WordPress Recommended Resources:
- Last Updated :
- November 27, 2019
We’ve carefully curated a list of top rated, very useful and highly recommended WordPress plugins for you to read through and see if they provide the functionality you need in your next project.
These are plugins that we’ve properly gone through from top to bottom, we’ve implemented deeper integration with the Overlay theme, and plugins that we use ourselves.
What are you looking for?
Read through and click to move to the relevant section on what you’re needing help with.
See our list of recommended web hosts. Through years of experience we’ve dealt with many different companies and we only recommend certain hosts.
When doing regular backups or migrating your website to new servers, we only suggest a select few to make it easy when doing this process.
We used many WordPress plugins from all the sites we’ve built, doing custom client work and building WordPress themes… See our recommendations.
These are the extras you don’t have to use but will definitely make life easier and enhance your website with some cool functionality and useful add-ons.
Recommended WordPress Website Hosting
From years in the industry, we only recommend these 2 hosts for top quality WordPress hosting and great customizer support for help setting up your hosting, or transferring to a new host.
If you’re looking for great, well priced hosting then we recommend looking into Cloudways hosting as your first solution.
Cloudways is a highly recommended WordPress hosting company. Cloudways managed hosting platform gives digital agencies and eCommerce businesses flexibility and choice in how their websites are hosted.
Kinsta is top quality, premium managed WordPress hosting. While they do cost a little more, we recommend trying then out.
Kinsta does cost a little more, started at $30 p/m, but they handle everything from caching to security & more, plus they offer amazing support. We highly recommend Kinsta.
Email - Newsletters / Mailers
If you’re wanting to sign users up to a regular newsletter and send regular mailers to keep users up to date and promote your products, then we recommending looking into one of the 2 following suggestions.
MailChimp is an industry leader when it comes to building and managing your email newsletters.
MailChimps marketing platform helps you find new customers, build stronger relationships, and boost sales through deeper customer insights.
Constant Contact offer modern, mobile-optimized templates and drag-and-drop editor make it easy to create, customize, and send professional emails that work for your industry.
Easily build and manage your newsletters with Constant Contact.
WordPress Website Backups & Migration
We highly recommend Duplicator for backing up your website or migrating your website to new servers. While the free version is great for smaller to mid-size websites, we recommend Duplicator Pro for large site backups or migration.
Duplicator makes moving your website to new servers, or creating manual backups very easy. You can in 3 steps scan your site, build the backup and download the entire site with 2 files. The free version is great for small to medium size sites.
Duplicator Pro offers scheduled backups and cloud storage to to your selected cloud platform too, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon and more. For larger sites / blogs, we highly recommend Duplicator Pro.
Recommended WordPress Plugins
Through years of experience in building custom WordPress sites and being in the theme industry, we’ve curated a list of top plugins we think you will find useful when building your website.
Page Builders
Elementor is a great page builder which makes it very easy and fun building your different website pages. With simple drag and drop functionality and lots of Elementor widgets/blocks to use, Elementor really lets you feel like a designer when building your pages.
Elementor + Elementor Pro running together on one site are possibly the only two plugins you will need to build a full website. Elementor Pro comes with Forms, Sliders, Social widgets and lots more all built in. We highly recommend you give Elementor a go and look into Elementor Pro, starting at only $49.
SiteOrigin’s Page Builder, along with the SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle plugin, offers a very easy to use, powerful drag and drop page building experience.
SiteOrigin Page Builder and SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle are very easy to learn, so you’ll be building beautiful, responsive content in no time.
Website Analytics
Labelled Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights on WordPress.org.
MonsterInsights is the most powerful and user-friendly WordPress analytics plugin in the WordPress market… With over 2 million active installs, Monster Insights really has over-powered all the other analytics plugins.
Grow your business with confidence using Monster Insights, for all businesses from bloggers to eCommerce stores to developers and Agencies.
Forms
The WPForms plugin is a simple to use form builder plugin which offers a lot, from form templates, spam protection, marketing tools and conditional logic included.
WPForms plugin offers extra add-ons too which will let you create more advanced forms such as user registrations, survey forms and polls, Form Abandonment, payment systems and lots more.
Ninja Forms is a very popular WordPress form builder which is easy to use and requires no coding knowledge.
Built or beginners, you can quickly and easily design complex forms with absolutely no code… Also built for developers, utilize built-in hooks, filters, and even custom field templates to do whatever you need at any step in the form building or submission using Ninja Forms as a framework.
Surveys
Survey Maker is a WordPress survey plugin designed for collecting and analyzing data from your selected group of users. Built by a company which specializes in building surveys, you can easily build extensive surveys and get the answers you need!
