100 powerful website features for maximal functionality

WordPress is largely extendable because there are virtually infinite combinations of features you can build into your site using various WordPress themes and plugins, as well as code.

WordPress themes define the appearance of a WordPress site and typically include all of the features required to build the themed site.

There are several of them available, each designed to prototype a themed site.

For example, if you want to build a directory website, you should use a directory theme because it includes features like advanced search, filters, and so on that are typically required to sift through listings on directory websites.

Plugins, on the other hand, add additional functionalities and features to WordPress, such as features that are required but not included in the installed theme.

There are currently millions of free and paid WordPress plugins available that you can install to get the most out of your site.

The following is a list of features to help you get the most out of your WordPress site; however, you do not need to have all of them for maximum functionality.

These features do not come by default with every WordPress installation, they are included here to inform you of their availability and how to use them on your WordPress website.

1. 2 Factor authentication

How to add Two-factor authentication to your WordPress website

Description: This lets you enable 2-factor authentication for your users to log in to your site, as an added security measure.

Benefits:

• Improves security on your site
• Forces all users to enable 2FA

2. Accessibility

Web accessibility: how to make your WordPress website accessible

Description: Web accessibility is the inclusive practice of making websites usable for all visitors, including those with disabilities, impairments, or limitations, and ensuring that no barriers prevent interaction with or access to websites on the World Wide Web.

This feature includes high-contrast web pages, manual font size changes, use of images with Alt texts, etc.

Benefits

• Visitors with disabilities can experience everything other site users can.
• Creating an accessible website will increase traffic to your site as site visitors will be more likely to return.

3. Advertisement

Description: This is a form of marketing that uses the internet (web pages) to promote products and services to audiences and site users.

This is aside from Google AdSense, as there are a number of other advertisement networks.

Bloggers can make use of personal ads, third-party ads, ad networks, etc.

Benefits

• This is a means to make money from your website/blog.
• Ads are usually personalized hence, site users are offered advertisements that are relevant to them/their recent web search.

4. Affiliate marketing

Complete guide to affiliate marketing with WordPress

Description: Affiliate marketing is a method of earning a commission by promoting a product or service made by another retailer or advertiser through the use of an affiliate link.

Benefits

• This is a means to make money from your website/blog.
• You project yourself as an authority in your niche
• You get to beta-test products/services for free.
• You gain offers from companies for your site readers to benefit from.

5. Affiliate Program

Guide to setting up an affiliate program

Description: An affiliate program allows your site to financially compensate readers, publishers, and bloggers who refer traffic to your site by giving them a percentage of the sale when someone they refer makes a purchase.

You would have to offer affiliate signups for interested site visitors and offer them affiliate links afterward.

Benefits

• High return on investment (ROI)
• Valuable partnerships
• Low risk
• Low start-up cost
• Low ongoing costs

6. Antispam

Complete guide to setting up antispam for your WordPress site

Description: Anti-spam software is used to block email spam, unsolicited bulk emails, and comments on posts on your WordPress website.

Benefits

• Prevent spam submission from contact forms, business emails, comments, etc.

7. Appointment booking

Description: Also known as appointment scheduling is a type of software that automates the process of scheduling appointments and allows businesses and professionals to manage appointment bookings.

Benefits

• Automated appointment booking
• Customers can schedule services quickly and easily
• You can easily convert new leads

8. Automatic site backup

How to automatically backup a WordPress website

Description: This is a copy of all your site’s data, including files, webpages, images, and databases, stored locally or remotely as a fallback plan should your current site fail.

In the event of an error on your site, you may lose critical data if you do not have a backup service in place.

Benefits:

• This keeps a safe copy of your site
• This backup occurs automatically
• You get to backup your site to remote storage e.g. Google Drive
• Backups are useful should your site break from an update or code error

9. Broken links check

Description: A broken link is a web page that a user cannot find or access for a variety of reasons, including if it has been moved or no longer exists.

These are common on websites and it’s good practice to routinely find and correct them.

This feature automatically visits all the links on your site and ensures they are valid and not broken.

