Comparing the best free WordPress page builder plugins

In this article, I’ll compare the most popular free WordPress page builders. Of course, there are many great free builders out there, but I’ll only take a deeper look at four of them. The page builders I chose to compare are Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder and Brizy. I’ve picked them because they’re popular amongst WordPress users. So I’m curious to figure out which one is the best free page builder for WordPress from these four. I’m going to analyze them based on the following criteria:

1. Interface

When you choose a page builder for your site, you always need to consider how easy it is to use the plugin. After all, you trust it to help you build beautiful pages for your WordPress site. So the plugin you choose can’t have a clumsy interface. The options need to be laid out logically, they can’t be all over the place. In other words, you need to be able to find your way around quickly. So the best free WordPress page builder needs to have an interface that’s a joy to work with.

2. Available Elements

Unless you have the right tools at your disposal, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to create a stunning website. Page builders need to give more than only the basic heading, text, image and button elements. If these basic elements are not available, it isn’t a good fit for a modern website.

3. Styling options

If a plugin wants to be the best WordPress page builder, it needs to offer more than the ability to add content. It needs to provide options to style or design this content to create something unique.

4. Templates

Being able to create what you imagined is great. But having premade layouts to choose from is always welcomed. That’s because these layouts save time and effort. Additionally, they can teach you about what you can create with each plugin, and how to do it.

5. Pricing

Most plugins have a paid version with extra features. Although, in this article, I focus on finding the best free WordPress page builder. But I have to mention the premium plugins. I’ll compare what more you get, and how much you need to pay for it.

6. Speed

The keys to a successful site are: good content, nice design and fast loading. This is why I want to compare the speed of each page builder. I’m curious to see which of them loads the page that has the same layout, content and images the fastest.

📚 Table of contents

1. Gutenberg
2. Elementor
3. Beaver Builder
4. Brizy
5. Speed
6. Pricing

Gutenberg – free page builder plugin built into WordPress

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Gutenberg is WordPress’ built-in, block-based page and post editor. It arrived with WordPress 5, back in December 2018. Gutenberg editor has come a long way since its initial release. As a result, today and in the future, it can compete with the best free WordPress page builders.

Interface of Gutenberg ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Gutenberg looks simple and minimalistic, maybe a bit basic. This makes it fast to learn and easy to use. While it’s a visual, drag and drop editor, it operates on the backend. As a result, you might not see everything the same way as they’ll appear on the frontend during editing. Although, themes can style Gutenberg’s backend editor. As a result, the backend and frontend can look as similar as possible.

What are the best sliders for Elementor?

1. Smart Slider
2. Revolution Slider
3. Elementor Slider widget
4. Layer Slider

In this article we’ll cover Elementor Slider widget and Smart Slider. If you want to learn more about the other sliders, be sure to check out article about the best WordPress sliders.

Sliders in Elementor

If you’re using the Pro version of Elementor, there are a couple of widgets that allow you to create sliders. For Free users, however, only one carousel widget is available. In any case, all of these widgets are fully integrated into Elementor. As a result, you can configure them the same way you set up any other Elementor widget. This ensures a seamless and familiar experience during slider creation.

So, you need a slideshow and you use Elementor. You can choose from the following built-in solutions to add an Elementor slider to your site:

Carousel widget: Free Elementor slider solution

In the Free version of Elementor, you can find a Carousel widget, which you can use to create sliders with. It’s a simple solution that allows you to add basic image galleries. The carousels you build are responsive and look great on mobile.

Using the Carousel widget you can select images directly from the Media Library. Do you want to leave your visitors guessing why you have added the images? If not, you can display the image title, description, or caption below the pictures. You can configure the text you want to be displayed at the WordPress Media Library.

At the widget, you can select the image size and also the number of slides you want to see next to one another. It’s also possible to set how many images you want to scroll together. For example, let’s say you have a carousel with 6 slides, and 3 slides display at the same time. You can set the “Slides to Scroll” value to 3. As a result, all visible images will change together, as opposed to going through them one by one.

Additionally, you can make your slides switch automatically by the given interval. This way you can create simple, autoplaying slideshows for your site. It’s pretty great, right?

Slides widget: Elementor Pro slider solution

In the Pro version of Elementor, you can find an actual slider widget. It’s much more suitable for creating sliders for your site. Additionally, it allows you to put content on the slides you make. You can add a heading, a description and a CTA button on each slide.

