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14 Best WordPress Grid Plugins to Transform Your WordPress Site Layout

Last Updated on January 12th, 2024

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Nobody likes a blog with just a large wall of text on it. Statistics show that a reader will decide whether or not to actually read your blog in just three seconds. To catch your audience’s attention (and keep it), you need to make your blog visually appealing. And to do that, you must combine text and visual elements in a harmonious manner. 

Customers are more likely to engage with your content if you present your blogs in an informative way. That’s why downloading a grid plugin is a must-do for any blogger. Today, we’ve put together a list of the best WordPress Grid Plugins that you might find useful. Let’s take a look and see which one is right for you!

NextGen by Imagely

NextGen by Imagely - Essential Grid - best wordpress grid plugins

Imagely created NextGEN Gallery, a free and paid WordPress gallery plugin, in 2007. Since its release it’s been prominent among WordPress users, making it the most widely-used WordPress gallery plugin to date. The plugin’s free version has over 1 million active installs around the world. 

NextGEN Gallery has received mixed reviews from users, despite having the most downloads and installations. The plugin has a 3.2 out of 5-star rating on the official WordPress.org plugins list.

The NextGEN Gallery plugin for WordPress helps you to create stunning photo galleries and collections. You can also bulk upload images, import metadata, add/remove/rearrange photos, edit thumbnails, and organize galleries into albums. It’s a full-featured WordPress gallery management app.

Price

  • Plus $79 per year
  • Pro $139 per year
  • Lifetime access $299

Pros

  • Upload your photos in batches to make sorting and grouping easier. 
  • Easily add a watermark, text, or an external link to your images. 
  • Thumbnails, slideshows, and expanded or portable albums are all available to view. 

Cons

  • The free version has limited features.
  • The setup wizard has a tendency to get stuck.

Go to NextGen by Imagely

Essential Grid

Essential Grid - best wordpress grid plugins

Essential Grid is a premium WordPress plugin that lets you create beautiful photo, video, and audio galleries from a variety of sources! You can use the adapted WordPress gallery features in posts and pages, including albums created with other plugins such as NextGen Gallery. You can also link them to major social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Flickr, and others, or create a completely custom gallery grid. 

The template library will show you how to create grids that look great on mobile devices and are simple to customize and fill with your content!

Price

  • Regular License – $69

Pros

  • You have access to all of Essential Grid’s simple models. You can change anything you want about each one on a skin-by-skin basis or just use it as is. Alternatively, you can also make your own from the ground up.
  • In the Global Settings, you can control who can modify and edit grids and how fonts and JavaScript are loaded.
  • It’s also easy to make a post for a new grid. It functions in the same way as adding a new post of some other kind does.

Cons

  • Support only includes emails.

Go to Essential Grid

Media Grid

Media Grid - best wordpress grid plugins

Media Grid is a one-of-a-kind plugin that allows you to easily build limitless responsive, filterable, and paginated portfolios using the masonry engine. 

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Using advanced techniques, you can build your own templates, dynamically or manually mixing any media form and adapting to any container!

Price

  • Regular License – $25

Pros

  • Visitors can quickly scan for unique objects by filtering the grid. 
  • Using a small shortcode, you can add your grid to any post, page widget area, or custom post. 
  • Allows you to customize the overlay by adding additional overlay types.

Cons

  • Customer service is slow and unresponsive. 
  • For certain media forms, there isn’t much flexibility.

Go to Media Grid

The Grid

The Grid - best WordPress grid plugins

The Grid is a premium WordPress grid plugin that lets you display custom post styles in a completely customizable and sensitive grid. It’s ideal for showcasing your blog, portfolio, e-commerce, or any other form of WordPress message. This plugin supports the following post formats: normal, video, audio, gallery, connect and quote. The possibilities are endless, and thanks to a strong admin panel, you can easily manage them.

Price

  • $29 with 6 months support

Pros

  • Use skin builder to create your own skins from the ground up, including changing fonts, hover states, adding animations, selecting media, resizing objects, and defining extracts. 
  • Grids, rows, and columns can all be adjusted easily, including full height and width. 
  • It also works with various media formats, including Vimeo, HTML, SoundCloud, YouTube, and photographs.

Cons

  • Many of its features can seem complicated to new users. 
  • You need to pay an additional fee for year-round assistance.

Go to The Grid

Image Photo Gallery Tiles Grid - best WordPress grid plugins

The key principle is simple: the pictures are not cropped and the original size is maintained (if possible). 

