If you’re using WordPress for your educational institution’s website, there are some excellent plugins that can help you create a great experience for your students and alumni while also streamlining your own administrative processes.
In this post, we’ve categorized 40+ essential WordPress plugins into 13 types that can help universities and schools improve functionality and efficiency.
Rather than a scattershot listing of individual plugins, we’ll highlight the types of plugins that can benefit your institution and recommend top options within each category.
Here are the 13 types of plugins that can enhance your university or education websites — keep reading for a much more detailed look at why we think each type is important and which top plugins to consider:
1. Form plugin
Every WordPress-powered education website needs a flexible form plugin to handle all the various public and internal forms that your educational organization needs to create, including:
…and pretty much anything else you can think to throw at it.
Beyond basic forms, a powerful plugin can also integrate with third-party tools that your institution is using, such as:
- Student management systems
- Customer relationship manager (CRM)
- Tuition payment platforms
Some plugins can even help you build various types of automation, such as business process workflows that require administrative work.
Here are some of the best form plugins to consider for your educational website:
- Gravity Forms — a flexible premium form plugin that has a large library of third-party extensions, in addition to its many official add-ons. Educational institutions might be especially interested in pairing it with the developer’s Gravity Flow plugin, which allows for flexible business process automation based on your forms. According to the Gravity Forms homepage, it’s used by well-known universities like Yale and Penn State University.
- WS Form — a newer freemium form plugin that already gives you a lot of flexibility for setting up different types of forms and integrating them with various services.
- Formidable Forms — another flexible option that can work for a ton of different form types and also supports automation. It also includes hundreds of pre-made templates to help you save time and a built-in feature to display form entry data on the frontend of your site.
2. Event manager plugin
Most educational institutions host various events on a regular basis. These could be events for existing students, alumni, prospective students/families, faculty, administrative staff, etc.
With an event manager plugin, you’ll be able to manage all of these events on the backend and then display them on the frontend in various formats, including calendars and lists. Most event plugins support both in-person events and online events, so you can easily handle both formats.
Some event plugins also offer ticketing functionality, which could be helpful if your organization ever hosts free or paid ticketed events.
Here are some of the top event manager plugins for educational institutions to consider:
- WP Event Manager — a freemium plugin that supports physical and digital events, one-time or recurring events, event calendars, and other important features. It can also handle selling tickets if you ever host ticketed events.
- Events Manager — while the interface and default designs can look a little dated, this freemium plugin offers all the essential event functionality that most educational organizations will need. It’s also very generous with its free functionality and easy to customize.
- The Events Calendar — a popular freemium plugin that offers a polished experience and all essential event functionality. You can also pair it with the developer’s Event Tickets plugin to handle ticketed events.
3. Custom content plugin (custom post types and custom fields)
Educational institutions most times need to go beyond WordPress’s built-in Post and Page data types to also add other types of content structures. For example, if you’re creating a WordPress university website, you might want to create data types for departments, faculty, etc.
To handle these custom data types, you can use WordPress custom post types and custom fields. While you can manage these with code, it’s a lot more efficient to use one of the existing custom content plugins.
Here are some of the top plugins that you can use to work with custom post types and custom fields:
- Pods — a flexible option that’s 100% free and lets you work with custom post types and custom fields.
- Meta Box — a freemium plugin that supports both custom fields and custom post types. It also offers a one-time payment lifetime plan, which can offer long-term cost savings for your organization.
- Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) — while ACF is mostly focused on custom fields, it also lets you create and manage custom post types.
- Toolset — a premium option that helps you not only create custom post types and custom fields, but also more easily display the data from those custom content types on your frontend site.
4. Learning management system (LMS) plugin
A WordPress LMS plugin helps you create and deliver course content through your WordPress website.
For a university, you might want to rely on more heavy-duty learning management software such as Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, etc. However, if you just want a lightweight solution to deliver course content through your existing WordPress site, an LMS plugin could be a good solution.
LMS plugins can also work well for smaller educational institutions that don’t require the more robust functionality of a university-level LMS tool.
If you want to explore this area, here are some of the best WordPress LMS plugins to consider:
- LearnDash — a popular premium plugin that offers some of the most advanced functionality for assignments and gradebook management, if you purchase the ProPanel add-on.
- LifterLMS — a freemium plugin that can support assignments, quizzes, and grades. The core plugin is free and you can purchase extensions to add more functionality.
- Tutor LMS — a freemium plugin that can handle free or paid courses and also supports the ability to add multiple instructors.