Each slide can have a background image or a color. If you choose to have a background image, you can set a colored overlay for it. Additionally, there’s an option to adjust the blend mode of the background. Moreover, the popular Ken Burns Effect is available as well.

You can add a title, a description and a button with a link to each slide. These are the most essential elements you’ll need to create a slideshow for your website. In conclusion, the Elementor slider widget is suitable for creating a basic content slider.

Other notable carousels in Elementor Pro

Elementor Pro has other widgets that can create a slider-like result. With the Testimonial Carousel you can display your client’s words in a nice slideshow. You can enter the content of the testimony, give the name and title of the person and upload an image. You can choose from two skins and five layouts to make the testimonial stand out.

With Elementor’s Media Carousel you can create a media gallery. This widget can create a thumbnail slider. Also, you can set it to show the enlarged image in a lightbox. It’s called Media Carousel because it also accepts YouTube and Vimeo URLs in the lightbox. In this case, the image is just a simple thumbnail that launches the lightbox.

Using the Reviews widget you can display your reviews in a tweet-like manner. You can upload a picture, set the name, title and rating and also choose an icon for the review. Also, you can set the actual review text. In short, you have all the tools you need to create a review slider.

A summary of Elementor’s slider widgets

There are many great widgets in Elementor that help you add carousels to your site. These sliders are easy to use and responsive, just like Elementor is. However, there’s one notable difference between them and Elementor: they feel a lot less customizable. You can create anything you want with Elementor. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true about these carousel and slider widgets.

How to create more customizable Elementor sliders?

Every website is different. With Elementor you can create simple sliders. That might be enough for a couple of sites you create. But on other sites, you might need to create more content-heavy slideshows. You might need to add another CTA, more paragraphs, images next to the text (not behind it), or even icons.

So you need to look for a slider, which works well with Elementor. Additionally, it needs to be responsive and easy to use, and have the features you need. Have a look at Smart Slider, the best Elementor slider solution for your website.

What is Smart Slider?

Smart Slider is a super popular WordPress plugin. It allows you to enrich your site with beautiful, modern and responsive slideshows. There’s a free version available, where you can create sliders or blocks. In the Pro version (starting at $49) there are more slider types: Showcase and Carousel. Additionally, each package offers lifetime updates and support for your activated domains.

Smart Slider has its own Elementor widget which makes the publishing super easy. Additionally, it is compatible with Elementor 3.

Comparing Smart Slider and Elementor’s carousels

Elementor’s slider is a simple but feature-rich slider plugin. In the table below I have compared its features with the Free and Pro version of Smart Slider.

Can you create the same looking slider in Elementor and Smart Slider?

The table above highlights the features you can expect from Elementor Slider and Smart Slider. Apart from telling you a couple of things you can do with these sliders, I also want to show you an example. In other words, I’ll try to create the same slider in Elementor and Smart Slider. As a result, you’ll have a better idea on the sliders you can create with each software.

But here’s a twist: I’ve chosen an existing Smart Slider Pro template to recreate. It’s one of the most popular full-width templates of Smart Slider. It looks really cool and fits any site. What’s more important: it uses only 3 layers in the same order as the Elementor Slider needs them.

Highlights of the Fullwidth Slider template

Before I start recreating this slider in Elementor of Smart Slider free, let’s see some of its details. First, the layout, which is quite simple: it contains a heading, a text and a button layer. These layers are placed into a 1200px wide container and aligned to the left inside it. As a result, on larger screens, there’s more space on the left side of the content than on smaller screens.

The heading uses the Highlighted heading layer of Smart Slider Pro. This layer can highlight the most important part of your text with the shape of your choice. Additionally, you can see a nice movement when the highlight happens. But there’s much more on this slide, so let’s move on!

On the button layer, there’s a cool hover effect. The color changes and the button grows a little. The growth happens because of the bigger padding on hover. Furthermore, the small image icons react to the mouse movement by trying to follow it. This happens because of the layer parallax effect.

Also, the slide navigation arrows are placed to the bottom-right corner of the slider. This is the slider I’ll try to replicate in Elementor’s slider solution and in Smart Slider Free. It’s time to get started!

