70 Best WordPress Plugins – Want Unfair Advantage?

Posted by Dustin Betonio on Jul 5, 2012 in Wordpress News | 0 comments

With so many plugins available finding some of the best wordpress plugins can be hard and time consuming! Let me give you a hand.

WordPress is certainly one of the most feature rich and user friendly publishing platforms available today. At the same time it is loved for its openness, extendibility and great open source community. WordPress is today used in serious projects and on large commercial websites besides the millions of hard working bloggers sharing their valuable knowledge. This trend have created a huge market for professional high quality premium themes and recently we have also seen a market emerge for high quality wordpress plugins as nearly any kind.

While WordPress originally gained it’s position in the market by being a pure open source and completely free platform I believe the premium offerings around it today is going to make it even stronger. You see some of the best WordPress plugins are created by expert plugin developers that back their best WordPress plugins with good support for their customers. In some cases free plugin developers provide support, but typically it depends on how busy they are and there is a significant risk that free plugins you rely heavily on, suddenly is not maintained any more.

We all know how time consuming or expensive it can be to implement the perfect website or blog. Making sure the important extension we use are going to be maintained, developed upon and most importantly well supported is key and worth spending a few bucks on. In this post, we will showcase some of the best WordPress plugins. I hope you will enjoy this tour. This article was just updated with more plugins and we also checked all links.

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Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.

As already mentioned WordPress is an exceptional open source blog tool and the great variety of best WordPress plugins and themes makes it even more useful. Choosing the right extensions can make the difference between whether you succeed or not. Let’s be inspired to make things easier and more effective with these great premium plugins. (Article updated 7.7.2012)

Quform – WordPress Form Builder – MORE INFO

If you use WordPress, require custom forms and don’t like wasting time or simply don’t want to touch any code then this is the must have tool for you. Quform WordPress is a plugin that allows you to build multiple forms in WordPress easily and quickly with total control. If it’s a complex quote or booking form or just a simple contact form, Quform plugin will allow you to do this without touching any code. In a few clicks you will have a fully functional form. It’s that simple.

Calendarize it for WordPress – MORE INFO

There are several great calendar plugins available for WordPress, but most of them target specific industries, or are limited in features. The developers of “Calendarize it for WordPress” have tried to create a feature rich Calendar and Event plugin, which targets a very broad audience. There’s a truckload of great features: Easy Point and Click interface to add new events, Preview when entering event in wp-admin, Show Individual Calendars per user in WordPress, Sidebar Widget for Mini Events Calendar and Upcoming Events, Event List per day, per week, monthly, Google Map integration for Events and Venues, And much more

Pure CSS Responsive Pricing Tables for WordPress – MORE INFO

This CSS Responsive Pricing Table plugin will help you to create unlimited CSS Responsive pricing tables with unlimited combination of colors and styles to suit your existing wordpress theme. The plugin is packed with 10 Easy Customizable Predefined Themes.

Justified Image Grid – Premium WordPress Gallery – MORE INFO

This WordPress jQuery plugin aligns your thumbnails into a responsive and justified grid. Flickr and Google+ both featured images by their own implementation of this idea. This plugin behaves similarly. Let WordPress present your galleries in an eye-catching and unique new way! You have the control over every aspect: appearance, on the fly desaturation, color overlays, captions with details, lightboxes, animation. It’s easy to install and setup and it comes with 9 pre-sets out of the box.

Mapify.it: 100% Custom Google Maps for WordPress – MORE INFO

Mapify.it allows 100% control over your maps, whether you choose to stick with Google Maps, or to use your very own images. It enhances Google Maps with custom pin-point graphics, limitless locations, and pop-up galleries, but also allows the use of ANY custom map image of your choosing, all while keeping the great zoom and pan effect of Google maps! There’s a lot of features available with this plugin.

Fanciest Author Box – MORE INFO

Fanciest Author Box is a WordPress is a very feature-rich author bio plugin automatically added before or after (or both!) your posts, pages and custom post types. It has widgets for Major Social Networks: Twitter bio, latest tweet, Facebook Subscribe, Google+ Add to Circles button. This will make you instantly recognizable and easy to connect with your audience.

