This guide will tell you some of the WordPress plugins that must-have on any WordPress blog. However, there are plenty of free WordPress themes and plugins available. But not all of them are useful.
WordPress is a popular platform to create a website and do you know that 30.8% of the web powered by WordPress.
Most bloggers use the WordPress platform. Because it is easy to use and anyone can start a website or blog on WordPress within 5 minutes and there are lots of themes & plugins available as well.
Here I have listed the essential plugins for WordPress that should be on every blog.
Brief Descriptions of The Content
Must Have Plugins for WordPress
Creating a blog is very easy on WordPress. But creating a website is not your last step. You will also need to add more features and for this you will need plugins.
There are thousands of plugins available for WordPress that can confuse a newbie which plugin is right for them.
Do not worry…! Here is the WordPress plugins list that should be on every blog.
Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet is an antispam plugin developed by Automattic. It checks spam comments and contact form submissions on your blog and prevents from publishing malicious content.
But you’ll need an Akismet API key to use it which is free for personal blogs.
It has the ability to automatically remove all junk comments from your website or blog. Alternatively, you can also use the Antispam Bee plugin to protect your blog from spam.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most popular and best SEO plugin in the WordPress repository. It is available in both free and paid versions.
This plugin makes your WordPress blog more SEO friendly and helps to get higher rank in search engines.
It provides solid toolsets and helps to optimize your site well for Search engines.
You can add Meta description to the homepage, single post or page, and social sharing. Apart from this you cancreate a sitemap, edit your Robots.txt and .htaccess file and many more. [Yoast SEO Settings]
- You can change the SEO title and meta description of the post.
- You can add Focus keywords
- Create XML Sitemaps
- It also includes .htaccess and robots.txt editor
- You can use Title and Meta description for taxonomies (category and tags).
- [Premium] Redirect manager
- [Premium] Automatic internal linking suggestions
- [Premium] Synonyms & related keyphrases
- [Premium]offers News SEO, Video SEO, Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO extensions
All In One SEO
This is a great alternative of Yoast SEO plugin. You can download All In One SEO Pack plugin by visiting the WordPress plugin page.
Additionally, it provides a one-page setting which is easy to setup. All In One SEO Pack offers you all the features like the Yoast. [All In One SEO Pack plugin Settings]
- XML Sitemap support
- Google Analytics support
- Support for SEO on Custom Post Types
- Advanced Canonical URLs
- Generates META tags automatically
- Google AMP support
Jetpack
Jetpack plugin has been developed by automatic. This is the best WordPress plugins offers three support Design, Marketing, and Security. It is available in both free and paid versions.
- It provides own network to load images of your site
- Lazy image loading to improve the user experience
- Site stats and analytics
- Automated social media posting and scheduling
- Brute force attack protection, spam filtering, and downtime monitoring
- Daily or real-time backups of your entire site
- Secure logins with optional two-factor authentication and many more features.
Cache Plugin
The cache plugin is very important to improve website loading speed. It helps to get rid of slow loading. There are many best cache plugins available for WordPress.
When you install cache plugin on your WordPress site, it generates static HTML files of your site, and when a visitors visit your site then it serves static HTML files instead of heavier WordPress PHP scripts.
W3 Total Cache and WP super cache are very popular cache plugin in WordPress. Furthermore, you can use WP Fastest Cache or WP Rocket on the blog.
a. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the popular caching plugin available in the market. This can take your website loading speed to the next level. But proper settings are very important. Here is a guide onW3 Total Cache settings.
- Improvements in search engine result page rankings.
- At least 10x improvement in overall site performance.
- Reduced page load time.
- Improved web server performance.
- Save up to 80% bandwidth via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds.
b. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is another best WordPress cache plugin that is a perfect choice for Shared Hosting. Its settings are very easy. [WP Super Cache Settings]
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize cleans your database, compresses your images and caches your site.
- Clean and optimise your database (removes all unnecessary data (e.g. trashed/unapproved/spam comments, stale data) plus pingbacks, trackbacks and expired transient options).
- Gives you the option to compress your images.
- Cache your pages, for super-fast load times.
Image Optimizer Plugins
We use a number of techniques to speed up our WordPress website, in which Image optimization is also an important part. You can easily provide better speed and performance to visitors.
When you upload images to your website, Image Optimizer plugins compress and reduces their size.
Some best Image Optimizer plugins
- reSmush.it Image Optimizer
- Smush Image Compression and Optimization
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- Compress JPEG & PNG images
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Ultimate Nofollow
The nofollow attribute is very important according to SEO purposes. The reason is that if you link an external site to your article that is spammy or not trusted, Google will also reduce your site ranking.
This plugin gives full control over the rel=”nofollow” tag. You can set rel = “nofollow” tag on any link to your blog.
