On today’s episode we are going to talk about the top 20 plugins (most popular plugins) in the WordPress repository right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 356.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we are going to explore and dive into the 20 most popular plugins in the WordPress repository. These are all free plugins and most of them we should probably be using in one way, shape, or form or another. So, before we get there, let’s bout the two pieces of announcements that I want to share with you. The first one comes over from WordPress.com and it’s going to affect WordPress.com users and Jetpack users and this is all about uploading photos to your WordPress media library through Google Photos. Google Photos is one of the most popular ways of storing and sharing photos online and WordPress.com is now one of the most popular ways to blog, so wouldn’t it be great if they just could work together?

Well, now they do. Now you can browse, search, and copy photos from your Google account right to your blogpost and pages within your WordPress library. So, to get started, you just go to the media library on your WordPress.com site or your Jetpack-enabled site. You select a source in the dropdown, so you can either do your WordPress library or photos from your Google library. The first time you will need to connect the account by selecting the connect button and then once you are connected, the library will be all of your recent photos in the Google library will show up and it doesn’t end there. You can also use the power of Google and you can search photos.

Google has this great algorithm that’s built in and you can just type dog and it will show you all the pictures of dogs or cats or bird or boat or whatever and it’s going to go through an index and find all of those images. So, it’s really cool. It is pretty awesome. It’s brand new out from WordPress.com and Jetpack. So, if you are one of those two types of users I definitely recommend checking this out. The second piece of news that I want to share with you today was big in the WordPress space in the last week or so. About ten days ago, Matt Mullenweg posted a post on his blog saying that React was no longer going to be the technology for the Gutenberg Project or Calypso and both of those projects had been written in React. So, it’s going to take a lot of time to rework and do things. This was all because of a patent clause that was inside the React license.

So, Matt wrote this big post. It wasn’t saying that it was bad for Facebook to have this post. It was nothing bashing in any way, shape, or form. It was just basically saying that we don’t agree as the Open-Source Community and the WordPress project, we don’t agree with this and we don’t want to have our users be part of this license or this clause that’s in there. So, that was all good. Matt and the team were starting to figure out, okay, what are we going to use as technology-wise now? Well, ten days after this happened after Matt published this blog, then Facebook came out with an article saying that they were going to drop that specific thing, that specific text inside the software license.

So, I’m not 100 percent sure if we’re still going to go React, or whatnot, but it’s just very interesting to see that the Open-Source Community of WordPress and, as big as it is, was able to influence a humongous company like Facebook in order to kind of get this going on the right path and allow everybody to use the React license without having this extra clause in the license. So, that’s really cool and I’m excited to see where the technology goes and how much faster we can get through Gutenberg and updating Calypso, and whatnot, if we don’t have to change the technology. So, that’s something that I wanted to share with you this week in the way of announcements. We’re going to skip the “Is there a Plugin for That Section” today because I’ve got 20 plugins here in just a second. So, let’s go ahead and dive right in.

All right, the last time I did a show like this was back in Episode No. 258, so that was 98 episodes ago. So, that was pretty close to two years ago that I did this and I just wanted to go through the top plugins on the WordPress repository. All of these are free plugins and, honestly, most of them are the same as they were two years ago but the order has shuffled quite a bit. This year we’re going to talk about Contact Form 7 and that’s the No. 1 spot. But two years ago, tiny MCE Advanced was the top spot. So, we’re going to dive in and we’re going to take a look at them. Now, I don’t think you need all 20 of these on your website. There’s a lot that kind of do the same thing. Some of them are tools that you can use for a one-time use and then you can remove them and you don’t need them anymore.

But let’s go ahead and just dive in and talk about the top 20 plugins on the WordPress repository. The first one is Contact Form 7 and it has 5M plus active installs. That’s the absolute top. I guess the top three of them have 5M active installs. So, Contact Form 7 is a contact form plugin. It is one of the most simple ones. It is the free one that’s out there and it’s used by so many people. It’s just very, very simple to get a contact form up and running. The trickiest part about using Contact Form 7 is you have to build a form and then you also have to build the email. So, you have to put all the form fields in the email so then when somebody submits the contact form it actually emails you back. So, that’s one of the things about Contact Form 7 but it has 1,300 reviews so there are a lot of people that are using Contact Form 7 and they use that for the simplicity or the freeness. They want a free contact form so they go to Contact Form 7.