WordPress Post Planner – MORE INFO

Post Planner makes running a multi-author blog a breeze. You can easily set a due date for posts and assign a post to an author. You can also gather research without cluttering up your post drafts and easily insert references, files, and even images into your post.

It’s easy to configure Post Planner to exactly your needs with a comprehensive settings section. There’s also plenty of actions and hooks built into the code for use by developers.

WordPress Pro Event Calendar – MORE INFO

The Pro Event Calendar plugin adds a professional and sleek calendar to your posts or pages. It is 100% responsive and you can also use it inside a widget.

EZ Notification Bar – MORE INFO

EZ Notification Bar for WordPress is a good solution for anyone looking to draw attention to any content you wish. With this plugin you are able to add an infinite number for message via the inbuilt admin options, and you can then sort, or resort them into you chosen order via a unique drag and drop interface. Styling is also fully customized too.

User Badges : WP User Achievements Plugin – MORE INFO

User Badges is a WordPress Plugin that allows you to give out badges and awards for users on your blog. Badges are proven to drive more engagement and there’s good chances that users will interact with your blog more, just to earn the shiny next badge. User badges comes with 11 automatically assigned badges. Users get points for reading articles, posting comments and even just visiting your site. And they get gold, silver and bronze medals for achievements in each category.

WP Best Tree – WordPress Plugin – MORE INFO

This plugin improve usability for categories meta boxes on the post editing screen. In WordPress, after a post is published, the selected categories are no longer displayed in a hierarchical and climb to the top of the list. This plugin maintains the hierarchy of categories even after the post was published.

WordPress Weather Forecast Plugin – MORE INFO

Powerful WordPress Weather plugin, based on Google Weather, with automatic location detection (with fallback) using GeoIP database, supports both Fahrenheit and Celsius degrees, also includes images for a better experience.

WordPress Hovercards – MORE INFO

WordPress Hovercards is exactly what it says. It is an extensive, powerful, customizable, lightweight and instant engine that displays hovercards on your website. Hovercards are like you see on Facebook and Twitter, where if you hover over someone it will hover over and provide more details to encourage you to use the site more. Now we’ve applied that to WordPress.

Ether Content Builder WordPress Plugin – MORE INFO

Ether Content Builder WordPress Plugin is a powerful tool for building custom content pages. It is equipped with many commonly used widgets that can be laid out via interactive drag&drop interface.

Banner Rotator / Content Slider – MORE INFO

All In One Banner WordPress plugin includes 5 types of WordPress banners plugins: Banner Rotator, Thumbnails Banner, Banner with Playlist, Content Slider, Carousel

Thumbnail Scroller – MORE INFO

This Plugin will help you to easily add a thumbnail scroller to your WordPress website or blog. The scroller is completely customizable, resizable and is compatible with all browsers and devices (iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones). You will be able to insert it in any page or post you want with an inbuilt short code generator.

KenBurner Slider WordPress Plugin – MORE INFO

Customize this slider with our drag&drop backend to your very needs. Give each slider some captions to transport your message. Use your Ken Burns Animated banner elements with the possibility of playing YouTube and Vimeo clips in a special detail view with describing text. The Ken Burns is totally customizable: Start-, End Point, Zoom In or Out, Zoom Factor are all in the different slider parameters. Or go nuts and choose “Random”!

Media Grid – WordPress Responsive Portfolio – MORE INFO

Media Grid allow you to create unlimited responsive and filterable portfolios with ease. The plugin uses the latest CSS3 and jQuery technologies to adapt each portfolio to its container. No matter if is wide or short, the grid will be always displayed correctly. Also in responsive themes, you can choose if use the automatic resizing system or set a relative width to keep the grid items always on the same size, they will be placed in the best way possible to ensure the best layout. Lastly, Media Grid integrates each item with Pinterest , the new popular social network.

