Our 10 Favorite WordPress Plugins for an Epic User Experience

A big part of WordPress’s appeal is its wide variety of plugins.  As of April 2022, WordPress had over 55,000 plugins, with new ones constantly added. 

With these plugins, you can conveniently customize your website and create a streamlined, silky smooth user experience. It’s just a matter of choosing the right ones. 

This post will highlight our 10 favorite WordPress plugins to enhance the user experience, including key info like pricing and ratings.

1. Yoast

• Basic version – Free
• Premium version – $99 per year
• 4.8 rating

Yoast has been called the number one WordPress SEO plugin, and with good reason. It provides detailed breakdowns of optimizing your pages for target SEO keywords to help your site rank in search engines and drive qualified traffic to your site. It’s an essential plugin for any business, especially if you’re new to SEO practices. 

Key features include:

• Automatic page optimization for internal links, external links, meta descriptions, titles, headers, and more
• Internal linking tools
• Google and social previews
• Access to educational SEO resources to increase your knowledge 

The result is dramatically improved SEO and a fantastic user experience. 

2. GTM4WP

• Completely free
• 4.7 rating

The GTM4WP plugin allows you to install Google Tag Manager onto your website easily. Simply put the GTM code into the plugin, and that’s it. 

Google Tag Manager is incredibly helpful when installing Google Analytics onto your site and configuring events and goals, which aren’t always easy if you’re new to the process. If, for instance, you want to track form submissions that don’t have thank you pages or button clicks, GTM4WP helps you do this without setting up any code on your site. 

That way, you can track what types of pages or posts users are landing on and gain valuable insights to refine the user experience continually – without onerous coding.

3. Gravity Forms

• Basic license – $59 per year
• Pro license – $159 per year
• Elite license – $259 per year
• 4.4 rating

Gravity Forms is the essential forms plugin we install across all our clients’ sites. It’s simple to use and looks great on the front end. Additionally, you can use several add-on pages to connect your forms to outside sources, like HubSpot. 

You can use it to make fully customized forms using a simple drag-and-drop builder. You can easily adjust column layouts for maximum personalization and include extras like form uploads, online payment collection, contact information, and more. 

If you want to create great-looking forms without any hassle, Gravity Forms is a must. 

4. Hotjar

• Basic version – Free
• Plus version – $31 per month
• Business version – From $79 per month
• 3.7 rating

Heatmaps are the perfect way to visualize where and how your users interact with your site. Rather than just looking at numbers, heatmaps allow you to “see” where visitors are clicking the most, what gets the most attention, what gets ignored, and much more. 

Here’s an example. 

With heatmaps, you can make the necessary adjustments to bring attention to core offerings and create a better overall user experience in a very intuitive way. When it comes to heatmaps, Hotjar is one of our favorite WordPress plugins because of how simple it is to generate them. 

5. Advanced Custom Fields

• Pro version for one website – $49 per year
• 4.9 rating

We use Advanced Custom Fields on nearly every site to get especially detailed in developing and creating a completely custom look. You can use it to build personalized fields in WordPress that give much more customization than a basic theme would. The only downside is that this plugin is geared more toward developers than beginners. 

That means it’s not necessarily layman-friendly; it isn’t your average drag-and-drop page builder straight out of the box. That said, if you have some developing skills and feel comfortable with a slightly more advanced WordPress plugin, this is an excellent choice. 

6. FacetWP

• Basic version for 1 to 3 websites – $99 a year
• Rating N/A

FacetWP offers advanced filtering for WordPress, which allows visitors to seamlessly search for specific pages, posts, products, listings, archives, and more. We like it because it’s lightning-fast where visitors can instantaneously find what they’re looking for without requiring frequent refreshes. 

Also, there are several other facets, such as drop-downs, checkboxes, date ranges, and sliders. You can even deliver information based on a customer’s geographical location for maximum personalization. Note that this plugin works well with Advanced Custom Fields. 

7. WooCommerce

• Plugin is free for WooCommerce users
• 4.5 rating

WooCommerce is one of the top e-commerce platforms and had over 23% of the market share in 2022. If you’re already running your store on WooCommerce, it only makes sense to install this plugin, as it’s free and lets you create beautiful, professional storefronts with customizable themes. 

You can use it to create products, set up shipping, and handle taxes, and this plugin features tons of extra add-ons for a personal touch. WooCommerce also integrates with countless other platforms like Square, Stripe, and PayPal for payments, USPS, UPS, and FedEx for shipping, and much more. 

8. Redirection

• Free (no premium version)
• 4.4 rating

If visitors get hit with the dreaded “404 error,” it can instantly hurt the user experience and send them running to a competitor. Not to mention it can be detrimental to your SEO as well. The purpose of Redirection is to “create, manage, and monitor 301 redirects” without requiring any technical knowledge.

This redirection prevents users from seeing 404 errors and, instead, redirects them to another page of your choice. 

We suggest using Redirection in conjunction with the Broken Link Checker plugin. The Broken Link Checker will check for broken links, and the Redirection plugin will fix them!

9. WP Rocket

• One website – $49 per year
• 4.5 rating

Not only is having a fast-loading website essential for keeping users happy, but it’s also vital for Google to consider when determining page rank. WP Rocket is our go-to plugin for clearing site caches to keep sites super speedy.  

We recommend it because it’s quick and easy to set up (it only takes three minutes), there are no complex configurations, and you don’t need to be a tech expert to use it. In addition to offering page caching and browser caching, WP Rocket also does GZIP compression and minification. It will remove excess CSS to make your site more “lean” for even better performance. 

10. HubSpot

• Plugin is free for HubSpot users
• 4.4 rating

This is the official HubSpot plugin and is incredibly useful if you have a HubSpot account. As you may know, HubSpot is one of the top platforms for CRM, sales, and marketing. And if you have a WordPress site, installing the HubSpot plugin is a no-brainer. 

With it, you can:

• Create forms and popups
• Add live chat and chatbots
• Create high-level email marketing campaigns
• Automate your emails
• Utilize built-in analytics 

Our Favorite WordPress Plugins: Closing Thoughts

WordPress has revolutionized web design and made it possible for nearly anyone to create a quality website and deliver an A+ user experience without the need for technical expertise. Their massive list of plugins has also been integral to WordPress’ overall appeal. 

Simply choose the plugin you want, install it, perform some basic setup, and you’re ready to go. If you’re looking for help with WordPress design or web design in general, feel free to reach out to 3.7 Designs. We’d love to hear about your project and will be happy to share our expertise to take your site to the next level.