10 Essential WordPress Plugins For Every Blogger

In my last blog post, I talked about how to start a blog and here I will suggest you some essential WordPress plugins ti install to take your blogging to the next level.

If you are completely new to WordPress plugins, So I am here to explain to you.

Basically, a plugin is a piece of software that contains a group of functions that could be coupled with the WordPress Website and thereby expand the functionality or add new features to websites.

Since the majority of the plugins are available free, they don’t come with technical support. Be therefore picky while choosing the one for installation.

This post contains affiliate links to tools and services to help you start a blog. If you make a purchase through these links, I’ll receive a small commission at no cost to you. Read the full discloser here.

With more than 58 000 plugins available in the market, both free and commercial, some may surpass quality than the others. Therefore, ask yourself few questions before choosing the right one.

• How long has it been updated?
• What’s its compatibility with the latest version?
• Are their support questions duly answered?
• What’s its rating?

In this post, I’ll explain to you what WordPress plugins you need for your blogs and how to install a plugin on your blog.

Before we go ahead, if you have not booked your hosting, go and book with Bluehost which start at only $3.95/month and you will get your domain name free for one year.

Must have WordPress plugins for your blog:

By now, you’re probably asking:

Which plugins are best for my blog?

Of the plethora of plugins available in the market, the following are the top 10, tried and tested.

All of these plugins are free to use. For some, you can upgrade to a paid premium version if you need the extra features. But as a beginner, it’s perfectly OK to just use the free version first.

WPForms

It is a form-builder plugin. All websites need contact forms for establishing contact with their visitors. WPForms is the most friendly and convenient to users for making contact with you. Its drag and drop contact form builder facilitates easy creation of

• Email subscription forms
• Contact forms
• Payment forms
• Online Order forms
• Surveys
• Polls
• Other types of online forms

Your visitors could get the desired forms just at a few clicks. You can build powerful forms within a few minutes by collating with popular marketing and payment platforms.

WPForms have the edge over other form builders such as form-landing pages, conversational forms, geological tracking, User Journey tracking, form abandonment, login forms, custom WordPress user registration, etc. GDPR-friendly.

You can have a free version of WPForms for a simple solution. You should use a Pro version with a powerful version that helps you in growing your business.

MonsterInsights (Best Google Analytics Plugin)

As this plugin connects your website properly with Google Analytics, you can watch how people find and make use of your website.

You can see all the important statistics that have importance in your WordPress Dashboard.

This enables you to optimize your website for increasing your traffic, revenue, and subscribers. You can get the necessary guidelines for the following:

• Installing Google Analytics in WordPress
• Using Google Analytics for enabling e-commerce tracking
• Tracking of user engagement

These guidelines facilitate easy installation and use of the plugins. You can free version of MonsterInsight versions.

If you want to make your website more attractive and traffic-jammed, opt for the Pro ones according to the features that would enrich your website.

All-in-One SEO

Because of its popularity, it is used by over 2 million websites. It offers the most comprehensive solution and comes with features and tools to improve your page SEO. It adds to the following:

• Meta tags
• Generation of site maps
• Connection of your site to Google Search Console
• Optimization for social media
• Improvement in SEO rankings.

WordPress SEO tutorials and guides are available for beginners. You can thus use the plugins even if you have no earlier knowledge about them.

You should prefer the commercial version over the free ones for ensuring more traffic. Some commercial versions worth mentioning are WooCommerce SEO, Smart Schema, and Local SEO.

WordFence Security

As the name suggests, it is the best security and Data Plugins. Although the most popular and adaptable platform, WordPress is the most vulnerable platform for hacking.

But, security features have been devised to mitigate a substantial amount of hacking risk. WordFence is the best plugin to encounter hackers before they harm your website.

The autopilot feature of WordFence provides a great amount of WordPress Security. It puts a firewall for protecting your site from break-ins of login and other sensitive points of common attacks as the first point of security.

The next step includes security scans which you can perform to make your site even more attack-proof. It also makes your site free of malware. Besides the free version, the pricing of the pro version starts from $99 per license.

