INTRODUCTION
In this article, we will look at the best WordPress plugins to choose for your blog. WordPress plugins are excellent tools that provide an extensive range of functionalities to a WordPress blog or a business website. A blog or Business website will be very effective and profitable with the help of plugins.
There are a lot of plugins on the market to choose from. However, choosing the right plugin for your site can be a daunting task, especially when you are a new blogger or a website owner as there are thousands of them out there.
That’s why we have selected 16 essential plugins to use for your blog or Business website.
BEST WORDPRESS PLUGINS FOR EVERY WORDPRESS BLOG & WEBSITE
Below are our top picks of the best plugins to use for your blog or website’s full functionality.
All in One SEO – Must-Have SEO WordPress Plugin
One of the most important factors needed to rank high in search engines and grow your blog or website is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Search Engine Optimization is how visitors will find your site.
However, mastering SEO is challenging for every blogger, especially new bloggers. That’s why it is important to have an SEO plugin on your site to easily take care of your site’s SEO needs, and that is where AIO SEO comes to play.
AIOSEO is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins with over 3 million active installs. The plugin allows you to easily optimize your blog and its contents to help it rank better in search results. AIOSEO offers great tools and features you’ll need to improve your site’s on-page SEO. It also makes it very easy to work on your site’s SEO directly from your dashboard.
The plugin is very beginner friendly making it easy for anyone new to SEO to use the tool to optimize their site and contents to rank high on search engines.
Key Features of All in One SEO
- Their TruSEO score helps you to know the performance of your site’s SEO and it gives you recommendations on how to improve the score.
- Improves the site’s Meta tags. AIOSEO helps you to properly write Meta titles, Meta descriptions, and keywords that will rank well in search results.
- It also generates XML Sitemaps and connects the site to Google Search Console. It allows you to customize your sitemaps and also notifies google and Bings of any changes you make on the site.
- The Plugin allows you to add more key phrases you can rank for in one click with their SEMrush integration.
- AIOSEO has a built-in schema markup that provides snippers with useful information on search engines. This helps them to better understand the contents of your sites. It also gives recommendations on how to improve your website rank and Click-through Rate.
Akismet – Best Anti-Spam Plugin
Akismet is the best anti-spam plugin in WordPress which is a must-have plugin for all bloggers. Spam comments are likely to flood your blog if you don’t have countermeasures to protect your site from them. Scammers will drop shady links in your article’s comment section to scam your readers. These spam comments can contaminate your blog over time.
That’s why you need a plugin like Akismet, an official WordPress best spam protection plugin to deal with spam comments. The plugin protects your site by examining all your comments to filter any sort of malicious comments from your site.
Key Features of Akismet
- Akismet automatically checks and filters spam comments from your site to prevent scammers from promoting malicious links on your site.
- The plugin also reveals and removes hidden and misleading URLs that can hurt your site.
- It also helps to speed up your site as spam comments can take up a lot of space over time slowing the site. Its discard feature which automatically blocks and prevents spam comments from your site helps to save up disk space.
To sum up, having Akismet on your site is a must-have for every blogger which must be downloaded and activated immediately after launching the blog.
MonsterInsights – Best WordPress Plugin to for Google Analytics
MonsterInsights is a WordPress plugin that integrates with your Google Analytics in just one click. The plugin allows you to access and monitor your blog metrics and stats within your WordPress dashboard.
Monitoring your blog traffic helps you to understand your audience better. It also helps you to come up with better content ideas to drive more traffic to the site. And as we all know, the more traffic you get on the blog, the more money you make.
Key Features of MonsterInsights
- It has a step-by-step installation wizard to walk you through the installation process.
- The plugin allows you to track your metrics and stats in real time from your dashboard.
- It also has an SEO headline analysis.
OptinMonster – Must Have Lead Generation Tool
OptinMonster is one of the best if not the best plugin in WordPress for lead generation. The plugin allows you to create beautiful Optin forms to convert your blog visitors to subscribers.
Chances are that most visitors which come to your blog will forget about your blog and never return. That’s why it is important you get those visitors to subscribe to your email list to convert them into loyal followers. That way, you can always get them back to your blog when you publish a new post or even sell offers to them.
OptinMonster makes it very easy to create beautiful and effective Popup forms, Floating bars, and other campaigns with their easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder.
Key Features of OptinMonster
- It has a drag-and-drop builder for easy customization of your forms.
- Easy integration with popular services.
- The plugin has multiple campaign types of actionable marketing.
- It also provides detailed campaign insight which can help you improve your campaigns.
Revive Old Posts – Social Media Auto Post & Scheduling Plugin
Sharing and promoting your blog content on social media is an excellent way of driving more traffic to your blog, however, doing this manually can take a lot of time. That’s when Revive Old Post comes to play. Revive Old Posts automatically share your new posts to Facebook now Meta, Twitter and other social platforms for more exposure.
