Are you using WordPress as the content management system ( CMS ) of your website or web application and looking for a list of the best WordPress plugins to take your website to another level in 2023?

The official WordPress plugin repository has over 55,000+ plugins that you can choose from. That’s, like a lot for new users to find the right plugins which will work best for their needs.

I often asked by clients and WordPress users on social media to suggest the best WordPress plugins for Security, SEO, backup, eCommerce, social media, speed, form, etc.

List of the best WordPress plugins of 2023

WooCommerce

This is the first plugin on my WordPress plugins list which is one of the most popular free and open-source eCommerce solutions across the world. With the power of this amazing plugin, you can turn your WordPress website into a web store just with a few clicks. I’ve described why woocommerce is the best web store solution in my 5 Steps to Choose Best Online Store Platforms article.

The Woocommerce plugin will allow you to sell physical/digital products and services which makes it a must-have for any business owner. It does not just provide a seamless shopping experience for customers, but also comes with all essentials solution for the business owner such as inventory management, shipping options, and payment gateways.

WP forms

This amazing WordPress forms plugin allows you to create and customize forms for any purpose. With its easy drag-and-drop builder and pre-designed templates, you can quickly create professional forms for contact, surveys, payments, and more.

It also offers integrations with popular marketing and CRM tools, making it easy to manage your forms and collect valuable data from your customers. WPForms also offers must-have form features such as spam protection, file uploads, and conditional logic to help you create advanced forms that meet your specific needs.

Rank Math SEO

WordPress offers all the basic SEO features a website needs at the start, if you are looking to improve the SEO score of your website then this is the must-have one. There are more SEO plugins like Yoast, and All in One SEO but my personal choice is Rank Math SEO which is the easiest and user friendly among all of them.

This plugin will help you to optimize your content and make sure your content will get a higher rank on popular search engines like Google. It also offers Ai powered content optimization and content readability checks to help you to create the best possible content for your audiences.

Wordfence

After creating a website, security is the top concern for any business website owner. Wordfance plugin provides the best security features a WordPress website can have, likewise real-time security scanning, firewall protection, and malware removal to keep your site safe and secure.

It also offers features like brute force protection and two-factor authentication to protect your website from any possible threat. With more than 3 million active installations, WordFance could be the best security solution for your WordPress website among all WordPress security plugins.

Jetpack

They said this is “the most popular WordPress plugin for just about everything”, I totally agree with this because this plugin provides almost all essential support and website needs.

Developed by the team behind WordPress.com, Jetpack offers everything from security and performance optimization to marketing tools and design customization options.

With features such as two-factor authentication, brute force protection, and daily malware scans, Jetpack helps keep your site safe and secure. It also offers backup and restoration options to ensure that you can easily recover your site in the event of an emergency. Jetpack also offers features such as lazy loading images, optimizing images for web use, email subscriptions, the ability to create and manage social media posts, and caching to help speed up your site.

WP Rocket – Optimize WordPress for speed

The post-powerful cache plugin, which able to optimize WordPress for speed just in a few clicks. It offers a range of features to help improve the performance of your site, including file optimization, database optimization, lazy loading, and integration with Cloudflare.

Some more useful features of WP Rocket are listed below:

• Options to control WordPress Heartbeat API and integrate with a content delivery network (CDN) to further improve site performance.
• File base optimization options, which include minification and concatenation of CSS and JavaScript files to reduce file size and improve performance.
• Offers advanced cache preloading to improve the speed of your site.
• Offers the ability to optimize Google Fonts and preload pages and posts to improve site speed.

You may not need to install all those mentioned plugins, it’s completely depending on your business type. It’s pretty common for a website built with WordPress will need most of those plugins.

Some people believe that installing more plugins on your WordPress site will result in a slower website. It totally depends on the plugin you are using. Poorly coded plugins may negatively affect the speed of your site, while well-coded plugins generally do not. However, if you use proper caching techniques you don’t have to worry about that.