Sidebar & Widget Manager for WordPress – MORE INFO

With this premium WordPress plugin you’ll get full control over Page Content, Sidebars (Widget areas) and Widgets. When you “widgetize” a page you can drop and drag widgets in page content area with vertical or Horizontal widgets alignment. And you can create custom sidebars so you can display relevant content on different pages

FontPress – Font Manager Plugin – MORE INFO

Personalize your wordpress website with customized fonts. With FontPress you can do that without put your hands on any file or writing any line of code. Forget wasting time in editing your CSS or JS files to test a single font, with FontPress it’s all very simple.

Usernoise Pro advanced Modal Feedback & Debug – MORE INFO

Usernoise Pro is a WordPress plugin for gathering and discussing public feedback using a modal window. Users can leave their thoughts, comments and rate them. Also, deep debug info can be gathered every time feedback is submitted.

Social Image Hover for WordPress – MORE INFO

Social Image Hover for WordPress combines all of the web’s most popular social services into one easy to use plugin. Social Image Hover allows you to quickly and easily add hover-over social buttons to your images on-the-fly making them instantly “shareable” on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. Even better, the hover effects are silky smooth, cross browser, and come with multiple overlay images.

Social Network Tabs For WordPress – MORE INFO

Combine all of your favorite social networks profiles & feeds into slick slide out or static tabs with Social Network Tabs for WordPress. Fast loading with each social network feed loaded using AJAX only when required!

Social Content Locker for WordPress – MORE INFO

Social Content Locker for WordPress gives you instant access to over 2 BILLION social media users allowing them to share your content to unlock it. Combine Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn to create a social media traffic generating powerhouse of your WordPress site.

HTML5 Video Player WordPress Plugin – MORE INFO

HTML5 VIDEO PLAYER is a powerful plugin with multiple skins and with all the controllers usable in full screen mode, including playlist. It responsive and also works on Android plus includes 3 types of video players: RightSide Playlist, Bottom Playlist and Without Playlist. You have a complete sound control. You can also set the initial volume.

Multipurpose Bookshelf Slider – MORE INFO

Multipurpose Bookshelf Slider – WordPress Plugin is useful for displaying products such as books, magazines, dvd, cd and others. It’s a way to showcase products in an attractive manner. Features of “lightbox” to display images, videos (Youtube and Vimeo) and any html content (WordPress editor). Can be added detailed content to each product. Easy to add into WordPress using widgets or shortcodes.

After The Deadline – WordPress Grammar Plugin – MORE INFO

The use of good writing skills and grammar is important to get good ranking in search engines and also to leave the right impression with your readers. Your WordPress installation has a spell checker already, but this plugin will give you a quick proofreading assistant. I checks your content against bias language, clichés, double negatives, jargon, hidden verbs, and more. do some proofreading really quickly.

Pretty Link – MORE INFO

Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. Unlike other link shrinking services, this plugin allows you to create shortlinks coming from your own domain! Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host.

WordPress SEO – MORE INFO

WordPress SEO plugin is a great plugin that will help you get your on page SEO right. Search engines are an important source of traffic for many websites. Having a good SEO plugin will help you get their attention and provide the content in a way search engines are expecting it.

WordPress Email Newsletter Plugin – DEMO

The email newsletter plugin is an advanced bulk emailer designed especially for WordPress 3. It is very easy to use and feature rich. Heaps of features which allow you to quickly send professional newsletters to your existing wordpress user database.

Magic Members – Plugin WordPress – DEMO

A premium WordPress membership plugin that allows you to create a closed site that’s only available to paying members. It offers lots of great features to totally customize your WP site and transform it into a professional premium content members-only website that’s easy to use. Magic Members best WordPress plugins also allows you to sell your posts and downloads separately.

Special Recent Posts PRO – DEMO

Special Recent Posts PRO is a very powerful plugin/widget for WordPress which displays your recent posts with thumbnails. It’s the perfect solution for online magazines or simple blogs and it comes with more than 60+ customization options available. You can dynamically re-size thumbnails to any desired dimension, drag multiple widget instances and configure each one with its specific settings. You can also use auto-generated PHP code/shortcodes to insert the widget in any part of your theme.

Visual Composer – Shortcode Plugin – DEMO

Visual Composer best WordPress Plugins will save you tons of time working on the site content. Now you’ll be able to create complex layouts within minutes!

