61 of the Best WordPress Plugins for 2015

WordPress Plugins. What would our sites look like without these little apps?

Devoid of functionality is what they’d be since the WordPress core only provides so much. Without plugins our sites would be really boring and fairly useless.

Plugins, and their sidebar cousins the Widgets, are available by the hundreds through the WordPress Repository, and yet more premium plugins are sold privately.

Sometimes, badly coded plugins will conflict with others, so you have to be careful which ones you install. If your site shows issues after activating a new plugin, deactivate it to identify the problem, and delete if necessary. And if you can’t make a plugin or widget work within an hour, ditch it and find another.

Here’s a list of some of the best WordPress plugins I’ve found, segmented by function.

Almost all descriptions are those of the developer. Most of these plugins are free, but have Pro versions. Plugins denoted with $‘s cost money, √ means I’ve used it extensively, and the rest I’ve either just started with or have heard good things about.

Advertising/Promotion

AdRotate
Supports unlimited groups for banners allowing you to tie certain banners to different areas of the website. On top of that with GeoLocation you can tie adverts to certain areas of the world. Version 3.11 | By Arnan de Gans of AJdG Solutions

CTA Widget
A simple text widget with Title, Image URL, A text/html area, Link Text and Link URL. Version 1.1 | By Charlie Strickler √

Calls to Action 
Create Calls to Action for your WordPress site. Monitor and improve conversion rates, run A/B split tests, customize your own CTA templates and more. Version 2.2.9 | By InboundNow √

Go – Responsive Pricing & Compare Tables
The New Generation Pricing Tables. If you like traditional Pricing Tables, but you would like get much more out of it, then this product is a useful tool for you. Version 2.4.5 | By Granth $ √

HMS Testimonials
Display your customer testimonials on pages or posts. Use groups to organize and display specific testimonials on specific pages. Version 2.2.27 | By HitMyServer LLC √

OptinMonster
Lead-generation plugin for WordPress that allows you to create attention grabbing optin forms that convert. Version 2.1.4.1 | By Thomas Griffin $ √

 

Communications

BuddyPress
Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of WordPress. Version 2.1.1 | By The BuddyPress Community √

BP Group Hierarchy
Allows BuddyPress groups to belong to other groupsVersion 1.4.3 | By David Dean √

Recently Registered
Add a sortable column to the users list on Single Site WordPress to show registration date. Version 3.3 | By Mika Epstein √

MailPoet Newsletters
Send newsletters, post notifications or autoresponders from WordPress easily, and beautifully. Version 2.6.14

Design

Column Shortcodes
Adds shortcodes to easily create columns in your posts or pages. Version 0.6.6 | By Codepress √

Flexible Map
Embed Google Maps in pages and posts, either by centre coodinates or street address, or by URL to a Google Earth KML file. Version 1.9.1 | By WebAware √

JetPack Custom CSS 
Gives you the ability to add to or replace your theme’s CSS, all while supplying syntax coloring, auto-indentation, and immediate feedback on the validity of the CSS you’re writing.JetPack Extra Sidebar Widgets – adds extra widgets √

JetPack Mobile The  
Visitors on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and other mobile devices will automatically see the mobile theme, with the option to view the full site. You can enable or disable the mobile theme by clicking the “Activate” or “Deactive” button above. √

Widget Visibility
Controls visibility- expand the widget and click the Visibility button next to the Save button, and then, choose a set of visibility options. √

Simple Page Sidebars
Designed for simplicity and flexibility, Simple Page Sidebars gives WordPress users, designers, and developers the ability to assign custom sidebars to individual pages–without making any template changes. Existing sidebars can also be assigned in quick edit and bulk edit modes. Version 1.1.8 | By Blazer Six √

Page Builder
Build responsive page layouts using the widgets you know and love using this simple drag and drop page builder. Version 2.0.5 | by SiteOrigin √

TablePress
Embed beautiful and feature-rich tables into your posts and pages, without having to write code. Version 1.5.1 | By TobiasBg

Thrive Content Builder
The Ultimate Click-to-Edit Front End Builder for Your Website. Great for landing pages. Version 1.60 | By Thrive Themes $$ √

WP Maintenance Mode
Adds a splash page to your site that lets visitors know your site is down for maintenance. It’s perfect for a coming soon page. Version 2.0.3 | By Designmodo √

WPtouch Mobile Plugin
Mobile plugin for WordPress that automatically enables a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors of your WordPress website. Version 3.6.5 | By BraveNewCode Inc. √

Ecommerce

WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful, extendable eCommerce plugin that helps you sell anything. Beautifully. Version 2.2.11 | By WooThemes

Easy Digital Downloads
Sell digital downloads through WordPress with this complete digital downloads management plugin. Version 2.2.7

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart
Very easy to use Simple WordPress Paypal Shopping Cart Plugin. Great for selling products online in one click from your WordPress site. Version v4.0.6

Events

All-in-One Event Calendar by Time.ly 
A calendar system with month, week, day, agenda views, upcoming events widget, color-coded categories, recurrence, and import/export of .ics feeds. Version 2.1.9 | By Time.ly Network Inc. √

