12 Surprisingly Useful WordPress Plugins You Don’t Know About

A swag of new WordPress plugins gets released every single day. While many are rehashes, integrations with external services don’t work or add to the ever-growing list of contact form generators, now and then there are some gems.

Here are several WordPress plugins that you don’t know about and therefore don’t even know that you need. (Well, probably don’t know about…)

This article demonstrates that, yes, there’s a plugin for just about anything.

They’re all interesting and offer various attributes, such as organization, information, display options, and more.

By the time you read through this, I feel you’ll discover at least one or two picks of the litter that will work great with your WordPress site.

• Image Watermark

  

  “Automatically watermark images uploaded to the WordPress Media Library and bulk watermark previously uploaded images.”

  This plugin is perfect for photographers or anyone that licenses out their images.

  You can set the watermark transparency, select image quality, remove watermarks, and more.

  Typically when you think of watermarking an image, you don’t think of a plugin. That’s what stands out with this one.

• Yoast Duplicate Post

  

  “Clone posts of any type, or copy them to new drafts for further editing.”

  I know I’ve personally had times where I wanted to duplicate a post. Specifically, sometimes I would run a sales page on my WordPress site, and I wanted all the material from a previous one, with a few minor adjustments.

  This plugin makes it easy to clone a post or page by simply hitting the ‘Clone’ button in the post/page title.

  It has a solid 5-star ranking and is as simple as it gets for cloning.

• Easy Media Download

  

  “Gives your users the ability to download digital media files from your website.”

  Making it easy for your users to download content is why this plugin was created. You can create awesome-looking download buttons that instantly start the download when clicked.

  It’s great for music, video, and image files. The user can even pick what format to download in.

  For a free plugin for downloads, this seems like a solid choice.

• Simple History

  
  

  

  “Shows recent changes made within WordPress, directly on your dashboard or on a separate page.”

  With this plugin, you can easily see who added, updated, or deleted a page or post. Plus, you can see who added attachments, taxonomies, and edited comments.

  It keeps organizing your WordPress site, especially for multi-users, a breeze.

• Email Address Encoder

  

  “A lightweight plugin that protects plain email addresses and mailto links from email-harvesting robots, by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities.”

  This unique plugin is an excellent solution to protecting posts, pages, comments, excerpts, text widgets, and other filtered content from spam.

  It’s free to use. However, you can upgrade to Premium for full-page protection, improved phone number protection, and more.

• Regenerate Thumbnails

  

  “Generate all thumbnail sizes for one or more images that have been uploaded to your Media Library.”

  This plugin is great for situations when a new thumbnail size has been added, and you’d like past uploads to have a thumbnail in that size, if you’ve changed the dimensions of an existing thumbnail, and if you’ve switched to a new WordPress theme that includes featured images of a different size.

  It can also delete old and unused thumbnails so that you can free up server space.

• WP-VR View

  

  The WP-VR View plugin brings the power of virtual reality to your WordPress website. It allows you to embed 360-degree photos and VR content, creating an interactive experience for your visitors.

  With WP-VR View, you can easily showcase stunning panoramic images, virtual tours, and VR videos directly on your website. The plugin has a user-friendly and easy-to-use dashboard.

  This plugin will create an interactive experience for your visitors by transforming even static images into 360-degree photos that visitors can explore in all directions.

  Engage your visitors with virtual journeys by creating and displaying complete virtual tours.

  Whether you want to showcase real estate properties, travel destinations, or showcase interior designs, WP-VR View enables you to create stunning virtual tours that captivate your audience.

  And the VR content can be easily added to your posts and pages using a simple shortcode, without requiring coding knowledge or technical expertise.

  The plugin is optimized for mobile devices, and major web browsers ensure a smooth VR experience for your visitors on smartphones, tablets, and browsers.

• Tidio Live Chat

  

  Tidio Live Chat is a feature-rich and user-friendly WordPress plugin that enables you to connect and engage with your website visitors in real time through a seamless live chat interface.