WPSubscribers – Best WordPress Plugins – DEMO

If your serious about list building and adding a large group followers to your website you need a good list building plugin. There is a lot of them to choose from and I won’t be the judge here, but I think this is one of the best WordPress plugins. It give your visitors multiple chances to connect with you increasing the chances of getting an opt-in.

Gravity Forms – DEMO

Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building. Select your fields, configure your options and easily embed forms on your WordPress powered site using the built-in tools.

LayerSlider – DEMO

This is the WordPress plugin of LayerSlider! You can create as many layers and sublayers as you want. You can use unlimited images with links. The script is very user-friendly, you can add global settings or local (per slide) settings to each layer or sublayer. You can change delay times, easing types, durations and much more.

Touch Carousel – DEMO

TouchCarousel is a posts content slider WordPress plugin with touch navigation for mobile devices. The Touch feature also works when you use a mouse…pretty cool actually. You can slide custom post types, with custom taxonomies (categories, tags, e.t.c.) and create layout templates using simple templating system

Slider Evolution for WordPress – DEMO

Slider Evolution is a JQuery plugin that lets you easily create powerful javascript sliders with very nice transition effects. Enhance your website by adding a unique and attractive slider! Create an unlimited number of sliders with customized settings for each one, and place them anywhere on your WordPress website with ease. You must check out this WordPress slider demos.

SLIDER PRO – WordPress Slider Plugin – DEMO

Slider PRO is one of the most powerful slider plugins for WordPress on the market (some buyers have been saying that it’s actually the best). The slider offers you 100+ customizable properties, 100+ possible transition effects, 10+ skins and much more. Also, the slider’s administration area is very powerful and uses the default WordPress design, which WordPress users are already familiar with. This slider plugin is carefully coded, using WordPress development best practices, to avoid conflicts with other themes and plugins that are well coded. Please take a look at the list of features at the feature page.

SUGAR SLIDER – Plugin WordPress Slider – DEMO

Sugar Slider makes it as easy as it could possibly be to create gorgeous sliders for your WordPress powered site. Forget nasty custom fields and image URLs. You can even forget about manually resizing every image before you upload it. With a huge list of features, Sugar Slider is on of the most advanced and powerful WordPress slider manager.

ROYALSLIDER – DEMO

RoyalSlider for WordPress is a cross-device jQuery content slider with touch-based navigation and fluid layout. It has user-friendly admin area where you can manage slides, change slider settings, customize interface and add blocks-captions using custom WYSIWIG editor.

DDSlider – Best WordPress Plugins – DEMO

DDSliderWP features everything that the jQuery plugin already offered PLUS a custom admin panel, with total management of slides. These best wordpress plugins is worth investigating.

Video Gallery WordPress Plugin – DEMO

The most advanced stock video gallery in the world! Now as one of the best WordPress plugins!

Video Player WordPress Plugin – DEMO

This wordpress plugin will help you administrate the entire video player using a very friendly interface. You’ll be able to customize the player look & feel, playlist and CSS file. Any type of video file that Flash Player supports can be played with this player: – FLV /H.264 encoded video : MP4 , M4V, M4A , MOV, Mp4v, F4V – YOUTUBE – RTMP (using FMS or RED5 ) and RTMP live streaming You can set this player to any size you want in wp-admin, changing the player width, the player height and the playlist width. You can easy integrate this in your pages using a shortcode.

VidEmbed – DEMO

VidEmbed is a powerful simple to use solution to adding videos inline within your WordPress posts, pages, and widget areas. With support for both self-hosted videos as well as YouTube and Vimeo you can quickly add videos from many sources. With the explosion of media on the web it is important to be able to easily and quickly provide video content to your site visitors.

UberMenu – Top Megamenu – DEMO

UberMenu is a user-friendly, highly customizable mega menu ( or mega drop down menu ) best WordPress plugins. It works out of the box with the WordPress 3 Menu Management System, making it simple to get started but powerful enough to create highly customized and creative mega menu configurations.

