WordPress utility plugins let you make enhancements to all aspects of your WordPress website: performance, design, and security. 

With thousands of options available, however, it can be quite difficult sorting the good from the not so good.

In addition, you need to be very selective when deciding on what kinds of plugins you want to use because each plugin added to your site can decrease the load speed of your pages. More plugins also increase the likelihood of scripting conflicts.

With all these issues in mind, I’ve compiled a list of 20 essential WordPress utility plugins available at CodeCanyon to help take your site from good to great. 

There is still a lot of room to improve basic and critical functionality of your WordPress website, and the best way to do so is with utility plugins. Grab some of these best selling WordPress utility plugins and take your website to the next level!

The Best-Selling WordPress Utilities of 2020

Let's look at the WordPress utility plugins available at CodeCanyon that will help take your site to the next level. 

1. WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress

WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress, formerly Visual Composer, is an easy-to-use page builder that will help you create any layout you desire quickly and easily. 

This visual page builder allows you to use simple drag-and-drop widgets or building blocks that allow you to create eye-catching websites without having to understand any coding. This allows you to build out your ideas visually and build out your website quickly and easily.  

This page builder not only allows you to visually construct any page on your website in the WordPress admin back-end, but it allows you to construct any page in the front-end as well.   

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  WordPress Plugins
  
  
  The Ultimate WordPress Page Builder: WPBakery
  
  
  Daniel Strongin

2. Yellow Pencil

Yellow Pencil is a WordPress CSS editor plugin which allows you to customise any theme quickly and easily by editing it in real time. All you need to do is click on an element you want to modify, start changing its features visually, and Yellow Pencil will create the required CSS style codes in the background for you. The plugin provides over 50 style properties, 500 fonts, 300 background colors, and a live color picker to help you modify your site. 

3. Hide My WP

Hide My WP is a security plugin that hides the fact you’re using WordPress on your site, which allows you to fly under the radar of attackers that target WordPress sites. 

In addition, their Intrusion Detection system automatically monitors the site and finds potentially dangerous requests. It then provides you with all details of the attacker like who they are, where they’re located, and how they’re trying to hack your site, and suggests whether they should be blocked or not.

Other great features include:

• easily replace any words in your HTML output file


• easily change or hide any URL 


• notify you when someone is poking around your WordPress site


• change default WordPress email sender

4. Interactive World Maps

Using maps on your website is a great way to integrate content with location, and the Interactive World Maps plugin is an ideal utility plugin for doing so. The plugin allows you to include maps in posts, pages, and even in the sidebar of your site. 

You can choose to use a map of the entire world, a continent, a country, a region, or a city. You can also add active colour regions to the map and display them in two different ways, as regions and as markers.

Other great features include:

• ability to add interactivity


• change background colour


• change the width and height of the map


• and much more

5. Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress

If the Interactive World Maps above isn’t quite what you were looking for, then Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress offers another viable option. This is a great plugin for displaying multiple posts, pages or custom posts on a single Google map. You can assign a location to your post easily using the meta box or your own custom fields.

Other great features include:

• display posts information like title, content, featured image, categories, etc.


• display post listing below the map and show post information in the listing 


• possible to customise HTML easily to integrate your own design


• display posts or locations below the map in grid or list format

6. Video Gallery Plugin

Video galleries are a great way to keep your visitors engaged. Here is where Video Gallery plugin comes in, to help you create a compelling WordPress video gallery. This plugin allows you to feature single videos, or mix-and-match video sources, streams, galleries, and playlists to curate the exact content you desire. 

It's fully responsive, with subtitle support and AdSense compatibility, making it a solid choice for a dedicated WordPress video gallery. You can completely customize the look and function of your player with a user-friendly, drag-and-drop admin panel. You can also use the Design Centre to generate a brand-compatible skin for your video gallery. 

7. Essential Grid Gallery

And if you want a plugin that builds video galleries and more, then the Essential WordPress gallery plugin allows you to build grid-style galleries using images, video, and audio files from a wide variety of sources, both self-hosted and social. Use the template library to create a fully-responsive and mobile-optimized gallery, or connect with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and more to stream social media content. Dozens of fully customizable skins and animation options give you total control of the look and feel of your gallery.

8. White Label Branding for WordPress

White Label Branding for WordPress allows developers more latitude in customising WordPress menus. The plugin allows you to customise the WordPress admin and the login screen and add a Role and Capability Manager, which allows you to create new user roles and assign capabilities and decide who has access to what features of the site.

Other great features include:

• ability to add your own favicon easily


• hide certain screen options


• add a private dashboard metabox for editors or administrators eyes only


• and much more

9. Reviewer WordPress Plugin

Reviewer WordPress Plugin offers you a great way for visitors, customers and clients to leave reviews on your site. What’s more, the plugin also allows you to add comparison tables inside your WordPress blog posts, pages, and custom posts. 

Reviewer WordPress plugin offers a good range of customisable themes so that you can adapt your reviews and comparison tables to fit your site, and each theme has a responsive layout to adapt to any devices.

Other great features include:

• review box and user review widgets


• three different rating modes


• ability to collect visitor name and email


• Google ReCaptcha for preventing spamming


• and much more

10. Ajax Search Pro

If you’re looking for a better search function than the native one WordPress provides, check out Ajax Search Pro. It's a live search engine plugin for WordPress that provides users with customisable front-end settings. 

For example, by checking different boxes, the user can change the behaviour of the plugin to look for exact matches, include or exclude certain post types, categories, etc.

