Are you looking for the best WordPress plugins for blogs to take it to the next level?
There are thousands of free and premium plugins available on WordPress.
But with the availability of so many plugins, the biggest problem is choosing the right WordPress plugin for your blog.
Here I’m sharing the list of best WordPress plugins that you can install to make your blog instantly better.
Table of Contents
1. Rank Math
Rank Math is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress that offer the best features and tools that you need to improve your on-page SEO.
By using these plugin, you can create XML sitemaps, meta tags, and structured data to your website.
XML sitemaps help search engines intelligently crawl your website content. The post and pages of your website will immediately index in search engines.
Rank math plugin also connects your website to Google search console.
By doing these you can see the most important information from Google directly in your WordPress dashboard.
One of the best features of this plugin is the 404 monitor tool and redirections.
404 monitor tool helps you to find out where users are unable to find the content.
You can create a redirection for your user when they get landed on the 404 error page. These redirections enable the users to remain on your blog.
Rank math plugin also counts the total number of an internal, external link, to and from links inside your page. You can also see the same count direct in the posts list page.
If you want to fix your all basic SEO problems, you should use this plugin.
Alternatives for Rank Math plugins is Yoast SEO and All in one SEO.
2. Ninja Forms
Every beginner needs a contact form for their website. It makes it easy for your visitors to get in touch with you.
Use Ninja Forms to create a beautiful, user-friendly WordPress form that will make you feel like a professional web developer.
Ninja Forms is the 100% beginner-friendly WordPress form builder. Drag and drop form fields to build beautiful, professional contact forms in minutes.
You don’t have to be a designer to create forms that will blend beautifully with your WordPress website.
There are also many features of Ninja forms.
- Drag and drop form builder
- 27+ field types
- Regular updates
- Dedicated support
- Customizable form template
- Fully responsive, SEO and mobile-friendly
- Beautifully matches your theme’s design decision
- Developer friendly
Over 1 million websites use Ninja Forms and they have consistently maintained a good rating till now.
So if you seriously want to connect with your visitors or looking to grow your business, then I recommend using Ninja Forms.
Alternative: WPForms is an excellent alternative to create a user-friendly contact form for WordPress.
3. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total cache is the highest-rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin.
This plugin is used by almost all of the website builders and bloggers because of its excellent features.
W3 Total cache plugin dramatically improves the speed and user experience of your website.
It reduces the load time by decreasing the size and number of CSS and JS files. Automatically remove unnecessary data from CSS, JS, feed page and post HTML.
It automatically turns on recommended WordPress caching like database cache, object cache and browser cache.
Browser cache reduces the server load and decreases response time by using the cache available in site visitor’s web browser.
You can also turn on other features like minification, CDN support, lazy loading images, debug, and much more to further improve website loading speed.
You can also enable Google page speed dashboard widget to display the result of your website speed on the WordPress dashboard.
That’s why this plugin is the easiest and most beginner-friendly caching plugin.
Alternative: WP Super Cache, this plugin is the best alternative for W3 Total cache and this is also a user-friendly plugin.
4. Jetpack
Jetpack is an ideal plugin for stats, social sharing, protection, backups, security and more.
Jetpack protects your website from brute-force attacks and unauthorized logins.
You’ll get a notification every time when your site goes offline or down.
Jetpack optimize the images and static files (like CSS and JavaScript) to increase the speed of your website. It also provides a feature of lazy loading images that improve your site speed and create a smoother viewing experience.
When you enable lazy loading for images on your website, images will load as visitor scroll down the screen, instead of all at once.
You can add social sharing and like buttons to your post and pages.
For the better engagement in your comment section, you can enable visitors to use a Facebook, Twitter, Google account to comment on your blog post.
So that they didn’t find any difficulty to comment on your website.
And the most important part is you can see the stats of your website directly in the Jetpack dashboard. You will don’t need any other tool to check the stats of your website.
You can also control the way search engines represent your site. With Jetpack SEO tools you can preview how your content will look on popular search engines and change items like site name and tagline in minutes.
But to use SEO tools you’ve to go with Jetpack premium plan.
But if you’re a beginner I will suggest you use the free plan of Jetpack. Because it already gives many features in its free plan.
So if you want to increase the protection and performance of your website, use Jetpack plugin.
5. Shortpixel
Shorpixel is an image optimizer plugin. It optimizes images automatically while guarding the quality of the images.
Shortpixel is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs used by millions of users for image optimization.
As we use images in our articles to provide more information and make it more attractive. But images can reduce the website speed.
Many beginners didn’t know how to optimize their images due to which the loading time of their website increases.
And most of them use photoshop to optimize their images, that’s a great choice, but it takes a lot of time.
But if you use Shortpixel plugin you don’t have to optimize any of your images.
Just upload your images to the media library of WordPress and Shortpixel will automatically optimize your all images without reducing the quality of images.
You can also backup your original images in a separate folder in order to be able to restore images to the original.
