23 Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers

The vast number of plugins is a contributing factor to why many bloggers prefer WordPress over other content management systems. There will always be a solution to match any dilemma regarding using free and premium WordPress plugins. One way or another, we have tried these plugins and, thus, sharing what we know about the best WordPress so you can consider these for your business.

Are you at a loss at what plugins to add to your website? Everything comes down to the kind of website you have. Some plugins are more suitable for content-based websites. In contrast, some plugins are better for eCommerce sites. As for bloggers, the five types of plugins are generally considered a must. These are the following:

  • Page builders
  • Backup
  • SEO
  • Forms
  • Social Sharing

Just because someone you know has that particular plugin in place doesn’t mean you should have it too. Most likely, their website is entirely different from yours. That being said, know which plugin would suit best for the website in relation to your need now and long-term goals.

What Are the Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers?

These plugins are readily available in the WordPress repository for plugins. Simply type the name on the search box to check them out.

Jetpack: The Best All-Around Plugin

Jetpack is the plugin for almost all requirements. It’s the plugin to use if you want to use the WP features on a self-hosted site. Jetpack contains modules or tools that help you in many aspects of website building and maintenance. You don’t necessarily have to turn on all modules. It’s advised not to since it might slow down your website.

You can find basic WordPress features in those modules. You can either mix and match those features or create your bundle as suited to your website. It’s easy to use, and a professional support team to back you up. With a wide variety of modules, Jetpack can be used by newbies to the WordPress platform.

Features:

  • Round-the-clock security
  • Real-time backup
  • Brute force attack protection
  • Auto-update on plugins
  • Powerful custom site search
  • Auto blog publishing
  • Integrations with Paypal and Stripe
  • Contact Forms
  • Slideshow tools
  • WooCommerce compatible
  • Google Analytics integrated

WordFence: The Best WordPress Security Plugin

WordFence blocks suspicious and harmful activities on your website. It also scans for malware and monitors your website security. It has an extensive set of features that is worth checking out.

WordPress powers more than a fourth of the world’s websites. It’s no wonder why it’s a common target for hackers, spammers, and the likes. WordFence protects your site from known attacks, and if you subscribe to its premium plan, you can acquire the list that contains the IP addresses of affected websites if there are is large-scale attacks.

You also get email notifications when WordFence finds some issue during scanning. The plugin also gives you reports, which you can customize to daily, weekly, or monthly. WordFence is a local plugin, so it scans on a deeper level. Since it’s installed locally, it will first review all your website files and determine which of those files are potentially malicious. WordFence would then discard those said files.

Features:

  • Advanced firewall settings
  • Daily website scans
  • Brute force protection
  • Real-time IP blocks list
  •  Core file malware scanner check
  • Two-factor authentication
  • Login page CAPTCHA
  • Disable or add 2FA to XML
  • WordFence Central

Yoast: The Best WordPress SEO Plugin

Yoast is used for optimizing blogs for SEO. It’s the de-facto WordPress plugin for SEO as most websites use this plugin for their SEO needs.

Yoast comes free for the core plugin. But for your website to fully enjoy all the features of Yoast, you should acquire the premium plugin. For example, you’re only allowed to analyze one keyword for each content in the free version. However, if you have the premium version, you can inspect multiple keywords per content.

With Yoast, keyword scoring is color-based, with the green color as the highest rating, yellow coding as satisfactory, and red as the lowest rating. Take note that readability analysis and keyword scoring have separate scores.

Yoast adds a meta box that allows you to add the focus keyword, meta title, and meta description for that particular content. Yoast will then score that content against the three mentioned above. It would provide recommendations, if there are any, so you can improve your Yoast SEO Score.

Aside from SEO scoring, Yoast can also restrict indexing pages you don’t want by adding the no-index tags and categories. This plugin can also include canonical links, so it’s easier for search engines to look for the right page. You can also avoid content scrapers with Yoast by adding your link every time you submit your content to RSS feeds.

Features:

  • Local SEO
  • Video SEO
  • News SEO
  • Redirect manager
  • Custom XML sitemap
  • Sitewide schema
  • Search console
  • Basic WooCommerce SEO
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Focus keyword analysis
  • Internal link suggestions
  • Internal link blocks
  • Multiple focus keywords
  • Related keywords
  • 404 monitoring
  • Intelligent word form recognition
  • Gutenberg integrated

MonsterInsights: The Best Plugin for For Analytics

An analytics plugin like MonsterInsights is essential when you’re not a Google Analytics expert, and you need to understand such data at a glance. If you’re still learning the ropes about analytics, this plugin is for you.

With MonsterInsights, you can customize demographics reports, anonymize IPs, and have cross-domain tracking, among others. Whatever size your website is, installing MonsterInsights won’t be complicated because there is no coding involved- and with just a single click of a button. MonsterInsights include advanced trackings such as eCommerce reports, file downloads, forms, ads, Facebook Instant Articles, and the likes.

You can create informed decisions with MonsterInsights by identifying which information is viable and more useful for your business and which is not. While you may be inexperienced with Google Analytics, MonsterInsights can help you develop data-driven decision-making skills.

MonsterInsights does not just track data; it’s compliant with most privacy regulations. It can also provide reports about your site speed, and it will also indicate how you can improve it. It allows you to post additional content at the sidebars or the end of the article.

Features:

  • Google Analytics for WordPress
  • Customized analytics report
  • Easy Google Analytics setup
  • Real-time statistics
  • Audience report
  • Behavior report
  • Content report
  • Forms report
  • eCommerce report
  • Search Console report
  • Custom Dimensions report
  • Demographics and Interest report

Social Warfare: The Best Social Sharing Plugin

If there’s one plugin that would help you jumpstart your social media marketing, you can include Social Warfare in your plugin armory. The free version connects with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest.