This is a whole new way to create photo galleries because the pictures can now be thought of as tiles of various sizes, allowing you to use a larger size for a cover image, for example. 

Since it can use hardware acceleration and CSS3 properties, the image picture gallery is completely sensitive and adapts to the browser using a pleasant and smooth animation, even on mobile devices.

Price

  • $29

Pros

  • Tiles and Columns are the two formats that are open. 
  • The margin between images can be adjusted. 
  • It can change image rendered size based on the current screen size.

Cons

  • There’s no support in the free version.

Go to Image Photo Gallery Tiles Grid

SmartPost Show

SmartPost Show - best WordPress grid plugins

Without coding, SmartPost Show (formerly Post Carousel) helps you easily filter and view messages, sites, and taxonomy (categories, tags, and post formats) in a beautiful carousel and grid interface. The plugin allows you to quickly build a beautiful post carousel or post grid to draw attention to your WordPress site’s content and keep visitors engaged. 

A user-friendly settings panel is available to assist you in quickly creating your carousel and grid. All of the shortcode generator’s settings are well-organized and defined.

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Price

  • Personal – $39
  • Business – $99
  • Agency – $199

Pros

  • Smart Post Show is SEO-friendly and sensitive right out of the box. On a laptop, tablet, or mobile device, you can change the number of slides that appear.
  • Anything on your web can be customized to your taste. Smart Post Show is really extensible, with a lot of hooks for changing the question and performance. 
  • Smart Post Show is designed for efficiency and success. It adheres to the most up-to-date WordPress coding requirements. It works well on a variety of websites.

Cons

  • The free version doesn’t support category filtering.

Go to SmartPost Show

Rays Grid

Rays Grid - best WordPress grid plugins

Rays Grid is a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to build personalized grid columns. This plugin has a user-friendly options panel and offers you innovative skins to make your site look better and exclusive, with over 1,000 installations in the WordPress community. You can also use any custom post form to build a grid.

Price

  • FREE

Pros

  • It has a high level of performance. 
  • It comes with over 20 different amazing skins. 
  • It’s mobile-friendly and totally responsive. 
  • It allows you to build an infinite number of grids.

Cons

  • Not frequently updated.

Go to Rays Grid

Easy Image Collage

Easy Image Collage - best WordPress grid plugins

You can include photos, galleries, photo archives, image carousels, videos, audio, and even Google Maps in a portfolio. The plugin automatically adds alt tags and title attributes to photos, making them SEO-friendly. It’s also extremely adaptable, supporting videos from 15 different sources as well as audio from three different sources. 

Easy Media Gallery is simple to use, with just a few clicks required to add objects. Customizing the placement, colors (infinite colors available), and adding special effects to products in your portfolio is also a breeze. Additionally, when visitors click on an object in your portfolio, the plugin supports ten different lightbox types. The portfolios are completely sensitive, and you can add filters to make navigation even easier.

Price

  • FREE

Pros

  • You have control over the collage region (grid). You can resize it and each picture inside the grid. 
  • You can change the color of the borders to make them thick, thin, or non-existent. 
  • The collage form is preserved on mobile devices because the images are sensitive.

Cons

  • You can’t add captions to your photos unless you upgrade to the premium edition. 
  • The individual images can’t have alt text because they’re used as background images, so blind people won’t be able to tell what they’re looking at. 
  • Even if background images are enabled for printing, your collage will not print.

Go to Easy Image Collage

Display Posts

Display Posts - best WordPress grid plugins

Display Posts is a common WordPress plugin that lets you display WordPress posts by using shortcodes to create your own custom queries. 

It uses shortcodes to conveniently display your best content anywhere on your web.

Price

  • FREE

Pros

  • The shortcodes used are straightforward and make sense. 
  • The developer has given tutorials on how to incorporate various types of post displays. 
  • The plugin comes with several plugins that you can use to customize it to your needs further.

Cons

  • The shortcode has a lot of options but no styling. For beginners, this will make it a little more difficult to use.

Go to Display Posts

Jetpack Tiled Gallery - best WordPress grid plugin

Jetpack Tiled Galleries is a free plugin that allows you to view images in a variety of ways. WordPress also owns the plugin and includes support for tiled and modeled galleries. This ensures that the gallery plugin can be conveniently installed on a WordPress website.

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Its Jetpack galleries have a variety of shapes, such as tiles, triangles, and circles. Custom widths, multiple column options, and a single gallery view are among the other customization options available. 

