WordPress plugins are a quick and easy way to extend your website’s functionality with minimal fuss—and, best of all, with no coding skills required.
Of course, with literally thousands of WordPress plugins available, it can be difficult to find the best one.
Now, I regularly read articles listing the most downloaded free WordPress plugins—the lists invariably contain all the usual suspects like Jetpack, Contact Form 7, and WordPress SEO by Yoast. However, you don’t really see versions of this list for premium plugins. This is because reliable download figures are harder to find for premium plugins.
But that’s exactly what I’m going to attempt today! CodeCanyon is the only major plugin marketplace making this data available, though, so I’m forced to work with what I have. If you want an idea of what types of premium plugins sell well, you should find this list useful. Here are CodeCanyon’s ten best-selling WordPress plugins of all time:
A quick note: developers bundle many top CodeCanyon plugins with premium themes from sister-site, ThemeForest. For simplicity, I’ve omitted these sales from the list.
1. Visual Composer: Page Builder for WordPress (59,000+ downloads, $28)
At the top of today’s list is Visual Composer, CodeCanyon’s best-selling WordPress plugin of all time.
Visual Composer is a responsive page builder plugin, allowing you to build custom layouts for your pages. You can design a page from scratch, or you can use one of the 40+ pre-built layouts—you can customize the pre-builds, too.
You can build your pages using a back-end editor, or on a working version of your website using a front-end editor—both versions of the editor use an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface. The plugin supports over 45 different page elements including social sharing buttons, call to action buttons, pie charts, and post sliders.
2. Slider Revolution (49,000+ downloads, $18)
With almost 50,000 downloads, Slider Revolution is the most popular image slider plugin on CodeCanyon. With a sophisticated list of features, Slider Revolution lets you do far more than the average image slider plugin.
For starters, you can build stylish, layered sliders—slides with moving text/images, animations, visual effects, and even embedded videos. You can control each element within a slide with precision using the WYSIWYG visual editor. There is a timeline view for configuring the timings, too.
Slider Revolution also includes tons of animations, transitions, visual effects, and navigation styles. A great plugin that lets you build truly unique image sliders for your website.
3. UberMenu Mega Menu Plugin (41,000+ downloads, $18)
Over 41,000 WordPress users have added visually stunning navigation to their website using the UberMenu Mega Menu plugin. (If you want to learn more about mega menus, I’ve talked about them in more detail here.)
UberMenu lets you build beautiful, deep menus, incorporating tabs, icons, images, and WordPress widgets into the design. The menus are also fully customizable with an unlimited selection of colors, loads of typography options, and a number of CSS3 transition animations.
4. LayerSlider Responsive WordPress Slider Plugin (26,000+ downloads, $17)
Another slider plugin in at number four is LayerSlider—a stylish, versatile image slider plugin with over 26,000 downloads.
LayerSlider lets you build stunning multi-layered sliders, with lots of moving parts per slide. This is done using the user friendly drag-and-drop slider builder. You can add any type of WordPress media to your slides, too – images, videos, audio, text, and WordPress posts/pages.
With another very capable plugin above it already on the list, why might you consider LayerSlider as your slider plugin of choice? LayerSlider’s major strength is the sheer volume of transition animations available, with 200+ stylish 2D and 3D CSS3 animations supported. It also includes 13 different slider skins, three navigation types, and all the customization capabilities you could want.
5. RoyalSlider Touch Content Slider for WordPress (22,000+ downloads, $22)
The third and final slider plugin to make the list is RoyalSlider. This plugin allows you to add beautiful image sliders to your website—you can also embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo to add video slides, too.
It supports five skins, and each skin can be used with one of the 11 “templates” supported. Each template adds extra CSS to your slider, producing a more distinct look and feel. For example, one template adds thumbnails below the featured images, while another converts the slider into an image carousel.
For extra convenience, you can pull images from Flickr, Instagram, and 500px directly into your slider. You can also add items from your WordPress media library and featured posts.
6. Quform WordPress Form Builder (14,000+ downloads, $28)
Quform is a fantastic premium contact form plugin, ideal for anyone looking to upgrade Contact Form 7.
You can create an unlimited number of forms using the convenient drag-and-drop live form builder, which supports 15 different form elements. This includes conditional logic, which populates the form based on the answers already given. You can also brand your contact forms in a light or dark skin, with each skin including five supported styles.
To keep spam to a minimum, Quform includes three anti-spam features: honeypot, image, and the brand new reCAPTCHA from Google.
7. Ninja Popups for WordPress (11,000+ downloads, $20)
If you want to boost conversions by using popups without annoying visitors, Ninja Popups could be the popup solution for you. Ninja Popups lets you configure the perfect time to display your popup by using sophisticated Exit Intent technology. This keeps user disruption to a minimum.
The plugin allows you to build visually stunning, responsive popups, with over 20 different templates to get you started – there is also an add-on featuring even more templates.
Ninja Popups works with 13 different email marketing services (including AWeber and MailChimp), five social media networks, and has built-in analytics and A/B testing.
8. EventOn WordPress Event Calendar Plugin (11,000+ downloads, $28)
Looking for a great way to display your upcoming events? In my opinion, EventOn is the best event calendar plugin available for WordPress users.
EventOn lets you build beautiful event lists with a stylish, minimalist design. You can add them anywhere on your website using a dedicated shortcode or sidebar widget.
The plugin allows you to conveniently display all your events and the key information for each – visitors can sort and filter the calendars, too. To help improve the calendar’s aesthetics, you can color code each item, as well as adding a featured image. Each item is expandable when clicked, allowing you to display a larger image or a Google map showing the location. The plugin works with PayPal if you want an easy way to sell tickets.
9. Justified Image Grid – Premium WordPress Gallery (11,000+ downloads, $28)
The Justified Image Grid plugin gives you a number of stylish options for displaying the images on your website.
You can pull images straight from your Facebook, Instagram, or Flickr accounts and place them in stylish gallery grids. You can also add videos to your grids by embedding from YouTube and Vimeo.
There are 20 pre-built template grids to choose from, allowing you to choose the perfect gallery for your website’s style.
10. Ultimate Add-ons for Visual Composer (9,000+ downloads, $17)
The last item on today’s list is an add-on for Visual Composer—a testament to just how popular the core Visual Composer plugin is.
The Ultimate Add-ons for Visual Composer gives you a brand new set of elements you can use with the best-selling page builder plugin. These elements include video backgrounds, parallax effects, and countdown timers.
Final thoughts
So there you have it: CodeCanyon’s top selling WordPress plugins. Whether you’re looking for a plugin to add new functionality to your website, or you’re a developer looking for which plugins sell well—hint: image slider plugins—I hope you found this list valuable.
One final point: Although some CodeCanyon plugins have a reputation for being lower quality, this shouldn’t be the case with any plugins featured in today’s list. With so many customers, the developers of these plugins have the resources, and incentive, to ensure the plugins are well built. The lowest rating on the list is 4.38 out of 5, which is still fantastic, and that’s after hundreds of different user ratings. If you want to see real users’ thoughts on each plugin, just have a look through the comments on the plugin pages to see what a good job the developers are doing!
Are you a fan of any of the premium plugins in today’s list? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!
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