The 24 Most Popular Paid WordPress Plugins And Why They’re Worth It

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for creating and customizing your own website. Whether is your own business, for a client, or you just want to start your own project, WordPress plugins and the ecosystem around it are super powerful for getting the most of the platform.

While some free plugins are incredible (and most of them can pretty much power everything your site needs) there's a need for premium plugins at some point.

With that in mind, these are the 24 most popular WordPress plugins and why they’re worth buying:

Envira Gallery Pro

Creating a blog or portfolio? Envira Gallery is your one-stop solution for creating responsive and stunning galleries. Besides its templates, some of its features include social media and e-commerce integration, SEO optimization, and an in-app Adobe Lightroom extension.

Envira Gallery also has flexible pricing, from $39.50 per year to $349.50 for lifetime access.

Fluent Forms Pro

Fluent Forms Pro is a WP form builder designed to help businesses scale and manage data better. Apart from customization, Fluent Forms also offers features like conditional logic, upload support, and dynamic content. They also integrate with popular applications such as PayPal, Stripe, Slack, and more.

Their annual plan starts at $47, and their single-site lifetime plan costs $239.

Essential Grid

Want something more modern and minimal than Envira Gallery? Go for Essential Grid: a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to create and display versatile content grids. It’s the perfect plugin for blogs, portfolios, and online stores because of its customizability and responsiveness.

Annual subscription to Essential Grid begins at $34 and can scale up to $2399 for 100 websites.

Gravity Forms

If your business deals with lots of data, then consider investing in Gravity Forms. It’s a popular WordPress plugin that makes form management easy through a customizable form builder, conditional logic, notifications, spam protection, and more. It’s great for creating contact forms, surveys, polls, and even quizzes for LMS websites.

Gravity Forms start at $59 per year.

LayerSlider

These days, it takes one hell of a hero section to capture your audience's attention — LayerSlider can help you with that. It's a premium slider plugin for WordPress that lets you create beautiful sliders and slideshows. LayerSlider has everything you need to create animated and dynamic content, from templates to sticky scrolling.

You can get LayerSlider using an annual subscription that starts at $26 or their one-time payment at $69.

Lumise

Designing products has never been easier with Lumise: a user-friendly WordPress and WooCommerce plugin. Not only does it allow you to create market-ready designs, but it can also set your product pricing depending on its printing technology.

Lumise’s current cost is $69 for the regular license or $349 for the extended license.

OptinMonster

The OptinMonster WordPress plugin is part of the OptinMonster lead generation suite. Its main feature is creating versatile pop-ups proven to increase conversions and build a loyal user base. Besides pop-ups, this plugin is your full-service solution for email subscription forms, sticky announcement bars, and more.

OptinMonster's pop-up plugin is available on all tiers, starting from their Basic Plan, which retails at $9 monthly.

Profile Press

Most websites need robust profile management for both staff and end users — Profile Press is a popular WP plugin for that purpose. Some of the features you get from this addon are the following:

• Custom User Registration and Sign-in Forms
• User Profile Editing
• Member Directories
• Content Restriction.

Profile Press starts at an annual payment of $129.

Schema Pro

Want to boost your ranking? Schema Pro might be the perfect tool for you: A WordPress plugin lets you add schema markup to your website without writing a single line of code. Implementing Schema Pro can improve search engine rankings and richer search results. 

You can get Schema Pro for an annual payment of $67 or a single payment of $237. They also offer a bundle option at $187, which includes other popular plugins such as Astra Pro, WP Portfolio, and addons for Beaver Builder.

Slider Revolution

Create websites that pop with Slider Revolution: a popular WordPress plugin that focuses on your website's aesthetics. From creating visually striking hero sections to ensuring every content on your site is easy on the eyes, Slider Revolution is equipped with features to create unique page designs.

Slider Revolution has a free version, but if you want to get the full experience, the most affordable plan costs $35 per year.

Smart Slider 3 Pro

Keep your visitors glued to the screen with Smart Slider 3 Pro. This versatile tool can create market-ready and stunning sliders, carousels, and dynamic content. No coding is needed; simply drag and drop elements and tweak the timing of your content. It's that easy with Smart Slider 3 Pro.

What's more, this plugin has a robust free feature. However, if you want access to better templates and more features, their pricing starts at $49, excluding taxes.