Building in Elementor slider

It wasn’t challenging, nor time-consuming to create this cool full-width slider in Elementor. I did, however, have to cheat a little: to be able to make the texts bold, I needed to use some HTML codes. I also needed to write HTML to make the bold text white in the description. Nonetheless, Elementor’s slider is easy to understand and fast to work with. Below you can see the pretty great-looking result:

However, for some reason, I wasn’t able to get the content to align to the middle, inside a 1200px wide container. I did the set 1200px content width, but that seemed to make no difference as my content wasn’t wider than 1200px. As a result, the final look of the slider looks a bit uncomfortable on the left side of the screen. Additionally, it’s far away from the guy in the picture.

I also couldn’t get the arrows to be on the same side. Elementor’s slider only allows placing the arrows on the inner or outer sides of the slider.

Building in Smart Slider Free

Smart Slider makes it easy to build responsive sliders fast. I just needed to drag the layers to their place and change the Inner align on their parent to finish the layout. For the “Make products that matter” text I used two heading layers. This way I was able to adjust the font weight and family in Smart Slider’s visual editor. At the text layer, I added an empty link, which I selected at the layer window. As a result, I could change the color by changing the color of the link.

I was able to style the arrows and position them to the bottom right corner without problems. Then I created a Static overlay, that’s above all slides in the slider, and placed the small images there. I used Absolute positioning to add these images and position them on the canvas.

As you can see the result is really close to the goal. Basically, the only difference between the slider made in the Free and Pro version is the Pro effects.

What more can you get with Smart Slider Pro?

With the Pro version of Smart Slider, you can create much richer slideshows. For example, if you click on the “But how?” button, a couple of new layers will appear. These are the layer animations, that you can trigger with an event. In this case, the event was clicking on the CTA button.

Clicking on any boxes takes the visitor to another slide within this slider. Using such navigation makes your slider look unique and ensures a memorable user experience.

Why should you choose Smart Slider as your Elementor Slider?

Elementor is a powerful page builder which you can use to create a beautiful site. On the slider front, however, it only allows you to create something basic. So if you need more functionality, you’ll need a slider plugin. Unfortunately, the market is full of slider plugins to choose from, which makes it hard to pick one.

I recommend giving Smart Slider a try. It has an excellent Free version you can try at no cost. Additionally, you can create amazing sliders even with the Free version. If the slider example above weren’t convincing enough, below is a list of reasons to choose Smart Slider.

Why should you choose Smart Slider Free?

• It’s free. Free things are always nice to have. Smart Slider offers a powerful slider builder tool, without having to spend a penny.
• Easy to use. Smart Slider is just as easy to use as Elementor’s Carousel and Slider widgets. But it’s much, much more powerful.
• 6 unique layers. There are 6 layers available, each suitable for a certain type of content. You can add as many headings, paragraphs, buttons, images, YouTube or Vimeo videos as you want to each slide.
• Default positioning. Add rows and columns to display your content, the same way you use Elementor.
• Absolute positioning. Need to add some decorative elements? Use Absolute positioning which gives you the freedom of placing the layers anywhere.
• Freedom to build what you want. With Smart Slider, you can build anything you imagine.
• Style as you want. Make the layers look the way you want to! As a result, the slideshow can bend into your site perfectly. Or you can create a slider that truly stands out.
• Customizable controls. Add arrows, bullets or thumbnails to your slides. Then customize them to your heart’s content.
• It’s responsive. With Smart Slider, you can create sliders that look gorgeous on any device. You can use responsive tools, like the Text scale to fine-tune the result on small screens.
• Post Sliders. Create sliders from your most recent blog posts using the dynamic slide generator. The best part is that the generator automatically updates when you add new posts.
• Beautiful templates to start. Need to create something good looking fast? Import one of the 11 ready to use sample sliders and customize them to your liking.

Why should you choose Smart Slider Pro?

