You should have already known that having a fully-functional travel website is crucial in order to scale your travel business. Thanks to WordPress, creating a travel website and setting it up is merely easy and time-saving.
You can find many travel themes to start a travel blog in the WordPress marketplace. However, your work doesn’t end here!
Once you create your travel website using any of the WordPress themes, it is necessary to install a few important travel plugins as well. Having few travel plugins installed on your website helps you to enhance your website’s functionality and make it more powerful.
Like travel themes, WordPress is no short of a wide variety of travel plugins. However, sometimes, the sheer volume of plugins can create more hassle and confusion in your mind.
Well, don’t worry! You have come to the right place to clear away your doubt as we will here give you detailed insights on 10 must-have WordPress plugins for every travel website.
A general rule of thumb is that before deciding on the best plugin for your website, you should go through its features and functionalities. Then, you should analyze its rating and reviews and see how frequently it gets updated.
Talking about the features part, suppose if you want to create a website for a travel agency, you need to have a travel booking plugin like WP Travel Engine. Similarly, for a normal travel blog or any type of travel website, having an SEO plugin like RankMath is a must.
So, we have already given you a sneak peek of two of the must-have plugins listed in this review article. Read the article carefully to explore more plugins and to know their peculiar features.
Now, let’s get along with the details!
WP Travel Engine is undoubtedly one of the best free travel booking WordPress plugins. This WordPress plugin is your best bet to create travel and tour packages for your travel website. It is a complete travel management system that introduces a handful of advanced features.
This plugin enables you to add a trip, day-to-day itineraries, trip gallery, trip description, duration, price, FAQs, as well cost excludes and includes. WP Travel Engine includes a smart booking process where the price automatically gets altered based on the number of users selected for booking.
On top of that, this plugin allows you to create several activities pages such as hiking, skiing, sightseeing, etc. You can even categorize your trips as per their types. Similarly, it enables you to create travel destination pages. With that, whenever your clients visit a particular destination page, he/she can see each and every trip that belongs to that destination.
WP Travel Engine features an inquiry form on the trip page so that your clients can easily find it and fill it out to contact you. Besides, every time your customer books a trip on your website, you can get an email notification with all the booking details.
This plugin integrates with the PayPal standard payment processing. Your clients can easily book trips online, and you can receive payment using your PayPal account. On top of that, WP Travel Engine supports more payment options through premium extensions, including Stripe, Authorized.net, PayU Money, PayU Biz, PayFast, and so on.
Some of the other handy extensions of the WP Travel Engine plugin are trip fixed starting dates, trip search, itinerary downloader, group discount, currency converter, and many more. The plugin comes translation-ready, which enables you to build your website in any language.
Key Takeaways
- Easy to customize and flexible
- Unlimited travel packages
- The smart travel booking process
- Easy-to-use inquiry form
- PayPal payment processing
- Premium payment gateways extensions including Stripe, PayU Biz, PayFast, Authorized.net, PayU Money
- Itinerary builder
- Unlimited trip facts
- Destination page, activities page, and trip type page
- Advanced extensions like trip fixed starting dates, group discount, trip search, itinerary downloader, currency converter
- Translation ready
- Quick and friendly support
2. RankMath (SEO Plugin)
RankMath is a popular all-in-one SEO plugin that is a must-have for your travel website. This WordPress plugin makes it effortless for you to optimize your blog content with built-in suggestions based on widely-accepted best practices. It is a fast-growing user-friendly plugin with a handful of benefits.
RankMath introduces a handful of modern-day SEO features. The best among them is that it comes with a 100-point page analysis test that goes broad into the needs of each page. Besides, it also enables you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free.
Other than that, this plugin offers a 1x-click advanced SEO analysis tool that enables you to perform a wide audit in a flash. It also allows you to manage meta tags for things like nofollow, noindex, and noarchive. And best of them all— RankMath is completely free.
Compared to Yoast SEO ( which is another popular SEO plugin), RankMath provides almost every feature offered by the paid version of Yoast for free of cost.