Smush Pro

Some websites require many images, whether you're making a portfolio or an online store. Unfortunately, these websites can have longer loading times due to the memory required to load these images — but that's not the case with Smush Pro. This specialized software compresses the sizes of your photos without sacrificing a pixel of quality.

You won't also need to burn a hole in your wallet to purchase Smush Pro, as its starting price is only $3 per month.

Soliloquy

Designed with accessibility in mind, Soliloquy is the best tool in the market if you’re looking for a user-friendly and robust slider builder for your website. It’s also more affordable than its counterparts like LayerSlider, Slider Revolution, and Smart Slider 3 Pro, as Soliloquy only has a starting price of $17.

SVG Icons

WP SVG Icons is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add and manage scalable SVG icons on your website. This may seem like such a small thing. Still, icons do a lot of heavy lifting in establishing a brand identity, especially since they're used in your website's header and footer, navigation bar, product pages, and more.

The Events Calendar Pro

Even in WordPress, you can keep track of your schedule with The Events Calendar Pro: a WordPress plugin for agencies and event professionals. This fantastic plugin lets you create striking calendars and fill them with relevant information or tags. Its features include automatic time zone adjustments, multiple views, and subscriber notifications.

The Events Calendar Pro has a free version, but if you're willing to pay more for premium features, they offer a one-time lifetime access plan that starts at $99.

WP Mail SMTP Pro

If you're running an email campaign, be sure to add WP Mail SMTP Pro to your arsenal. It's a premium WordPress plugin that helps you send emails from your WordPress site. It configures your site to use a dedicated and reliable SMTP server instead of the default WordPress mail function.

WP Mail SMTP has four pricing plans, from $49 for one site to $399 for 100 sites.

You can learn more about this product in our article here.

WP Mega Menu Pro

Having trouble finding a responsive and customizable menu builder plugin for WordPress? Look no further than WP Mega Menu Pro: a tool that lets you streamline your website's navigation through templates and a user-friendly builder.

The following are the payment plans of WP Mega Menu Pro:

• Individuals — 1 Site: $29 per year.
• Freelancers — 5 Sites: $49 per year.
• Agencies — Unlimited Sites: $79 per year.

WP Rocket

What good does aesthetics do if your website is slow? WP Rocket is a premium caching service plugin for WordPress that boosts your website’s performance by creating static HTML files of your webpages. Other features of WP Rocket include:

• File Optimization: Compress your CSS and JavaScript files to reduce size and improve loading speeds.
• Lazy Loading: Load images and videos only when they are scrolled into view. 
• CDN Integration: WP Rocket can be integrated with a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve your static files from servers close to your visitors.

WP Rocket comes in three annual pricing tiers: $59 for one site, $119 for three sites, and $299 for unlimited pages.

WPBakery Page Builder

WPBakery Page Builder is one of WordPress's most popular page builder plugins, with over 5 million active installations. This popular drag-and-drop website builder plugin creates and customizes WordPress pages and layouts without writing code. 

All pricing options for WPBakery are for lifetime access, starting at $59.

WPBakery Ultimate Addons

Ultimate Addons build upon the features already available in vanilla WPBakery and extend them. Some new functionalities include simple icons, info box, counters, and more. These addons are available on the Envato Market for only $26.

WPForms

Like Gravity Forms, the WPForms plugin lets you easily build intuitive and modern forms. It's user-friendly and feature-rich, which is why it's used by over 6 million websites worldwide.

It's also cheaper than Gravity Forms, starting at only $49.50 per year.

WPML

Language has always been a barrier in business — but not anymore. WPML is a multilingual plugin for WordPress for quick and accurate translation. Not only that but WPML is also built with a robust understanding of SEO, which ensures you won't lose your website ranking even with non-native language content.

Unlike the other plugins, WPML's pricing is in euros. Their lowest tier currently costs €39, and their highest (made for multinational agencies) costs €199 per year.

Yellow Pencil

Lastly, we have the Yellow Pencil WP Plugin. Contrary to popular belief, this tool isn’t a website or theme builder by itself but a visual CSS editor meant to assist website owners and developers in creating stunning pages manually and with more flexibility.

Yellow Pencil is currently available on the Envato Market for $32.