With Survey Maker, you can build multi-page surveys with unlimited sections, submissions with real time reporting and more. The plugin is fully customizable so you can design the surveys to match you brand identity and suit your website.
eCommerce
WooCommerce is most used and trusted eCommerce plugin to turn your WordPress website into an online store, WooCommerce is free to use and set up your shop and start selling your products.
With lots of WooCommerce extensions available, you can easily create the exact store you want from digital products to tangible products, to product licensing, subscriptions and lots more.
Easy Digital Downloads is another great eCommerce system you can use for your online store… We use it on this site.
Offering the same environment with EDD and a lot of EDD extensions available for the different type of store you may need to set up. Easy Digital Downloads is a great system for selling your products online.
StoreCustomizer helps you further customize your WooCommerce store without having to touch any code. With all the WooCommerce code snippets build into a visual interface, you can easily edit Add To Cart buttons, Sale banners, edit the different WooCommerce pages and lots more.
StoreCustomizer also offers a premium version which includes more advanced features for customizing your WooCommerce store such as Catalogue Mode, Ajax Product Search, Custom Thank You Pages for WooCommerce, Product Quick View and WooCommerce Menu Cart… And that’s not all, there is more!… Try out StoreCustomizer on your online store.
Comments
Disable Comments is a simple way to remove comments from your website.
Giving you the options to remove comments from certain sections on your site, or to remove them completely, we often use this plugin and it removes everything in 2 clicks.
Site Under Maintenance / Construction
WP Maintenance Mode is great plugin used to create an ‘under construction’ or ‘coming soon’ landing page for your WordPress website while you’re busy building it.
You’re able to login and continue building your website while non-logged in users will see the maintenance mode page until you deactivate it.
Search Engine Optimization
The Yoast SEO plugin is the go to plugin for Search Engine Optimization and ensuring that Google and other search engines love your site.
With dashboard hints and help on how to increase your ranking in search engines, Yoast is a must have for getting top quality help on the best SEO practices.
Security
JetPack is your top plugin for Hassle-free design, marketing, and security – all in one place.
Built by Automattic, it’s an all in one plugin that offers:
- Brute force attack protection, spam filtering, and downtime monitoring
- Daily or real-time backups of your entire site
- Secure logins with optional two-factor authentication
- Malware scanning, code scanning, and automated threat resolution
- Fast, priority support from WordPress experts
Wordfence is a very popular, with over 3 million installs… Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect your WordPress website.
Activate and further configure Wordfence security tools to protect your website and prevent harmful attacks or login attempts.
Speed & Performance
Created by Automattic themselves, WP Super Cache is our most recommended plugin for caching your site files and speeding up your site to reduce page loading time.
WP Super Cache generates static html files from your dynamic content, we use WP Super Cache on most of our websites.
Tranlsation
Loco Translate is widely used to translate WordPress / WooCommerce websites. With over 900k active installs, it definitely makes translating your site easier.
Loco Translate provides an in-browser translation editing experience of your WordPress files.
It also provides better localization tools for developers to use… such as extracting strings and generating templates for translations.
WPML is one of the most popular and loved WordPress translation plugins… It can be a bit more pricey, but that is because it’s a great plugin for translating your site.
WPML comes with many features and extensions, giving you full control over all elements when translating your website into other languages.
WPML offers support for WPML 6 days per week, 19 hours per day and in 9 different languages.
Polylang is also one to consider when translating your website… It’s also very popular, with over 400k installs.
Polylang lets you to create a bilingual or multilingual WordPress site. You write posts, pages and create categories and post tags as usual, and then define the language for each of them.
Extra Useful Tips & Recommendations
Here’s an extra list of plugins we enjoy using and find useful in our projects.
Breadcrumb NavXT is a plugin that adds breadcrumbs to your website. The breadcrumbs are very customizable and easy to set up.
Overlay offers deeper integration with this breadcrumbs plugin… Simply activate the plugin and Overlay does the rest.
Haven't found the plugin you're needing?
Our list above only consists of plugins that we have often used ourselves and we know they are good plugins with no issues. If you’re still looking for more functionality then the best is to look either on WordPress.org or on the CodeCanyon directory.
Make sure you test out the plugins properly and check the support forums or comments section to ensure the developers are there to help for is any issues come up.
While some of these recommendations do contain affiliate links, we will only recommend companies or products that we fully trust and recommend.
With some of our recommendations we do have more than one suggestion, so if you need to ask us anything on the information above, then don’t hesitate to get in contact and we’ll assist you as best we can.