- LearnPress — another popular freemium option that still offers a lot of functionality even in its free version. The developer also offers education-focused WordPress themes that are designed to pair well with the LearnPress plugin.
5. School manager plugin
If you want more of an all-in-one solution for your educational institution, you could consider a dedicated school manager plugin.
These plugins typically include functionality for a lot of backend school administrative tasks, including the following:
- Student information management, including attendance, grades, and disciplinary records.
- Teacher and admin staff management, including performance records.
- Finance management, including tuition and fees.
- Timetable management for classes and other schedules.
- Admissions management for accepting student applications and other related tasks.
- Library management for managing circulation and inventory.
- Communication tools to send emails to parents, students, and staff.
For example, here’s the main school dashboard from a plugin named The School Management:
School management plugins are much larger in scope than the other types of plugins on this list, so expect some added complexity. You should think deeply about whether you want to add these school management functions to your actual WordPress install or if you’d prefer to use a third-party tool.
If you do want to use a WordPress school management plugin, here are some options to consider:
- WPSchoolPress — the most popular option on the WordPress.org plugin directory. The core plugin is free and you can purchase paid add-ons to extend its functionality, including support for online fee payments.
- The School Management — another popular option that can handle all essential school management functionality. There’s also a Pro version that costs $49.
- School Management System — an affordable premium option that’s available at Envato’s CodeCanyon marketplace. It costs $59 for lifetime updates and six months of support.
6. Social media plugin
Social media is a great place for your educational institution to connect with current and former students and their families. To help you integrate your organization’s social media accounts into your WordPress website, you can use one or more of the many available WordPress social media plugins.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the top options for different social functions:
- Novashare — a lightweight premium option that can create social media share and follow buttons.
- Spotlight — a good freemium option for embedding one or more Instagram feeds in your site.
- Smash Balloon — a flexible option for embedding social feeds that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube, and TikTok. You can purchase individual integrations or a bundle of all integrations.
- Simple Social Buttons — a simple freemium option for adding social share buttons.
- Blog2Social — a freemium option that lets you automatically share blog posts and other content on your social media profiles.
7. Search engine optimization (SEO) plugin
While the core WordPress software does a lot of things well, search engine optimization (SEO) is not one of those things. If you want to optimize your educational institution’s website to rank in search engines like Google, you’ll need the help of a WordPress SEO plugin.
SEO plugins can handle basic optimizations such as setting SEO titles and meta descriptions, as well as more technical strategies for improving your site’s rankings.
Here are some of the best WordPress SEO plugins to consider:
8. User registration plugin
If you want to use your WordPress website to handle user accounts for your students and/or faculty, you’ll probably want a WordPress user registration plugin to handle registration-related tasks on your site.
Using a dedicated registration plugin will give you more control over your site’s registration form and also more flexibility for assigning user roles. For example, you could have one form for students that assigns them the “Student” user role and a different one for faculty that assigns them the “Faculty” user role.
Depending on your specific feature needs, you could also skip this and just use one of the form plugins from above, as those form plugins can offer some (but not all) of the functionality in registration plugins.
Here are some of the best WordPress user registration plugins to consider:
- User Registration & Membership — a freemium plugin that can help you create custom registration forms and assign user roles. It also offers basic membership functionality and content restriction.
- Ultimate Member — another popular freemium plugin that can help you customize the registration experience. It also has other membership functionality such as content restriction and member directories (which could be useful for displaying faculty).
- Profile Builder — a freemium plugin that lets you customize your user registration form(s) and handle user role assignment(s). It can also work for lightweight role-based content restrictions, but it doesn’t offer as many membership features as the previous two plugins.
9. Community plugin
If you are using WordPress to manage user accounts for students, faculty, and/or alumni, you might also want to consider adding a community plugin to your site.
Community plugins can unlock useful social functionality such as user groups, discussion forums, and public user profiles, which can create an engaging space for users.
Here are some of the top WordPress social community plugins:
- BuddyPress — a 100% free plugin that adds a lot of social community functions such as frontend user profiles, user groups, friendships, activity streams, private messaging, etc. It also has a large library of third-party extensions.
- PeepSo — a freemium option that supports a lot of the same functionality as BuddyPress, including frontend user profiles, activity streams, user groups, private messages, etc.
You could also consider adding a WordPress forum plugin to the mix for more robust discussion board functionality. Both of the plugins above work well with most forum plugins, including bbPress.
10. File/document management plugin
Your educational institution will almost certainly need to manage a lot of files and documents. These could be internal files that you don’t want to make public or files that you want to make available to your site’s visitors, such as printable forms.