The Free version of Smart Slider is an already amazing and highly customizable plugin. But if you want more power, have a look at Smart Slider Pro! It has all features the free version, and much more. Some reasons to go Pro:

• Much more layers. There are a total of 23 layers in the Pro version to create content with.
• Self-hosted videos. You can use MP4 videos in your slides to avoid having to use a 3rd party service for it. Additionally, an MP4 video can look great as the background of the slide.
• Cool effects. You can find the coolest and most popular effects in Smart Slider. For example parallax, particle, Ken Burns effect and Shape Divider.
• Layer animation. Breathe some life into your layers by animating them separately. Build any layer animation you like or select from our preset animations.
• Reveal animation. Reveal animation is a special type of layer animation, that gives a modern touch to your slides.
• Layer events. Events let you start layer animations when visitors interact with the slider. For example, you can make a layer show up when the visitor clicks on another layer.
• Lightbox. Display your images in a lightbox, which allows the visitors to enjoy them in a larger size.
• More beautiful templates to start. Get a headstart and choose from more than 180 sliders.
• Friendly pricing. All Smart Slider packages come with lifetime updates and support. You don’t need to renew your subscription yearly to be able to get help or access the latest features.

Conclusion

Elementor already has some great built-in slider solutions. They let you create nice-looking, responsive sliders to your site. But in some ways, they lack functionality and creative freedom. So, if you need more functionality and features, you need a slider plugin.

Give Smart Slider a try. It works well with Elementor, which makes it an excellent choice to create sliders for your site. Even the free version can fulfill your website’s slider needs. You can add unlimited layers and create any layout you want. But if you need more features and some cool effects, you can go for Smart Slider Pro. I’m sure you won’t regret it!

The post The Ultimate Guide to Elementor Sliders and Carousels appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

Meet Hello Theme, Elementor’s first theme. Since they know Elementor better than anyone else, they could create a theme that lets the user make the most of it. As a result, they created a theme that lets you build beautiful websites using Elementor. Additionally, the theme you use won’t get into your design’s way anymore. In fact, they claim this is the best theme for Elementor. Is that true? Let’s find out!

What is Hello Elementor theme?

What are the best themes for Elementor?

Elementor works with any WordPress theme you can find. Despite this, there are three best themes for Elementor which developers love to use the most. The themes people particularly love are: Astra, OceanWP, and GeneratePress. Not only they’re free themes, but they also power over 800.000 WordPress sites. Hello Elementor is here to challenge these super popular themes. It has a single goal, to be the best theme for Elementor while being the fastest one as well.

What do you need to know about Hello Elementor theme?

Hello Elementor is a clean and simple WordPress theme. As a result, it doesn’t offer many styling options. But that’s not a problem, because you can use Elementor to design every aspect of your website. As a matter of fact, without Elementor, you can only style your pages with custom CSS. For instance, there’s only one menu, but it has no styling. With Elementor Pro you can easily overcome this problem, though.

Although WordPress traditionally has sidebars, Hello Elementor doesn’t have any. If your layout relies on sidebars, Hello Elementor might not be the best theme for Elementor for you. However, you can install a plugin that lets you create sidebars if that’s what you need. Using Elementor’s Sidebar Widget, you can place these sidebars on any page.

While it works fine with the free version, at the end of the day, Hello Elementor feels like a theme for Elementor Pro. For instance, you can’t style the header menu at all without the Pro, unless you do custom coding. However, many people who use Elementor don’t want or don’t know how to do that. There’s nothing wrong with creating a theme for Elementor Pro, of course. But it might have been better to call Hello Elementor what it actually is: a theme for Elementor Pro.

How easy is it to switch to Hello Elementor from a different theme?

Hello Elementor is a lightweight theme, designed to be the best theme for Elementor. Because of this, it makes many people think about abandoning their current theme for its sake. You can switch to Hello Elementor the same way as you’d switch to any other theme. In other words, you need to check the new theme in a testing environment first.

It’s important to realize that Hello Elementor is only a blank canvas you can work with. It’s different from the other popular Elementor themes. Due to the fact that these themes offer more features without the need of Elementor. So you need to be ready to make some heavy changes to keep the look and feel of your site after the theme changes. As a result, you’ll get a simpler and much faster loading website.

Is Hello Elementor a worthy challenger for “the best theme for Elementor” title?

Hello Elementor’s main purpose is to give a blank canvas for Elementor page builder. As I’ve mentioned before, the same team is behind the Elementor and Hello Elementor. Hence you can expect the theme to remain compatible with Elementor for years to come. With this in mind it worth giving Hello Elementor a chance for your next project. As a result, you can reduce the possibility of a conflict between your theme and page builder. If that’s not a good reason to say Hello Elementor is the best theme for Elementor, I’m not sure what is.