WP Sticky Menu Plugin – DEMO

Our sticky Menu Plugin comes with 8 different styling options, plain, shiny and transparent. When you do want your own style based upon your theme then you only have to change a few css lines and it’s just as you wanted it. Each style can be selected through the Sticky Menu Option panel. Sticky Menu Plugin has it’s own option panel from where you can select your styles, the alignment of the menu (Top or Bottom), the width of the menu (980px or Full Width). You can also select the animation effect for the sliding out and in of the menu.

Sticklr WP – Sticky Side Panel WordPress Plugin – DEMO

Stickr WP, a sticky side panel menu WordPress plugin. Inspired by Envato site-switcher, after released as CSS3 +jQuery, due to popular demand I decided to create this WordPress plugin version. The features are similar with jQuery version, only WordPress version has an intuitively easy administration panel, so you don’t have to know the coding behind it.

Menu Management Enhancer for WordPress – DEMO

The WordPress 3 Menu Management System is excellent, but it can be a bit cumbersome if you’re managing many menu items. The Menu Management Enhancer for WordPress aims to improve the menu management user experience.

Admin Menu Tree Page View – DEMO

This WordPress plugin adds all your pages to the admin menu, so all your pages will always be available within just one click, no matter where you are in the admin area. You can also add pages directly in the tree and you can quickly find your pages by using the search box.

CMS Tree Page View – DEMO

Adds a CMS-like tree overview of all your pages and custom posts to WordPress – much like the view often found in a page-focused CMS. Within this tree you can edit pages, view pages, add pages, search pages, and drag and drop pages to rearrange the order. I personally use this plugin on some site where I have many pages.

Dynamic Step Process Panels – DEMO

Dynamic Step Process Panels for WordPress is one of the more confusing plugins. It’s premium-themed base costs only $25 and allows you to generate dynamic AJAX content in tabbed form. This may include bulleted content, photos, videos, product descriptions, or anything else. These are truly multipurpose best wordpress plugins with resources available to those who understand WordPress’ systems.

WordPress Events Calendar – DEMO

Professional and elegant plugin that adds an Event Calendar to your posts or pages.

WP Business Directory – MORE INFO

WP Business Directory is a WordPress Plugin that allows you to add business directory features to your WP based web site. It’s easy to use and has a lot of features.

attentionGrabber: WordPress Notification Bar – DEMO

This is not directly a Facebook plugin, but it allows you to grab the attention of your visitors by placing a simple, fully customizable banner on your site. attentionGrabber is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to add a notification bar in your website or blog. With this plugin you can easily display facebook Like button, custom texts, Twitter posts and even Feed RSS.

uBillboard – Premium Slider for WordPress – DEMO

uBillboard are slider best WordPress plugins. We have been developing sliders for our WordPress themes for over a year now, and all that experience has been distilled into this one slider plugin. It is a premium quality jQuery-based slider with a nicely polished WordPress admin.

uPricing – Pricing Table for WordPress – DEMO

uPricing is a pricing table for WordPress. We have been developing it for our WordPress themes, but have decided to release it as a standalone best wordpress plugin. It is a premium quality Pricing Table with a nicely polished WordPress admin.

CSS3 Web Pricing Tables Grids – DEMO

This is a pack of pure CSS3 Web Pricing Tables Grids For WordPress with 2 table styles and 12 predefined color versions including hover states.

Facebook Likebox Slider for WordPress – DEMO

Nice looking slider plugin for facebook and other social sites.

FB Page Integrator – DEMO

Plugin WordPress that will allow you to create content for Facebook Fan Pages (iframe) using WordPress. You can show an image, SWF file, video from YouTube/Vimeo… FB Integrator using shortcodes for pre and post-LIKE page so you can easily hide content for non-fans and create “Call to Action” on the welcome page.

Facebook Like to Download for WordPress – DEMO

Facebook Like to Download for WordPress allows you to turn the Like Button into a social media like / traffic building download button.

WordPress Like Locker – Like to Read Plugin – DEMO

This is a pretty cool plugin and maybe the first of its kind. It allows you to wrap your post content in a “Like Locker” that will require the user to like the post to view the content. If you have some premium content or a download (could be an ebook, source files to a tutorial) this is a great way to build virality to a valuable resource by asking visitors to spread the word before showing the link.