But the down part of this plugin is you can only optimize 100 images per month.
If you want to optimize more images you’ve to purchase its premium plan.
But according to me, 100 images per month is sufficient for a website.
If you’re are using more than these go with the premium plan. The premium plan is also not too costly. Check the pricing here.
6. AMP
The AMP plugin for WordPress is a powerful tool that helps you build a user-friendly WordPress site, that is, site that is fast, beautiful, secure, engaging, and accessible.
AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages. This plugin increases the speed of your website in mobile devices.
As you know the usage of mobiles has increased rapidly nowadays.
There are more mobile devices than people on earth.
So it is very important to optimize your website for mobile devices.
AMP plugin optimize your website by creating an AMP version of your website.
When any user opens your website in mobile they will land on your AMP version of the website.
This plugin is best for improving the speed and performance of your website in mobiles.
AMP plugin automatically improve the page speed and loading time with minification option.
It also supports the serving of AMP pages to make it easier for site owners to take advantage of mobile redirection, AMP to AMP linking, and generation of optimizes AMP by default.
When you check the speed of your website you’ve definitely seen that the website speed differs for mobile and desktop.
And always the website speed for mobile is very low as compared to that of the desktop.
To solve this issue you can use AMP plugin since it will increase the website speed for mobile.
7. Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from spam.
Akismet plugin is used by millions of users to protect their site from spam.
Akismet checks your comment and contact form submission to prevent your site from publishing malicious content.
It automatically checks all the comment and filters out the ones that look like spam.
You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s Comment admin screen.
When you use Akismet plugin in your website, URL’s will show in the comment body, so that when anyone tries to use hidden or misleading links in comment section Akismet will reveal that links.
So if you want to protect your site from spam and malicious attacks, use Akismet Anti-Spam plugin.
8. Sassy Social Share
Sassy social share enables your website users to share the content of your website over Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Reddit, Line and over 100 more.
If you are looking for the simplest and smoothest social sharing plugin then Sassy social share is the best choice.
The configuration of the plugin is dead simple. Screenshots are provided with options wherever required.
You can customize icons in thousands of ways using the option available within the plugin.
You can also specify the position of social sharing bar with respect to content – Top and Bottom.
It is also compatible with AMP and WooCommerce.
The best part of this plugin is, the loading time of social sharing icon is optimal and if you compare with other plugins, you will find it less than that of all those plugins.
9. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the world’s highest-ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently-active installs.
UpdraftPlus plugin is easy to use, it allows you to backup and restores with a single click.
With the use of this plugin, you can back up your files into the cloud and directly to Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, FTP, and email.
WordPress like any CMS can be vulnerable to any things such as hacking, server crashes, and insecure web hosts.
That’s why backups are the ultimate insurance if the worst were to happen, your website stays safe and can be restored in no time.
You can also choose a remote location like Google Drive to save the backups of your website.
10. TinyMCE Advanced
TinyMCE Advanced extends and enhances the block editor and classic editor.
If you’re not quite ready to use block editor, then using the classic paragraph editor is the best option.
This plugin adds more features to your classic editor for more tasks and also gives you full access to all blocks and new features in the block editor.
You can add, remove or arrange the buttons that are shown on the visual editor toolbar in the classic paragraph.
This plugin also has the ability to set the font family and font sizes in the classic block and classic editor.
So if you want to make your article more attractive for the visitors with some extra features you can use this plugin.
11. WooCommerce
WooCommerece is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress used by over 4 million websites.
Whether you’re launching a business or developing a site for your store, use WooCommerece for making your site more user-friendly.
Over the last few years, WooCommerce has established itself as the most trusted and dominant eCommerce plugin for WordPress.
If you’re looking to established an eCommerce website you can install these plugin to make your website simpler and attractive.
12. Redirection
Redirection is the most popular redirect manager for WordPress. With it you can easily manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 error, and it helps to reduce error and improve website ranking.
It has been a WordPress plugin for over 10 years and has been recommended countless times.
Redirection lets you set up custom 301 redirections within your website and then keep a full record of data on clicks. You can even use it to track broken URL’s on your site.
Google hates bad user experience and 404 or broken page is one of them.
But it is quite not possible to check every single post or page of your website by hands.
Simply installing the redirection plugin will show you a list of pages that are 404s and all you need to do is enter the URL where you want to redirect the visitor.
13. Google XML Sitemap
Yet another useful plugin for WordPress. This plugin will improve your SEO by helping search engines to better index your site using sitemaps.
As soon as you install this plugin it automatically creates XML sitemaps.
With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your website and retrieve it more efficiently.
Additionally, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Final Words
No matter what type of website you’re running, there are certain plugins that are always worth installing.
These 13 are the best and must-have plugins for any type of website.These are the best WordPress plugins for blogs.
Have you used any of this WordPress plugin? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.
Hey Friend!
I am Ankur Gohite, the founder of Huppdigital. A blog that provides authentic information regarding blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing, and how to make money online.
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