RankMath makes use of less coding and fewer PHP requests than Yoast SEO. Hence, it offers higher speed than Yoast SEO. Another reason to choose RankMath over Yoast SEO is that it permits you to optimize for up to 5 keywords. Using the free version of Yoast, you can only optimize for one focus/primary keyword.
Want to explore the difference between RankMath and Yoast SEO? Go through the article on Yoast Vs RankMath, WordPress SEO Plugins Comparison.
Key Takeaways
- Easy-to-follow set up process
- Simple and interactive user interface
- Broken link checker and 404 error monitor
- One-click SEO audit
- Automatic SEO image optimizer
- Google keyword suggestions
- XML sitemap
- Rich snippets
- Internal linking recommendations
- Quick and easy support
3. Contact Form 7 (Contact Us Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is a popular plugin with over 5 million downloads that manages multiple contact forms. Besides, it enables you to customize the form and the mail content flexibly with simple markup. This plugin is very useful for you to create a contact form for your travel website so that your website visitors can contact you easily.
This is free contact us form plugin and it supports AJAX-powered form submitting. Contact Form 7 makes use of WordPress REST API for AJAX submission. You can simply insert contact forms into any post or page using the shortcode.
The plugin introduces a Drag & Drop builder feature that lets you quickly set up your contact forms on your travel website without any codes. It also includes the Conditional Logic feature that shows or hides related fields, sections, and elements based on your customer’s selection.
The Multi-Page forms feature of this plugin lets your users fill-up a contact us form portion-by-portion. In addition. Contact Form 7 includes the Entry Management feature that allows you to manage and sort the information coming to your contact forms.
Contact Form 7 integrates seamlessly with email marketing services like Constant Contact by default. Likewise, it supports the reCAPTCHA and Akismet for spam protection. You can also accept payments quickly using your contact forms with the Payment Acceptance feature of this plugin.
Using this plugin, you can build an unlimited number of contact forms, use several types of fields like date, URL, email, and text, and also incorporate the email address of your choice to receive your messages from customers.
The support is another best part of this contact form plugin as it includes documentation, a support forum, an FAQ, and a full website with information.
Key Takeaways
- Drag and Drop Form Builder to quickly set up your contact forms without coding
- Uses WordPress REST API for AJAX submission
- Includes conditional logic function that lets you show or hide fields, sections, and elements based on your users’ selection
- Ability to create an unlimited number of contact forms
- Supports Multi-Page forms feature to allows your users to fill-up a contact us form portion-by-portion
- Features Entry Management system to manage and sort information
- Accepts payments for subscription and purchases
- Integrates with the email marketing service like Constant Contact
- Supports reCAPTCHA and Akismet for spam protection
- Totally free and includes documentation, an FAQ, a support forum, and a full website with information
- Quick and easy support
4. W3 Total Cache (Caching Plugin)
A caching plugin ensures that your website runs as fast as possible. It is very crucial for your travel website or any other website.
W3 Total Cache is a handy caching plugin that improves the SEO and overall user experience of your website by improving website performance and reducing load times. It leverages features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
This plugin includes some advanced caching features like caching compressed pages and posts, compressed CSS and Javascript, and database objects. On top of that, it also offers you various options for caching methods — Local Disk, Redis, Memcached, XCache, and more.
With W3 Total Cache installed, you can see improvements in search engine result page rankings, especially if your travel website is mobile-friendly and uses SSL. The plugin ensures 10x improvement in overall website performance which surely boosts your user experience.
Besides, the plugin also features the minification function of pages, posts, JavaScript, and CSS. It also supports some crucial tools for speed optimization and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). With the optimized progressive render, your website pages start rendering quickly and can be interacted more efficiently.
Key Takeaways
- Fully compatible with shared hosting
- Transparent CDN management with media library, theme files, and WordPress
- Mobile support
- Supports Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Supports Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
- Caching of minified CSS and JavaScript
- Caching of feeds like site, categories, tags, comments, and search results
- Features caching methods like local Disk, Redis, Memcached, APC, APCu, eAccelerator, XCache, and WinCache
- Improves conversion rate and site performance
- Supports browser caching using cache-control
- Includes various security features to help ensure website safety
- Quick and easy support
5. HTML5 Maps (Maps Plugin)
Interactive maps are always a great way to showcase the traveled destinations if you own a travel website. A free WordPress plugin like HTML5 Maps can be your best bet for this purpose.
