, etc.
We use WPForms on the WPBeginner website and all of our other websites. But we’re not alone. Over 4 million websites use WPForms, and they have consistently maintained a 4.9 out of 5-star rating average for over 4 years now. There’s a free WPForms Lite version available for those who are looking for a simple solution. If you are seriously looking to grow your business, then we recommend getting the Pro version because it comes with all the powerful features you need to boost your lead generation efforts. Use this WPForms coupon to get 50% off your purchase.
Alternative: Formidable Form is an excellent alternative for creating advanced solution-focused WordPress forms.
2. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to “properly” connect your website with Google Analytics, so you can see exactly how people find and use your website. The best part is that it shows you all the important stats that matter right inside your WordPress dashboard. You can then optimize your website accordingly to increase your traffic, subscribers, and revenue. We have detailed guides on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress, how to use Google Analytics to enable eCommerce tracking, and how to track user engagement.
MonsterInsights has a free version, but the true power of it only unlocks when you upgrade to the premium version. You can use our MonsterInsights coupon to get 50% off your purchase. MonsterInsights is used by over 2 million websites.
3. All in One SEO
SEO helps you get more visitors from search engines to your website. While WordPress is SEO-friendly out of the box, there is so much more you can do to increase your website traffic using SEO best practices. All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time. It is used by over 2 million websites.
Out of all the WordPress SEO plugins, AIOSEO offers the most comprehensive solution with all the features and tools that you need to improve your on-page SEO. It helps you add meta tags, generate sitemaps, connect your site to Google Search Console, optimize it for social media, and more. Their team is continuing to innovate and add new SEO features to help you improve your SEO rankings. For complete SEO setup on your website, follow our complete AIOSEO setup guide and then our ultimate WordPress SEO tutorial for beginners.
There’s also a free version of AIOSEO available. However, the pro version includes more powerful features like WooCommerce SEO, local SEO, smart schema, and much more. To save 50% on the pro version, see our All in One SEO coupon.
Alternative: Yoast SEO is another good alternative for AIOSEO.
4. Constant Contact
Email is the most effective and most reliable marketing tool at your disposal as a business owner. It allows you to stay in touch with your users even after they leave your website. This is why we recommend every business owner to start building an email list right away.
Constant Contact is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world. Their platform allows you to build an email list and send beautiful email newsletters to your subscribers. It offers a quick and easy setup for non-techy users. It also works well with popular lead generation plugins for WordPress like OptinMonster and WPForms.
Alternatives: SendinBlue and ConvertKit are good alternatives if you want something more advanced, but they are more pricey.
5. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the most popular conversion rate optimization software in the market. It allows you to convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers and customers. This WordPress plugin and application helps you get more email subscribers and sales, fast. You can use their hundreds of high-converting templates to create WordPress popups, slide-ins, announcement bars, gamified spin a wheel, and full-screen welcome mats to capture users’ attention.
Each opt-in form or campaign template can be easily customized with their drag & drop builder. OptinMonster’s powerful display targeting features allow you to personalize the campaigns for each user, so you can show the right message at the right time. It’s a great solution for bloggers, business websites, and eCommerce websites. Basically, if you want to make more money from your website traffic, then you need OptinMonster.
It helps you recover abandoned cart sales, convert website visitors, and grow your email list. Read these case studies to see how much success other businesses are having by using OptinMonster. We use OptinMonster on WPBeginner and our other websites. There’s a free version of OptinMonster available if you signup from inside the WordPress plugin.
6. SeedProd
SeedProd is the best drag and drop page builder for WordPress. It allows you to easily customize your website design and create custom page layouts without writing any code. Business owners love it because it lets them create completely custom landing pages within minutes without having to hire a developer. You can choose from over 100+ beautifully designed templates, or create a completely custom layout from scratch with their easy-to-use drag & drop WordPress page builder (no coding needed).
There have pre-made templates for landing pages, sales pages, thank you pages, webinar registration pages, coming soon pages, maintenance mode pages, 404 pages, and more. SeedProd comes with a smart design system, so you can save time by re-using elements instead of doing repetitive work. You can define color schemes, save font combinations, page templates, custom blocks, sections, and more. It has all the blocks and features that you would expect from a powerful page builder such as opt-in forms, social profiles, countdown timers, contact forms, buttons, various content blocks, and more. It also comes with built-in subscriber management and seamless integration with third-party email marketing services and CRM software.