Price

  • FREE

Pros

  • Easily inserts gallery posts in a standard way. 
  • It provides automatic styling based on your Jetpack settings. 
  • Allows you to add a caption to each picture that will appear if a user hovers their mouse over it. 
  • Tiled Gallery has various choices for you to choose from, including Tiled Mosaic, Square Tiles, and Circles.

Cons

  • Jetpack will cause your WordPress website to load slowly. 
  • The plugin is directly connected to your WordPress account, and it sends it a lot of data, so there is no utter privacy.

Go to Jetpack Tiled Gallery

 Portfolio Gallery Builder - best WordPress grid plugin

It is the most innovative and searchable WordPress plugin. Numerous customization and styling choices, as well as the most recent updates. It is easy to use, and you have plenty of customization to choose from.  The gallery plugin includes four types of popup boxes: Fancy Box, Lightcase Box, Nivo Box, and Color Box. Users can easily export or import page templates to use on another website. Standard, Auto Load, and Load More are the three types of paginations available. 

Price

  • $17

Pros

  • To build beautiful portfolios, the plugin comes with four more common layout styles: masonry, justify, gallery, and slider. 
  • It can view project tiles, connections, magnification buttons, and descriptions, among other things, thanks to more than 50 predefined effects and animations. 
  • Shortcode support is available for simple customization. 

Cons

  • Customer service is ineffective. 
  • A yearly support fee is required.

Go to Portfolio Gallery Builder

Nimble Portfolio

Nimble Portfolio - best WordPress grid plugin

Nimble Portfolio is a free gallery plugin for WordPress that is very capable. Users can also quickly add websites, posts, custom post forms, videos, and photographs to the gallery using the plugin.

Price

  • FREE

Pros

  • The gallery’s circular thumbnails make it look trendy and tidy, attracting more viewers. 
  • The completely responsive gallery can be filtered to make it easier to locate objects. 
  • It also helps the user to choose how many columns they want. 
  • You can also improve its functionality by combining it with premium add-ons. 

Cons

  • In comparison to other options on the market, the features are minimal. 
  • It takes a long time to get the first answer on live chat.

Go to Nimble Portfolio

Go Portfolio

Go Portfolio - best WordPress grid plugin

Go Portfolio allows you to build a versatile portfolio out of any form of content on your website, including blog posts and custom post styles. It also includes over 38 demos that you can import to get started. There are some truly unique layout choices, such as the one seen in the screenshot above. 

You can also use photographs, videos (from YouTube or Vimeo), and audio players as direct content sources (e.g. a SoundCloud player). You’ll be able to choose from a number of different formats, as well as add real-time category filters and a number of eye-catching hover effects. 

Price

  • $26

Pros

  • After the installation is complete, you can immediately begin attaching media. 
  • Users can also use its customization tools to select from an infinite number of colors and over 600 Google fonts and adjust the image size and spacing. 
  • It also allows an unlimited number of grids to be added using shortcodes in the related page, post, or widget region.

Cons

  • Compatibility with the most recent version of WordPress is limited. 
  • Customers have complained about the inefficiency of customer service.

Go to Go Portfolio

What’s your favorite WordPress Grid Plugin?

Without being biased whatsoever, we [kind of] highly recommend Essential Grid, as this WordPress plugin strives to be an all-in-one grid building solution. After installing this plugin on your blog, you can build grids that are embedded into your posts and pages, as well as displayed in your site’s sidebars. 

These grids can also be shown on the homepage, depending on how your site is set up, making them an appealing way to highlight your content to visitors as soon as they arrive. 

You can display blogs, websites, items, photographs, videos, and a variety of other types of WordPress content in the grids generated with this plugin.

Essential Grid includes a variety of templates and skins for customizing the look of the grids you build, as well as a skin editor for even more customization. The plugin also comes with several options for deciding which content is displayed in a grid and how it is presented.

It’s a Wrap!

This concludes our list of the best grid plugins for your WordPress blog.

Grids are an ideal building block for responsive design because they can be scaled without breaking the overall structure of a website. 

Moreover, it is important to note that using the best WordPress grid plugins for your website will accommodate various post formats and lets you have stellar optimization so that they do not slow you down. Most importantly, it makes it easy as all you have to do is create your content, and the attractive grids will keep your visitors on your site longer and stimulate higher conversions! Cool, huh?

Let us know how you get on!

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.