Other great features include:

• four built-in layouts


• image support


• custom field filters


• keyword highlighting


• and much more

11. Blog Designer PRO for WordPress

If you’ve ever dreamed of designing your own blog but don’t have the necessary coding skills, Blog Designer PRO for WordPress may be the answer. Unlike the average blog template, the plugin comes with 36 templates, all of which you can customise extensively to suit your own design aesthetic.

Other great features include:

• fully responsive blog templates


• support of custom post type


• preview of blog layout


• and much more 

12. Super Store Finder for WordPress

Super Store Finder for WordPress is a great plugin for businesses who want to help their website visitors and potential customers find their stores easily and quickly. The plugin is integrated with Google Maps API v3 and has a fully responsive design for smartphones, tablets, and touch-screen devices.

Other great features include:

• multiple store locator layouts to choose from


• manages unlimited store locations


• full-screen street view feature


• extensive map settings to show all stores, specific location, or geo location


• and much more

13. Ajax Translator Revolution WordPress Plugin

Ajax Translator Revolution WordPress Plugin is quite simply an automatic WordPress translation plugin that allows your visitors to view your website in their preferred language in a matter of seconds. 

The translation bar sits at the top of the website by default, but you can use the custom positioning settings to place it wherever you want. The plugin can translate as many as 91 languages and remembers a visitor’s selected language.

Other great features include:

• over 80 settings for customisation available


• display languages, flags with names, just names, or just flags


• translate everything or selected sections of a web page


• can exclude entire pages, posts, and categories


• and much more

14. Cornerstone

Cornerstone is a front-end WordPress page builder that allows you to see the changes you make to your site in real time as you build it. One of the great features of this plugin is Skeleton Mode, which allows you to see the underlying structure of your entire page without leaving the front-end interface.

Other great features include:

• huge library of ready-made and customisable elements


• text editing on the fly


• compatible with any WordPress theme


• and much more

15. Filetrip

The Filetrip plugin makes it easy to distribute files directly from your WordPress site as it allows your website visitors and clients to easily download any digital file from your website to Dropbox, Google Drive, or another cloud service. 

You can also program the plugin to automatically send copies of files uploaded by users to multiple destinations.

Other great features include:

• automatic email notification for uploads and backups


• ability to schedule full backup for your website


• convert media files into transferable files


• and much more

16. Ultimate Author Box

The Ultimate Author Box plugin is a great way to celebrate the authors who write for your blog. The plugin allows you to add an author box to each post to identify the author and provide additional information about them. 

You can add extra tabs to highlight the author’s other posts, social feeds, or other custom content like a contact form. The plugin comes with over 19 predesigned author box templates.

Other great features include:

• ability to set role restrictions for author boxes


• over 20 social media profiles


• author summary in pop-up display


• unlimited custom colour scheme customisation options


• and much more

17. WP Contacts 

Use WP Contacts to manage, log, track and share your contacts on any page of your site you choose. This responsive drag-and-drop plugin facilitates front-end login, and the contact database is highly customisable.

18. Custom Page Templates

Custom Page Templates allows you to override your theme design and create a unique page template for your WordPress website. The plugin has an enormous amount of flexibility and gives you complete freedom to control precisely where and when your changes will be applied.

Other great features include:

• over 30 shortcodes


• ability to work with any plugin


• support for popular plugins like Visual Composer, WooCommerce, etc.


• and much more

19. Out-of-the-Box

Want to share photos, videos, or other files with your customers, clients, friends, and fans directly from your website without eating up your bandwidth? Say hello to Out-of-the-Box, a Dropbox integration plugin for WordPress that allows you to display your Dropbox files on your website. This responsive plugin is also multilingual ready.

Other great features include:

• audio and video players


• smart loading to save time and bandwidth


• ability to search files by name or contents


• and much more

20. Diamond Flipbook

The Diamond WordPress flipbook plugin allows you to create flipbooks from a variety of source files. Automatically convert PDFs, or upload multiple JPGs at the same time to create a flipbook. You can also manually add pages, or simply enter text directly into the WYSIWYG editor. Then, either add a shortcode for the generated flipbook to your website or post an image link that will launch a lightbox with one click. 

This WordPress gallery plugin also offers YouTube support. Fully responsive and with no Flash needed, this plugin works reliably on both mobile and desktop.

Add a Premium WordPress Plugin to Your Website Now!

Check out these thousands of premium WordPress plugins , as well as the best-selling, trending WordPress plugins, available on CodeCanyon that will vastly improve how your WordPress website functions and offer visitors an excellent user-experience. 

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Learn More About WordPress Plugins

What makes WordPress an awesome platform is the wealth of unlimited resources available to help you succeed with your WordPress website. We are some selections from Envato Tuts+! 

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  FREE
  
  
  WordPress
  
  
  Essential WordPress Plugins
  
  
  Rachel McCollin
  
  

Discover the best WordPress plugins to use for backup, security, caching, and SEO. Learn how to install and configure key WordPress plugins in this free course.

One of the great things about using WordPress is the vibrant plugin ecosystem. There are many thousands of WordPress plugins that promise to improve every aspect of your site. With the right plugins, your WordPress site will run more smoothly, get more visitors, and be less likely to face problems.

In this free course, Envato Tuts+ instructor Rachel McCollin will teach you how to install and configure free WordPress plugins for backup, security, caching, and SEO. You'll see how WordPress can be made far more powerful and secure by the addition of a few key plugins.

Learn How to Use WordPress

If you're just getting started, learn how to use WordPress in our complete guide or check out our free Beginner's Guide to WordPress course.

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