The blogging industry has been growing at the fastest pace. As per WordPress, every month, 409 million individuals read more than 20.7 billion blog post. It clearly shows that people are taking an interest in reading blogs, and their demand is also increasing. To begin with the blogging website, many people prefer to choose WordPress. Why? Because by following few easy steps of blogging, they can build a WordPress website effortlessly. Apart from blogs, individuals who want to make a website for magazines, businesses, news, etc. prefer to create their websites on WordPress.
While building a WordPress website for blog, it’s easy to choose the theme. But when it comes to installing plugins, you have to be a little careful. Plugins are a piece of software that adds functionality in your website. It helps both the website owner and visitors to navigate through the website effectively. There are many plugins that are developed for multiple uses. But there some that are developed for a single purpose only. One should only add those plugins that are necessary for the website. Adding unnecessary plugins may slow down the site.
Choosing the right plugin for a blog can be a little tricky. So here is a list of top 15 WordPress plugins that are essential for your blog website.
1) Yoast SEO:
Yoast SEO is the most popular and useful search engine optimization plugin for blogs. Millions of users have found this plugin useful as the plugin gets updated for better upgrades and helps in getting traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo search engines. The plugin offers a wide range of SEO features and options to optimize the site. It checks every part of the content and shows how it looks from the SEO and readability perspective. Apart from checking, it also provides suggestions to improve it. Apart from optimizing the content, users can also do the following things:
- Set canonical URLs to avoid Google penalties and duplicate content
- Create and submit Google XML sitemap
- Control site breadcrumbs
- Add focus keyword
The plugin is easy to install and is available in both free and premium versions.
2) Popups by OptinMonster:
If you want to make money through your blog, it’s essential to build your email list. An email list helps you to communicate directly with your customers. Popups are one of the best ways to get the attention of the visitors and convert them into subscribers and customers. Popups by OptinMonster is a great plugin that gives its users complete control over the opt-in process. Instead of flashing popup in front of the reader, it allows its users to set the time for the popup. Here are some of its unique features:
- It helps in creating beautiful opt-in forms designs that are optimized for higher conversion rate.
- Some people visit the website once and do not come back. The exit-intent technology helps the marketer in analyzing the behavior of visitors and evokes them at the exact time they are going to leave with a targeted campaign.
- The page-level targeting module lets its users build individual target pages so that they can make a hyper-targeted list.
3) Simple Share Buttons Adder:
Social sharing has become an integral part of our internet experience. Simple Share Button Adder precisely does what it is intended to be- add buttons in all your posts and pages. Being a new blogger, you want to viral your content, and the best way to do that is by taking the help of your audience. The plugin may seem to be very basic, but if you want your audience to share your content on different channels, you have to make the process easy. Keep yourself in their place and think would you prefer to log in to your social page and share the link or want to share the link with a single click of the button?
4) MonsterInsights:
Once you start getting the traffic on your blog, you want those visitors to keep coming back again. For that, you have to have a proper understanding on from where those visitors are coming, what all pages they are viewing, what device they are using, how long they are staying and much more. These insights will help you in making better marketing strategies. You may find fetching this data a little complicated, but it’s not! MonsterInsights plugin allows its users to connect your WordPress site to Google Analytics easily. Here are some of its additional unique features:
- The plugin is easy to set-up
- It provides real-time statistics
- It helps its users in knowing which post is drawing maximum visitors
- It provides all the data the site owner requires on their Digital Download store or WooCommerce.
- Users can track ads and see how many clicks they are getting from respective banner.
5) WPForms:
Contact forms are a great way to get in touch with visitors. Although many other plugins can help you in creating a contact form, being a novice, you must be looking for a plugin that is easy to use. WPForms are an easy-to-use plugin that helps its users to create contact forms within minutes. It has a lot of in-built templates, and those templates can be customized according to the needs of a user. Once you create your form, you can copy the shortcode and paste it in your page. All the forms are responsive and mobile-ready. With an instant notification feature, the user can respond to the leads without any delay.
6) WooCommerce:
If you want to sell anything online, then consider WooCommerce plugin. The plugin allows its users to convert their website into an e-commerce store easily. The plugin is not only famous among website owners but with developers too. By using the plugin, you can create invoices, handle taxes, manage inventory and shipping, and much more. In addition to these features, the plugin offers the number of beautiful themes that are specifically designed for WooCommerce stores.
7) ShortPixel Image Optimizer:
Image optimization is a practice of providing high-quality images in the right size, format, dimension, and resolution. For any website, image optimization is essential because it has a direct impact on the page loading speed, SEO ranking, user engagement, etc. So if you want to compress all the images and PDF documents in a single click the consider ShortPixel Image Optimizer plugin. The moment you activate the plugin, it starts compressing your images and save your original images in a separate folder. The plugin also allows comparing the original image with the compressed version. You can use the plugin with multiple sites with a single API key. It works well with both HTTPS and HTTP websites.