The plugin also allows you to revive your old articles by re-posting them to social media to bring more attention to them and boost engagement. Also, it allows you to set a schedule for your publication.
Key Features of Revive Old Posts
- Automatically post to Twitter Instagram Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
- It also helps generate hashtags for your posts on social media.
- Controls which posts to share as well as the time between shares.
Push Engage – Top Web Push Notifications Tool
Push Engage is one of WordPress’s best Push notification plugins which allows you to send web notifications to your site’s visitors. The plugin makes it very easy to turn your site’s visitors into subscribers, which brings them back to the site after visiting by sending personalized messages or notifications.
You can use Push notifications together with email notifications to drive more traffic and increase engagement to your site.
Also, Push Engage can automatically send new blog posts and other notifications to your subscribers. It is also a great plugin for e-commerce websites as it works seamlessly on e-commerce platforms like Shopify, and Big commerce to send abandonment notifications, price drop alert notifications, and automatically trigger carts.
Push Engage has a free plan which allows you to send 120 notifications per month and grow your subscribers. However, the subscriber limit for the free plan is 2500. Once it exceeds 2500, you’ll have to upgrade to the premium plan which goes for $25 per month.
Key Features of Push Engage
- Create drip campaigns and a series of notifications.
- It has customizable Optin to create personalized and targeted push notification opt-ins.
- The plugin allows you to track views, clicks, and sales of each push notification campaign.
- Smart opt-in reminders.
Smush – Best Image Optimization Plugin
Smush is one of the best WordPress image optimization plugins. The plugin helps to optimize, compress and resize images on your blog.
Having images that are not properly optimized on your site, can slow down your site. This can affect your site’s SEO and also cause visitors to leave. That’s why it is important to have a plugin like Smush to optimize your images to help speed up the site’s loading time.
Smush has a free plan with great features and a premium plan of $7.50/month, which also comes with more advanced features.
Key Features of Smush
- Optimizes images automatically every time you upload a new image.
- Compresses site’s images without affecting the image quality.
- The plugin also enables lazy load for off-screen images in one click.
- With Smush, you can resize the image with a specific height and width.
- With Smush you can bulk compress about 50 images at a time.
Wordfence – Plugin for Firewall and Malware Scan
Word Fence is also one of the most popular WordPress security plugins with over a million active installs. The plugin protects your blog from being hacked and other threats it might face.
Wordfence has both free and paid plan which starts at $99/year and offers advanced features like malware signature updates, real-time IP blocking, and constantly checking if your site has been backlisted for malicious activities,
Key Features of Wordfence
- Malware Scanner
- Highly configures alert
- A firewall that bans IPs and malicious login attempts.
- Protection from brute force attacks.
Sucuri – Best WordPress Security Plugin
Protecting your site from hackers and any type of site attack should be one of the priorities for your site as a blogger or website owner. Not taking serious actions to protect your site can make it prone to malware and virus infection and also hackers penetrating your website to spam your visitors or even worse, hijack it.
However, with Sucuri being one of the best security plugins on WordPress, your site will be protected from any form of attack such as malware, spam comments attack, and hackers getting access to your website.
Key Features of Sucuri
- The plugin automatically removes malware from your blog or website.
- It also offers Brute force and firewall protection.
- It automatically adds a CDN layer which helps to speed up your site.
- Sucuri has an effective security hardening to remove Vulnerabilities.
- It also constantly checks whether your site is being blacklisted for security reasons or not.
- The plugin post-hack feature also helps to take necessary actions if your site’s security becomes compromised.
Socialsnap – Ultimate WordPress Social Media Plugin
One easy way to generate more traffic and grow your blog is to encourage social shares on your site. Socialsnap is a great plugin that talks social sharing to a new level with its great-looking social share buttons.
The plugin allows you to include buttons of over 30 social networks to your content. It also has great placement options like Inline buttons and Floating sidebar. With Socialsnap you can control how your content will look when it is shared by editing the metadata of your content.
Socialsnap has a free plan but comes with limitations and a paid plan which goes for $39 per year, however, a paid version with all add-ons starts at $99 per year.
Key Features of Socialsnap
- Social Snap automatically shares new posts to your social media platforms.
- It boosts old posts by re-sharing them to Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms to drive more traffic and boost engagement.
- It adds click-to-Tweet boxes to your content to make sharing convenient for your visitors.
Broken Link Checker – Top Broken Link Checker Tool
Broken link checker is a free plugin that monitors and checks all internal and external links on the site to find broken links. The plugin will notify you to fix it if it finds any. It is very important to have a broken link checker plugin as having broken or non-functional links on your site can affect the reading experience of your visitors. It can also affect the SEO of the site.
Doing this manually can be time-consuming, however, the broken Link Checker plugin will handle all that for you and will notify you of any broken links so you fix them.
Key Features of Broken Link Checker
- Detects broken and redirect links that can easily be edited right from the plugin’s dashboard.
- Notifies you about broken links present on your site through your dashboard or email.
