Must-have WordPress Plugins best blogging experience
Are looking you looking for the must-have WordPress plugins to your toolkit for effective blogging?
It’s no surprise that with the expansion of the internet over the world, the blogging activity has been growing continuously.
WordPress has been, over the years, the most popular content management system (CMS) to get started with blogging.
WordPress is popular because it is cost-effective, easily customizable, and has a very responsive design; but another reason why people choose WordPress over other platforms is its plugins that make your job very simple as a blogger.
If you haven’t started blogging yet, you can easily create a WordPress website by following some simple steps.
But after creating a WordPress website for blogs, finding the right resources and tools is the next step.
Installing the right WordPress themes is a significant step in creating a secure, beautiful, interactive, and SEO friendly blog. But remember all plugins are not equally valuable; in fact, some might be dangerous to your website.
Plugins that are not updated frequently are riddled with bugs. Some have terrible coding that doesn’t go with your theme, and it makes your site slow.
You must avoid these kinds of plugins and install only popular and trustworthy plugins to your website.
In this article, I’m suggesting some of the best WordPress Plugins that will help you create an effective blog. These plugins will improve your blogging, and your website will run at its peak performance at all times.
Must-have WordPress plugins for effective blogging:
Google Site Kit
What it does:
When you install Google Site Kit plugin to your website, all the relevant metrics and insights that Google provides us will show on your WordPress dashboard.
The 4 metrics and insight that you can access through Google Site Kit Plugin are –
1. Google Search Console
2. Google Analytics
3. Google PageSpeed Insights
4. Google Adsense
Why you need it:
It’s all in one WordPress Plugin, and after installing it, you can access all the data of our website that Google provides us.
By Installing this single plugin, you can reduce the number of plugins you usually require to access the same data like monster Insights or Analytify to access Google analytics.
It also has Google AdSense, and Google PageSpeed Insights integrated with it so you can monitor and review your blog’s performance. The best thing is – It’s totally free.
Jetpack
What it does:
Jetpack is a great plugin to filter spammy content on your website.
You can also scan your websites for malware as Jetpack comes with a brute force attack protection.
You get real-time to get back up and push notifications, and you can also check your website downtime on it.
Why you need it:
It helps avoid unwanted intrusions to your website.
Jetpack gives you an ability to manage all your websites from its dashboard and provide top Notch security against brute force attacks.
All these above features are a must for effective blogging.
Yoast SEO
What it does:
If you know much about On-page search engine optimization, then the Yoast SEO plugin is one of the must-have plugins for you.
There aren’t many SEO plugins that can compete with Yoast SEO’s functionality and effectiveness.
If you purchase Yoast premium, you are also allowed to optimize keyword for keyword’s synonyms and related keywords.
You can create a sitemap for your blog easily with the help XML sitemap tool in Yoast SEO Plugin.
Why you need it:
It offers a beginner-friendly way to take care of most of your blog’s on-page SEO. Also, it provides readability analysis from the Flesch reading ease score.
After you’ve completed the basic keyword research, the Yoast SEO Plugin will hold your hand and guide you through the step by step process of optimizing your content for various search engines.
Elementor Page Builder
What it does:
Elementor is one of the most user-friendly WordPress page builder plugins which comes with basic drag and drops features.
You can drag and drop widgets of your choice from the left panel to your main section.
Elementor comes with tons of templates and most commonly used website elements and widgets. You can also add a full-page template and then customize it accordingly.
Why you need it:
From the basic image, videos, and text widgets to advanced post and image sliders, FAQ, testimonials, social media icons, signup forms, etc. can be added to your website without any coding.
Adding these elements doesn’t slow down your website page speed because Elementor is known for its lightweight and high-speed performance.
There are hundreds of beautiful page or block templates to choose from. These templates are created by their creative designers.
These features make Elementor one of the must-have WordPress plugins
Akismet
What it does:
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that monitors all the comments and contact form submissions to find spammy or harmful explicit content on your website.
Why you need it:
Spams can ruin your entire website’s user experience. When you start blogging, you’ll notice lots of spammy comments on your articles.
Akismet analyzes your website’s content, and blocks spam automatically.
