WordPress utility plugins let you make enhancements to all aspects of your WordPress website: performance, design, and security.

With thousands of options available, however, it can be quite difficult sorting the good from the not so good.

In addition, you need to be very selective when deciding on what kinds of plugins you want to use because each plugin added to your site can decrease the load speed of your pages. More plugins also increase the likelihood of scripting conflicts.

With all these issues in mind, I’ve compiled a list of 20 essential WordPress utility plugins available at CodeCanyon and Envato Elements to help take your site from good to great.

There's still a lot of room to improve the basic and critical functionality of your WordPress website, and the best way to do so is with utility plugins. Grab some of these best-selling WordPress utility plugins and take your website to the next level!

What Is Envato Elements?

As a developer or designer, you want to focus on great design, not worry about adding credits or managing download limits. You will need helpdesk photos, helpdesk graphic templates, helpdesk web templates, helpdesk presentatation templates, and more. That's why it's important to have unlimited digital assets under one roof and for one low monthly price.

This is where Envato Elements comes in!

Envato Elements gives you an unlimited creative subscription to consistently high-quality and unique assets for your projects under one simple commercial license for all content.

So What Do You Get With Your Subscription?

Unlimited downloads of 54+ million creative assets under one no-strings-attached subscription covered by a lifetime commercial license.

• unlimited premium themes to download
• unlimited advanced plugins
• unlimited fonts for a stylish site
• unlimited icons and graphics for website design
• royalty-free stock photos and videos
• logos
• the Elements plugin for WordPress

There are no strings attached to your subscription. You can cancel anytime.

Create with confidence! Get Envato Elements now and gain access to millions of creative assets that you can download without any limitations.

WordPress Utility Plugins on Envato Elements

Envato Elements gives you unlimited downloads of 54+ million creative assets (including WordPress utility plugins) under one no-strings-attached subscription covered by a lifetime commercial license.

1. WP Ultimate Firewall—Performance & Security

This plugin provides real-time firewall protection for your website. It does this in two ways: first, blocking attacks when it detects them. Second, using reCAPTCHA keep out spam.

It comes with a user-friendly admin panel that makes it easy for you review status and setting of your plugin. The reporting system allows you to see the last IP address of user that logged on to your website. The plugin sends you email notification for hack attacks, brute-force attack, proxy attacks, and spam comment attacks,

The plugin also optimizes your website for speed. There are lots of optimization options from lazy-load features, shortlink remover, browser caching, HTML compression, and more.

2. W8 Contact Form—WordPress Contact Form Plugin

W8 Contact Form for WordPress is a Contact Form plugin with multiple recipients, unlimited forms, different styles, animations, auto reply option and huge variety of additional customization options.

Notable features include:

• light and dark styles
• minimal and default skins
• original and a minified jQuery file
• usable HTML template and tags in auto-reply messages
• 10 unique photo styles
• customize contacts’ order with shortcodes

3. Ultimate DB Manager—WP Database Backup, Optimize

Maintaining your database without any headaches is what Ultimate DB Manager helps you do. It saves you time and space by making it easy for you to

• create database backup on single click
• clean database
• optimize database
• schedule cleanup and optimization to run hourly, daily and weekly
• cleans up the obsolete data from database

It also repairs corrupted database tables or damaged ones.

4. Everest Gallery

If you're looking for a versatile gallery for your WordPress website the consider Everest Gallery. Rich in features and beautiful designs, this plugin supports audio, video, images, posts, Instagram and mixed gallery.

It also comes with tons of layouts including grid layout, blog layout, slideshow layout, masonry layout, filmstrip layout and carousel layout. And each layout has sub-layouts and other configurations. In addition, you get overlay hover effects and image hover effects, four different lightbox types with multiple lightbox themes.

A back-end preview functionality will allow you to view how your gallery will look in real time.

5. Elegant Calendar

When you need to create, show, and manage events on your WordPress website then Elegant Calendar will make it easy to do so. It comes with all features you will need to customize your calendar to suit your website's theme and aesthetic style. The plugin is multisite-ready, WPML ready, SEO ready, and Schema ready.

Best-Selling WordPress Utilities Plugins on CodeCanyon

For a one-off license fee, you can grab one of the WordPress utilites plugins on CodeCanyon and enhance the performance, design, and security of your website.

The Best-Selling WordPress Utilities of 2020

Let's look at the WordPress utility plugins available at CodeCanyon that will help take your site to the next level.

6. WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress

WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress, formerly Visual Composer, is an easy-to-use page builder that will help you create any layout you desire quickly and easily.

This visual page builder allows you to use simple drag-and-drop widgets or building blocks that help you to create eye-catching websites without having to understand any coding. This plugin enables you to build out your ideas visually and publish your website quickly and easily.

This page builder not only allows you to visually construct any page on your website in the WordPress admin back-end, but it allows you to construct any page in the front-end as well.