With Social Warfare, you can add social buttons anywhere you wish to put on the page. You can also showcase the number of times the post has been shared on social media.

You can customize the Click to Tweet style to your liking or choose from the six different premade styles.

Subscribe to the premium account, and you can have more social media platforms to add to your list, including Reddit, Tumblr, and WhatsApp.

Social Warfare keeps your website’s social share counts intact Before your blog site migrates to a more secure HTTPS protocol. Its Frame Buster feature will protect your content from hijackers by redirecting the links to your links. Aside from that, this feature can also reduce your bounce rates.

Features

  • Multiple social network sharing buttons
  • Customizable share button placement
  • Social proof
  • Social share counts
  • Popular posts
  • Custom visual themes
  • Click to Tweet
  • Shortcodes
  • Frame Buster

The Best Plugins for Performance

Speed is one of the biggest hurdles of websites. With high-def images and other essential plugins, you’d find that website speed is compromised. This is where WordPress performance plugins come into play. A caching plugin works best when your website is on a shared host.

As there are many performance plugins out there, we have narrowed the three best ones. Each of these plugins has the best points that the other two may not have.

Choose W3 Total Cache if you want a less expensive take on performance plugins. This would give you the most flexibility, but it might not be suited for the newbies as this plugin can be complicated to handle for the less experienced. Opt for WP Rocket if you want your performance plugin to offer you beyond caching. You might prefer a no-frills performance plugin such as the WP Super Cache, which is excellent for beginners.

WP Rocket is easy to set up and can compress Javascript and HTML files.

Features:

  • Compatibility with popular page builders
  • Lazy-Load Technology
  • Fabulous support team

W3 Total Cache is another performance plugin that minifies CSS and JavaScript files. Since it’s integrated with a CDN, you’re assured of a better performance.

Features:

  • Browser and database caching
  • Mobile page caching
  • Google AMP support

WP Super Cache is a free plugin developed by the people behind WordPress. A simple plugin, WP Super Cache is known for its one-click installation. WP Super Cache is webhost-agnostic that works well with websites that generate heavy traffic most of the time.

Features:

Browser caching

GZIP compression

Import and export settings

OptinMonster: The Best Form Builder

OptinMonster is the best opt-in form plugin to use for increasing your lead generation and blog subscription rate. It has been known to provide its customers with clean, sleek, and beautifully made opt-in forms.

Optin Monster opt-in forms can show the right forms for the right audience, making sure that you’d have higher conversions. It won’t show up to all your readers, only to those suited to that form. Another plus point for this plugin is it gives you full control of the popups.

OptinMonster is cloud-based, so this plugin won’t take a toll or slow down your website performance. This plugin is also integrated with tons of third-party apps such as MailChimp, Oracle Netsuite, SendLoop, and the likes.

Bloggers would find this plugin particularly helpful, especially when trying to grow their email lists. With OptinMonster, you can create email popups that could entice readers to subscribe or stay longer on your page.

This could be done by adding a popup when the readers are about to leave. It could also be added when readers have spent some time on the website or visit a particular page. You can also create a lead magnet such as a free download if they subscribe. You can also use this as augmentation for your affiliate links by creating a popup that connects to your affiliate sites.

Features

  • Multiple types of forms
  • Prebuilt templates
  • PopUp Editor
  • Logical Conditions
  • A/B Testing
  • Exit-Intent
  • Drop-and-drag interface
  • Floating bar

Akismet: The Best Anti-Spam Plugin

No website owner is spared from spam messages. This is how vital spam blockers like Akismet are. Blogs, forums, and other websites that generate a lot of traffic would particularly love this plugin.

Akismet can check all the comments and filter the spammy ones. If you don’t want to automate everything, Akismet allows you to choose which comment to consider unwanted. It has a dedicated section where all spam comments go. It has an accurate chart that indicates how many times spams have been blocked for a certain length of time.

You don’t have to filter the comments, thus, saving you time manually. It has superb customer service, doesn’t put the load on your website, and it’s intuitive. It’s cloud-based, so you’re assured that it houses an extensive database for spam yet does not undermine web performance.

Features:

  • Automatic filter
  • Status history
  • URL display
  • Complete control over comment approval
  • Easy installation

Google XML Site Map: The Best XML Site Map Plugin

Search engine bots use XML sitemaps to look for specific web pages on your site. XML site maps not only tell search engines about the content and website, but these maps also tell the latter what to check out on the pages.

That being said, your blogsite would greatly benefit from having an XML sitemap, so Google and other search engines can easily use it as a reference for content, be it new or revised. The Google XML site mappings Google and other search engines about your website updates, after which search bots would crawl your site.

Google XML Site Map notifies both Google and Bing of any updates on your sitemap. The plugin would then compress and add an HTML format to your sitemap. While XML site maps aren’t really for humans to read, they can be human-readable by customizing Google XML Site Map.

The Google XML Site Map can also be used to include pages that are not usually in your blog. Such an example would be if the blog is in a subdirectory, and you have to include a page from the directory. Contrastingly, you can also exclude some pages or categories from the site map using this plugin so search engines won’t index them.

Features

  • Versatile page options
  • Ping options
  • PHP memory limit
  • Automatic inclusions of URLs to WordPress
  • Manual exclusion of categories

UpDraftPlus: The Best Plugin for a Backup

Security should be on your priority list. It’s not something worth joking about. Not to sound too pessimistic, but it’s a reality that website owners will always be vulnerable to cybersecurity a