20 Must-Have Wordpress Plugins For Your Art Website

WordPress is undeniably one of the most popular platforms for eCommerce sites and blogs.

This isn’t surprising considering the fact that it runs 35% of the entire Internet and 60% of the global CMS (Content Management System) market.

And part of this massive influence and success can be attributed to its extensive plugins.

As of this writing, WordPress has a total of 54,896 plugins, and this number might have changed by the time you are reading this article.

With this overwhelming number of options, it’s an understatement to say that choosing the best WordPress plugins for your business can be exhausting.

Hence, I’ve come up with this guide to help you choose which among all of these WordPress plugins would work best for your blog and your eCommerce site or online store.

10 Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO isn’t regarded as the best WordPress SEO plugin for nothing.

If you are new in the blogosphere, one of the most important things that you should put into consideration is SEO.

Although content is still the king, without SEO it can’t take off and reach greater heights.

And this is the primary role of this plugin – to drive more visitors to your website by ensuring that your content and your site per se are highly optimized for the search engine.

Check out the complete Yoast SEO review here.

NextGEN Gallery

One of the effective ways to keep your readers hooked to your content is by adding images. This is especially helpful for longer posts.

And NextGEN Gallery is the perfect option if you want to add a gallery plugin on your site.

It is easy to use, but it is also powerful enough to meet the high demands of imaging professionals, artists, and photographers.

The free version provides three gallery options: thumbnail, slideshow, and image browser; and it offers two album styles: compact and extended.

Find out more about the features of this amazing WordPress gallery plugin.

Easy Social Sharing

Adding social media share buttons into your posts and your pages is another important way to increase engagement on your site and drive traffic from your social media accounts.

With Easy Social Sharing, your content can be easily shared across 18 social media networks with just a click of the buttons.

This plugin also features sharing counts so you can keep track of the number of shares of your posts on social media.

Akismet

You should definitely consider an anti-spam plugin like Akismet if you don’t want to screen every comment that your visitors leave on your site.

This plugin can save you time and money in removing spam, thereby allowing you to spend more time responding to your legitimate and potential clients.

It also keeps a history of filtered comments so you can review if there were comments that were mistaken as spam.

Everest Forms

When running a blog, you should be aware that there will be times that your readers might have some questions they would like to share in private.

Seeing a contact form on your blog can certainly give a sigh of relief to your readers knowing that they can reach out to you easily and out of the public’s attention.

And this is where Everest Forms comes in – it is a drag and drop form builder that allows you to easily create forms without technical knowledge.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is the ultimate go-to plugin for bloggers and business owners.

This plugin allows you to achieve more in less time with your content marketing goals.

It is highly recommended for collaborating with team members and in scheduling the content of your entire blog, as well as of your social media presence.

Simply sync all your social media accounts with CoSchedule, and with its drag and drop editorial calendar, you can schedule when do you want to publish your posts.

OptinMonster

Users that leave your website all of a sudden are like money that has turned into stone.

It was almost there, but sad to say it didn’t convert into a sale.

But with OptinMonster, there is still hope – you can convert your abandoning website visitors into email subscribers and even loyal customers.

Hence, your visitor might not purchase today, but you got him into your mailing list.

With your email marketing campaigns, you can certainly persuade him to come back and buy next time.

OptinMonster is a powerful conversion optimization tool that can help you make the most of every visitor that comes to your site.

ThirstyAffiliates

If you’re a blogger and you’re not earning through affiliate marketing, you are missing a lot from the blogosphere.

Affiliate marketing is one of the popular ways to earn as a blogger.

And if you want to manage and organize your affiliate links while increasing your income, ThirstyAffiliates is a must-have plug-in for your site.

With this plugin, you can easily add affiliate links into your blog posts and you can sit down and relax knowing that your commissions are safe from theft.

ThirstyAffiliates also lets you cloak long and complicated links to make them more pleasing to your readers.

Check out this article if you want to find out how affiliate marketing works.

UpdraftPlus

You could never be complacent with your site’s security and data storage, as such it’s imperative to always back-up your files to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

UpdraftPlus is certainly one of the best WordPress plugins as far as backing up your content is concerned.

It allows you to easily backup your files and to store them safely in cloud databases like Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and more.

And you can restore your data with just a simple click of the restore button. You can also schedule an automatic backup for your content to save a lot of your time.