HTML5 Maps allows you to embed the colorful interactive, responsive map to your WordPress website. An interactive map offers your website geographically-related content or an effective navigation system. This comes in handy for travel websites as you can pin different travel destinations for your customer’s convenience.
You can just add a unique shortcode to any page, and you will find a fully functional map on your website within a few seconds. It also allows you to add popups or informational side panels near the map.
HTML5 Maps lets you choose from several predefined maps, including World, US, UK, Germany, Italy, France, etc. New maps and geographical regions get added continuously.
This plugin is fully responsive and mobile-friendly, which is a big boost if your users surf your website from mobile devices. It perfectly works on smartphones, tablets, desktops, and laptops.
Key Takeaways
- Interactive map of a specific country or region
- Responsive design and custom-color regions
- Works on Android, iPhone, and iPad
- Includes clickable regions (continents, regions, states, and countries)
- Popup windows that show when your mouse cursor is over a specific region
- Customizable landing page links
- An easy to use shortcode for easy map placement
- Quick and easy support
6. Google Analytics (Analytics Plugin)
Google Analytics is the most important plugin that allows you to track your website traffic and see what pages are most viewed and where the web traffic is coming from. You can simply install this plugin and integrate it with your travel website to access Google Analytics reports in the same user interface you use every day to write and manage your posts.
This plugin provides various features, including a number of visitors every day, unique visitors, and returning visitors. Besides, it gives insights on most viewed pages, visitor’s behavior, source of incoming traffic, and bounce rate percentage of your blog.
This amazing tool not only offers you accurate statistics on blog traffic but also tracks almost everything a cookie can store on each unique visitor. You can also get a sneak peek at the live traffic status of your blog through Google Analytics.
As it is effortless to monitor, analyze, and measure visitor engagement for your travel website directly from your WordPress dashboard, you can easily make strategic plans to scale your blog. Unlike other WordPress plugins, Google Analytics has no monthly fees or paid upgrades. All of its features are free of cost.
Getting started with the Google Analytics plugin is super easy. You need to simply download the plugin, log into Google, and select the required website. After that, the plugin will automatically include the appropriate code, and you are ready to analyze your website in less than 10 minutes.
Key Takeaways
- Insights on 10 most viewed pages
- Displays your website’s page views, users, pages per session, and bounce rate
- Shows the five top traffic sources that derive most visitors to your website
- Mobile-friendly and responsive
- Easy to set up and use
- Ability to track conversions by setting up goals
- Ability to improve page views and pages per session
- Insights on users and traffic based on demography (age and gender)
- GDPR compliance
- Quick and easy support
7. Editorial Calendar (WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin)
To make your travel blog successful, you must publish articles on a strict schedule on your website. Google rewards websites for being predictable as they know that users want to get their desired content in a predictable time.
Thankfully, a free WordPress plugin named Editorial Calendar helps you organize your posting schedule and manage the posts on your travel website. In general, the Editorial Calendar plugin offers a better overview of your website.
Editorial Calendar shows an easy-to-use drag and drop calendar. All of your draft posts get displayed on the right side of your screen. You can simply drag and drop the titles onto the day in the calendar that you would like to publish. You can easily set the time of publishing and schedule it right from the plugin.
Besides, the block calendar view gives you the day-by-day details of published posts, posts scheduled to be published, as well as dates with nothing scheduled. You can effortlessly manage drafts as well as perform quick edits to your blog posts.
For your convenience, this calendar plugin is available in different languages, including English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and so on.