Now, Yoast SEO is No. 2 on the list. It helps you to improve your WordPress SEO. You can write better content and they do this by having this little stoplight on the inside. There’s a meta panel that you can use and you can say what your keywords are and what your title is and whatnot and then it will kind of grade you and it will let you know what the level of text is. You know, you’re writing on a third-grade level or you’re writing at a twelfth-grade level, whatever that looks like. So, it gives you a lot of tools. It’s kind of like a guideline, a checklist that you can go through on each and every post. Then depending on your scores and how the algorithm works, you can either get a stoplight (a red, yellow, or green) and then depending on the way you have it set up, like green is obviously the best then you know you want to continue with that.

So, it can be a lot of steps and motivation to get your content and SEO juice and just do it correctly, but then it also can give you some frustrations by – you might spend too long trying to figure out all the SEO goodness that you need to put in a post. So, that’s Yoast SEO. I can’t believe this but this one has 15,000 reviews on the WordPress repository. Remember Contact Form 7? The one that’s rated No. 1 has 1,300? This has 15,000 reviews. So, those are the first two – Contact Form 7 and Yoast SEO. The next four are mainly made by WordPress. Automatic has the next three, I guess – Akismet, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. So, those are all, in a nutshell – Akismet checks your comments and contact forms against spam to make sure that you’re not getting spam on your website – so, that’s Akismet. Jetpack – we’ve talked about this a lot in previous episodes, but it gives you tools to design, secure, and grow your website in one convenient bundle.

It’s got 34 or 35 separate modules that you can turn on and turn off depending on what you need on your website. It also brings you the power of WordPress.com to your self-posted site. It gives you a lot of cool benefits and a lot of things that you can add with Jetpack. There’s also now a Jetpack Pro and Jetpack Premium and so those are additional ways that you can kind of amp up or soup up your WordPress site. Then WooCommerce – that’s the team that I work on. It is a powerful extendable eCommerce plugin that helps you sell anything that you want in the world and it helps you do it beautifully because the WooCommerce sites are beautiful. So, those are kind of the next three at 5M active installs, 4M active installs and 3M active installs.

There’s also one called WordPress Importer. This is one that you may use and then you probably will never use it again. So, this will allow you to import pages, posts, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, and more from a WordPress Export file. So, if you export things from WordPress site, you can import them with the WordPress Exporter. This is one that, I think, even if you have it installed it doesn’t even show up in the plugins area because you go to Tools, then you go to Import inside WordPress and then you say, oh, I’m importing from WordPress and it will automatically download this plugin and then it just kind of keeps it running on the backend. So, I’m pretty sure that’s why there’s 4M active installs of this because, at one point, these sites have had to import content and now it’s just a plugin that kind of keeps running.

So, that is WordPress Importer. So, those are the first six. No. 7 is All-in-One SEO Pack. So, this is the original SEO plugin. It’s been downloaded – it says here over 30M times but it’s showing 3M active installs and this plugin is not quite as complex as the Yoast SEO. It doesn’t have quite all the little fancy bells and whistles and this one definitely is not used nearly as much. When I log into WooCommerce sites when I’m helping troubleshoot, for my day job, I see almost every time that Yoast SEO is installed on almost every site and I rarely see All-in-One SEO Packs. So, your mileage may vary; one might have better needs than your others but I’d definitely check out both of those if you’re looking for an SEO plugin.