• WordPress Plugins The Ultimate WordPress Page Builder: WPBakery Daniel Strongin

7. Essential Grid Gallery

And if you want a plugin that builds video galleries and more, then the Essential WordPress gallery plugin allows you to build grid-style galleries using images, video, and audio files from a wide variety of sources, both self-hosted and social. Use the template library to create a fully responsive and mobile-optimized gallery, or connect with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and more to stream social media content. Dozens of fully customizable skins and animation options give you total control of the look and feel of your gallery.

8. Yellow Pencil

Yellow Pencil is a WordPress CSS editor plugin which allows you to customise any theme quickly and easily by editing it in real time. All you need to do is click on an element you want to modify, start changing its features visually, and Yellow Pencil will create the required CSS style codes in the background for you. The plugin provides over 50 style properties, 500 fonts, 300 background colors, and a live color picker to help you modify your site.

9. Hide My WP

Hide My WP is a security plugin that hides the fact you’re using WordPress on your site, which allows you to fly under the radar of attackers that target WordPress sites.

In addition, their Intrusion Detection system automatically monitors the site and finds potentially dangerous requests. It then provides you with all the details of the attacker, like who they are, where they’re located, and how they’re trying to hack your site, and suggests whether they should be blocked or not.

Other great features include:

• easily replace any words in your HTML output file
• easily change or hide any URL
• notify you when someone is poking around your WordPress site
• change the default WordPress email sender

10. Ajax Search Pro

If you’re looking for a better search function than the native one WordPress provides, check out Ajax Search Pro. It's a live search engine plugin for WordPress that provides users with customisable front-end settings.

For example, by checking different boxes, the user can change the behaviour of the plugin to look for exact matches and include or exclude certain post types, categories, etc.

Other great features include:

• four built-in layouts
• image support
• custom field filters
• keyword highlighting
• and much more

11. Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress

If the Interactive World Maps plugin above isn’t quite what you were looking for, then Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress offers another viable option. This is a great plugin for displaying multiple posts, pages or custom posts on a single Google map. You can assign a location to your post easily using the meta box or your own custom fields.

Other great features include:

• display post information like title, content, featured image, categories, etc.
• display post listing below the map and show post information in the listing
• possible to customise HTML easily to integrate your own design
• display posts or locations below the map in grid or list format

12. Video Gallery Plugin

Video galleries are a great way to keep your visitors engaged. Here is where Video Gallery plugin comes in, to help you create a compelling WordPress video gallery. This plugin allows you to feature single videos or mix and match video sources, streams, galleries, and playlists to curate the exact content you desire.

It's fully responsive, with subtitle support and AdSense compatibility, making it a solid choice for a dedicated WordPress video gallery. You can completely customize the look and function of your player with a user-friendly, drag-and-drop admin panel. You can also use the Design Centre to generate a brand-compatible skin for your video gallery.

13. White Label Branding for WordPress

White Label Branding for WordPress allows developers more latitude in customising WordPress menus. The plugin allows you to customise the WordPress admin and the login screen and add a Role and Capability Manager, which allows you to create new user roles, assign capabilities, and decide who has access to what features of the site.

Other great features include:

• ability to add your own favicon easily
• hide certain screen options
• add a private dashboard metabox for editors' or administrators' eyes only
• and much more

14. Out-of-the-Box

Want to share photos, videos, or other files with your customers, clients, friends, and fans directly from your website without eating up your bandwidth? Say hello to Out-of-the-Box, a Dropbox integration plugin for WordPress that allows you to display your Dropbox files on your website. This responsive plugin is also multilingual ready.

Other great features include:

• audio and video players
• smart loading to save time and bandwidth
• ability to search files by name or contents
• and much more

15. Reviewer WordPress Plugin

Reviewer WordPress Plugin offers you a great way for visitors, customers, and clients to leave reviews on your site. What’s more, the plugin also allows you to add comparison tables inside your WordPress blog posts, pages, and custom posts.

Reviewer WordPress Plugin offers a good range of customisable themes so that you can adapt your reviews and comparison tables to fit your site, and each theme has a responsive layout to adapt to any devices.

Other great features include:

• review box and user review widgets
• three different rating modes
• ability to collect visitor name and email
• Google ReCaptcha for preventing spam
• and much more

16. Blog Designer PRO for WordPress

If you’ve ever dreamed of designing your own blog but don’t have the necessary coding skills, Blog Designer PRO for WordPress may be the answer. Unlike the average blog template, the plugin comes with 36 templates, all of which you can customise extensively to suit your own design aesthetic.

Other great features include:

• fully responsive blog templates
• support of custom post type
• preview of blog layout
• and much more

17. Super Store Finder for WordPress

Super Store Finder for WordPress is a great plugin for businesses who want to help their website visitors and potential customers find their stores easily and quickly. The plugin is integrated with Google Maps API v3 and has a fully responsive design for smartphones, tablets, and touch-screen devices.