Alternative: Beaver Builder and Divi page builder plugins are great alternatives with powerful features. You can also try CSS Hero for theme customization.
9. MemberPress
MemberPress allows you to build online courses, communities, and membership sites using WordPress. It is the best WordPress membership plugin in the market. You can create subscriptions and restrict content access to users based on their subscription plans. It works with all popular payment solutions and plays nicely with online stores using WooCommerce as well.
MemberPress comes with many other powerful features including drip content, course management (LMS), group memberships, powerful access rules, automation features, and more. For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to make a membership website in WordPress. You can connect MemberPress with all email marketing platforms to communicate with your customers. MemberPress helps creators generate over $500 million dollars in revenue each year.
8. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the most popular WordPress backup plugin on the market. It allows you to set up automatic backups and safely store them on a remote location like Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Rackspace, FTP, email, and more. It also makes it super easy to restore your website from a backup. Their base plugin is free, but they also have a paid plan with extra features and priority support.
Alternative: BackupBuddy and VaultPress (Jetpack Backups) are also excellent solutions, but they are paid only.
9. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market. It allows you to instantly improve your WordPress website speed and performance with no technical skills required. It automatically turns on recommended WordPress caching settings like gzip compression, page cache, and cache pre-loading. You can also turn on optional features like lazy loading images, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, minification, and more to further improve page load times.
Most importantly, WP Rocket doesn’t wait for someone to request a page to save it in the cache. It automatically crawls and builds your website cache which results in an instant performance boost. WP Rocket also offers Imagify which is a free image optimization service to help you speed up your website even further. This is by far the easiest and most beginner-friendly caching plugin. The only downside is that it’s paid only.
Alternative: WP Super Cache is free, but it’s not as powerful or easy.
10. Sucuri
Security should be a top priority for all online business owners. Sucuri offers a WordPress security plugin and web application firewall that is probably one of the best protection you can get for your site. They monitor and protect your site from DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, and basically every other type of attack. If you don’t have a firewall on your website, then you need to add one today.
To learn more on how to strengthen the security of your website and protect your business, see our ultimate WordPress security guide with step-by-step instructions for beginners. Sucuri helps us block hundreds of thousands of attacks every month on WPBeginner.
11. RafflePress
RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market. It allows you to instantly increase your website traffic, get more social media followers, and email subscribers with viral giveaways and contests. RafflePress comes with an easy drag and drops giveaway builder along with proven giveaway templates that you can use to create a giveaway that attracts visitors’ attention.
To enter the giveaway, website visitors must use their email addresses. This helps you get more subscribers to your email newsletter. RafflePress incentivizes users to follow your social profiles and share the giveaway with their friends to get more entries into the contest. This helps you increase social media engagement. Word-of-mouth marketing helps you get more traffic, FASTER! This results in more followers, more sales, and more revenue! You can easily connect your social profiles, WordPress form plugins, and all popular marketing platforms and CRMs.
RafflePress has a free version called RafflePress lite that you can get started with. If you want more powerful features to skyrocket your growth, then you need to use RafflePress Pro. WPBeginner users can use our RafflePress coupon code: wpbeginner20 to get an additional 20% off.
12. PushEngage
PushEngage is the best web push notification plugin for WordPress. It allows you to send targeted messages and announcements to your website visitors using the browser push notification technology. We use push notifications alongside our email newsletter to increase our customer engagement and website traffic. Push notifications are consistently a top 5 traffic source for WPBeginner.
PushEngage comes with all the powerful features like drip campaigns, a/b testing, dynamic user segmentation, opt-in reminders, powerful analytics, goal tracking, and more. For eCommerce websites, it can automatically trigger cart abandonment notifications, price drop alerts, inventory alert notifications, and more.
For bloggers & publishers, it can automatically send out new blog post notifications to all of your subscribers. PushEngage works seamlessly on all website builder platforms including WordPress, Shopify, Bigcommerce, and more. They have a PushEngage WordPress plugin that makes it easy to enable web push notifications on your website. The best part about PushEngage is that they DO NOT sell your data unlike every other provider in that space.
Alternative: OneSignal is another popular alternative, but they sell your data on free plans.