Elementor is the most popular page builder plugin. Because of that, there are many other plugins extending it with extra functionality. For instance, there’s a plugin that adds post grid to Elementor. The theme is not only compatible with Elementor, but it also works with these plugins. So if you plan to use any of these plugins, feel confident that the theme won’t cause you trouble.

Is Hello theme the fastest Elementor theme?

You can’t tell how fast a theme is without actually testing it. To find out how fast Hello Elementor is, I’ve imported five Elementor demo templates. Then I loaded each page using Hello Elementor, OceanWP, Astra and GeneratePress. To make the text more interesting, I also added Twenty Nineteen to the mix.

I ran the tests on the same website, with no other plugins but Elementor Free. The only exception is OceanWP, where I also installed and activated Ocean Extra. The server I ran the tests on runs PHP 7.2.16. There wasn’t any caching either on server side or via a plugin. The internet speed was 10Mbit/s for each test. These are the results for each template.

Homepage – Restaurant

Elementor’s Homepage Restaurant demo was my first choice for the speed comparison. To begin with, it has lots of images and a couple of fancy effects, which makes it perfect for measuring speed. As you can see from the table below, Hello Elementor managed to outperform the four other themes. The second fastest was Twenty Nineteen, which might be a little bit surprising. GeneratePress finished in third place with four extra requests compared to Hello Elementor.

Homepage – Fitness

Homepage Fitness is a bit more lightweight template than the Restaurant one. Because of this, it’s perfect for a fast loading landing page. It’s not surprising that Hello Elementor was the fastest to load this page as well. GeneratePress and Astra earned the second and third place respectively.

Landing Page – Vacation

Header background videos are popular design choices on many websites. For this reason, it makes sense to test a template which is a similar design choice. Landing Page Vacation is a cool template which has a background video in its hero header. This time, Twenty Nineteen loaded the template the fastest. Hello Elementor was the second fastest, closely followed by Astra.

Homepage – Agency

After testing a template with a video hero, I wanted to check a less content heavy template again. I’ve chosen Homepage Agency because of its modern look and few, but reasonable number of images. The results are quite similar to what we have got before. Hello Elementor is the first, Astra is the second and GeneratePress is the third.

Product – App

Product App template has very few images. As a result, it helps to get a better look at the actual speed of the theme. The speed test results aren’t so surprising. Hello Elementor is the fastest theme. The close second is Twenty Nineteen which managed to be faster than Astra by 0.02s.

Speed result conclusion

Based on my tests, Hello Elementor is indeed the fastest theme for Elementor. Twenty Nineteen, another rather basic theme was the only one that could beat it. In the light of the results, it’s safe to say Hello Elementor is a great choice for any website. As a matter of fact, it might just be the best theme for Elementor.

Where could Hello Elementor improve to be the best theme for Elementor?

Hello Elementor is a minimal theme, which lets you design your whole site using Elementor. As a result, there are some significant disadvantages, which future updates might solve. Here’s a list of features I’m missing from Hello Elementor the most:

• Global styling options. See, when you download a standalone theme, it has some basic styling. For instance, it sets font sizes, colors, line height and so for texts and headings. Hello Elementor lacks these features. Of course, you can always fix this via custom coding, but it would be nice not to have to do that.
• Removing the page title. Not all pages need to have a visible title. This is especially true when you can’t even style them without custom coding. Because of that, an option would be nice to remove the title from the specific page. Currently, you can only hide it, but that happens with CSS. Additionally, the h1 tag stays there, which can make it difficult for you to do proper SEO. However, if you switch to canvas page template, you can get rid of the page title. But you’ll need to say goodbye to your header and footer, because it doesn’t support them.
• Better usage of Customizer. All themes must be Customizer ready to be a part of WordPress.org’s theme collection. Because of that Hello Elementor uses Customizer, too. With this in mind, it would be great to have a couple of options here, such as some global styling, mentioned above.

In any case, Hello Elementor is a great theme, perhaps the best theme for Elementor. But it would be great to see either of these features in a future release. In the meantime, Hello Elementor remains your average, but speedy minimal WordPress theme.

How can you use Smart Slider 3 with Elementor and Hello Elementor?

Smart Slider 3 is the best rated WordPress slider plugin. Moreover, it’s fully compatible with Elementor. As a result, you can add the sliders you created to Elementor using a special Smart Slider 3 widget. Since Hello Elementor relies on the page builder, Smart Slider 3 works with it as well. In case you haven’t used Smart Slider 3 yet, here’s a quick video that shows you how easy it is to display your slider.

