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7 listings in this collection
WooCommerce
FeaturedWooCommerce turns a WordPress site into a store without moving it to another platform. The core plugin is free and handles products (simple, variable, grouped, downloadable), orders, stock, coupons, taxes, shipping zones and a checkout that can run on blocks. Payments come through extensions or provider plugins; Stripe and PayPal are first-party. What makes WooCommerce significant is the surrounding ecosystem — subscriptions, memberships, bookings, multilingual stores and accounting integrations all exist as plugins that share the same data model. That openness is also the cost: performance and checkout behaviour depend on what you install, and a large catalogue needs hosting that can handle it. It suits businesses that want ownership of their storefront and are willing to maintain it.
LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache is free and unusually capable, but its best features depend on the server. On LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed hosting it can serve pages from a server-level cache, which is faster than anything a PHP plugin can do. On Apache or Nginx it falls back to a normal page cache and loses part of its advantage. The plugin also handles image optimisation, CSS and JS minification, critical CSS generation, lazy loading, and a QUIC.cloud CDN integration. Its settings screen is enormous, with dozens of options and a preset import tool, which is both the appeal and the problem: an untuned install can break layouts. Hosts that ship LiteSpeed increasingly preconfigure it. If your host runs LiteSpeed, it is the obvious first choice; if not, evaluate whether the server cache features are worth switching hosts for.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is the form plugin that ships with an enormous number of tutorials, which is why it is still installed on so many sites. Forms are written as markup-like templates with tagged fields, so you control exactly what renders and can move fields between columns without fighting a builder. It supports file uploads, reCAPTCHA, Akismet and a simple mail configuration with hooks for custom handling. Storage of entries is not built in — the plugin emails submissions and leaves persistence to add-ons, which is a deliberate design choice and a frequent surprise. Styling is minimal by default, so it inherits your theme unless you add CSS. For a simple contact form on a site that already has one, it is still the lightest option. For anything transactional or multi-step, most teams outgrow it quickly.
Burst Statistics
Burst Statistics is a privacy-first analytics plugin that keeps everything on your server. It records pageviews, referrers, device types and countries without cookies or personal identifiers, and presents them in a clean dashboard with date comparisons. The plugin is lightweight by design: a small tracking script and aggregated tables rather than raw event storage, so it does not bloat the database the way a full event tracker would. A pro tier adds email reports, campaign tracking and ecommerce metrics. It is a sensible default for sites that want basic numbers without Google, and it pairs well with a consent-free privacy policy. The limitations are the flip side of its simplicity: no funnels, no user-level paths, and less granular attribution than a hosted product. For a directory, blog or small store, that trade is usually fine.
BackWPup
BackWPup is a free backup plugin with a job-based model: you define a job, choose what it includes (database, files, plugins, themes, uploads), pick a destination and a schedule, and it runs on WP-Cron or a real cron job. Destinations include Dropbox, S3-compatible storage, Google Drive, FTP and email. It can also produce a WordPress XML export, which is useful for moving content rather than a full site. The interface exposes more detail than UpdraftPlus — compression format, file exclusions, job logs — which suits administrators who want to see exactly what happened. Restores are performed by uploading the archive through the plugin or manually; the free version's restore tooling is less guided than its backup side. For a no-cost, well-understood backup routine with off-site copies, it remains a solid choice.
Query Monitor
Query Monitor is a debugging plugin that adds a toolbar panel showing what WordPress actually did to render a page. It lists every database query with the caller that triggered it, slow queries, duplicate queries, PHP errors and warnings, HTTP API calls, hooks and their callbacks, enqueued scripts and styles, and the template hierarchy that produced the page. It also flags plugins and themes that contribute unusually many queries. The value is diagnostic: when a page is slow or a plugin behaves oddly, this shows the cause instead of inviting guesswork. It is developer-only and should not be left active on a production site for visitors — its overhead is real, and the toolbar exposes internals. Used during development or behind a staging password, it is one of the most useful plugins in the ecosystem.
Code Snippets
Code Snippets manages small pieces of PHP, CSS and JavaScript from the WordPress admin instead of the theme's functions file. Each snippet has a name, a scope (front end, admin, everywhere), an activation toggle and a syntax check before saving, which prevents the classic white-screen caused by a missing semicolon. Snippets can be exported and imported, and a safe mode can disable them all if the site breaks. The free version handles PHP, CSS and JS; pro adds revisions, cloud sync and a scheduler. It is not a replacement for a proper child theme or plugin, but for the small customisations that would otherwise accumulate in functions.php, it is far easier to audit. The one caution is governance: snippets are code, so whoever can edit them can change the site. Restrict the capability accordingly.