What are the best WordPress plugins for 2022?
WordPress is a great choice for your website, allowing you to modify to levels other platforms can’t match. Especially when it comes to WordPress Design. The huge collection of plugins available to you makes this easy, but sometimes it’s hard to know which plugins to use; here we’ll recommend our best WordPress plugins for 2022 to help make your site a better place.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is one of the best WordPress plugins because of how easy it is to use and its ability to integrate with many other services.
This is our form builder of choice for WordPress, allowing you to build any number of forms for various purposes and embed them anywhere you want using blocks or shortcodes.
Key features
- Simple and easy visual form editor
- Online payment collection
- Conditional logic
- File uploads
- Integrations with a huge number of services
Why we love it
We love Gravity Forms because it’s so easy to use and integrate with other services, the visual form editor allows quick form deployment and integrations allow us to link the data up to another service easily. Plus, you don’t have to be an expert in website development to use it!
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of our favourite WordPress plugins since we deal with a lot of ecommerce clients, it’s practically an essential plugin!
WooCommerce is an obvious inclusion in this list, if you need to add eCommerce functionality to your WordPress website it’s second to none. WooCommerce is a popular choice for most ecommerce websites.
Key features
- WooCommerce is owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, meaning it will be maintained and work alongside WordPress for the foreseeable future
- The simple setup wizard makes getting your storefront up and running a breeze
- Everything you need is available out of the box to get your storefront setup
- If you need to add some extra functionality there is a huge collection of plugins available
Why we love it
WooCommerce is our favourite eCommerce platform because it allows us to easily build a digital storefront from the ground up to suit any requirements. Any additional functionality required can often be found through a plugin but can also be easily added by ourselves.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
Advanced Custom Fields is a great WordPress plugin due to the additional functionality it provides, allowing you to add custom data to templates.
ACF lets you add new fields to almost any entity type in WordPress to extend functionality and include extra data.
Key features
- Add a range of field types
- Add fields to almost any entity in WordPress
- Add custom settings pages for sitewide settings
- Include new fields within templates
Why we love it
ACF is our go-to because it allows us to extend templates for pages to include custom data, it also means that custom text doesn’t need to manually be written into templates making changing text easier.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is an all-in-one performance WordPress plugin that we use for most of our clients. Its simple set up make it even better.
Performance is often raised as an issue with WordPress, while a well built theme and using reputable plugins shouldn’t cause major performance issues it’s still recommended that you use a performance plugin. WP Rocket is an all in one plugin which does everything needed to improve website performance.
Key features
- Site caching improves load times
- Asset bundling and minification, reducing how much is loaded
- Preloading, pages get loaded and saved beforehand meaning faster loading
Why we love it
We build our websites to be fast but we love to use WP Rocket because it’s a simple setup and makes our sites even faster.
Wordfence
Wordfence is one of those WordPress plugins that makes dealing with security issues that much easier.
Security can be an issue with WordPress, it’s the world’s most used platform which means it’s the most targeted for attacks. The most important thing to do is to keep everything updated with your WordPress installation and plugins. Wordfence adds an extra layer of reassurance with scans and a firewall.
Key features
- Security scans to find issues and any malware in the site
- Firewall protecting your site from spamming attacks
- Checks for any updates in your site and alerts you
Why we love it
We love to use Wordfence for the reassurance it gives us when we’re maintaining our sites and keeping them updated. Using Wordfence allows us to rest assured that we’ve done everything to keep a website protected.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is an essential WordPress plugin for any SEO related activities. It acts as a helpful guide to ensure your site is optimised for search engines.
Yoast enables all the fields you need to optimise pages in your WordPress site for SEO, enabling you to achieve higher page rankings.
Key features
- Yoast accesses your website’s SEO for you
- XML sitemap generation for submission to search engines
- Adds all the meta fields you need to improve page rankings
Why we love it
Yoast SEO adds everything you need to your website to help you to improve page rankings and gives helpful suggestions to help improve content further.
We hope you find our recommendations for the best WordPress plugins for 2022 helps identify some key plugins which help to make your website reach its full potential.
The key is finding plugins with a good reputation that provide great support, you can view reviews before you install to check what other users have thought of it and there is a support section where you can see how active the developers are.
Most of our plugin recommendations are paid for which can be off-putting, purchasing from a reputable source means a greater level of customer support and guarantees.