Smart Slider 3 is a great choice to create beautiful sliders, especially, if you don’t have Elementor Pro. Even if you do have it, Smart Slider 3 has much more features compared to Elementor’s own solution. For instance, you can create gorgeous dynamic post sliders, even with the Free version.

Conclusion

Choosing a WordPress theme isn’t easy as there are so many themes to choose from. The final choice always depends on the project’s requirements and personal preferences. With this in mind, Hello Elementor is a great starter theme. It indeed suits well for most Elementor websites. In case it doesn’t suit yours, you can choose from the three most popular Elementor themes from above. They’re great, just like Hello Elementor, although maybe not as fast.

The post Is Hello Theme the Best Theme for Elementor? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

To help you narrow down your search, I’ve handpicked this collection of the best premium plugins for WordPress, based on the many years I’ve been working with WordPress. These are plugins I see time and time again in the backends of WordPress — these are premium WordPress plugins people use and get value from.

Want to jump to a section quickly?

🏗️ Visual Builder Plugins
🔒 Security Plugins
⚡ Optimization Plugins
🔍 SEO Plugins
🛒 Ecommerce Plugins
📝 Forms and Booking Plugins

Best Visual Builder Premium WordPress Plugins

Page builders and visual builders have become an important design tool for WordPress users. Building sites is no longer just for developers — with visual builder plugins, now anyone can create a beautiful WordPress site.

1. Elementor Pro

It’s easy to see why it’s so popular. With Elementor you can build complex, pixel perfect page designs using drag and drop. Want to start designing from scratch? Choose from over 80 design elements and add text, buttons and even forms to your pages. Need a template? There are 100+ pre-designed templates to help get you started.

2. Smart Slider 3

Don’t be confused by the name — this plugin is truly heavy duty, allowing you to create everything from homepage sliders and WordPress carousels to fullscreen video sliders and image sliders.

With the user-friendly canvas and content modes, layers, and huge range of elements and templates, Smart Slider 3 blows every other slider plugin out of the water with the level of functionality it provides compared to other premium WordPress plugins.

3. Divi

The Divi offers user-friendly visual page building that’s really fast. There are 46 modules for everything from text and email optins to filterable portfolios and galleries. A unique feature of Divi is its integrated a/b split testing and conversions rate optimization system, which lets you test different design — no other page builder offers this.

4. JetElements

• post carousel and slider, advanced carousel, and animated box;
• recent, featured, sale, best-selling, and top products;
• image grid, justify, and masonry;
• services and testimonials;
• portfolio, audio players, Parallax effect, and many other amazing tools.

5. Ultimate Blocks

No matter what type of website you maintain, whether a blog, news portal, eCommerce, or else, Ultimate Blocks can help present your content beautifully on posts and pages. Some of the most used blocks of the plugin are Testimonials, Call to Action, Content Toggle, Button, Rating, and Review.

In addition, some of its other exciting blocks are Tabbed Content, Image Slider, Content Filter, Styled Box, and Icon. Based on respective blocks, Ultimate Blocks lets you customize their color, font, size, value, and heading.

Best Security Premium WordPress Plugins

It’s easy to take on an it-won’t-happen-to-me approach when it comes to website security, but chances are, if your website hasn’t already been compromised, it will be hacked sooner or later. That’s why you need security and backup plugins for your site.

6. Sucuri

Premium users get access to an enterprise grade Website Firewall designed to give you the best security protection any website can hope for. It protects your website from a variety of website attacks, including DDoS attacks, exploitation of vulnerabilities, Zero Day disclosure patches, and brute force attacks.

7. Defender

• Security scans
• Vulnerability reports
• Audit logs
• Two-factor authentication
• Safety recommendations
• Blacklist monitoring
• Brute force lockout
• IP lockout device
• Simple security tweaks
• Code checker (for core, plugins and themes)
• Login masking
• File change detection
• Automated backups (via Snapshot)

On top of all that, Defender has one of the most user-friendly UI’s of any premium WordPress plugins for security I’ve used. Tweaking security settings can be a headache, but Defender makes it easy (and strangely, kind of fun!).

