Best Places to Find WordPress Plugins

It’s easy enough to list “top WordPress plugins for X task”, but it’s not so much common knowledge where you can go to find a huge resource of WordPress plugins for a variety of tasks. This can be frustrating, especially to newbies who don’t know of the most popular WordPress plugin websites. So where are the top places you can turn to when you need plugins to extend the functionality of your website? There are quite a few good ones, but here are some of the better options available.

WordPress.org Plugin Director

Yes everyone knows of this place, but it still needs to be on the list. I won’t go into much detail since it is a common knowledge resource for free plugins, but with 35,000+ and counting, this should be your first stop when searching for a plugin. Something you should remember when using WordPress.org, make sure that whatever plugin you use on the website has been updated recently and has a decent rating. The problems with free plugins, much like the problems with free WordPress themes, are that many times a plugin won’t be updated for a long time, making it incompatible with your theme.

Code Canyon

Code Canyon ranks second only to WordPress.org in terms of number of plugins available, but unlike WordPress.org, these plugins are not free. Premium plugins, for the most part, are consistently updated and have far more features and functionality than the free plugins. And there is a plugin to fit nearly any need, ranging from membership and galleries, to widgets and newsletters. If you use this as your plugin go-to website then I highly recommend looking at the support section to make sure the developer is adequately answering questions and concerns, and also make sure the plugin has been updated somewhat recently. Typically you should try to shoot for a plugin that is popular, that way the developer would be staying on top of updating the plugin to keep the money flowing.

WPMUDEV

WPMUDEV is a great place to go to find some pretty neat (and advanced) plugins to meet nearly any need. This is my personal go-to place to find plugins because I know the developers will update them to be compatible with the next WordPress update and will answer any questions/concerns/problems you have. There is only one minor problem I’ve come across when using WPMUDEV. Since the premium developer website is so popular they do not have enough support personal to answer the loads of questions they get on a daily basis, so more often than not you’re going to have to wait a while for an answer. A minor nitpick really, especially since they have tons of extremely advanced plugins to choose from.

Pluginswp

Probably the least diverse plugin outlet on this list. I have PluginsWP on as a top plugin website because they have some spectacular video and gallery plugins (which is great since there is a huge demand for video and gallery functionality in WordPress). Another great thing about Pluginswp is they allow you purchase bulk items, such as this.

iThemes

iThemes, as the name suggests, is mostly a theme outlet, but they still have a decent amount of premium plugins to choose from (not as many as Code Canyon or WPMUDEV though). Security, ecommerce, slideshow, billboard, voting are just a few of the plugins they offer. The only negative to using iThemes is that they are bit more expensive than the previous four websites, hence whey they are last on the list.

If you can’t find the plugin you need on the above websites, you probably aren’t going to find it anywhere. Though there are other (more expensive) options you can resort to such as custom plugin development from a developer such as webdevstudios.