Booking Calendar
An ultimate booking system for online reservation and availability checking service for your site. Version 5.3 | By Wpdevelop. √

Events Manager
Fully featured event registration management including recurring events, locations management, calendar, Google map integration, booking management. Version 5.5.5

WP Meetup
Pulls events from Meetup.com onto your blog to be displayed in a calendar, list, or various widgets. Version 2.2.12 | By Nuanced Media √

Forms

Contact Form 7
Manage multiple contact forms, and customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. Version 4.1 | By Takayuki Miyoshi √

Formidable Forms
Enables you to quickly and easily build forms with a simple drag-and-drop interface and in-place editing. Version 1.07.11 | By Strategy11 

JetPack
Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users. Version 3.3 | By Automattic √

JetPack Contact Form 
Each contact form can easily be customized to fit your needs. When a user submits your contact form, the feedback will be filtered through Akismet (if it is active on your site) to make sure it’s not spam. Any legitimate feedback will then be emailed to you, and added to your feedback management area. √

Maintainance

Broken Link Checker 
Checks your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and will notify you if any are found. Version 1.10.4 | By Janis Elsts √

Duplicator
Create a backup of your WordPress files and database. Duplicate and move an entire site from one location to another in a few steps. Create a full snapshot of your site at any point in time. Version 0.5.12 | By LifeInTheGrid

Simple Backup
Simple Tools to Optimize and Backup Your WordPress Website. Version 2.7.8 | By MyWebsiteAdvisor √

WP Backitup
Creates a backup archive (zip) of your entire website with a single click. Backup archives can be quickly and easily downloaded so that they can be stored securely and separately from your hosted WordPress site. Version 1.10.2 | By Chris Simmons √

Images

Advanced Image Styles  Adjust an image’s margins and border with ease in the Visual Editor. (Necessary since WP v. 3.9) Version 0.3 | By Gregory Cornelius √

FlexSlider
Add responsive sliders to your website using shortcodes, template tags or widgets, to showcase custom slides, blog posts or other content in a responsive animated slider. Version 2.0 | By WooThemes √

JetPack Tiled Galleries
Create elegant magazine-style mosaic layouts for your photos without having to use an external graphic editor. [mini-icon icon=”leaf”]

NextGEN Gallery
The most popular WordPress gallery plugin and one of the most popular plugins of all time with over 10 million downloads. Version 2.0.66.37 | By photocrati. √

WP Smush.it
Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress. Version 1.7 | By WPMU DEV √

Speed

Hyper Cache (was Lite Cache)
A cache plugin specifically written to get the maximum speed for your WordPress blog. It can be used in low resources hosting as well on high end servers. Version 2.3.4 | By Stefano Lissa √

WP Super Cache
Generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Version 1.4.2 | By Automattic √

Query Strings Remover
Removes query strings from your static resources like CSS and JavaScript files. It will improve your cache performance and overall score in Google PageSpeed, YSlow, Pingdom and GTmetrix. Version 1.0 | By Atul Kumar Pandey

Security

Akismet – (Out of the box with WordPress)
Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. Version 3.0.4 | By Automattic √

BulletProof Security
Website Security Protection: BulletProof Security protects your website against 100,000’s of different hacking attempts/attacks. Version .51.4 | By AITpro | Edward Alexander 

Captcha
Plugin Captcha intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. Plugin asks the visitor to answer a math question. Version 4.0.8 | By BestWebSoft √

Login Security Solution
Requires very strong passwords, repels brute force login attacks, prevents login information disclosures, expires idle sessions, notifies admins of attacks and breaches, permits administrators to disable logins for maintenance or emergency reasons and reset all passwords.  Version 0.50.0 | By Daniel Convissor √

Sucuri Security
The Sucuri plugin provides the website owner the best Activity Auditing, SiteCheck Remote Malware Scanning, Effective Security Hardening and Post-Hack features. SiteCheck will check for malware, spam, blacklisting and other security issues like .htaccess redirects, hidden eval code, etc. Version 1.7.5 | By Sucuri, INC √

Search Optimization

Google Analytics by Yoast
This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site, adding lots of features, e.g. error page, search result and automatic outgoing links and download tracking. Version 5.3 | By Team Yoast √

Google XML Sitemaps
For those who don’t use WP SEO by Yoast, this plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. Version 4.0.8 | By Arne Brachhold √

JetPack Stats
Makes the most popular metrics easy to understand through a clear and attractive interface. √

WordPress SEO by Yoast
The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more. Version 1.7.1 | By Team Yoast √

Social

Floating Social Media Icon
Easy 2 Use Plugin 2 Show SocialMedia Icons That Floats, Can Configure Social Icon Design, Order & Size, Support Widget & Shortcode. Version 1.3.8. | By Acurax International

JetPack Publicize
allows you to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yahoo!, and Linkedin. √

JetPack Sharing
Drag and drop social sharing services into the enabled section to have them show up on your site. √

Share Buttons by AddToAny
Share buttons for your pages including AddToAny’s universal sharing button, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, WhatsApp and many more. Version 1.5.1 | By AddToAny √

Miscellaneous