Benefits:

• Automatically review all site links
• Notify admin to take action on broken links – unlink, edit, or delete.

10. Business hours

Description: This allows you to inform your customers about the hours your business is open and closed.

Benefits:

• Notify your customers when you are open
• Notify customers of your off days/holidays
• Limit the display of some of your website’s content to the time you are open.

11. Click to tweet

Description: This enables visitors to your site to tweet a snippet of your posts after reading them by simply clicking a button.

Benefits:

• Increases your Twitter following
• Improves engagement with your website’s content

12. Contact form

Description: This provides a form for your site visitors to fill out to reach you.

It offers the added advantage of specifying needed fields for your site visitors to fill e.g. user’s phone number.

Benefits:

• Prevent email spam
• Helps to create an email/phone list
• It is an alternative to providing your email address
• May include a subject field, for visitors to indicate the context of getting in you with you.

13. Contact information

Description: This indicates how your site visitors can get in touch with you.

It typically includes your email address, phone number, and physical location(s).

Benefits:

• Customers can easily reach you, physically or digitally.
• By displaying your business’s physical location, you can easily reach customers in your neighborhood.

14. Content copy protection

Description: This prevents site visitors from copying the content on your site – text, images, etc.

It disables highlight text and right-click save image feature.

Benefits:

• Visitors cannot copy your site content
• Users cannot save images from your site

15. Cookie consent (GDPR)

Description: This displays an opt-in consent notification on your site in compliance with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Benefits:

• Regulation compliance
• Users can opt-in to your use of cookies on your site.

16. Coupons /coupon codes

Description: This adds the ability to provide coupon codes to your site for visitors to use in order to take advantage of your product/service offers.

Benefits:

• It boosts your sales
• It improves user engagement

17. Custom user image/avatar

Description: This adds the ability to upload custom images as user avatars.

Benefits:

• Useful if an author has no default avatar.

18. Custom login

Customize WordPress login page

Description: This customizes your site’s login page.

Benefits:

• Removes the default WordPress branding
• Beautifies your login page
• Utilize your brand colors on your login page

19. Custom sidebars

Description: This adds extra sidebar options to your WordPress site.

Benefits:

• Offers custom sidebars to be displayed on specific web pages and locations

20. Customer testimonials

Description: This feature shows what customers who have used your products or services have to say about them.

Benefits:

• This adds social proof to your site
• It increases your credibility towards intending customers.

21. Dark mode

Description: This is a low-light website user interface that uses a dark color as the primary background color.

Benefits:

• It makes images stand out
• Eases eye strain while reading long texts

22. Directories

Description: This enables you to create a listing of almost anything, typically of physical businesses, but it can also include a catalog of skilled human beings such as artisans, etc. for your website visitors to browse.

Benefits:

• You can make money from paid listings
• You benefit from partnerships with business owners
• Visitors to the site have access to pertinent details about businesses and their contact information.

23. Disable comments

Description: This disables the default comments feature on your WordPress site.

Benefits:

• Prevents comment spam
• Speeds up your site

24. Donations

Description: This enables your site visitors to make donations on your site, either for you or for a specific cause.

Benefits:

• Your devoted audience can send you money as appreciation for your work on your site
• If you own/run/want to give money to an NGO, this can aid you in raising funds from your readers.

25. E-commerce

Description: This allows you to convert your website into an online store and sell goods and/or services to your visitors.

You would have to create web pages for each of your products, categorize them, and display them all on your shop page.

Benefits:

• You can offer your products/services online for people to buy
• You get to automate the process of running a store.
• You can make money while you sleep.

26. Email (newsletter) signup

Description: This allows visitors to your site to subscribe to your email list in order to receive future communications from you and stay up to date with your site.

Benefits:

• It helps you build your email list
• You get to demonstrate expertise in your field
• Your email list will include readers who are genuinely interested in your content.

27. Embed documents

Description: This allows you to easily display the content of your documents on the web pages of your WordPress website, including PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files, without your visitors having to download or convert them first.

Benefits:

• You can display any compatible document of your choice on your site posts and pages.

