Imagine you’re a teacher with a simple WordPress site. You’re excited about the new school year, but you’d like to give your students some digital documents to help them prepare for class and understand the material. Your first priority is to share all assignments and tests with the class throughout the semester. You have the PDF file, but you’re not able to turn it into a printable blog post or page.
Why doesn’t WordPress have a PDF viewer where visitors can view a full PDF and download it if they want? WordPress has a lot of features, but a PDF viewer isn’t one of them. Luckily, the wonderful world of WordPress PDF viewer plugins comes to the rescue.
What is a PDF Viewer and When to Use It?
Take our teacher and class example from earlier. In this situation, there is no substitute for a visible, printable PDF on the class website. Chances are, half of the students will throw away the printed handouts, and the idea of copying and pasting the PDF content into a blog post is a formatting and printing nightmare.
PDFs are great for many situations, and a PDF belgium email list plugin allows you to embed a full-featured PDF viewer into a WordPress page.
This way, visitors can flip through the pages Top 10 WordPress just like a real document, and at the same time zoom in, take notes, and print the document when needed. Some of the pdf plugins offer other useful tools to convert a blog post into a PDF or generate a cover image for a PDF you upload to your WordPress blog.
In short, a standard PDF viewer allows users to view a PDF file as if the file was saved on their own computer. They get the expected capabilities of a PDF, along with other useful features that WordPress plugin developers have included.
When Should You Use a PDF Viewer?
- Once you have a great document formatted and converted to a PDF, it would be a waste to rewrite or reformat it.
- To display large documents that would look awkward like a blog post or page.
- If you need to share links to documents that should not be modified by the people who downloaded them, you can technically convert a PDF to an editable document, but there are ways to secure PDF documents or at Top how to easily create tables in wordPress with tablePress 10 WordPress least make them harder to modify.
- When you share documentation that needs to be signed and dated by numerous people. For example, a real estate agent might send the same contract to hundreds of clients or simply have everyone download it from a website.
- If you want to share something online without it being detectable by search engines. An example might be an eBook, where burkina faso business directory you would prefer to protect the content and not have it crawled by search engines.
- When you need to generate a PDF based on your current website content, such as a series of blog posts you’d like to turn into an eBook.
Best WordPress PDF Viewers in 2025
To help you filter through all the available options, here are the 10 best WordPress PDF viewer plugins worth checking out (in no particular order).