Yoast SEO

It offers real-time page analysis for optimization of your

• Page Content Images
• Meta Descriptions
• Meta Titles
• Keywords

Through this plugin, you can ask Google not to index a page or set of pages. Additionally, it performs the following functions

• Analysis of readability of your copy
• Checking the word contained in your sentences and paragraphs
• Frequent use of passive voice in your content
• Use of transition words or sub-headings
• Generation of URLs automatically for which you don’t get penalized by Google for plagiarized contents
• Creation of readable XML and sitemaps
• Getting finer control over breadcrumbs

Although free versions are available, commercial versions are more powerful and versatile

Gravity Form

This plugin is particularly useful if you need a contact form for your WordPress and you have no earlier experience or knowledge about creating form.

It enables you to generate complex contact forms easily and quickly.

• It has a user-friendly editor that prompts you for the selection of the fields you want
• Configuration of your options and
• Embedment of your WordPress site
• Breaking up your forms into multiple pages

A progress bar shows you how far you’ve progressed in the process. There is also a HubSpot add-on. There is a provision for scheduling forms to appear and disappear at certain points.

You can create your order form with pricing fields. You can also create user-generated WordPress posts on your site. The commercial version is priced at $59.

WP-Rocket

As the name suggests, this plugin is particularly suitable if your concern is about your site’s speed. You can install and configure it just within a few minutes.

After straightway activating, you are enabled to get a boost of speed on your site. Since the plugin’s crawler simulates a visit for pre-loading the cache, there will be an instant improvement in your website’s indexing by search engines.

It has the following additional features:

• The images on your site get loaded only when your visitor resorts to scrolling down the page and reducing the weight of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript through minification
• Both these improve your load times further
• Price begins at US$49 and has regular updates.

Blog Vault

This plugin is specially designed to meet any unforeseen eventuality of security breaches.

Catastrophe may strike at any time, thus putting your online data in the most vulnerable position. Therefore, it is essential to keep backups of the same.

This plugin backs up your entire WordPress site, including your files, and database on a suitable time frame and schedule. It has the following features:

• It works in low memory shared-memory environments
• Allows multiple managing schedules
• Sends each of the backed-up files emailed to you

You are enabled to send your backups to the following destinations

• Remote FTP servers
• DropBox
• Google Drive
• Amazon S3, Rackspace Clouds, DreamObjects, DreamHost, and Microsoft Azure

You can download it for free.

Akismet

This is particularly designed to manage and eliminate spasm comments. If you are allowing comments on your site, you may have to eliminate many spasm comments.

You can manage the same by comment moderation to a particular extent. If the comments surpass a certain limit, Akismet will solve your problem.

It automatically checks and filters out all the seemingly spam comments. You don’t have to set the background to configure.

Therefore, you can run this plugin easily. Unfortunately, sometimes it may filter out a false positive spasm. But, identifying the false positives or indicating when it missed a spasm can improve itself over time.

It would help if you had an Akismet API key to download it free. There are free keys for personal blogs. But, you have to subscribe to it for commercial sites.

OptionMonster

OptinMonster plugin optimizes the conversion of website visitors to email subscribers and sales. It comes with the following features:

• Hundreds of templates for creating WordPress pop-ups slide-ins
• Announcement bars
• Full-screen welcome mats to capture the attention of the users gamified spin a wheel
• Customization of campaign templates along with their drag and drop builders
• Powerful display targeting allows personalization of the campaign for each user that enables you to show the right message at the right time.
• Recovery of abandoned cart sales.

The above top 10 WordPress plugins are distinguished out in the 58,000 + plugins because of their popularity among bloggers and e-commerce websites.

How Do I Install WordPress Plugins?

Installing a plugin on your WordPress website is super easy.

On your left menu click on plugins > add new > and enter a keyword or a plugin name in the search box.

Or if you have already download the plugin, you can upload the .zip file.

When you click enter you’ll get a list of lots of different plugins. Just look through the list and pick the one you want to install and click “install now”!

Wait a few seconds for the plugin to get installed, when it’s done the button will say to activate.

Just activate the plugin and that’s it!

If you enjoyed this post on the best WordPress plugins for blogs, please leave your comment below!

Which WordPress plugins do you use? I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and add them to the list!

Happy blogging!