28. Event Calendar

Description: This allows you to create and manage physical or virtual events on your WordPress site using a calendar displayed on your site.

Benefits:

• This lets you manage your events
• Send event reminders to attendees
• Display event days on your site.

29. Exit intent email subscription

Description: When visitors are finished with your site and about to leave, this reminds them to subscribe in order to stay up to date with the content on your site.

Benefits:

• It helps you build your email list

30. Facebook feed

Description: This displays your Facebook profile or page’s feed on your site.

Benefits:

• Visitors can like your Facebook page
• Visitors can follow you on Facebook and engage with your content.

31. File sharing

Description: This allows visitors to your site to upload and download files to and from your site.

Benefits:

• Users can upload documents e.g. resumes to your site.
• Creates more user engagement with your site content.

32. Folders in the media library

Description: This helps to organize the files in the media library into categories to easily browse through.

Benefits:

• Easily and quickly find the files you need
• Keeps the media library organized

33. Free fonts

Description: This enables you to use any of the free Google fonts on your website.

The font you use has a significant impact on the look and feel of your website, so select fonts that are easy to read and match the theme of your site.

Benefits:

• Make use of any custom font that suits your site’s theme
• These fonts are free to use.

34. Google AdSense

Description: This is the Google advertising network, where you can generate income by placing targeted advertisements on your website and earn money when your visitors click on the advertisements.

Benefits:

• This is a way of making money from your site.

35. Google Analytics

Description: Google Analytics is a platform that collects data from your websites to generate reports that provide business insights and resources to help you better understand your customers.

Benefits:

• You get access to analytic resources about how your site is doing in terms of user visits and their activities on your site.
• It provides statistics like monthly visits, devices visitors used, and from which part of the world.

36. Google forms

Description: This is a survey administration software that is included as part of Google’s free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite.

It allows you to create and send online surveys, forms, quizzes, and questionnaires, among other things.

Benefits:

• Embed forms, surveys, etc. on your site.

37. Google maps

Description: This allows you to embed map locations on your site.

Benefits:

• You can display the location of your business.

38. Google ReCAPTCHA

Description: This is a free Google service that helps protect websites from spam and abuse by distinguishing between human users and automated bots.

Benefits:

• Prevent email spam
• Prevent contact form from spam
• Prevent comment spam

39. Google Reviews

Description: Google reviews are business reviews left on the Google platform by customers.

This feature allows you to collect and display the Google reviews of your business on your website.

Benefits:

• Display your business’s Google reviews

40. Google search console

Description: Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google that allows you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results, including information about your site’s search traffic and performance as well as issues with indexing any of your web pages.

Benefits:

• Monitor site performance
• Identify page indexing issues

41. Hide WordPress theme/plugins

How to hide WordPress theme and plugins

Description: This prevents site visitors from learning about the WordPress theme you have installed on your site.

Benefits:

• Keeps snoopers from discovering your WordPress theme.

42. Image Gallery

Description: This adds the ability to display a set of images in the form of an online photo gallery.

Benefits:

• Display images in a gallery
• Group relevant images together

43. Image Lightbox

Description: This allows you to display images in a lightbox on your website.

Benefits:

• Displays your site images in a lightbox when clicked.
• Site visitors can see a larger version of images.

44. Import and export

Description: This enables you to import and export files from and to your website, such as text and images, demo content, menu items, widgets, customizer settings, and so on.

Benefits:

• Import files to your site
• Export your files either for safekeeping or to another site.

45. Instagram feed

Description: This displays your profile’s Instagram feed on your site.

Benefits:

• Site visitors can view your posts from your site
• Visitors can follow you on Instagram

46. Lazy loading

Description: Lazy loading, also known as on-demand loading, is an optimization technique that allows your website to load media only when a user scrolls down to the specific media, such as an image, reducing website load time and improving website performance.

Images, audio, and video do not need to load on a web page until they are to be viewed, watched, or listened to; lazy loading displays the page text first and then the media when needed.