WordFence Security
What it does:
Features of WordFence Security Plugin-
1. malware scanner
2. exploit detection
3. threat assessment
4. Real-time blocking of website attackers
The plugin automatically scans the website for frequent threats. We can also launch a full scan whenever we want. Wordfence security comes with a built-in firewall.
Why you need it:
Website security should be our number one priority. A security breach can damage your search engine rankings and destroy all the hard work you have done on your website.
If hacked, you might lose all your data.
You might also lose access to your website, or hackers could hold your data hostage.
This is not the position you want to be in because all this could taint your brand reputation.
WP Limit Login Attempts
What it does:
WP limit login attempts plugin limits the login attempts for login security.
This plugin helps us protect the site from hackers or attacks. Which makes it one of the must-have WordPress plugins.
Why you need it:
Hackers continuously attempt different usernames and passwords, over and over again, until they are logged in, with this plugin, you can limit the login attempt and save your website.
The plugin also blocks the IP address temporarily to protect the website.
LiveChat
What it does:
The LiveChat plugin helps us to add a chatbox on our website with just a few clicks.
By adding a live chat box, we can chat with the website visitors in real-time. This helps in user retention and increases engagement.
Why you need it:
It helps the user to provide answers to the website visitors’ queries as quickly as possible. This helps them to take the desired actions, like buying your products and services.
With LiveChat, you can increase your sales and engagement rate as it’s the quickest way to remove buyer doubts about your product or services.
You can build stronger relationships with your audience using Livechat.
MailChimp for WordPress
What it does:
MailChimp for WordPress is an email marketing tool that helps us collect website visitors contact information such as name and email address through its signup forms.
You can build visually appealing opt-in forms through WPForms and integrate it with MailChimp. These features make it one of the must-have WordPress plugins
Why you need it:
Email lists are essential to building a loyal audience for your blog.
Whenever you write a new article, you can send email updates to your email list subscribers. This is one of the best and cost-effective ways to bring traffic to your website.
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing services because it is very beginner-friendly and has a straightforward user interface.
WPForms
What it does:
WPForms is a WordPress contact form builder. It is one of the most popular forms builder plugins.
Its usually used to create a contact form, but it also has several tools to build pretty much any type of form. You can create a signature form, offline forms, user registration forms, etc. with it.
You can also create surveys and polls using WPForms just in few minutes without writing any code with the help of its drag and drop feature.
Why you need it:
It helps in creating beautiful, simple, easy to embed, and 100% responsive (meaning it works on mobile, tablets & desktop) contact forms for your blog.
It also provides automatic spam protection through its smart and honeypot.
W3 Total Cache
What it does:
W3 Total Cache plugin helps us improve the search engine optimization of our website.
With it, you can enhance the user experience of your website by increasing your website speed and reducing load times.
This is done through a content delivery network (CDN) integration, which increases site performance considerably.
Why you need it:
A cache plugin is one of the easiest ways to speed up any website.
It is designed to increase the page load speed for a WordPress blog, which will improve your visitors’ overall experience.
In case you don’t know, slower sites rank low, and fast websites rank higher in the search engine. Page speed is a significant ranking factor on Google.
Updraftplus
What it does:
UpdraftPlus is the backup, restore, and migration WordPress Plugin.
It automatically schedules your site backup. It also provides the user with a Migrator to quickly duplicate or migrate websites.
Why you need it:
Website hacking, brute force attacks, crashing of servers, dubious updates, or other errors can wreck your WordPress blog.
That is why it is recommended to have a backup of your website. UpdraftPlus automatically creates a backup of your content.
WPtouch
What it does:
With WPtouch, you’ll be able to make your WordPress website mobile-friendly.
What this plugin does is automatically create a mobile-friendly version of your WordPress website for the audience that visits your website through their mobile phones.
It changes the appearance of your website that suits your mobile audience through simple yet elegant mobile themes.
Why you need it:
Having a mobile-friendly website is very important today, Google considers mobile-friendliness as one of its ranking factor in SERPs.
So, if you don’t have a mobile version of your website yet, you must use this plugin to create one within few steps.
