Plugins play a very important role in the performance and functionality of any WordPress site. If you use the best plugins for a blog then the performance of your website will improve but if you use wrong plugins for your website then the ranking and also the performance of your website can go down.
Now the question is which plugin is best and suitable for your website? Then your answer is in this post. I have used many WordPress plugins and created a list of the best WordPress Plugins. To know about these plugins read this whole post.
Table of Contents
SEO
Yoast SEO
This is the most recommended SEO plugin for all WordPress sites since 2008. It has been downloaded over 5+ million times. If you are planning to start a blog then you must have to install this plugin. Without this plugin, you can’t do proper SEO for your site.
This plugin provides a lot of features –
- On-page SEO
- Schema mark-up
- Structured data
- XML Sitemap
- Complete site and Page analysis
- Redirect system
- Social integration
- Breadcrumbs
- Adding custom titles and description
This is very flexible so everybody can use it easily. Even if you are completely new to blogging or SEO, you can use it very easily.
This is an all-in-one SEO plugin. This plugin is available in free and paid both versions. If you buy its premium version, you will get extra awesome features that will boost your ranking in search results. Yoast provides additional add-ons for Local SEO, Video SEO, etc.
Broken Link Checker (FREE)
Many times when you visit a link, there is an error on that page – error 404 – not found. This happens when the content of that link or page is removed or the link to that page is changed. In such situations, the page gets deleted but the link of that page is available on the search engine. Even many pages of your website also are linked with that link. Such links are called broken links. These links are very harmful to SEO. Therefore, we should regularly keep searching for and removing such links from our website.
This plugin makes this process very easy and simple. This plugin detects all broken links through your whole site and informs you. The plugin also prevents the search engine from following these links. You can easily edit or remove these links from the plugin page directly without updating the post.
Analytics
Site kit By Google
This is an official plugin by google. This plugin provides all the important features of Google developer tools. Site Kit shows all key metrics and insights from Google platforms. In short, this is a complete analytics plugin. It is provided by Google so you don’t have to worry about its authority. This is the best plugin for a blog that provides all analytics data in one place.
Supported services by SiteKit
- Search console
- Analytics
- Adsense
- PageSpeed Insights
- Tag Manager
- Optimize
Google analytics by monster insight
This is another important plugin for analytics. This plugin also shows details from different google platforms. You have to verify this plugin with google products. After verifying this plugin will show the data. This plugin is similar to Site Kit but it shows some extra details about your website. You can also do customization according to your needs and the importance of metrics.
Page Builder
Elementor
This is the best page builder for any WordPress website. For the page building, this is one of the best plugins for a blog website. This is the It is a drag and drops page builder. This will give you a completely separate interface for creating posts, pages, and custom post types. With this plugin, you don’t need any kind of programming knowledge like HTML or PHP. You can create responsive pages and posts. And the great thing about this plugin is you can use this plugin with any WordPress theme.
If you are not so creative then you don’t have to worry about this. Elementor also provides you a lot of templates for pages and posts. You can simply import and insert it on your page.
Elementor Pro
This is the premium version of the Elementor plugin. The free version cannot fulfill the needs of everyone. In the premium version, you will get a lot of extra features. There are many useful premium features that you will not get in the free version. If you are looking for extra powerful features you should use the Elementor Pro version to build your website.
Adsense
Ad Inserter
When you have a website with low traffic and very few pages and posts then it is easy to manage Adsense on your site. But, if you have huge traffic on your website then it can be an unloved work to handle ads on your site for you.
This awesome plugin helps you to manage ads on your website. This plugin allows you to insert ad code according to the position. For example, you can insert code before post, after post, after paragraph, before paragraph, between comments, and all possible positions on your blog. you can also change ad code by changing code in the plugin. You can also choose where to display ads as on the post, pages, category pages, archives pages, etc.
This plugin also allows the insertion of ads manually during the creating page or post. Means, you can enable or disable ad insertion when you are writing the post.
Affiliate Marketing
Thirsty Affiliates
This is a very important plugin for affiliate marketing. This plugin gives you the ability to organize your affiliate links while optimizing your income. With this plugin, you can easily organize, clock, track, your affiliate links.
