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[Update: This article is out of date. Please read our Top WordPress Plugins for 2020]

We’re super excited about 2016. Lion’s Share has been growing steadily and our clients have been nothing but happy and great to work with. Last year, we made a post about The Best WordPress Plugins for 2015. We received so much positive feedback for this post that we decided to try to curate a list of the Best WordPress plugins for 2016!

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System(CMS) for making websites. Over 20% of the world’s websites are made using WordPress.

One very popular feature of WordPress is its plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its abilities well beyond the core installation. WordPress has an enormous database of plugins, each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs. These customizations range from SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media sharing, eCommerce stores, email list sign up boxes and much more.

Here are the 20 Best WordPress Plugins for 2016

20 Best WordPress Plugins for 2016

  1. WooCommerce – Excelling eCommerce

WooCommerce is a powerful, extendable eCommerce plugin that helps you sell anything with ease. With endless flexibility and access to hundreds of free and premium WordPress extensions, WooCommerce now powers 30% of all online stores — more than any other platform.

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2. Memberships for WooCommerce

WooCommerce Memberships is not just another plugin for restricting your site’s content: it’s an easy-to-use, site-wide membership solution that brings your content, shop, and memberships together.

3. Stripe

Stripe is a simple way to accept payments online. With Stripe you can accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and Diners Club cards directly on your store. Stripe has no setup fees, no monthly fees, no hidden costs: you only get charged when you earn money! Earnings are transferred to your bank account on a 7 day rolling basis. Stripe also supports a subscriptions extension and re-using cards.

WooCommerce just gets easier and easier!

 

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4. Duplicate Post

This plugin allows you to clone a post or page, or edit it as a new draft. There is also a template tag, so you can put it in your templates and clone your posts/pages from the front-end. Clicking on the link will lead you to the edit page for the new draft, just like the admin bar link.

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5. HTML SEO Sitemap

If you use WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin as your main SEO plugin, you may have noticed they don’t have a HTML sitemap feature. This plugin is the answer to that problem.

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6. Google Analytics Yoast

Track your WordPress site easily with the latest tracking codes and lots added data for search result pages and error pages. This way you’ll benefit from all Google Analytics offers and use the fastest method of embedding it on your site.

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7. WP Smush.it

Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress. This is a great plugin for updating an existing site to make it run more quickly.

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8. Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation-and it’s 100% free!

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9. Manage WP
Manage all your WordPress sites from one place – including updates, backups, security and more.

10. Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is hands down the best contact form plugin for WordPress powered websites. This plugin allows you to quickly and easily integrate with a variety of third party services such as PayPal and provides for even deeper integration with WordPress through its collection of optional Add-Ons.

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11. Imsanity

Imsanity automatically resizes huge image uploads. Are contributors uploading huge photos? Tired of manually scaling? Imsanity to the rescue!

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12. Bloom

Bloom gives you all the tools you need to turn your website’s visitors into loyal followers and customers. Not only is Bloom going to convert extremely well, it’s going to look great doing it.

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13. Monarch

Monarch makes social sharing an absolute breeze. With a diverse set of display types such as floating sidebars, inline buttons, and automatic pop-ups, your visitors can now share your content with ease.

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14. Business Profile

Display your business’s contact details with seo-friendly Schema.org markup. Supports a Google Map, hours of operation and more.

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15. Google Places Reviews

Easily display Google Reviews on your WordPress website using a powerful and intuitive widget. Great for restaurants, retail stores, franchisees, real estate firms, hotels and hospitality, and nearly any business with a website and reviews on Google.

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16. Yelp Widget Pro

Yelp Widget Pro allows you to easily display Yelp profiles for any business on your website or blog using an intuitive and easily configurable widget. Yelp Widget Pro users are able to display business names, ratings, review counts and profile images in any WordPress sidebar.

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17. Event Calendar Pro

Events Cal Pro is robust, but easy to use. It is loaded with awesome features such as recurring events, venue and organizer views, location search and geolocation.

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18. Cue Music Player

Cue gives you the ability to easily create stylish playlists and display them anywhere on your site using a widget, shortcode or template tag. Upload new audio files, reuse existing files in your media library, or even link to remote sources.

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19. WP Rocket

Both easy and terribly efficient, WP Rocket has very quickly become an indispensable tool. This developer friendly plugin reduces the weight of your website for light speed loading times.

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20. Foo Gallery

Foo Gallery is the most intuitive and extensible gallery management tool ever created for WordPress and the premium extension, now supports the creation video galleries.

We hope you enjoyed our list of 20 Best WordPress Plugins for 2016. Do you have a favorite WordPress plugin that you want us to know about? Leave a comment and we’ll add it to the list.

Alicia Horn

Hailing from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Alicia is a music loving outdoors fanatic that now calls Austin, Texas home.

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