22 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites in 2020

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps you get more visitors from search engines to your business website. WordPress is already an SEO friendly content management system. You can easily increase your website traffic using best SEO practices.

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugin of all time. Out of all the WordPress SEO plugins, Yoast offers the most comprehensive solution with all the features that you need to improve your on-page SEO. Yoast also comes in Premium version with more functions and seo tools.

Yoast SEO plugin features and benefits

Optimize for keyphrases, keywords and synonyms, related keywords and all word forms.The seo plugin also helps you generate sitemaps, add meta tags, connect your site to Google Search Console, Readability check, optimize it for social media, and much more.

Yoast comes with a Redirect feature that lets you easily create 301 redirects. It also detects change of URLs and create auto-redirects, so you don’t have any broken links on your website.

Alternative: All in One SEO Pack is one of the good alternative for Yoast SEO.

When it comes to free backup, UpdraftPlus is the world's leading WordPress backup plugin available. It allows you to set up automatic backups and store them on a remote location like One Drive, Dropbox, S3, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, email, and more. 

It makes the backup, restore and migration process so easy. Used by over a million WordPress sites, you can backup with full confidence. The free version of UpdraftPlus backup plugin works just fine, but if you need more features and options you can purchase Premium version.

Alternative: BackWPup is the second most popular free plugin for WordPress back ups.

With 5 million plus active installations Contact Form 7 is a most popular and oldest contact form plugin on wordpress. Contact form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, also you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup.

The Contact form 7 form supports Ajax-powered submitting, Google Re-CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. Lots of third-party extensions to add additional functionality

Alternative : WPForms is the best alternative among other Contact from plugins.

WooCommerce is the most popular open source eCommerce plugin for WordPress used by over 4 million plus websites.

WooCommerce is built to allow store managers to run an eCommerce site without needing of a web developer. There is also a free WooCommerce mobile app (Android and iOS) for store management. It comes with all the powerful features that you need to create an online store.

Over the last few years, WooCommerce has established itself as the most influence eCommerce plugin on WordPress. For more flexibility and reliability there are dedicated WooCommerce hosting, WooCommerce themes, and WooCommerce plugins available.

Alternative: BigCommerce is a fully-hosted eCommerce platform for WordPress which offers high scalability and low maintenance. 

G Suite is a productivity suite of web applications like gmail, docs, spreadsheets, etc. Developed by Google, this powerful set of business applications are easy to use and deploy.

Chosen by millions of small medium businesses to the Fortune 500. The cloud based suite allows you to save costs on software licenses, hardware, managing backups, hiring IT staff, and more. It provides you with professional email addresses with your own business domain name right inside Gmail.

Alternative: Microsoft Office 365 is the best available alternative with more features. You can also get a free business email from your WordPress hosting provider.

With 500,000+ active installs, SeedProd is the best WordPress coming soon and maintenance mode plugin that helps you create Beautiful Coming Soon pages and collect leads and grow your followers list even when your website is under maintenance.

If your site is under construction or in maintenance mode, then you can use it to create coming soon landing pages. It includes features like integration with your email marketing services like mailchimp, countdown timer, social media integration, and dozens of templates to choose from.

SeedProd free version is a nice basic tool, but many of the best features only come in the Pro version.

Alternative : WP Maintenance Mode is right behind SeedProd in terms of popularity.

Sucuri is globally recognized WordPress security plugin and web application firewall that provides one of the best protection your website.

Securi protect your website from cyber attacks like DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks etc. If you don’t have a security firewall on your website, then you need to install one today.

Alternative : Wordfence is another most popular firewall and security scanner.

W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular WordPress caching plugins, with over a million active installations. Used by many major publications, such as Smashing Magazine, MakeUseOf, Web Designer Depot, Mashable and many others. W3 Total Cache plugins allows you to instantly improve your WordPress website speed and performance with no technical skills required. Alternative : WP Rocket & WP Super Cache

SEMRush is an all-in-one marketing toolkit that every digital marketing professionals and business owners requires. It comes with amazing tools to help you improve your organic SEO, social media optimization, paid traffic strategy and content strategy.

The SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant provides instant recommendations for content optimization based on the qualities of Google’s top 10-ranking pages for your given keywords in a given location. Bloggers, Content professionals and marketing experts can check if their post or the article of writers meet various content-quality requirements in just a few clicks.

It also helps you gather competitive intelligence on your competitors, so you can outrank them and dominate your industry.

Alternative :  It’s a must have tool in for serious business owners & Digital Marketing professionals.

Sometimes you may need to add code snippets to your WordPress website header or footer for domain or website verification or inserting ad retargeting scripts, etc.

Insert Headers and Footers is a simple plugin that allows you insert code like Google Analytics, custom CSS, Facebook Pixel, and more to your WordPress site header and footer. Without editing your theme files you can easily achieve the task.