Benefits:

• Makes site load time faster
• Improves site performance

47. Lead magnet

Description: This is something valuable, such as content or information that you provide to your website visitors for free in exchange for their email address.

Usually, they get access to the value only after subscribing to your email list.

Benefits:

• It helps you build your email list
• You get to demonstrate expertise in your field
• Your email list will include readers who are genuinely interested in your content.

48. Live chat

Description: Live chat is a type of customer messaging technology that enables you and your website visitors to chat in real time, allowing customers to speak directly with representatives from your company.

Benefits:

• Improves product conversion rate
• Communicate in real-time with your site visitors/customers

49. Logo bar

Description: This displays a carousel or slider of company logos with which you have interacted in your business – those who use your products and/or services and those with whom you collaborate.

Benefits:

• It lends credibility to your business.
• Site visitors can see companies you have worked with

50. Maintenance mode/ Coming soon

Description: This is a page that allows you to show a user-friendly notice to visitors when you are making changes to your site, such as updating plugins, themes, or the WordPress core.

Benefits:

• Allows your site visitors to know your site is currently unavailable
• Visitors can sign up to be notified when your site is up and running again.

51. Media compression

Description: This compresses the size of media on your site

Benefits:

• Faster load speed
• The compression will not affect image quality

52. Mega menu

Description: Mega menus are a type of expandable menu that displays many navigation menu items to site visitors by making use of large multi-level drop-down and pop-up menu windows which are not typically available through regular menus.

They are excellent for accommodating a large number of menu items or revealing lower-level site pages at a glance.

Benefits:

• It accommodates a lot more menu items than default menus
• Display menu options in a multi-level manner

53. Microformats

Description: These are schema.org tags for humans and robots (such as Google crawlers) to read, and they can all improve the visibility of your site when your content is shared or found on search and social media, such as Twitter card (Twitter) and Open Graph (Facebook)

Benefits:

• They improve site visibility

54. Migrate WordPress site

Description: This is the process of transferring your website’s content from one URL to another.

Benefits:

• Easy and fast
• No data loss

55. Mobile responsiveness

Description: This entails your site’s layout smoothly adjusting based on screen size and resolution, especially to make content readable on mobile.

Benefits:

• Makes your site content readable on mobile
• Improves your site’s user experience

56. Multilingual content

Description: This lets you present your site content in multiple languages for your audience.

Benefits:

• Visitors to your website can enjoy your content in their native language.
• Engage more non-English readers in your target area.

57. Notifications bars

Description: These bars or boxes allow you to place important information or call-to-action in prominent locations on your website for your site visitors to act on.

Benefits:

• This draws the attention of your readers to an update on your site.
• Nudges your readers to take action e.g. to subscribe to your newsletter.

58. Online applications

Description: This enables you to include an online application feature on your website.

Benefits:

• Site visitors can submit applications online

59. Online courses

Description: This enables you to create online courses and enroll users on your website.

Benefits:

• Make money by offering paid courses.
• Increase user engagement with your site

60. Open external links in new tabs

Description: This enables all external links on your site to open in a new tab rather than the current one.

Benefits:

• Site users can continue with your content where they left off.
• Reduces the bounce rate of your site.

61. Password-protected pages

Description: This allows you to restrict access to your entire website, a web page or post, or a portion of a web page using a password.

Benefits:

• Restrict access to a resource to only a select few users
• You can earn money by giving people access to these resources.

62. Paystack payment

Description: This enables you to accept payments on your website through the Paystack payment solution.

Benefits:

• Accept payments in Naira

63. Pinterest feed

Description: This displays the feed from your Pinterest profile on your website.

Benefits:

• Site visitors can see your pinned images
• The site visitor can follow you on Pinterest

64. Podcasting

Description: You can embed podcast episodes on your website for visitors to listen to and enjoy.

Benefits:

• Build authority in your field
• Capture testimonials from clients
• Educate their customers
• Target leads for interviews

65. Polls

Description: This allows you to poll your site visitors to get their thoughts on a topic.

Benefits:

• Increased user engagement and participation

66. Pop-up

Description: This is a display area that appears as a window in various sizes and screen positions while browsing a website and is primarily used for advertising and lead generation.