Key Takeaways
- Easy to navigate all of your posts and publish dates
- Drag and drop functionality to change your post dates
- Includes a new drafts drawer to manage your drafts
- Ability to quickly edit post titles, content, and times
- Easy to check the status of your blog posts
- Ability to manage posts from multiple authors
- Quick and easy support
8. Akismet Anti-Spam (Security Plugin)
As your travel website grows, you start noticing a bunch of spam comets appearing in your comments section on your blog posts. These annoying spam messages can never be completely avoided; however, there is a WordPress plugin that helps you to limit your spam comets to an absolute minimum.
Akismet Anti-Spam is the solution you are looking for and it is undoubtedly the most popular WordPress plugin out there. This plugin prevents malicious comments from being published on your website. Besides, it also checks form submissions to secure you from being inundated by spam.
Each and every comment comes with a status history. As a result, you can see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator. The plugin displays URLs in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
Akismet Anti-Spam includes a discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you enough disk space and helps to speed up your website. This plugin offers a free version for personal blog sites. On the other hand, businesses can get it for a certain fee depending on the number of websites they want to protect.
Once you complete the installation and activation of Akismet Anti-Spam, you will be prompted to get an Akismet.com API key to use it. This API key is absolutely free for personal blogs.
Key Takeaways
- Free API keys for personal blogs
- Automatically checks all comments and filters out spams
- Offers clear insights on which comments were cleared or caught
- Shows URLs in the comment body to expose hidden or misleading links
- Provides details on the number of approved comments for each user to moderators
- Introduces a discard feature that blocks worst spams
- Saves you enough disk space and speeds up your website
- Quick and easy support
9. WP Smush (Image Optimization Plugin)
As a travel blogger, you will have many large photos to upload. Well, this can really slow down your website. Therefore, it is recommended for you to use an image optimization tool to speed up the load time of your travel site.
WP Smush is one such optimization plugin that compresses your photos automatically on upload. Using this plugin, you can not only auto-compress images on upload but also batch compress previously uploaded photos saving around 70% of the space. In the process, you won’t lose out on visible image quality.
WP Smush is tested number one for speed and quality. It is the award-winning, back-to-back proven crowd favorite image optimization and compression plugin for WordPress. This plugin also lets you resize your images. You can set a maximum height and width for large images and scale them down as they are being compressed.
This free plugin processes all types of file formats like PNG, JPEG, and GIF for optimum results. Smush enables you to compress any image in any directory so that you get to optimize all the images on your website. These images can include nextgen images, images stored on Amazon S3 using WP Offload Media as well as images in WordPress plugin and theme package.
Furthermore, WP Smush features a wrong size image finder. You just need to activate this handy feature and you can see your images highlighted with smart scaling tips. It is easy to quickly locate images that are keeping you away from getting a perfect Google PageSpeed test score.
In addition to that, WP Smush is multisite compatible as it offers both individual and global multisite settings.
Key Takeaways
- Easy to strip unused data and compress images without losing image quality
- Support lazy load
- Includes image resizing feature
- Ability to optimize and compress up to 50 images with one click
- Ability to detect incorrect size image
- Features automated optimization
- Includes Gutenberg Block integration
- Processes all types of files like JPEG, PNG, and GIF
- Multisite compatible
- Quick and easy support
10. UpdraftPlus
WordPress can be vulnerable at times, and you may have to lose your important credentials due to annoying bugs. As a result, it is essential to create backups of your travel website. Thankfully, there is a plugin like UpdraftPlus to help you with the backup and restoration process.
With over 3 million active installations so far, UpdraftPlus is the top-ranked and most popular scheduled backup plugin. It simplifies your process of backing up your website files and databases into the cloud. You can later restore your backups easily with a single click if anything goes wrong with your website.
You get both free and premium versions of this plugin. You can set up complete, manual, or scheduled backups of your website database, plugins, and themes, even using the free version of this plugin.
However, if you switch to its paid version, you get some of the most advanced features. For instance, the premium version supports website cloning and migration, an option to backup non-WordPress files from your server, and incremental backups.
UpdraftPlus allows you to backup your website files via Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze, Microsoft OneDrive, and so on.