8) Akismet Anti-Spam:
Akismet is one of the official WordPress plugins that is always associated with every new key installation of WordPress. It is an anti-spam plugin that verifies all the remarks and filters out the spam remarks. It also provides the history for each comment so that users can see which comments were found spam by the plugin. You should install this plugin because if your blog has a comment section, then you don’t want it to be spammed. To activate the plugin, you need to add an API key, which is easy to set up and free for personal blogs.
9) wpDiscuz:
Being a blogger, you want to make your blog interactive. So how will you do that? By adding the comment section in your blog! The comment section in your blog allows your readers to ask questions, share their views on a particular blog. Some may also write negative views. But don’t get disheartened with such comments. Negative reviews will give you the opportunity to improve your blog. wpDiscuz is one of the best plugins to add a comment section to your blog. The plugin comes with a lot of exciting features. Some of its unique features are:
- Depending upon the blog post, users can activate or deactivate the blog section
- Users can sort the list of the comments according to the newest, oldest or most voted comments
- The plugin can be integrated fully with social media login systems
- The plugin has built-in anti-spam protection
10) UpdraftPlus:
For any WordPress website, backups are the first layer of security. Besides automated backups, you also required an easy way to restore the backup. Researches have shown that every year, globally, enterprises bear $1.7 trillion costs for losing the data. All websites are exposed to security threats. There can be many scenarios where you could end up losing your data. The best way to protect your website against such threats is to back up your website regularly. UpdraftPlus is one of the best plugins for backup. By using the plugin, users can backup their files in cloud databases such as Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, etc. and can restore their files in a single click. Users can restore their files in more than one cloud databases. Some of its other features include:
- It schedules the backup for your files automatically
- It uses fewer server resources for faster processing.
- With the help of Migrator, it migrates or duplicate websites easily.
11) Cache Enabler:
Cache Enabler is a light-weight plugin that improves the loading speed of the website by creating static HTML files. These files get stored on the web server. Here are the unique features of the plugin:
- Automated or manual clearing of the cache
- Minification of HTML and inline JavaScript
- Manually purge the cache of specific pages
- WordPress multisite support
- Translation ready
- Display of the actual cache size in your dashboard
- An efficient and fast disk cache engine
- Custom Post Type support
- Expiry Directive
- WebP Support (when combined with Optimus)
- Supports responsive images via srcset in WordPress 4.4
- Works perfectly with Autoptimize
12) ThirstyAffiliates:
If you are a blogger who is looking to make money from affiliate marketing, then it’s essential to manage all your affiliate links. ThirstyAffiliates is a plugin that allows the website owners to keep track of all the affiliate links. It gives the authority to manage links with its tools like link shortening/link Cloaking, customizable link URL prefixes, 301 redirects, Do follow/No follow option, and much more. Here are some of its unique features:
- Linking affiliate links to keywords automatically throughout the website
- Geotarget visitors and redirect them to their geographical URLs
- It provides a detailed analysis of reports in the form of charts and tables.
- It automatically checks the affiliate links for 404 and notifies the users in case of any problem
- It import/export affiliate links through CSV
13) CoSchedule:
CoSchedule is one of the best interactive content calendar plugins for WordPress. It helps the users to efficiently plan, publish, and promote blog posts and social media messages directly in WordPress. Other features include:
- It has a built-in headline analyzer
- It has a simple drag and drop interface
- It measures the performance of every post and Requeue it when a gap is available
If you want to reduce your workload and make your content calendar more professional, then this plugin is perfect for you.
14) Fancier Author Box
Being a blogger, you must know the importance of the author bio box. It makes the blog post look tremendous and add a personal touch to it. It also affects blog SEO and blog credibility. Fancier Author Box is one of the best plugins to add author bio box in the blog. It makes the author bio box looks more professional and lets its users customize the colors, social media buttons, and much more. Here are some of its unique features:
- It automatically pulls in the WordPress user profile information including their image and bio description
- It adds extra fields to the user settings so that they can add the company name, URL, their position in the company, etc.
- It has two tabs where the first tab displays the details of the author, and the second tab displays the latest posts.
15) All In One Rich Scheme.org Rich Snippets:
Below the search results pages, you must have noticed additional information such as star rating, number of reviews, images, etc. Such information is known as Rich Snippets. They are the best way to make the search engine results more attractive to users. Rich snippets also have a high click-through-rate. To create Rich Snippets, WordPress provides a plugin known as All In One.org Rich Scheme Rich Snippets. The plugin supports the following content types:
- Review
- Product
- Recipe
- Video
- Articles
- Event
- People
Conclusion:
So, folks, these are the best 15 WordPress Plugins for your blog. By using these plugins, you can take your blog to the next level by converting your visitors into customers, improving site SEO, loading speed, solidify security, and promoting your products and content in a better way. If you are already using any of these plugins, share your experience in the below comment section.
