Using plugins, you can greatly increase WordPress’s usefulness. Anything you can think of that would make your work with WordPress easier already exists as an add-on, whether it is a contact form, a heatmap, or a new visual editor. But what about attractive add-ons that improve the visual appeal of your website?
In this blog, we’ll define plugins and provide a curated list of the best ones for enhancing the functionality and aesthetics of your WordPress site.
What are WordPress Plugins?
Plugins allow you to extend your website’s functionality without touching a single line of code. With the help of browser plugins, WordPress extends its functionality in a variety of ways for its users. Plugins are often lauded among web designers because of the significant impact they have on improving a site’s overall performance.
They can change the look of your website and add features like dropboxes and forms for visitors to fill out. To further facilitate communication between the user and the website, these plugins can also have specialised social media buttons.
Listing all the plugins would take forever, so it’s crucial to zero down on the most pressing problem areas. Consider the Learning Management System (LMS) plugin, for instance, if you’d like to streamline a number of back-end processes, such as programme tracking, reporting, and distribution.
The following are some examples of essential plugins that you, as a website owner, should think about using:
- Security – There is an ever-increasing amount of cyber risks and breaches, making it imperative that all websites use WordPress security measures. Without the right WordPress security plugins, a website can easily be hacked, exposing sensitive data.
- Backup – To back up their data, WordPress site owners should also install a backup plugin. Despite a prolonged site outage, we can quickly restore service thanks to our offshore backups.
- Contact Forms – As far as plugins go, this is one of the best at turning readers into paying clients. Readers are more likely to stay on a website and make a purchase if they can use the contact form to ask questions or provide feedback. While there are several options for contact forms, many companies choose either Gravity forms or WPforms.
- SEO – WordPress’s SEO plugins are a terrific asset for increasing a site’s visibility in search engines, which is why they are so important for website content creation. Useful plugins for WordPress include SEO Press and All-in-One SEO.
Now that you have an idea about what WordPress plugins are, here are some plugins that will make your WordPress website attractive and useful.
1. UberMenu
What good is a website if it doesn’t have a well-designed menu that lets users easily traverse the various sections?
The UberMenu plugin was developed with this sort of intuitive menu access in mind. The very flexible and adaptive plugin provides seven primary menus and a number of drop-down menu choices to accommodate a wide range of preferences and requirements.
Notable features:
- Fully responsive and compatible with mobile and touch-enabled devices
- Easy to add images and descriptions
- Choice of 18 layout variables
- Google Maps
- Extensive user-friendly documentation
The WordPress menu system is already compatible with UberMenu, so you can get started right away designing beautiful menus.
2. Justified Image Grid: Premium WordPress Gallery
Displaying photographs in a grid might be challenging if you have images with varying sizes and orientations. The preceding illustration, however, shows how straightforward it is with the Justified Image Grid add-on.
The most notable features are:
- Retina-ready
- Right-click content protection
- Responsive gallery
- Gallery support for YouTube, Vimeo and self-hosted
- Special effects on-the-fly
- Video gallery support
3. Real3D FlipBook WordPress Plugin
If you’d like to provide your users with the same page-turning experience they’d find in a book or magazine, this layout manager is for you.
It’s a novel approach to web page design, and the main benefit of this WordPress plugin is that no additional plugins, such as Adobe Flash, are required. You may make your own dynamic pages with minimal effort and a lot of personalization options.
Notable features:
- Optimised for mobile
- Create flip-books directly from PDF files
- Font Awesome or Material Icons
- Responsive mode
- Light/dark skins
- 100% HTML5 (no Flash!)
It’s possible to customise the flip book’s layout for various devices. In addition to the usual two-page spread, mobile devices also make advantage of a single-page view that improves readability by eliminating the need to scroll horizontally, all while preserving the 3D page-flipping effect and shadows.
4. Video Gallery WordPress Plugin
The Video Gallery WordPress Plugin is an excellent choice among WordPress video plugins since it provides more functionality than most users will ever need.