WP Smush
What it does:
WP Smush is an incredibly powerful Plugin used to resize, optimize, optimize, and compress all of the website images. Which makes it one of the must-have WordPress plugins.
It has some great features like:
1. Lossless Compression
2. Lazy Loader
3. Bulk Smush – Optimize up to 50 images at once
4. Image Resizing
5. Incorrect Size Image Detection
Why you need it:
Nothing will slow down your website or delay your load times more than oversized and un-optimized images.
Smush Pro has been benchmarked as one of the best image compression and image optimization plugins
Broken Link Checker
What it does:
This plugin does pretty much what the name suggests.
It frequently scans the website and identifies if there are any broken links.
If it detects any broken links, then it sends a notification to the user to fix that link.
The scanning includes redirects and broken images. Broken links can hurt your on-page SEO this why it one of the must-have WordPress plugins
Why you need it:
When a website has broken images or links, the user interface of that website becomes complicated.
During crawling search engines, start to take notice of those broken links, which ultimately has an effect on your SEO.
It’s considered best to remove or replace links that direct to nowhere.
Redirection
What it does:
Redirection Plugin is a redirect manager for WordPress.
After a user identifies broken links, the next step is to redirect it to an appropriate URL.
Why you need it:
After we’ve found the broken links with the help of broken links checker plugin, the next step is to redirect those links to a relevant page.
We can easily fix the 301 and 404 redirection errors with the Redirection plugin in a few simple steps.
By fixing broken links with the help of the redirection plugin improve our on-page SEO and search engine ranking.
Subscribers.com
What it does:
Subscribers are an entirely free Web push notifications plugin for the WordPress website.
It allows you to send instant push notifications, similar to those found on your Smartphone apps to your subscribers’ mobile devices.
Why you need it:
There is no limit on sending the notification.
After activating this plugin, the visitors of the website can opt-in to receive push notifications.
When a new post published on your website or you are having a special sale on your products, you can instantly send a notification to your subscribers.
The best thing is that the visitors receive these notifications even after they’ve left your website.
TinyMCE Advanced
What it does:
TinyMCE Plugin is the primary text editor for WordPress. With this plugin, the editing system on your WordPress website can be adjusted according to your comfort.
TinyMCE could help you create more engaging content for your website visitors.
Why you need it:
If you are not comfortable with the new block editor (Gutenberg), with TinyMCE advanced, you can get a “classic paragraph” block and a “Hybrid Mode.”
Social Warfare
What it does:
Social Warfare is a WordPress social sharing Plugin. It’s one of the best plugins for generating more social shares.
Social shares are valuable because they bring us unique visitors on our website and help to generate brand awareness.
Why you need it:
The problem with most WordPress social sharing plugins is it affects our website speed.
Another problem is it’s hard to find a social share plugin that looks stylish and has attractive social icons.
But Social Warfare doesn’t slow down your website, and its social share buttons are beautiful.
With this plugin, you can have floating share buttons that follow the reader until the end of the article.
Revive Old Posts
What it does:
With the help of this plugin, you can revive your old blog post. You can reshare them on various social media with this plugin and driving more traffic to your website.
Sharing your content only once on social media is not enough these days to catch people’s attention. You need to reshare your content every 3-4 months.
This is the reason revive old post plugin is one of the must-have WordPress plugins for every blogger.
Why you need it:
It can prove to be a very effective plugin for growing your website traffic.
One feature which I find very helpful in revive old post plugin is posting exclude element.
You don’t want to share old posts that are outdated and have lost their value, right?
With this feature, you exclude all outdated post from being shared using this plugin.
ALSO, CHECK:
- How to Create a Perfect WordPress Blog In 2019
- Recommended Blogging Resources & Tools
- Top 7 Free Online Proofreading Tools for Flawless Content Writing
- Grammarly Review – Features, Pros, Cons and My Verdict
- SiteGround Review: (Plans, Pricing, Ratings, Uptime, Performance, Pros & Cons)
- How to Create a Signature Form in 3 Simple Steps Using WPForms
Hi there, of course thiss post is genuimely nice and I have learned lot
of things from it concerning blogging. thanks.
Thanks a lot for such nice words. Cheers!
-Divyanshu