You can also easily customize your links. Using this plugin, you can create a pretty link for your ugly affiliate links. You can edit link slug and also can upload an image to your affiliate links, track your links and get states and reports.
You can also create categories for your links. With this feature, you can easily search your links. You can also insert categories in links slug. With this plugin, you can easily insert links in your posts, pages and also in comments.
This plugin provides a safe link redirection which means this plugin also improves your website.
Forms
Everest forms
This plugin provides you an easy way to create beautiful forms. With drag and drop feature you can create beautiful forms in minutes.
To use this plugin you don’t need any kind of programming knowledge. So, even if you are a beginner, you can create various types of forms easily. This plugin is very lightweight, fast, extendible and fully mobile responsive.
This plugin is specially made for simplicity and the use of this plugin is so easy for new users.
Gravity form
Gravity form is the Easiest and Most Trusted plugin to Create Advanced Forms for Your WordPress Website. This plugin is a bundle of most powerful features.
With this plugin, you can add more functionality to your form. You can create quizzes and multi-steps forms. You can add some extra and powerful functions and features to your form and create various types of forms using built-in tools.
Newsletter & Email Marketing, List Building, CTA
MailChimp
This is one of the best e-mail opt-in marketing plugins. To set up this plugin is a little difficult but not so much. Besides it, this plugin is so powerful having a lot of useful features.
This plugin allows you to create landing pages, manage e-mail lists, send newsletters and many other campaigns. If you take e-mail marketing serious then you should definitely use this plugin.
Email Subscribers & Newsletters
This is a very useful plugin for beginners. This plugin is very easy to use with powerful features. Even I also use this plugin just because it’s simplicity and awesome features.
With this plugin, you can use e-mail subscriber forms as I have created in the sidebar and footer. This plugin sends automatically e-mails to subscribers on publishing new posts. You can send manually campaigns to subscribes. In short, If you have no experience of managing emails then you can use this plugin.
Icegram – Popups, CTAs & lot more
This is the best free plugin to create CTAs, popups, and a lot more. The paid version of this plugin is also a plugin. If you want more features and customization then you should use it’s paid version.
With the help of this plugin, you can create popups, CTAs, email opt-in forms and many types of opt-ins. This also allows you to integrate other features like Mailchimp and many others.
Optimization
WP Rocket (Paid )
This is a paid but very powerful plugin. I personally use this plugin on my site. This plugin helps to boost your site performance and ranking too.
This plugin allows you to create a cache for your site. optimize images and embeds, optimize the database and all other files as HTML, CSS, javascript, etc. It provides many other features that will improve your site’s performance very effectively.
W3 total cache
This is a widely used free plugin. This plugin is used to create a cache of your website, optimize HTML, CSS, javascript, images, etc on your site.
Using this plugin your site’s performance will definitely improve. There are more than 1 million active installations of this plugin.
Imagify
This plugin is used to optimize your images. Large size images increase the size of the webpage. The larger webpage takes too much time to load which is absolutely not good for ranking.
With this plugin, you can optimize your all images at one time. You can also set to display images in .webp formats on the webpages. If you turn on the setting then it will optimize images during uploading this will save your lot of time.
Schemas & Structured Data
Schema – All In One Schema Rich Snippets
Schemas are very helpful in the ranking of any website. These schemas give extra details to google available on webpages. Google always take schemas seriously for indexing webpages. So if you are not using schemas for your website then start using it from today.
This is one of the best plugins for a blog to insert schemas. With this plugin, you can insert various types of schemas.
This plugin supports the following types of Schemas:
- Review
- Event
- People
- Product
- Recipe
- Software Application
- Video
- Articles
Schema Pro is the premium version of this plugin. The premium version gives some extra features that will definitely boost your site traffic and ranking.
Structured Content
Structured contents also help to boost your ranking and traffic very effectively. If you don’t know what is structured content? Then the answer is simple that helps search engine to understand your site and its contents.