To improve WordPress’s document management functionality, you can consider installing a dedicated WordPress document/download manager.
Here are some of the top download manager plugins to consider:
- Download Monitor — a freemium plugin that lets you manage downloads from your WordPress dashboard, including tracking downloads, restricting access, generating download links, connecting to cloud storage, and other useful features.
- Download Manager — another freemium option that offers similar features to the Download Monitor plugin.
11. WordPress multisite plugin
A lot of WordPress university websites rely on WordPress multisite because it can be really useful for managing different department websites. While WordPress multisite itself is a core feature that doesn’t require a plugin (you just need to enable it and set it up), there are a lot of plugins that can help you more effectively manage your multisite network.
Here’s a quick rundown of some plugins that can be helpful for managing WordPress multisite:
- User Switching — a free plugin that lets you quickly switch between user accounts, which can be helpful for experiencing your multisite network with different user roles.
- WordPress Multisite User Sync/Unsync — a freemium plugin that lets you easily sync/unsync one or more user accounts between different network sites.
- WordPress Multisite Content Copier/Updater — another freemium plugin from the same developer that lets you copy/update content between network sites, including support for custom post types (with the paid version).
- Multisite Shared Media for WordPress — a $30 premium plugin that lets you easily sync media files (documents, images, etc.) across one or more network sites.
If you’re using WordPress multisite for your university, it’s important to use WordPress hosting that can handle the unique needs of a multisite network. Kinsta’s multisite hosting ensures optimal performance while providing valuable tools like a staging environment and advanced performance optimizations.
With Kinsta’s PHP Performance Add-on, you can:
- Increase your total PHP memory pool
- Boost the number of PHP threads
- Expand the PHP memory limit
These enhancements help maintain fast, stable, and scalable performance across your entire network of sites.
12. Multilingual/translation plugin
If your educational institution is targeting a multilingual student body, you’ll probably want to offer your site’s content in two more languages.
While WordPress doesn’t offer built-in multilingual functionality, you can easily add this using one of the many quality multilingual plugins out there.
Here are some of the top options to translate your website:
- TranslatePress — a freemium option that lets you manually or automatically translate 100% of your site’s content. It stores translations locally and you can manage them from a visual interface. It offers its own automatic translation service powered by popular models or you can connect directly to Google Translate or DeepL.
- WPML — a premium option that lets you manually or automatically translate 100% of your site’s content. It stores translations locally and gives you multiple interfaces for managing translations. You can also choose between multiple machine translation services if you’re using automatic translation.
- Polylang — a freemium option that only supports manual translation in the free core plugin. You can add automatic DeepL translation with the Pro version, though, and there are third-party extensions that add support for other machine translation services.
13. Performance plugin
Finally, you’ll also want your educational organization’s website to load quickly for your visitors.
If you use Kinsta’s managed hosting for educational institutions, Kinsta will already implement some essential performance strategies for you, which can eliminate the need to use separate performance plugins. In addition to optimized infrastructure, these features include server-level caching, edge caching on a content delivery network (CDN), and image optimization.
However, if you’re using a different host that doesn’t handle these performance optimizations for you, you might need to use one or more performance plugins to optimize your site.
Here are some useful WordPress performance plugins:
- WP Rocket — a premium performance plugin that uses an all-in-one approach, including most popular optimization strategies.
- FlyingPress — another all-in-one premium performance plugin that has a similar approach to WP Rocket.
- Perfmatters — a premium plugin that includes a lot of smaller performance strategies, including a useful tool that lets you enable/disable scripts on a page-by-page basis.
The free Query Monitor plugin can also be really handy for debugging performance issues, though it won’t speed up your site by itself.
Summary
With our picks for the best WordPress education plugins, you can set up your institution’s digital experience for success.
Choosing the right plugin stack will depend a lot on your educational institution’s unique needs. For example, some institutions will prefer to use third-party software for essential school management functionality, while others might be happy using a self-hosted WordPress school management plugin.
It’s also important to remember that plugins alone will not create a successful WordPress education website. You’ll also need performant and reliable hosting to power your website and plugins.
Kinsta’s education hosting can help educational institutions of all sizes host WordPress sites that load quickly, are reliable, and are secure from malicious actors. Check out Kinsta’s education WordPress hosting today to learn more.
Colin Newcomer is a freelance writer with over 10 years of experience with WordPress and internet marketing. You can connect with him on Twitter or at cnewcomer.com.
