If you are a WordPress user, you know what plugins are and why WordPress users install various plugins. More than thousands of plugins are available in the market and new plugins are launched daily, making WordPress websites more user-friendly and systematic. In this article, our aim is to provide information on plugins and different types for plugins for your blog and website.
Before starting anything, let us understand what WordPress plugins mean and how to install any plugins on your WordPress dashboard.
Plugins are the soul of WordPress websites. Plugins are a piece of software to increase additional functionality on your WordPress theme. However, it is important to learn what Plugins can be compatible with your theme to have better performance on your websites.
To explore more on WordPress Plugins, you can visit our previous blog article where we have explained what are WordPress plugin with more details.
What are Different Types of Plugins | Updated: 2025
There are thousands of plugins available in the market and are increasing every day. Some plugins are free whereas some are premium. Due to the number of plugins, it is quite confusing what plugins can be best for your blog. We have explained my best recommendation and personal use for my blog to make my blog have great functionality.
Security plugins
My primary aim when creating any website or blog is to have a secure site. For that, I use various plugins to make a site secure and safe for users. Some of my recommended securities plugins are:
Really simple SSL
Sometimes your site has an SSL certificate installed but still shows the site is unsecured (no padlock or says: your site is unsecured) this can move your audience away from your site and nobody wants that to happen. Using the Really Sample SSL plugins automatically defects the setting and configures your website to run HTTPS.
iThemes Security
iThemes security plugin is another recommended plugin to use as a blogger. Theme security helps your site protect from hackers, malware and other protection. The theme uses its site scanner and detects any malware on your blog.
Some other plugins for maintaining a security level high are the Wordfence plugin, use of CDN, Sucuri security, Defender, the sculptress and others.
Performance plugin
The second plugin I look for is a plugin for better performance of the site. The performance plugins include cache plugins, optimization, compressor and use of CDN.
WP fastest cache
WP Fastest cache helps to decrease the page load time of your website and every blog requires cache plugins as it does impact your site ranking. I use the wp fastest cache because it is easy to use, lightweight and work better.
Autoptimize plugin
Smush plugin
Any website or blog consists of an image and is important to have the image on your site to make website design attractive and improve your site ranking on Google as well. The use of an image in your site makes your site load slower Smush plugin is the best plugin to compress and optimize images improving your site speed.
SEO Plugin
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugins are those piece of software designed to help website owner to optimize their website content in search engine and make your content or site visible to higher audience with gaining organic traffic. Some Popular Available SEO plugins are listed below.
Rank Math SEO Plugin
Rank Math is a new and popular SEO plugin with unlimited features provided. Rank math help your website optimize your content for search engine and help your website Rank higher or search engines. Within a free person, you can do lots of things that most SEO plugin offers on a premium person.
Yoast SEO
Yoast is another popular SEO plugin to help your website optimize your website whether you are creating a small business or a large enterprises. Presently, over 13 millions of people uses Yoast SEO to optimize their website and with their premium version, it help your website rank higher and make SEO work easier.
Some other popular SEO plugins available in the market are All In One SEO plugin, SEOPress, The SEO Framework, and so on. Read our article that explains the popular SEO plugins for your WordPress websites.
Page Builder Plugins
Page builders helps you to create, edit and customize your website’s layout with drag-and-drop features interface allowing you to create a modern and professional design website without having any coding skill or hiring a professional developer.
Elementor Plugin
Elementor is the best Free WordPress website builder with Elementor you can create a professional design website without any coding knowledge. Also, you can create any design for your WordPress website with mobile responsiveness. You just need to drag and drop the elements and start creating your design. Elementor’s free version provides 40+ Basic widgets and 30+ Basic templates and for more other features you can go to their premium plan (Elementor pro) starting from $49\year check out their pricing plan.
Divi Builder
Divi is premium WordPress Page builder with more 950,000 available customer providing drop-and-drag user interface enabling you to create highly professional designed website without requiring knowledge about coding and hiring professional developer.
There are many other page builder plugins available in the market. Some of the popular page builder are SiteOrigin, Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect, SeedProd, Visual Composer, Brizy, Oxygen, and more. Read our new article to explore the popular WordPress Page Builder Plugins for your website.
Contact Form Plugins
Every website requires a medium to contact you through website. With contact form plugins, anyone can easily contact to website owner and make an enquiry. This tool is important for any-sized website to discuss about the products, services, and for information.
Contacts from 7
Your blog needs contact information or a contact page This is your audience You through a website contact from 7 is the best free contact from a plugin in the market. Contact form 7 can manage multiple contact forms and has high flexibility, If you are a non-programmer contact form 7 can be a little arduous. Therefore you use another contact from “wp forms” with a drag-and-drop feature but for more features, you need to go to their premium plan.