Alternative : The Header Footer Script Loader Plugin from CreativeMinds is good alternative plugin to manage additional scripts easily.

For businesses that have wider audience from different countries must require WPML plugin as wordpress by default doesn't allow you to create multi-lingual website.

WPML is a popular wordpress multi-lingual plugin that makes it easy to build multilingual websites. It’s powerful enough for business websites, yet simple for blogs.

The SEO friendly lets you fully optimize your site for SEO in multiple languages and helps you easily create content in different languages.

Alternative: TranslatePress is an best alternative multi-lingual plugin.

Images generally take longer to load than text which your website loading speed and performance. To deal with this you would require image optimization plugin to optimize your images for the web.

EWWW Image Optimizer is the best WordPress image optimization plugin to automatically optimize your images in WordPress. It comes with powerful tools to compress images without loosing quality. After installing EWWW Image Optimizer plugin, it’ll automatically optimize all the images you upload to your blog or website as long as they’re either JPG, PNG, or GIF files.

Alternative: WP Smush & Short pixel 

Tawk.to is the best live chat support plugin for businesses and e-commerce websites. Super easy plugin allows you to quickly add live chat option on your WordPress website.

With Over 2,200,000+ business use the tawk.to live chat plugin that lets you monitor and chat with visitors on your WordPress site. This plugin is truly free and always will be.

Alternative : Live Chat and Sendinblue Chat are another popular plugin which lets live chat, Integration with CRM, SMS, Social Media, and email in one platform.

RafflePress is the powerful and user-friendly WordPress contest plugin in the market. The plugin lets you grow your website traffic, email list and social media followers with viral giveaways & contests.

It comes with an easy drag and drop giveaway builder along with giveaway templates that can be used to create a giveaways to attract visitors. You can easily connect your social profiles, WordPress form plugins and CRMs.

RafflePress has a free version called RafflePress lite that gives you basic functions to start with. If you want more powerful features, then you need to use RafflePress Pro.

LearnDash is the best WordPress LMS ( Learning Management System ) plugin to create and sell online courses from WordPress website. With drag and drop builder, it allows you to easily add lessons, quizzes, and assignments to create your course.

LearnDash plugin is used by Fortune 500 companies, training organizations, universities and entrepreneurs worldwide for creating and selling online courses.

Alternative : LifterLMS & LearnPress both are great alternatives.

Wp Chat App by Ninja Team is an amazing WhatsApp Chat plugin for WordPress which allows you to integrate your WhatsApp directly into your wordpress website. One of the best plugin to connect and interact with your customer, you can also offer support directly.

It support multiple Whatsapp account so your customer can choose a supporter they want to chat with. With different customization functions, it integrates with any WordPress translation plugins like WPML or Polylang to customize any languages on your site easily and quickly.

All you need to do is just uploading the plugin into WordPress, activating the plugin, customizing all the available options and Done!

With over 2 million active installs, MonsterInsights plugin is the most popular Google Analytics Dashboard plugin for WordPress. It allows you to connect your website with Google Analytics, and shows you all the important stats inside your WordPress dashboard. 

Unlike other Google Analytics plugins, it allow you to enable all advanced Google analytics tracking features with just a few clicks. So you can start making data-driven decisions to grow your business.

Email Marketing is the most powerful, effective and reliable marketing tool ever for awareness and conversion. It lets you to stay in touch with your website users even after they leave your website. This is the reason it is recommend for every business owner to start building an email list. 

Constant Contact is one of the most popular email marketing plugin for wordpress. It allows you to build an email list and send beautiful newsletters to your subscribers. It also Integrates with lead generation plugins for WordPress like OptinMonster and WPForms.

Alternatives: Mailchimp and SendinBlue are good alternatives.

OptinMonster is the most popular lead generation and conversion rate optimization plugin in the market. It allows you to convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers and customers.

OptinMonster comes with high-converting opt-in forms that you can easily customize with drag & drop builder. Their powerful targeting features allow you to personalize the campaigns for each user, so you can show the right message at the right time.

For ecommerce website it helps you recover abandoned cart sales, convert website visitors, and grow your subscriber list. 

CookieYes GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice Plugin

Are you looking for a simple cookie consent solution that will help you manage your website cookies for GDPR and similar privacy laws? This cookie consent plugin would be just what you need to do that.

Its built-in cookie scan allows you to detect and categorize both first and third-party cookies on your website and lets you seek consent as per the GDPR norms. Auto-blocking of cookie scripts enables your website to block cookies until users grant consent.

The plugin lets you display a fully customizable cookie notice on your website. You can choose from multiple customizable cookie banner templates for it. Cookie consent storage, Geo-IP based cookie notice exclusion, etc., are other popular features offered by the plugin.