8. VaultPress

Best Performance Optimization Premium WordPress Plugins

You’ve got 15 minutes of free time to speed up your site. What do you do? For time-poor site admins who want only the best performance optimization plugins, WP Rocket and Smush are must-have premium WordPress plugins.

9. WP Rocket

In addition to browser caching, WP Rocket also provides:

• Minification and GZIP compression for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
• Database cleaning
• Lazy loading
• Cache preloading
• DNS prefetching
• File deferring
• Google Fonts optimization

10. WP Smush Pro

A useful feature of WP Smush is the ability to bulk smush images automatically when you upload them to your site so you don’t have to do it manually. It also offers WebP conversion.

11. Optimole

• Optimole optimizes your images automatically
• Picks the right image size for the visitor’s browser and viewport
• Serves images via a fast image CDN​
• Uses lazy loading to display your images

Optimole has full compatibility with popular page builders and you can easily integrate it in your WordPress site. It can be installed in a few clicks and then left in the back-end to do its job.

Best SEO Premium WordPress Plugins

Need some help with your search engine optimization? There’s one premium SEO plugin for WordPress that beats all others…

12. Yoast SEO

The premium version of Yoast SEO includes:

• Advanced XML sitemaps
• Full control over site breadcrumbs
• Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content
• Title and meta description templating
• Content and SEO analysis, including readability
• Text insights
• Automatic internal linking suggestions

Best Ecommerce Premium WordPress Plugins

WordPress isn’t just the most popular content management system — it’s also the world’s most popular ecommerce platform when you pair it with WooCommerce.

13. WooCommerce

Beyond the core WooCommerce plugin, the WooCommerce Extensions store provides access to hundreds of free and premium extensions, allowing you to add all sorts of additional functionality to your store.

14. WooCommerce Subscriptions

You can customize Subscriptions to include payment models for both physical and digital goods, but also any services you provide. Create time-based subscription packages that can entice new customers based on package value, e.g. weekly, bi-weekly, and quarterly payments.

15. PH WooCommerce Deposits

• Enhanced Experience: Simplify deposits, secure items now, pay later at checkout.
• Flexible Deposits: Control amounts – fixed or percentage-based, aligning with preferences.
• Automated Invoices: Streamline with auto balance invoices, scheduled customer alerts.
• Seamless Integration: Smooth deposit process, personalized buttons for ease.
• Tailored Schedules: Daily, weekly, monthly payments – flexible choices.
• Product-Centric Control: Customize per-product deposit options, shape your store.

Best Forms and Booking Premium WordPress Plugins

No matter what kind of site you have, you’ll want to keep in touch with people who visit — and for that you’ll need a contact form. With the options below, you’ll have access to advanced features and functionality.

16. Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is available for free, but you can do a lot more by upgrading to the premium version of the plugin. You have control of every elements, and you can easily put it on your WordPress site with widget or shortcode. Whether you choose the free version or decide to upgrade, you’ll have a solid and reliable form that’s easy to use.

17. JetFormBuilder

JetFormBuilder allows integration with leading email marketing and CRM platforms for efficient data collection and enhanced lead generation. MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and PayPal integrations are available in the free version. Additionally, you can choose ready-made form patterns to start creating the form from the template.

18. Amelia

With Amelia you can receive a booking engine with lots of features, it’s easy to use, you can install it with a few clicks. You can customize it to fit your needs on your website, and it has a tons of demos what you can use.

19. LatePoint

With its user-friendly interface, LatePoint ensures a seamless experience for both administrators and clients. Optimized for speed and responsiveness across all devices, it supports popular payment methods and integrates smoothly with external services.

Whether you’re a fitness coach, beauty salon owner, or consultant, LatePoint adapts to your specific scheduling needs, enhancing user experience and making appointment management effortless and efficient.

20. SureMembers

This plugin streamlines the process of establishing membership tiers, integrating payment gateways, and customizing access rules. Setting up access groups, defining content permissions, and choosing between free or paid memberships is straightforward and hassle-free.

With features like drip content, paywalls, and user role customization, SureMembers provides granular control over content access, allowing for the precise management of posts and resources.

Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or managing multiple sites, SureMembers offers a comprehensive and flexible solution for building and running successful membership websites.

Wrapping Up

There you have it, the 20 best premium WordPress plugins. Do you use any of these plugins? Or do you have any favorites that didn’t make the list? Let us know!

The post 20 Premium WordPress Plugins to Look Out For in 2024 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.