This plugin can be adjusted in a wide variety of ways and is responsive, so it will look amazing on everything from a mobile device to a 5K monitor. Analytics are included, videos may be indexed and optimised for search engines, and advertising can be used to make money if desired. The whole shebang comes with the regular six-month support.
Video Gallery WordPress Plugin works with videos hosted on your own server, as well as videos hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook.
Notable features:
- Subtitle support
- Stream from many sources
- Shortcodes
- Play from a specific point
- Iphone/Ipad compatible
- Easy to install
- Ultra-responsive
- Extensive admin panel
5. The Grid: Responsive WordPress Grid Plugin
The Grid is an excellent alternative if you’d like to use your WordPress posts to create a grid. It allows for a variety of post formats and is loaded with capabilities, including as:
Notable features:
- Up to 12 Instagram posts per grid
- Quick and easy setup
- YouTube and Vimeo streams
- WooCommerce integration
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6. Essential Grid WordPress Plugin
Essential Grid is a layout plugin for WordPress that can be used to create a grid for displaying your content, whether it’s blog entries, photographs, products, testimonials, social media streams, services, or anything else you can think of.
With this flexible grid, you may organise your WordPress site’s content anyway you choose.
The first step in entering data into a grid is deciding where to get that data. Then, you may modify the grid to your liking by picking a layout from one of three options, tweaking the number of columns, rows, and item spacing. Once that’s done, you can change the appearance even further by using one of many skins.
Notable features:
- Various animation styles available
- Widely varied content sources possible, including images, YouTube, and HTML5 self-hosted video
- Over 25 example skins included
- Responsive and mobile optimised
You may make your WordPress page more aesthetically appealing and interesting by using the Essential Grid plugin.
7. Media Grid
Media Grid is a fantastic page template plugin for WordPress, allowing you to effortlessly construct endless flexible, filterable, and paginated portfolios.
Make your own gallery arrangement and use a wide variety of media. The plugin provides extensive control over your gallery’s appearance.
Notable features:
- One-click grid cloning system
- Visual, drag-and-drop grid builder
- Ability to create grids using any public post on your website
- Unlimited layout-free portfolios
8. Templatera
Templatera is a WordPress template manager developed by the same people responsible for the WPBakery Page Builder. It allows users to create, manage, and assign access to templates based on the user role or content type.
Notable features:
- Edit content across templates from one central place
- Easy content reuse across templates
- Ability to import or export templates in XML format
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9. Sidebar and Widget Manager
The Sidebar and Widget Manager is a great choice if you’d want the flexibility of adding widgets wherever on your WordPress page.
The widget placement options are not limited to the sidebar and bottom of the page anymore thanks to this plugin; you can now install widgets anywhere within the page content area.
Notable features:
- Supports any kind of content
- Drag-and-drop grid manager
- Ability to display or hide any widget on any page
- Vertical or horizontal widget alignment
The Sidebar and Widget Manager plugin for WordPress makes it easy to add widgets to any part of a page, giving users a lot of flexibility in creating their own custom page designs.
10. DHWCPage
DHWCPage is a page content plugin for WordPress that can be used to design a WooCommerce page in any layout. The plugin, which necessitates the use of WPBakery Page Builder, is simple to set up and requires no coding knowledge.
Notable features:
- Display the product description and review separately
- Supports WooCommerce shortcodes
- Create a single product by category or product type
- Works with any theme
Wrapping up
The number of potential actions is overwhelming. Don’t forget that more is less when it comes to WordPress plugins. Your site’s load time could increase if you use too many, especially if they’re graphic ones like these. Don’t blindly click download on all of them; instead, give some thought to which ones would be most useful to your site and then download only those.
No matter which one you pick, your site will look amazing with these attractive plugins. We sincerely hope that you were able to use this collection to locate an aesthetically pleasing plugin that you will like using.
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