  With Tidio Live Chat, you can provide exceptional customer support, increase engagements, capture leads, and also boost conversions.

  You can easily manage all the customer messages, emails, and chats from one place. With pre-made chatbot flow and strategies, you can increase sales and easily solve customer problems and queries.

  There are dozens of chatbot templates that you can use for various scenarios like recovering abandoned shopping carts, offering discounts to returning customers, lead collection and qualification, and more

  It also offers a simple ticketing system that can be used to manage and resolve customers’ requests.

  And it seamlessly integrates with popular mailing software like Mailchimp. Omnisend, mailerlite, and more

• AdRotate

  

  AdRotate is a versatile and powerful WordPress plugin that lets you manage and display advertisements on your websites.

  Whether you want to monetize your site, promote products or services, or display sponsored content, AdRotate provides you with the features to optimize your ad campaigns

  With AdRotate, you can not just create, but also schedule when your ads should be displayed.
  You can create multiple ad groups, organize ads by category, and define target locations on your website for precise ad placement.

  This plugin offers you the easiest way to manage and run your AD campaigns. It supports every prominent advert including, Amazon ads, affiliate networks, google adsense, google ad manager, double click, DFP, and media.net ads

  Even in the free version, there is no limit on how many AD you can create and display. It also offers a handy block that can be added from your WordPress block editor

  You can track all the clicks and impressions on your adverts right from the dashboard. The Ads displayed on your page are rotated every few seconds and on page load.

  Adverts can be placed on your site using blocks, widgets, shortcodes, and PHP snippets.

• My sticky menu

  

  This is a lightweight WordPress plugin that empowers you to create and customize sticky menus for your website.

  You can enhance your website’s navigation by ensuring your menu stays visible at all times, even as visitors scroll down the page.

  Display a sticky menu or notification bar after scrolling for a specific number of pixels.

  All you need to do is just the sticky bar feature on and without any additional setup, or coding the sticky menu is displayed on your site right away.

  It is compatible with all the major themes as well as theme builders. You can add greater customization features to it using custom CSS. Other than sticky menus you can also create engaging welcome bars.

• Blog2Social

  

  This plugin simplifies the process of social media sharing and promotion.

  With Blog2Social, you can schedule and automatically share your blog posts, pages, and custom post types across multiple social media platforms, saving you time and maximizing the reach of your content.

  Whether you’re a blogger, marketer, or business owner, this plugin’s features will help you effectively manage and optimize your social media sharing strategy.

  You can share your blog posts on various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and more

  The plugin lets you customize the post title, description, hashtags, and image for each social media channel, ensuring your content is optimized for maximum engagement.

  It has a convenient scheduling feature that allows you to set specific dates and times for sharing your content on various platforms.

  Before sharing your content, you can preview how your post will appear on each social media platform. This allows you to optimize your posts, ensuring they look appealing and compelling to your audience.

• myCred

  With the myCred plugin, you can gamify your website by implementing a rewarding points system.

  You can create a fun and interactive experience for your users, encouraging them to engage more with your content, participate in activities, and earn points for their actions.

  The plugin manages and tracks user points and gives you full control over how points are earned, redeemed, and displayed on your site.

  You can award points for a variety of activities, such as commenting, visiting pages, publishing posts, making purchases, referring new users, or completing specific tasks. Users can redeem their earned points for rewards that you define

  You can not just award but also deduct users’ points and all these transactions are well documented in the logs.

  The plugin comes with multiple built-in add-ons for expanding installation with additional features, such as transfers, notifications, statistics, buyCred, cashCred, and much more.

  Using this plugin, you can use three different ways to reward your users: points, ranks, and badges. You can track users’ points in real-time, award them accordingly, and set ranks on leaderboards.

An eclectic mix, I think you’ll agree. Each of these plugins offers something of value that may help enhance your WordPress site.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for accuracy and relevancy. [Originally Published: June 2014 / Revised: May 2023]