One of the important reason for selecting WordPress platform to start a blog is its support for plugins that enhances a website's functionality.
Plugins are the building blocks of a WordPress blog. It is a piece of software containing a group of functions that allow you to add new features and functionality to a WordPress website.
WordPress plugin directory currently has more than 50,000 plugins. And there are thousands more on third-party websites like CodeCanyon.
With so many options available it becomes very difficult to choose the right and essential WordPress plugins for your blog.
I have compiled some of the best and must have WordPress plugins for bloggers that are crucial for improving website speed, security, functionality and productivity.
These plugins will help in:
- Adding contact forms
- Tracking website visitors
- Taking backup of a site
- Taking care of GDPR cookie consent
- Improving SEO of a website
- Creating beautiful landing pages
- Taking take care of the security of your site
- Checking spam on your site
- Creating sitemap for your site
- Compressing images
Let's check out the some of the best WordPress plugins.
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13 Essential WordPress Plugins
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress.
Before I tell you about its features, let me first tell you what is Google Analytics. It is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It is the most widely used web analytics service on the web.
By adding google analytics to your website you can track your website traffic and users activity such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate etc. along with the information on the source of the traffic.
But the problem is that to see these stats you will always have to login to your Google Analytics account. Wouldn't it be better if you could see all your blog's analytics right inside your WordPress Dashboard.
This is made possible by MonsterInsights.
Just install this wonderful plugin, activate it and see all the analytics stats inside WordPress Dashboard.
Now, let's see some of its excellent features:
With over 2,000,000+ active installs, MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Learn more about this plugin below.
2. RankMath
Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the main key to get consistent and free organic traffic from search engines like Google. RankMath is the one SEO plugin that you need to improve your SEO efforts and attract more traffic to their website.
It also offers built-in suggestions that are based on widely-accepted best practices for SEO.
It also optimizes your content for rich snippets with 20+ schema types include FAQ schema, featured snippets and others.
Check out some of its wonderful features below:
If your website is already using SEO plugins like YoastsSEO, you can easily migrate your SEO settings to RankMath with the help of its built in wizard.
Once you install RankMath on your site, it gives you a score out of 100 for each of your blog content. Higher the score means the content is properly optimized for SEO. If the content scores poorly, RankMath also gives recommendation to improve your score.
If you want to learn more, check out my RankMath review where I have explained each of its important features & benefits, pros and cons, price and other details.
Try RankMath today. It's completely free.
3. BlogVault
BlogVault is one of the most reliable and popular backup plugin. More than 400000+ websites uses BlogVault. It offers secure cloud backups, inbuilt free staging and bulk site updates.
It allows you to schedule your website backup and also takes automated backup every day.
BlogVault also allows you to backup offsite and store it in remote locations. It also offer features like WordPress incremental backup and cloud storage options like Google Drive with a single click.
Features of BlogVault
Why you should use a backup plugin?
WordPress like any CMS are vulnerable to server crashes, hacking, security flaws, bad plugin or theme updates and insecure web hosts.
If anything worse happen to your website it could cost your valuable time, money and reputation.
Using a backup plugin like BlogVault will allow you to restore your website (including all files and databases) in single click.
Thus, Blogvault is one of the best WordPress plugins that you must use on your site. Start your free-trial now, no credit card is required.
GDPR is a privacy law that came into force in May 2018 with the aim to protect the personal data of the EU citizens.
If your website has visitors from the EU, your website is on its radar too and compliance is must to avoid any bitter consequences.
Properly handling cookies on your website (including the third-party ones) can be crucial towards your website’s compliance.
With the help of the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, it would be a walk in the park for you.
In addition to helping you comply with the GDPR, it also lets you comply with CCPA ( California Consumers Privacy Act).
Here are some notable features of the GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin.
With Thrive Architect plugin you can turn your ideas into pages with the fastest and visual WordPress Page Builder. You can easily create beautiful, engaging and visually impressive content & layouts for your blog.
It has ready to use 334 beautifully designed and 100% conversion focused landing page templates which you can use to create your blog content.
Thrive Architect is simply the fastest way to create professional looking sales pages, opt-in pages, webinar pages and more.