The next one on the list is called Google XML Sitemaps and this one has 2M active installs and this plugin will improve your SEO by helping search engines better index your site-using sitemaps. So, this is definitely another good SEO plugin if you need it. Some of these – I know Yoast has the sitemaps built in. I’m not exactly if All-in-One has them built in but if you just want a standalone plugin to do the sitemaps, then Google XML Sitemaps will do the trick. Again, all of these will be in the Show Notes. There will be links directly to get to the WordPress repository for the Show Notes for Episode No. 356. The next one on the list that wasn’t on the list back two years ago is called Limit Login Attempts and this will limit the rate of attempts. It’s fully a way of cookies for each IP address and it’s fully customizable. So, this one does a really good job if you can say, like, I only want people to try x amount of logins in 5 minutes and then lock them out or if somebody tries to use admin as a login, lock them out indefinitely because admin is not a user name, or whatever the case may be.

There’s a lot of customality and a lot of functionality that you can add to this plugin. I’m really shocked to see that it IS one of the top ones but then, again, we’re seeing so many different sites – not necessarily Word Press but we’re talking about, you know, Equifax got hacked and this company got hacked and this company got hacked. We don’t want our websites to be hacked, so I would recommend installing Limit Login Attempts to get that type of lockdown on your site. The next one is Tiny MCE Advanced and this extends an enhanced MCE (the WordPress and Visual Editor). This gives you more buttons and more ways to interact with your text inside your posts and your pages and this one dropped, like I said, all the way from No. 1 a couple of years ago and is not into the eighth or ninth spot right now.

So, that one is one that’s not being used as much and I can see this dropping. If I do this show in two years or I do the same type of show in a couple of years I think this will drop even more as we get into Gutenberg and Tiny MCE won’t even really be a part of the Gutenberg Editor anymore. So, that will probably drop off a little bit as well. The next one on my list is Wordfence Security and this allows you to secure your website with the most comprehensive WordPress security plugin. You’ve got firewall, malware scanning, blocking, you’ve got the limit login attempts in there as well. This one has 2M active installs.

The cool thing that I like about Wordfence Security is it will look at your plugin code and it compares it to the code on your WordPress repository and notices if anything changes. This also does it for the WordPress software, so if your WordPress software actually gets hacked, every once in a while, depending on your settings inside of Wordfence it will go through and scan and look at the code and make sure there’s no differences or makes sure there’s been no changes to the code and so you know that your website hasn’t been hacked. So, Wordfence Security is another free plugin that’s really good for that. Duplicate posts finds the list on the next spot and this is a very simple plugin. I’m not exactly sure why this isn’t built into WordPress natively but it copies posts of any type with a click.

So, this will be posts or pages or custom post types. You can even use it with products and you can just copy things. You can just basically click the button and it creates a duplicate post exactly like it is and it just says, “copy of” and then whatever the post name was. This is super handy if you are creating very repetitious content and you want things very, very similar. You can just go ahead and duplicate the post. It’s got, like I said, more than 2M active installs and it found its way on the list this year. WP Super Cache comes next. It is a fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. This one is made by Automatic as well. It’s not really one that’s advertised as one of the flagship products of Automatic but this is the simplest caching solution. You go in, you turn it on, and you do a few settings depending on your hosting provider and then after your site is kind of crawled through or scanned, every time somebody goes to your website it will show them an html page instead of going to the database, finding all the information and then serving that up to the web browser.

It makes your website much, much faster and it just allows more people to be on your site at one time. So, WP Super Cache is a plugin with more a million active downloads or active installs, so check it out if you need a caching plugin. The last one on Page 1 of the Word Press repository browse – the popular ones that I’m looking at – I’ve got six more on the next page but the next one is Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights. This is one that is new to the list. This wasn’t even a plugin a couple of years ago. It’s got more than a million active installs and it’s created, like I said, by MonsterInsights. It’s made by the same company that did OptinMonster, so those are very compatible plugins but this one will allow you to get Google Analytics right on your WordPress dashboard.

You hook it up to your Google Analytics account and then you can see all the information right in your WordPress dashboard, which is super handy. A lot of times you forget about Google Analytics and then you have to go and login to Google Analytics and take a look. This will allow you to see all of that information right in your dashboard. Another one on the list this year is Regenerate Thumbnails. This has a million active installs. This is another one of those utility plugins that you use it and then most people just leave it on their site because they might need it again and just keep it activated. That’s probably WHY it’s on this list. This basically allows you to regenerate your thumbnails after you change the thumbnail size.