Social Sharing & Buttons
Monarch Plugin
I always say that “Empower your readers with social sharing buttons”. The social sharing helps you to reach new users and drive more traffic to your website. It also helps your site to rank higher because search engines also consider the social share of any page during indexing.
This is my favorite social sharing plugin. The reason is simple that it is easy to use and very lightweight. This plugin allows you to insert a social button at many places like inline buttons, top of the content, the bottom of the content, on the images, at the sidebar, etc.
Monarch plugin allows you to select the social networks which you want to show on posts or pages. You can also select where to show buttons like on the pots, pages, homepage, archive pages, etc. You can also exclude any specific page. I personally use this plugin on my all websites. This is available in both free and paid versions.
Social Warfare
This is a free plugin. You can also use it’s paid version. This is a lightweight plugin. It also provides a variety of features that you can use to show the social share button on your website.
You can customize buttons, select your desired network to show buttons, also apply many other useful features that will give an awesome look to your website.
Backup
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
This plugin is used to automatically backup and restore your website. On one knows the future. Nowadays there are many people ho always try to hack the new website and harm them. And unfortunately, if your site git hacked or there is some other accident that causes your site to be destroyed and your data is also destroyed, then this plugin can help you in this situation.
YOu have to set up a backup location and some other settings and you are all set. This plugin will create a backup on a remote location automatically. You can easily restore your site with this plugin if any accident happens with your website.
Security
Wordfence
This plugin helps your site to protect from viruses and malware. This plugin regularly scans your site and removes all harmful things so your site can run smoothly. You should definitely use this plugin to protect from harmful things.
Akismet Anti-Spam
Spamming is a very big problem for website owners. Nowadays there are many people who spam. In this comment spamming is a major way to do spamming. WordPress does not provide ant powerful features to prevent comment spamming.
With this plugin, you can easily prevent comment spamming in a few steps. You can add logic and conditions to prevent spamming. This is used by almost every site owner nowadays. Currently, it has 5+ million active installations.
WPS Hide Login
This plugin is used to hide your login URL. It is the best plugin for a blog to secure your login link. Using this link you can easily change your login URL. The default login URL for all websites is domain.com/login.php. With this URL it is very easy to hack your website and anyone can log in to your website. FOr all WordPress users, this is one of the best plugins for a blog.
After installing this plugin you can change the login URL and redirect the default URL to any page which you want.
Other Tools
OneSignal – Web Push Notifications
Push notifications are very important for any website. This simple but powerful tactic can increase your traffic by up to 38 %.
With this plugin, you can set up a push notification system for your website in minutes. And the great thing about this plugin is, this plugin is absolutely free. You can set up for different browsers like chrome, firefox, safari, android, etc in a few easy steps.
Cookie Notice
All WordPress sites use cookies to serve the best content to users. And it is also very important to tell your users that your site uses cookies. With this plugin, you can easily show a popup os to your users. You can also customize the cookie popup box. You can change color, font, background, and also you can change the display setting.
This is a very important plugin that every WordPress site owner should use it. I also use this plugin on my all sites.
GDPR Cookie Consent (Paid)
GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin by WebToffee helps your WordPress website in attaining GDPR compliance for the use of cookies. The plugin helps in displaying a banner and a cookie policy to your website. The plugin not only adds the banner but also blocks third-party cookies until the users give their consent to use them.
Other main features of the plugin include:
- Automatic scanning of the cookies
- Automatic script blocking
- High customization options for the cookie banner
- Multiple layouts and the predesigned customizable cookie banners
- Show banner based on GeoIP
- Granular control over the cookies for the users
- Support for multilingual websites
- Import and export cookie details using a CSV file
- Logging consent details and export into a CSV file
Easy Table of Contents
With this plugin, you can create an awesome “table of content-box”. You can also customize the content box according to your needs. You can set functionality and colors that will give a fabulous look to your website.
WP Sticky Sidebar
This plugin allows you to make your sidebar sticky. This feature gives your site a professional look. I personally use this plugin on this website.
Conclusion
In this post, I have shared the best plugins for a blog that you must use for your blog or website. These plugins will improve your work and save you a lot of time.
If you have any questions or feedback, please write in the comment box.