- Add nofollow checkbox when inserting links in posts.
- You can open the link in a new tab.
- Add or remove the nofollow tag from all links in comments.
Broken Link Checker
This Plugin helps to search and fix broken links (404 Error) on your WordPress site and improve user experience and website ranking.
Lazy Loading Plugins
Compared to any other element, the image takes more time to be loaded, and if there are so many images in your article, it increases your page load time.
But if you install the lazy load plugin on your WordPress website, then your image will be loaded when a user scrolls down your page. This lazy loading will greatly improve your website page load time and save bandwidth.
Some of the best lazy loading plugins for your WordPress site:
Redirection
Redirection is the most popular plugin. You can easily manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors. This can help reduce errors and improve your site ranking and user experience.
Security Plugin
There are plenty of paid and free security plugins available. You can use anyone on your blog but Wordfence security is very popular in all of them. It includes firewall and malware scanner that protects your WordPress site.
Some of the best Security Plugins
- Wordfence Security
- All In One WP Security & Firewall
- Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening
- Cerber Security & Antispam
- Shield Security for WordPress
- Anti-Malware Security and Brute-Force Firewall
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is most popularWordPress Backup Plugin. You can backup your website files and database into the cloud and restore with a single click.
It provides many 3rd-party storages like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, OpenStack Swift, and email to store your backup file.
It comes with a free and paid version. Its free version works perfectly for a small website.
Social Warfare
The plugin allows adding share buttons to your site (homepage, archive page and post) without affecting the loading speed. This is a very lightweight plugin.
It includes top social networks sharing buttons like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, mix etc.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin creates an XML Sitemap for your site and helps search engines crawl your site better. The plugin supports all types of WordPress pages along with custom URLs. When you post new content to your site, it notifies all the major search engines.
But if you use Yoast SEO or Jetpack, then use them to create a sitemap.
All In One Schema Rich Snippets
All in One Schema Rich Snippet plugin is used to markup posts/pages with rich snippets. Rich snippet is a short summary of your page in the search results.
It includes star ratings, photos, writers, prices etc and helps you stand out from the competition & rank higher in SERPs. This plugin supports following schema types,
- Review
- Event
- People
- Product
- Recipe
- Software Application
- Video
- Articles
AMP
Mobile searches and users are growing fast day by day. That’s why it’s important that your website should be mobile-friendly. This plugin makes your WordPress website mobile-friendly and faster for mobile users. With this plugin, you can make your site mobile-friendly in just a few seconds.
- Many Optimizations.
- AMP-first Experiences support.
- Gutenberg Support.
- Core Theme Support.
Autoptimize
Autoptimize is a speed booster plugin. It makes your site super fast. If you want to increase your site’s performance and keep your website lightweight, then the plugin can help you a lot.
Apart from this, the pluginremoves query stringsand Google font from your site.
These are some of the best WordPress plugins that must have on every blog. Find this article helpful? Don’t forget to share!
WPForms
WPForms is a drag & drop WordPress form builder that allows you to create beautiful contact forms, feedback form, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site.
It also has a Pro version which offers very good features. Alternatively, you can use Contact Form 7 on your site.
MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. The best part is that MonsterInsights shows analytics reports inside your WordPress dashboard.
It is available in both free and pro versions. But its real power comes from upgrading to the premium version.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the most powerful email marketing services. You can build an email list and send beautiful email newsletters to your subscribers.
OptinMonster
OptinMonster plugin is a must-have for every WordPress blog or website. It generates more subscribers, leads and sales from the traffic you already have. This plugin comes with pre-made opt-in forms that you can easily customize all the details with drag & drop builder.
LiveChat
It is a must-have plugin for any business and e-commerce websites. It adds live chat to your WordPress website.
The plugin has tons of customization options and also offers a mobile app that allows you to provide real-time support to the user.
ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates is a very popular WordPress affiliate plugin that cloaks your Affiliate Links for free. It comes with a user-friendly interface and available in both paid and free versions.
Plugin gives full control to manage your affiliate links. You can categorize your affiliate links.
Alternatively, you can use Easy Affiliate Links and Pretty Links.
Insert Headers and Footers
Insert Headers and Footers is a simple plugin that lets you insert code like Google Analytics, custom CSS and more to your WordPress site header and footer.
The plugin gives you the ability to place code in site headers and footers without editing your theme files.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress websites.
Simply activate the WooCommerce plugin on a new or existing WordPress site and convert your website into an online store.
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Mark Henry says
Great job Aman! Thank you for sharing.
You can try one more plugin related to security called User Activity Log. It has strong monitoring power over the activities of your team members and registered users in your website. It also helps admin to get notification if any selected user logged in at the admin area.