So, within WordPress if you want your thumbnails to be a different size, whether that be the small images or the thumbnail images – any of those size images. When an image is uploaded to your WordPress site then if you change any of those dimensions off whatever it’s set at right now when you start, you have to regenerate your thumbnails, so they all get to be resized. It’s kind of a pain to do, especially if you have a very, very large site but that’s what the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin will do. The next one I’m not really counting but it’s Hello Dolly. It’s just a plugin that’s installed and it’s turned on for most active installs, so I am going to say that one doesn’t really count. The next one is Advanced Custom Fields and you can customize your WordPress experience with powerful, professional, and intuitive fields.

So, if you want to create a custom field maybe for your podcast and you want to have specific meta content for each podcast or video or TV show or whatever you’re building a website for, you can create custom fields so you can have those fields built in so you won’t have to worry about any custom code or anything like that. This plugin handles all of that with 1M active installs. It is tested to – even 4.9, they’re even testing it with the beta software. So, that is Advanced Custom Fields. We’ve just got a couple more here. Page Builder by SiteOrigin and this allows you to build responsive page layouts with widgets you know and love by just using drag and drop blocks inside of your site. So, again, this is kind of similar to what Gutenberg is doing but this is Page Builder by SiteOrigin and it’s got a million active installs and this is one I honestly haven’t played with a whole lot but definitely if you’re looking for some sort of page builder I would check out this one. Advanced Plus WordPress Backup plugin is a whole mouthful but it basically will backup and restore your website.

It can be scheduled backups or manual backups. You can backup to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google – any of those services. It’s a plugin that’s free on the WordPress repository that I know that lots of people adore and use. There’s 2,600 five-star reviews and so that’s one that has a very vibrant community. So, if you’re interested in a free backup option I would check out UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup plugin. Two more on my list today – W3 Total Cache and this is another caching plugin. I feel that this one is just a little bit harder to set up and to tweak and I find that sometimes if this one doesn’t work quite as well as the WP Super Cache, so your mileage may vary.

It depends on your host and your server and whatnot, but it will allow you to improve the SEO and the user experience of your website by increasing the load time or decreasing the load time, or whatever. It makes your website load faster. It does the same thing as WP Super Cache. It makes each webpage on your site a static page and so a customer or somebody coming to your website doesn’t have to have the contents served up from the database each and every time. The last one on the list is Google Analytics Dashboard for WP. This will connect your Google analytics with your WordPress site and it displays stats and all the information that you need to understand what types of users are coming to your WordPress site.

This one was not on the list before and I’ve never heard of it and never installed it, so if you’re looking at a way to get Google Analytics on your WordPress dashboard I would check out this plugin as well. Now, there’s only one, two, three, four more that have more than a million active installs. I’ll give them honorable mentions here. The first one is Really Simple CAPTCHA. It is a captcha plugin that will allow people to have to fill out some sort of captcha before a form or a sign-in on the WP admin login page, so that’s what that one is all about. Duplicator is a WordPress migration plugin. It will allow you to migrate and create backups for your WordPress site so you can clone, you can backup, you can duplicate, you can move, you can do whatever you need. So, that’s a duplicator plugin. NextGEN Gallery is a WordPress Gallery Plugin.

This one was really high on the list last year. When I did it two years ago it was No. 3 on the list and now it’s down to the 24th spot and this is the only gallery that’s been on the list, so it’s the most popular WordPress gallery. So, you want to look at that if you’re looking for some sort of gallery on your site. The last one that’s in the top 25 that have 1M active installs is SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle and this gives you a collection of widgets that you can use on your website. So, if you’re interested in extra widgets I would check out SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle. So, that’s the list for 2017. Lots of plugins, lots of ones that are very useful and I can see why they all made the top 25 spots. So, that’s what I wanted to share with you this week. Next week we’ve got more great WordPress information coming towards you but until then take care and check out some of these plugins this week. We’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.