Sendin Blue
Sendin Blue presently known as Brevo is a digital marketing tool for small and medium-sized businesses and blogs. Sendin Blue offers email marketing service, SMS marketing service and instant chat service so you can better understand your audience and engage with your audience. Besides that, it also provides other services such as CRM, marketing automation landing page, sign form Facebook ads and soon.
Analytics Plugins
Google Analytics plugin is an important tool to learn your website’s traffic and performance. The tool helps website owner to track metrics such as page visits, duration of stay, and traffic sources like social media and organic traffic. With these information, you can easily analyze your website performance and can easily improve user experience for driving more traffic into your website.
Monster Insight
Monster Insight is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress monster insight helps you set up Google Analytics on your WordPress blog in a second without any code. It has various features such as universal tracking Google Analytics dashboard, Red time stats, an Affiliate link and ads tracking performance and optimization, and many other features with their full premium version.
Site Kit by Google
Site Kit by Google is a free Google analytics plugin for WordPress website to connect your website with various google related services mainly Google Analytics. Once you connect your website to the plugin, google with automatically add the Google Analytics and track your website performance.
E-commerce Plugins
This is beneficial for the blog and website, who are looking for selling their products and services online. It helps to convert your website with e-commerce functionality and with their easy setup process, you can easily design your website adding e-commerce functionality. Check out our previous article to discover the best e-commerce Themes to start your own e-commerce website and sell physical or digital products.
Woocommerce
Do you have any physical products or digital products to sell on your blog? or do you promote any products and affiliate marketing through your blog? WooCommerce is a free plugin which convert your website to e-commerce without requiring any technical expert. With WooCommerce, you can easily sell physical or digital products.
Easy Digital Download
With easy digital download plugin, you can easily sell digital products and do not impose any additional bandwidth charges on file downloads. With Easy Digital Download you can use various popular payment gateways such as Stripe, Paypal, Apple Pay, and Google pay.
Backup Plugins
WordPress backup plugins is an essential tools for website owner to safegurad and secure your website by storing your website copy and can easily restore during the breakage of your website or any mishaps.
Updraft Plus
When you crash or are hacked, all your website information can be erased ruining your blog. To avoid such a situation. You can use updraft plus which helps your site to Back up your site files and help you restore when required. You can automatically keep regular backups so you can restore if something worse happens.
Jetpack VaultPress Backup
Jetpack Vaultpress backup plugin provides automated daily and real-time cloud backup without compromising the speed of your website. The plugin is developed by Automattic (Founder of WordPress).
Newsletter Plugins
A Newsletter is a popular tool that allows your business to expand your email list and let them provide email newsletters and information for free. These plugins mainly helps you to save your time sending emails everyone (customer, audience, subscribers) and helps you make your work effective. Gavrilenko. K (2024).
Mailchimp For WordPress
Mailchimp for WordPress (MC4WP) is a popular plugin designed to provide email marketing service with WordPress websites. The plugin allows user to build and expand the email lists and creating beautiful and customization sign-up form and placed into your site. Also the plugin can be easily integrate with WooCommerce, Contact form 7, and other popular plugins.
Mailster
Mailster is another popular plugin that can easily turn your website into fully functional email marketing perform and help you manage your email campaigns into your WordPress website and provide you full control over subscribers data and email marketing efforts. The plugin provides drag-and-drop email builder, automation tools, and detailed analytic to track your subscribers.
Some other best newsletter plugins are Omnisend, AcyMailing, JetFormBuilder, Mailpoet, Icegram Express, and Others.
Community Plugins
WordPress Communityn Plugins are those types of software that is designed to enhance the social and interactive features for a WordPress website to add engagement and collaboration among users. The plugin provides certain features for your website such as forum, social networking, user profile, group, community streams ans so on. The tool is important for many websites so it can enable users interactions, share contents, and contribute to discussion.
BuddyPress
BuddyPress is a powerful community plugin available to transform your website into a fully functional social network. This allows users to create a profile, form groups, and also send a private message. BuddyPress is highly customization and is easily integrates with other popular plugins.
bbPress
If you are looking for lightweight community plugins, then bbPress is a best option for your website. The plugin is developed by creators of WordPress that enable to add forums into your website so users can engage in discussion, ask questions, and share contents.
Other popular available Community plugins are PeepSo, WPForo, and Ultimate Member
Conclusion on Types of Plugins
These are the most preferred different Types of Plugins required for various websites. There are other different types of plugins which can be necessary based on their website types or required based on website.
References: Gavrilenko. K (2024). 11 Best WordPress Newsletter Plugins 2024, from www.crocoblock.com. Link: https://crocoblock.com/blog/best-wordpress-newsletter-plugins/