Facebook Walleria – DEMO

Facebook Walleria is a WordPress Plugin that embeds a number of Facebook Objects into your website. It uses the Facebook Graph to pull information about Albums, Photos, Feed, Comments, Events and presents the information on your website in a sleek style. Instead of doing a double job of updating your site and Facebook profile, Facebook Walleria enables you to update your albums, events and feed on Facebook with the changes appearing in real-time on your website. Facebook sharing for logged in Facebook users is also integrated with Events and Wall allowing interactivity with your visitors. Commenting and Liking has also been enabled on the Wall, thus your visitors can make comments on topics on your feed without leaving your website.

Facebook Quiz Application – DEMO

This facebook application uses as administration wordpress platform, so you can easily install it as plugin on your wordpress website.

Facebook AWD All in one – DEMO

Facebook AWD is an all in one Facebook capabilities for wordpress. Add like button, like box, activity box, FB Comments, Open Graph and FB connect.

SocialBox – Social WordPress Widget – DEMO

With SocialBox you get an absolutely easy to use Plugin for WordPress which enables you to add a sleek social widget to your WordPress site or blog. It displays the current numbers of Facebook likes, Twitter followers and YouTube Channel and Feedburner Feed subscriptions. You can enter default values which will be shown if the related API is not reachable.

Styles with Shortcodes for WordPress – DEMO

Have you ever been in the situation where you have a great looking WordPress theme, but you are missing some custom styling for different elements? Maybe you don’t know PHP , CSS and Javascript and are not able to implement the cool feature you are missing. Styles with Shortcodes is the solution for this problem. These best WordPress plugins lets you customize content faster and easier than ever before by using Shortcodes. Choose from 100 built in Shortcodes.

Custom WordPress Widget Areas – DEMO

The plugin lets you create an unlimited number of Sidebars (Custom Widget Areas), easily lets you configure them by adding widgets, and then place them directly inside the content of Pages and Posts by simply using Shortcodes. We have also added support for Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies. It recognizes your themes default sidebars and allows you to replace them, as well as allowing you to set individual sidebars for each Page, Post and Category.

Tabs Widget for WordPress – DEMO

This plugin creates a new WordPress widget to display a tabbed panel with different content types on your site. Tabs can rotate one after the other thus allowing for more exposure of the content: your posts are no longer hidden.

Security Ninja – DEMO

This plugin combines years of industry’s best practices on security in one plugin. It has been featured on CodeCanyon – check it out.

Vaultpress – DEMO

Vaultpress is premium backup service for WordPress, brought to you by Autommatic, creator of WordPress. Vaultpress backups your blog’s database, theme files and plugins, keeping multiple revisions (real time) so you can always revert back to any prefered copy.

Subscribers Magnet – DEMO

Created by MaxBlogPress, these best WordPress plugins allows you to easily integrate email list sign-up forms into nearly every section of your current WP site. Doing so helps you grow your email based newsletter subscription and earn more revenue from your website. Growing a well targeted email subscription list is highly desired by online publishers because it’s one of the best marketing tools available, it increases the probability of additional purchases, and it encourages customer loyalty.

WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin – DEMO

A premium WordPress shopping cart plugin built by Tribulant that allows the WP blog admin to sell both digital and physical goods online plus any services the admin decides to offer. Such services may include online teaching courses, hands on training, premium support, or any other non-product related sales that are service oriented. Using this premium wordPress plugin you can easily find ways to monetize your WP blog whether it’s through selling digital products like ebooks, selling online services, or selling any tangible goods.

WP Robot – Unique Autoblogging Plugin – DEMO

WP Robot is a premium WordPress plugin that permits the administrator to automatically add content and posts to his/her WordPress blog. Currently this best WordPress plugins for autoblogging can add, translate, and rewrite content from RSS feeds, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, YouTube, Flickr, ClickBank and more. This was my list of hand-picked Best WordPress Plugins – please leave a comment if I missed a good plugin or if you want to give feedback!