Benefits:

• It is a means of promoting a product or service to readers.
• It is a way to alert readers about a site update.
• Users can be encouraged to sign up for your email newsletter.

67. Popular posts

Description: This is a widget that displays the most popular or interacted with posts on your site based on a set of parameters such as user views, comments, and so on.

Benefits:

• It draws attention to your best posts.
• It lowers your site’s bounce rate because visitors are less likely to leave immediately.

68. Portfolio

Description: This is an extension of your resume, a unique way to showcase your work and tell others about yourself by expressing your personality, experience, and capabilities through web pages that detail your previous projects and case studies.

This is useful for creatives, freelancers, and agencies.

Benefits:

• Showcases your best works/projects
• It aids in demonstrating your level of expertise.

69. Post title generator/checker

Description: This generates titles for your blog posts and evaluates their search engine optimization (SEO).

Benefits:

• You get to generate catchy post titles.
• It boosts site SEO.

70. Post views counter

Description: This shows how many times each of your blog posts have been viewed.

Benefits:

• It adds social proof to your site
• It builds credibility for your site content.

71. Rating and reviews

Description: This enables site visitors to rate and write reviews on any content on your website, including both virtual and physical goods and services that they have used or purchased.

Benefits:

• Customers can provide feedback on products and services.
• Good ratings result in an increase in the number of leads.

72. Reading time

Description: This lets site visitors know how long they should expect to spend reading a particular post.

Benefits:

• It encourages readers to read a post instead of clicking away.
• It improves engagement with your site content.

73. Redirection

Description: This is a URL webserver technique used to intentionally reroute your site’s visitors from one URL to another.

It can range from redirecting just a single post or page to involving the entire site.

Benefits:

• It is pretty helpful if you change the domain, subdomain, or subdirectory of your site’s content.
• It draws attention to the new location of your site content.

74. Related posts

Description: This allows you to show posts that are in the same categories or tags as the current post the site visitor is reading.

Benefits:

• It encourages readers to interact with your site’s content more.
• It reduces your site’s bounce rate.

75. Reset WordPress

How to reset a WordPress website

Description: This allows you to restore your WordPress installation back to its default state without any content, usually by deleting all of the current content on the site.

Benefits:

• This avoids having to set up WordPress on your hosting from scratch.
• It is useful if your site is hacked and you need to restore your backup.

76. Scroll bar

Description: This is a line that appears beneath your sticky header and informs your site’s visitors how far down the web page they have scrolled and how far they still have to scroll before reaching the end of the page.

Benefits:

• It encourages readers to continue reading a post instead of clicking away.
• It improves engagement with your site content.

77. Scroll to top

Description: This is typically a button or simply a hyperlink that appears after reaching the bottom of a webpage and, upon clicking it, returns users to the top of the webpage.

Benefits:

• It improves site navigation.
• It boosts the user experience of your site.

78. Search bar

Description: This is a bar that users can type in to find the content they require on your site.

With the exception of landing pages, you can add this to any type of website that has multiple pages and posts.

Benefits:

• Improves user experience
• Helps users find relevant information on your site
• Users are more likely to return to your site for more if they find what they are looking for.

79. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Description: This makes your site content available on search engines, allowing online users who are unfamiliar with your website/business to find it.

Optimizing your site with relevant keywords that match the intent of an online searcher is vital for increasing website traffic and generating leads.

You can use SEO to define post titles, how your web pages and blog posts appear in search engines, change your post slugs, keep the URL structure concise, include a meta description, and so on.

Benefits:

• This makes your website’s content visible to search engines.
• Increased organic traffic to your website

80. Security

Description: This adds security features to protect your website from malicious hackers.

Benefits:

• This secures your website
• Prevents loss of your website files.

81. Shortcodes

Description: These are code shortcuts that allow you to quickly and easily embed dynamic content, such as galleries and videos, into WordPress posts, pages, and sidebar widgets.