You can create beautifully formatted blog posts that increases user engagement and shares. Check out the Thrive Architect review to know more about this plugin.
In your blog post you can include elements like:
Thousands of websites are hacked every day. Your website can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin or theme vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.
To save time and money, and also your efforts in creating your blog it is crucial to provide security to it.
iThemes Security plugin is one of the best security plugin. I am also using using this plugin to protect my blog from hackers.
Some important features of this plugin are:
7. WP-Rocket
Faster websites tends to ranks better in Google. Why? Because among numbers of factors that are responsible for higher rankings in search engines, speed of a website is also one of the important factors.
Thus, you should not ignore this and do everything you need to keep your website fast and thoroughly optimized.
WP Rocket is a revolutionary, all-in-one plugin that cleans your database, compresses your images and caches your site to reduce your website's load time.
Important features of this plugin are:
If you want to learn more, check out my in-depth review on WP Rocket.
Spammers are everywhere. Once a blog starts getting organic traffic, it will face lots of spam comments every day.
To automatically block all the spam comments you can use this wonderful plugin, Akismet Anti-Spam.
Akismet checks comments and contact form submissions in your blog against its global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content.
Major features in Akismet are:
It is important for your blog to have sitemap. Sitemaps make it easier for search engine crawlers like Google to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
The Google XML Sitemap plugin supports various types of WordPress-generated pages and custom URLs.
Every time you create a new post the plugin notifies about it to all major search engines.
10. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is the most popular contact form plugin. When this plugin is installed and activated, users can easily contact you via contact forms.
It also supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering functionality to help prevent spam.
Broken links are the links that bring your users to a page that says “404 error”.
Broken links not only results in lost customers and revenue but also hurt your search engine rankings.
If broken links are not fixed it can do some serious damage to your website reputation and your business.
Broken Link Checker plugin regularly monitors your websites to check for any broken links. If it finds any broken link it will notify you so that you can fix it by redirecting it to some other URL.
12. Elementor
Gone are the days when you work on the backend designing your web page and guess what the frontend will look like.
However, with Elementor plugin you could work on frontend with its instant drag and drop page builder, instant live edit, and instant page load. Everything is live with Elementor. What You See is What You Get fits perfectly with Elementor.
If you are looking for a page builder that delivers high-end page designs and advanced capabilities then Elementor could be your best choice.
By working with Elementor you would be amaze to find how easy and fast it is to design a blog page or post.
Some of its features are Box Shadows, Background Overlays, Hover Effects, Headline Effects, Animations, Shape Dividers, Gradient Backgrounds and much more.
13. Smush
Image optimization is crucial while doing on-page SEO. Let's see what exactly is image optimization and how we can achieve it.
Website loading speed is one of the important Google ranking factors. Whether you are using single or multiple images on your website, you must compress it to keep the image size to minimum.
By reducing the image size your blog post or page will load faster. But how do we reduce the image size?
There are many plugins available that can help you to achieve that. I recommend you to use Smush plugin.
Smush helps to optimize your images by turning on lazy load and resizing & compressing it. It is 100% free. Download it from the button given below.
Improve Your Blog With These Essential WordPress Plugins
You can't imagine a WordPress website without a plugin. From the above list you must have realized that how much additional functionality these essential plugins adds to your site.
Whether it is about improving your website speed, compressing images, taking backup of your site, doing SEO, adding email opt-in form, adding social sharing buttons, etc., plugins are essentially required to perform all these tasks.
In WordPress there are plugins for just about anything you can think of. You just have to find the perfect one that suits your need.
Check out our guide if you want to learn how to install a WordPress plugin. Here, I have explained 3 easy but important ways to add a plugin to your WordPress website.
Wrapping up
I hope you liked the above list of essential WordPress plugins for bloggers.
If you have just started your blog then I would recommend you to start using these plugins to enhance your website's functionality and user experience.
If you are already using them, write your feedback in the comment box below.
Did I miss any essential WordPress plugin? I would appreciate if you suggest me any.
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Looks cool! Great article.
You can also add a Blog Designer PRO WordPress plugin. This plugin is tested with its latest features and has proven to work quite well to enhance the blogs. It has plenty of features that can make your blog effectively better.