Other great features include:

• multiple store locator layouts to choose from
• manages unlimited store locations
• full-screen street view feature
• extensive map settings to show all stores, specific location, or geolocation
• and much more

18. Ajax Translator Revolution WordPress Plugin

Ajax Translator Revolution WordPress Plugin is quite simply an automatic WordPress translation plugin that allows your visitors to view your website in their preferred language in a matter of seconds.

The translation bar sits at the top of the website by default, but you can use the custom positioning settings to place it wherever you want. The plugin can translate as many as 91 languages and remembers a visitor’s selected language.

Other great features include:

• over 80 settings for customisation available
• display languages, flags with names, just names, or just flags
• translate everything or selected sections of a web page
• can exclude entire pages, posts, and categories
• and much more

19. Cornerstone

Cornerstone is a front-end WordPress page builder that allows you to see the changes you make to your site in real time as you build it. One of the great features of this plugin is Skeleton Mode, which allows you to see the underlying structure of your entire page without leaving the front-end interface.

Other great features include:

• huge library of ready-made and customisable elements
• text editing on the fly
• compatible with any WordPress theme
• and much more

20. Ultimate Author Box

The Ultimate Author Box plugin is a great way to celebrate the authors who write for your blog. The plugin allows you to add an author box to each post to identify the author and provide additional information about them.

You can add extra tabs to highlight the author’s other posts, social feeds, or other custom content like a contact form. The plugin comes with over 19 predesigned author box templates.

Other great features include:

• ability to set role restrictions for author boxes
• over 20 social media profiles
• author summary in pop-up display
• unlimited custom colour scheme customisation options
• and much more

21. WP Contacts

Use WP Contacts to manage, log, track and share your contacts on any page of your site you choose. This responsive drag-and-drop plugin facilitates front-end login, and the contact database is highly customisable.

22. Custom Page Templates

Custom Page Templates allows you to override your theme design and create a unique page template for your WordPress website. The plugin has an enormous amount of flexibility and gives you complete freedom to control precisely where and when your changes will be applied.

Other great features include:

• over 30 shortcodes
• ability to work with any plugin
• support for popular plugins like Visual Composer, WooCommerce, etc.
• and much more

24. Diamond Flipbook

The Diamond WordPress flipbook plugin allows you to create flipbooks from a variety of source files. Automatically convert PDFs, or upload multiple JPGs at the same time to create a flipbook. You can also manually add pages, or simply enter text directly into the WYSIWYG editor. Then, either add a shortcode for the generated flipbook to your website or post an image link that will launch a lightbox with one click.

This WordPress gallery plugin also offers YouTube support. Fully responsive and with no Flash needed, this plugin works reliably on both mobile and desktop.

25. Interactive World Maps

Using maps on your website is a great way to integrate content with location, and the Interactive World Maps plugin is an ideal utility plugin for doing so. The plugin allows you to include maps in posts, pages, and even in the sidebar of your site.

You can choose to use a map of the entire world, a continent, a country, a region, or a city. You can also add active colour regions to the map and display them in two different ways, as regions and as markers.

Other great features include:

• ability to add interactivity
• change background colour
• change the width and height of the map
• and much more

26. Filetrip

The Filetrip plugin makes it easy to distribute files directly from your WordPress site as it allows your website visitors and clients to easily download any digital file from your website to Dropbox, Google Drive, or another cloud service.

You can also program the plugin to automatically send copies of files uploaded by users to multiple destinations.

Other great features include:

• automatic email notification for uploads and backups
• ability to schedule full backup for your website
• convert media files into transferable files
• and much more

Add a Premium WordPress Plugin to Your Website Now!

Check out these thousands of premium WordPress plugins , as well as the best-selling, trending WordPress plugins, available on CodeCanyon that will vastly improve how your WordPress website functions and offer visitors an excellent user experience.

Discover More Awesome WordPress Plugins

In the following articles and tutorials, you will find more useful plugins for your WordPress website:

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Learn More About WordPress Plugins

What makes WordPress an awesome platform is the wealth of unlimited resources available to help you succeed with your WordPress website. Here are some selections from Envato Tuts+!

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Discover the best WordPress plugins to use for backup, security, caching, and SEO. Learn how to install and configure key WordPress plugins in this free course.

One of the great things about using WordPress is the vibrant plugin ecosystem. There are many thousands of WordPress plugins that promise to improve every aspect of your site. With the right plugins, your WordPress site will run more smoothly, get more visitors, and be less likely to face problems.

In this free course, Envato Tuts+ instructor Rachel McCollin will teach you how to install and configure free WordPress plugins for backup, security, caching, and SEO. You'll see how WordPress can be made far more powerful and secure by the addition of a few key plugins.

Learn How to Use WordPress

If you're just getting started, learn how to use WordPress in our complete guide or check out our free Beginner's Guide to WordPress course.

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This post has been updated with contributions from Franc Lucas. Franc is a writer for Envato Tuts+ who enjoys exploring the world of SaaS.