Benefits:

• They make the process of embedding content easy.
• They simplify the addition of features to a site

82. Site Analytics and statistics

Description: This gives you access to statistics about how your site is performing, such as the number of visitors in a given time period, the bounce rate, and so on.

While this is also possible with Google Analytics, as discussed earlier in this post, this is entirely handled by your site and does not involve the Google platform.

Benefits:

• You gain access to analytic resources pertaining to user visits and activities on your website.
• It provides statistics such as monthly visits, devices used by visitors, and location.

83. Site caching

Description: This is a technology that temporarily stores a copy of your site’s web pages on your visitor’s web browser the first time they visit your site, making the pages load faster when the visitor returns to your site without sacrificing anything.

Benefits:

• Improves site load speed

84. Slider/ slideshow

Description: This is a design element that functions similarly to a slideshow and is used to display several images and videos on your website, typically showing one image or video at a time.

Benefits:

• Content is presented in an automated and engaging manner.
• Useful for displaying important content on your website.

85. Social login

Description: This allows your site visitors to register and log in to your site using their social media profile accounts, including those from popular social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Benefits:

• Makes your site’s registration process faster for your users.
• Logging into your website is made easier.

86. Social media profile

Description: This allows you to add links to your social media profiles to the web pages of your site.

Benefits:

• Users can connect with you on social media
• Your social following contributes to increased organic traffic to your website.

87. Social media sharing

Description: This adds social sharing buttons to your website pages and posts, allowing visitors to share them on their preferred social media platforms.

Benefits:

• Visitors to your website can share your content on social media.
• This fosters greater engagement with your website’s content.

88. Spell checker

Description: This will automatically sift through your site’s text content before publishing it, allowing you to correct spelling and grammar errors and ensure that your content is error-free and grammatically correct before publishing.

Benefits:

• Good spelling and grammar demonstrate the seriousness of your business.
• Removes spelling and grammar errors from your content

89. SSL certificate

Description: An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that verifies the identity of a website and enables Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol for establishing secure encrypted communication between users and your website over the internet.

Benefits:

• Secures sensitive information such as passwords, login information, account information, and so on.
• This informs visitors to your site that they can interact with it safely.
• Increases user trust in your website

90. Sticky header

Description: This keeps your site’s header sticky and visible even when the user scrolls down the page.

Benefits:

• This enhances site navigation
• Helps improve the user experience on your website

91. Sticky widget

Description: This makes a specific widget or widget on your site sticky and always visible on a desktop display.

Benefits:

• It focuses attention on your widgets.
• Suitable for advertisements and important announcements.

92. Stock images

Description: This gives you access to free stock images for use in your posts right from your WordPress website dashboard.

Benefits:

• Access to free images
• Features for editing these free images for use on your website

93. Table

Description: This allows you to create tables in your WordPress site to display content in rows and columns.

Benefits:

• Display content in tables.

94. Table of content

Description: This allows you to create tables in your WordPress site to display content in rows and columns.

Benefits:

• It aids in the organization of sections of your blog posts.
• Enhances site navigation
• Improves the user experience on your website

95. Team list

Description: This section displays a list of your business’s workforce.

Benefits:

• It encourages potential customers to work with your company.
• It demonstrates the strength of each member of your team.

96. Translate WordPress

Description: This allows you to change the text of features that come standard with the WordPress themes and plugins you have installed on your site.

Benefits:

• This modifies your theme’s texts to meet the requirements of your website.

97. Twitter feed

Description: This shows a feed from your Twitter account on your website.

Benefits:

• Visitors can follow you on Twitter
• Visitors can engage with your tweets.

98. User role management

Description: This allows you to manage your site’s users, including their roles and capabilities.

Benefits:

• You have complete control over each user’s access to your website.

99. User switching

Description: This allows you to quickly switch between user accounts in WordPress as you’ll be logged out and back in as the desired user.

Benefits:

• Beneficial in testing environments
• When site administrators must toggle between multiple accounts.

100. YouTube videos

Description: This allows you to display a YouTube video playlist on your WordPress site.

Benefits:

• Embed YouTube playlist on your site.