Topic
Plugins worth installing, and the ones worth removing.
Plugins
CartFlows builds landing, checkout and upsell steps as a flow inside WooCommerce. It is a thin layer over a store you already own — which is both the reason to use it and the limit of what it can do.
Plugins
Forminator gives away features that competing form plugins charge for — payments, calculations, quizzes and polls — and stores every submission in your database, which is a benefit and an obligation.
Plugins
LifterLMS turns WordPress into a course platform with memberships and payments built in. The core is free and capable; the add-on model is where the budget goes, and video hosting is the cost nobody plans for.
Plugins
BuddyPress adds profiles, activity streams, groups and private messaging to WordPress. The plugin is the easy part; the moderation, the performance and the theme work are the actual project.
Plugins
Site Kit connects Search Console, Analytics, AdSense and PageSpeed to your admin and shows you the numbers there. It is the least risky way to add tracking, and the dashboard is the least useful part of it.
Plugins
TablePress keeps table data out of your post content and in its own store, which is why the tables survive redesigns — and why they are one shortcode away from disappearing.
Plugins
FacetWP builds the filter sidebar that shops, directories and archives keep asking for. It is very good at it, and it is a subscription your templates end up depending on.
Plugins
FunnelKit replaces the WooCommerce checkout with a funnel — optimised cart, order bumps, one-click upsells and abandoned-cart automation. It works, and it puts your revenue path inside a plugin.
Plugins
SeedProd is two products in one plugin — a coming-soon switch that is genuinely useful for nothing, and a landing page builder that quietly becomes the place your marketing pages live.
Plugins
CleanTalk filters spam without showing visitors a challenge, which is its whole appeal. It does that by sending every submission to a hosted service, which is the fact that should decide whether you use it.
Elementor
The free plugin builds pages. The paid tier builds the parts of a site that repeat — headers, footers, archive templates, single-post layouts — and that is the line that decides whether you need it.
Plugins
PowerPress turns WordPress into a podcast publishing platform by generating the RSS feed the directories read. Understanding that the feed is the product explains every decision around it.