- The plugin also prevents search engines from following broken links.
WP Forms – A Drag and Drop WordPress Form Builder
It is very important for every website owner to have forms on their site. Forms are a great way to help you capture your visitor’s details and also an easy way for your visitors to get in touch with you. For instance, having a contact form on your site makes it easy for visitors to contact you for Partnerships, Guest Posting, Display ads and many more opportunities. In order to make this possible, you need a great forms plugin like WPForms.
WP Forms is a very popular and easy-to-use WordPress Forms plugin, which has over 5 million active installs. WP Forms has a drag-and-drop editor for creating different forms such as Order forms, Survey forms, Email subscriptions form and a lot more. They have over 400 pre-made templates available to help you save time in creating forms for your website.
WPForms comes with a free and paid version which starts at $39.50/year. You can always start with the free version if you don’t need the advanced features yet.
Key Features of WPForms
- The plugin comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder to help you create forms on your site.
- WP Forms are 100% responsible on mobile.
- The plugin easily integrates with Email marketing services to help you grow your email list.
- WPForms premium version has great features like Job application form, Survey form, forms to collect payment with Stripe, PayPal and Square and many more.
- WPForms are well optimized for conversions and results.
UpdraftPlus – Most Trusted WordPress Backup, Restore and Clone Plugin
UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins. It is recommended that you create a complete backup of your blog before taking major actions like changing your blog theme or updating your WordPress version. That way if anything should go wrong, you can easily recover your blog which UpdraftPlus makes very easy to do.
UpdraftPlus has a free plan which provides all the essential features needed to back up your site. They also have a paid plan which offers more advanced features and functionality and goes for $70 per year.
Key Features of UpdraftPlus
- Incremental backups that can be set to the hourly schedule of your choice.
- UpdraftPlus supports cloud backup to sites like Amazon s3, Google Drive and Dropbox.
- Database backup encrypted for security.
- Multi-site (i.e. WPMU/WordPress Network) compatible.
- Proven to backup sites of 100GB.
- Backs up limitless non-WordPress files and external databases.
Jetpack – All in One Solution Plugin for Website Management
Jetpack is one of the must-have WordPress plugins for site management. It is an all-in-one solution packed with great tools to help improve the functionality and growth of the site.
Jetpack is a plugin that offers features and tools for easy management of your blog. The plugin offers great features like security and SEO tools, built-in analytics, social media integration for easy sharing of your content, and many more.
They offer a free plan and a premium plan which start at 4.95 billed yearly.
Key Features of Jetpack
- Jetpack offers some security features like malware protection, automatic backup to easily restore any lost data, spam protection and brute force protection.
- Ability to manage multiple websites from one dashboard
- Jetpack makes the migration of your site very easy.
- Provides social sharing buttons to make it easy for your readers to share your posts.
- Ability to manage multiple websites from one dashboard.
- The plugin also has great SEO tools to help optimize the site for easy ranking on search engines.
WP Rocket – Best WordPress Caching Plugin
WP Rocket is the best caching plugin on WordPress, which helps to boost the site’s load time. One of the things to take into serious consideration is the speed of your site as a delay in a website’s loading time can result in customer dissatisfaction and visitors leaving the site. That is why you need a caching plugin like WP Rocket to reduce the site’s load time so you don’t miss out on traffic.
WP Forms is one of the best WordPress caching plugins with great features which help in optimizing your site’s performance. The plugin improves your page speed score, boosts your site’s loading times and optimizes your Core Web Vitals.
Unfortunately, WP Rocket only has premium plans which start at 49 per year. If you want a free alternative, you can check out WP Super Cache which can is a 100% free WordPress Caching plugin.
Key Features of WP Rocket
- It is fast and easy to set up.
- WP Rocket creates cached copies of your site.
- The Plugin Improve the site’s performance by offering browser caching, GZIP compression and page caching.
- Minifies your HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Feeds.
- The plugin is compatible with cloud flare.
- It also has features for Lazy loading images and content.
Thirsty Affiliates – Best Affiliate Link Management and Cloaking Tool
Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways of monetizing a blog. This is where you promote other people’s products or services for a commission when you drive a sale, sign up or lead.
Thirsty affiliate is a very good WordPress plugin for managing all your affiliate links. The plugin makes it easy to cloak your links and make them look great before using them. It also allows you to easily categorize all your links for easy management.
Thirsty affiliate has a free plan and premium plan with pro features which start at $79.50.
Key Features of Thirsty Affiliates
- Easy to set up and use.
- The plugin allows adding an image to the affiliate links.
- It has built-in analytics that allows you to see the statistics of your affiliate links and campaigns.
- Automatically replays assigned keywords with affiliate links.
- Thirsty Affiliates allows you to easily find and replace links from your Thirsty Affiliate Panel.
WRAPPING UP
To sum up, adding plugins to your site will not only improve the functionality of your site but also enhance user experience of the site. Check them out to help take your site to the next level.