Key Takeaways
- Convenient backup and quick restoration with a single click
- Supports full, manual, and scheduled backups
- Full website backup including database, themes, and plugins
- Supports backup via Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, UpdraftVault, and so on (free version)
- Supports backup via Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft OneDrive, SFTP, and so on (pro version)
- Incremental backups (pro version)
- Easy to migrate and duplicate websites (pro version)
- Database encryption (pro version)
- Backs up non-WordPress files and databases to multiple remote destinations (pro version)
- Multisite and multi-network compatible (pro version)
Which WordPress Plugin is Best for Travel Websites?
Every plugin mentioned in this review benefits your website in a different way. As a result, it is very crucial to have these plugins installed on your travel website to enhance its functionality.
As per our recommendation, the must-have plugins among these 10 plugins are:
WP Travel Engine helps you with online booking functionality. It enables you to add a trip, day-to-day itineraries, trip gallery, trip description, duration, price, FAQs, as well cost excludes and includes.
This plugin integrates with PayPal standard payment processing for booking payment settlement. It also supports more payment options through premium extensions, including Stripe, Authorized.net, PayU Money, PayU Biz, PayFast, and so on.
The next plugin, RankMath, is a must-have plugin if you want to rank your travel website higher on search engines.
It comes with a 100-point page analysis test that goes broad into the needs of each page. Besides, it also enables you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free.
Similarly, you need the Google Analytics plugin to analyze your audience’s behavior on your website.
This plugin provides a variety of features including a number of visitors every day, unique visitors, and returning visitors. Besides, it gives insights on most viewed pages, visitor’s behavior, source of incoming traffic, and bounce rate percentage of your blog.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
How many plugins should a WordPress travel website have?
Yes, you need to have plugins installed on your travel website to enhance its functionality. However, having too many plugins on your website can make a negative impact on your website.
Too many plugins can result in security breaches on your website, site crashes, bad performance, and slow loading speeds. In general, you should never exceed 20 plugins on your website. Besides, if your travel website is hosted on shared or budget cloud hosting, it is recommended not to use more than 5-10 plugins.
How can I add a plugin to my travel website?
Once you login to your WordPress dashboard, you should click on the Add New button on the Plugins menu. You can then see the Install Plugins page that you can use for installing plugins from inside the dashboard. The dashboard is also the place where you search for your desired plugins.
You can type for the travel plugin you want on the search bar. After that, you get redirected to the Install and Activate page to install and activate the travel plugin for your travel website.
Similarly, you can also look for the coveted travel plugins on third-party websites and download the zip file of the respective plugin. After that, you can quickly upload the zip file on the Plugins section to install and activate the travel plugin on your travel website.
What is the good thing about the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin?
Akismet plugin is best known for its easy setup, impeccable functioning, and robust protective measures. It is a smart plugin that has its own spam filtering algorithm. The plugin runs comments in its algorithm and decides accordingly on its own. Finally, it successfully blocks all conceivable malicious content.
Can WordPress travel plugins contain viruses?
Well, yes! A WordPress travel plugin can definitely contain a virus or bug. Besides, if it is written poorly, it can open your website up to attacks. As a result, you should always use reputable plugins that have been downloaded most times and are updated on a regular basis. Besides, to be extra safe, download the plugin on your pc first and scan it using the antivirus software. After making sure everything is alright, upload it through the plugins dashboard.
Our Thoughts
All of the afore-mentioned 10 must-have WordPress plugins for every travel website suits travel agencies, travel blogs, as well as travel and tour companies. In addition to that, some of the plugins help you to create an advanced website with hotel booking, online payment, localized currency, and similar other features.
One thing is sure that, these 10 plugins will save you time, increase useability, and will ultimately help you to attract more traffic to your travel website. It’s up to you to select the plugins based on your website’s requirements.
There are new plugins added to the WordPress directory every day. As a result, we surely have missed including some recent plugins in this list. Which plugins do you find the most useful? Please kindly share in the comments section below and tell us why they are so crucial.
Also, check out this guide 19 Must-Have Features For Travel Agency Websites, to find out the key features a travel agency website should have.