WP Rocket

It’s not rocket science for you not to figure out that this plugin is dedicated to increasing your WordPress website speed.

No matter how good your content is if your site takes forever to load your visitors will easily exit from your page.

Hence, it’s a mortal sin to undermine the importance of your site’s speed, and this amazing WordPress caching plugin.

10 Best WordPress Plugins for eCommerce

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the number one eCommerce plugin for WordPress.

And in fact, it’s now the most popular eCommerce platform powering over 28% of all online stores.

Hence, you can be assured that you are in good hands.

WooCommerce provides the functionalities needed to create and run an online store from scratch.

With this plugin, you can sell digital and physical products from your site and serve your customers anywhere in the world.

The core plugin is available for you to download for free, though you can always add some paid extensions to meet your specific needs.

Veeqo

Veeqo is a multi-channel retail platform that lets you manage your WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and other eCommerce stores.

It also allows you to take control of your online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Rakuten, Walmart, and a lot more.

Its core features are multi-channel inventory, order management, pick and pack, and shipping.

Veeqo helps you with all of your back-office tasks, so you can deliver your customers the best experience that they deserve.

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular among all WordPress plugins when it comes to analytics.

It allows you to easily connect your site to Google Analytics so you’ll know how your visitors find you and what they do while they are on your site.

Knowing these pieces of information is crucial so you can have a clearer understanding of what works best with your target audience.

Constant Contact

As a business owner, you must exhaust all options as far as marketing is concerned.

And without a doubt, email marketing is one of the most effective tools that you can use to grow your business.

This is where Constant Contact comes in. It is an amazing eCommerce plugin for building an email list and sending newsletters to your subscribers.

AdSanity

Placing ads on your website is one of the best ways for you to earn online. And you can monetize your ads through Google ads or by selling direct ads.

Nevertheless, regardless of how you make money from your ads, you need an ads management plugin like AdSanity.

With the help of this plugin, you can easily manage your ads and you can keep track of their performance based on the number of views and click-throughs.

Live Chat

Have you ever wondered how you can add a live chatbox on your site? Well, the answer is here – you can do it through LiveChat Inc, the best live chat tool for business websites.

It features a lot of helpful customizable options to meet your specific needs, and it also comes with a mobile app, so you can stay connected anytime and anywhere.

With LiveChat, you can increase your sales, solve customer problems in real-time, and save money on your customer support.

Envira Gallery

While you can always make use of the WordPress gallery, the features are still fairly basic for a business website.

With Envira Gallery, you can easily create beautiful and responsive photo and video galleries on your site.

It’s the best premium WordPress gallery plugin with over 320,000+ downloads to date.

It is also SEO-friendly, mobile-ready, and optimized for maximum speed.

LearnDash

If you are planning to create and sell online courses from your WordPress site, then you should consider using LearnDash.

It is the most trusted LMS (Learning Management System) plugin and it’s the number #1 choice of Fortune 500 companies, universities, and businesses worldwide.

And you don’t need some coding skills to get started. Just sign-up and you can go straight ahead in setting-up your online learning website.

Feel free to check out this detailed guide, if you want to learn more about how to create online courses on WordPress using LearnDash.

Sucuri

Web security is not only important in safeguarding what belongs to you but is also crucial in maintaining a high level of trust from your customers and potential clients.

Sucuri ensures that your site is safe from website hacks and DDoS attacks.

It also sends you notifications for security alerts, keeps tracks of the integrity of your files, removes malware, and so much more.

RafflesPress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin. It allows you to grow your email list, your website traffic and social media followers with giveaways and contests that hook your target market.

And you don’t need to worry about coding skills, because it’s a drag and drop builder that can help you create successful giveaway campaigns without taking so much of your time and effort.

The RafflePress widget is user-friendly and it works perfectly fine on mobile, tablets, and desktops.

RafflePress could also help you grow your social media presence by incentivizing users to follow your profile and share the giveaway with their friends.

This tactic is obviously an effective way to increase social media engagement while also generating traffic to your site.

Final Thoughts

That concludes my lists of the best WordPress plugins for your blog and business website.

If you found this post helpful, you may also want to check out these other articles:

And if you’ve used some of the plugins that were listed above, feel free to share your experience in the comments below.

Are you still figuring out which website builder to use for your art business site? Check out this article that I’ve written about the best website builders and packages available for artists.

Your Art Empire