The Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers
The Best WordPress plugins for bloggers to install. A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to your website.
They add to blog design and can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites.
An example of a WordPress plugin would be GS plugin which is one of my favorites.
What GS plugins does is displays your Pinterest account anywhere on your blog.
You can choose a board to be displayed and it even allows your website visitors to scroll through your pins or click to follow you on Pinterest.
The Best WordPress Plugins for New Bloggers
The developers encode the plugin with all the functionality and all you need to do is install it and add some customization to your settings.
With little experience or for beginners in building websites you can find the best WordPress plugins that will add virtually any type of functionality you are looking for.
There are thousands of WordPress plugins available for free at the official WordPress plugin directory.
Some of them offer a premium or upgrade for a fee option.
Best WordPress Plugins
When downloading a free plugin you want to verify if there is a support team to help with questions you may have.
For this reason it is important to be careful when choosing which ones you want to install on your site.
Very important to note. Not all plugins are good for your website. There maybe compatibility issues or version issues.
A good practice before installing would be to check if it’s compatible with the latest version of WordPress?
Are people getting answers to their support questions? What type of rating does it have?
So I say be careful and do some research before installing your plugins.
Best Plugins for Your Website
The list of plugins I’m recommending is from personal experience.
These are great tools to use. They are installed and active on my blog or other websites.
I have a small group of favorites and because of my experiences I am slow when it comes to adding new plugins.
One other thing about adding to many plugins. I have been told by people who work in support for web hosting companies that having to many plugins on your site can slow it down.
My personal recommendation is to keep your website as lean as possible.
When installing plugins look for plugins that do multiple tasks so that you don’t have to install multiple plugins.
You can’t go wrong with running a lean website and keeping plugins to a minimum.
Plugins deliver a wide variety of options for your blog/website. If your marketing a product you can find a plugin to simplify sales.
If you have a design website or e-commerce website you can find useful plugins to add.
There are plugins for security to reduce attacks to your site. Plugins to help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Plugins that can change the layout or design of your blog/website.
Plugin shortlist
1. UpdraftPlus– Best free WordPress backup plugin
UpdraftPlus is the most popular WordPress backup plugin. It allows you to automatically backup your complete site and safely stores your site backup file on a cloud service such as Google Drive, Dropbox, UpdraftVault, etc.
It has an option to manually backup your site with a single click and also, you can restore your site with one click.
All these features work for free, but UpdraftPlus has a paid option with more features and premium support.
Images are essential to your blog. Because an image helps you to engage with your blog readers and it reduces the bounce rate of your site.
But high-quality images take a long time to load and also it slows down your site.
I recommend two different plugins that work to reduce image size. Short Pixel is a great plugin that will give you three levels of compression to choose from.
Short Pixel -Image optimization
Sometimes you have images with detail you need to preserve so having the option to choose how much compression you add is a must have.
There is a limited free version and a premium version that’s pretty affordable with all the features you need.
2. Smush Image Compression and Optimization – Best free WordPress image optimizer plugin
That’s why you need the Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin. Smush allows you to compress and optimize your images automatically.
It has an option to bulk smush up to 50 images with one click. Smush uses lossless compression, which means it compresses your images without losing their quality.
This plugin is user-friendly and it lets you optimize unlimited images for free.
3. Akismet– Anti-spam plugin for WordPress.
Spam is the most unwanted part of your blogging life. You’ll start getting spam comments as you get some popularity.
What’s worse is that some of these spam comments will look genuine.The best part is that we have Akismet, a free, useful plugin to automatically detect spam comments for your blog.
Akismet is the official anti-spam plugin offered by WordPress parent company Automattic.
4. WP Fastest Cache– Best free WordPress cache plugin
The free version is enough to speed up your site but in the premium version there are extra features such as Mobile Cache, Widget Cache, Minify HTML Plus, Minify CSS Plus, Minify JS, Combine JS Plus, Defer Javascript, Optimize Images, Convert WebP, Database Cleanup, Google Fonts Async, Lazy Load for super fast load times.
It’s the most reviewed WordPress caching plugin, which is completely free and beginner friendly.
5. Wordfence Security- Firewall & Malware Scan – Best WordPress security plugin
Security is the most important factor when you have your own money making blog.
Hackers are moving freely all over the internet. Your new blog can be their field of experiment or their next business opportunity.
So it’s obvious that you should take action to save your blog from those hackers.
Wordfence Security plugin is super easy to set up. Its web application firewall identifies and blocks malicious traffic and whenever something unusual happens, the plugin will send you an email notification instantly.
It has a malware scanner that helps you to scan your site’s core files, themes, and plugins for malware.
SEO Marketing Plugins
6. Yoast SEO– Free WordPress plugin for SEO
Everyone wants their blog to rank higher on Google. But to rank higher on Google, you have to create keyword optimized content on your blog, you need to do lots of other optimization on your blog to rank higher on Google or any other search engine.
Also, we all know that SEO is an extremely complex subject and as a beginner, it’s hard to learn SEO and optimize your blog for search engines.
That’s where the Yoast SEO plugin comes in.It’s the most popular and easy to understand WordPress SEO plugin of all time.
Yoast SEO plugin helps you add meta tags, check readability, generate XML sitemaps, optimize your content for social media, connect your site to Google Search console, optimize your content using a focus keyword and more.
It has a premium version with lots of other features. But if you are a beginner, free version of Yoast SEO is enough for your blog.
7. Social Warfare– Best free social sharing plugin
You can start with the free version of Social Warfare. The free version comes with modest options and would be perfect for basic social sharing.
It’s free, attractive, and lightweight. You can upgrade to the pro version for more customization such as social icons matching your brand.
8. Pin it Button–Free social sharing of images
Pin it button on image hover plugin provides facility to pins your blog posts, pages and images into your Pinterest account boards.
Simply install then activate the plugin and start pinning. You can show or hide pin it button in post/page.
You can enable or disable pin it button on image hover through plugin settings tab.
9. Woocommerce-Best free plugin for e-commerce
WooCommerce is a flexible, open-source eCommerce solution built on WordPress.
Whether you’re launching a business, taking an existing brick and mortar store online, or designing sites for clients you can get started quickly and build exactly the store you want.
10. Contact Form 7- Free plugin to create forms
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup.
The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
This list is just a few of the many plugin options available. The plugins mentioned had all performed well on my blog/websites.
I have tried others and mostly been satisfied, but I will keep this recommendation list to a minimum. My goal was to create a list of plugins that have not had any errors or conflicts and share them with you.
Enjoy, Explore, and Create Good Content!
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Now over to you
I’m curious? What plugins are you using for your website? Have you had any issues with plugins?
Leave a comment below, We love hearing from our readers!
12 Responses
I use a few of these plugins. Like you, I’m hesitant to add untested ones to my site. I’m not tech savvy so I err on the side of caution.
I’ve been getting a lot of spam lately but the Askimet plugin is doing a really good job of catching it. You’re right– the spam comments sometimes look genuine. Thanks for the great recommendations!
Yes Ana totally with you. I do err on the side of caution until I’m satisfied with my research
I like the Yoast SEO plugin but it crashes my site and I had to unplug it.
I was really shocked that it wasn’t compatible with my site.
Yes every so often you will encounter this. Theres a really popular cache plugin that I have not been able to use because it crashes my site
I use some of the listed plugins. Getting to know more about other plugins was quite helpful. Thank you for the guide.
Awesome Kunika! I’m glad this helped
I use many of these plugins except woo commerce. Great post.
Thanks for reading! Share if you have others
Nice Article Very good information.
Thanks for reading Tatai
I found Yoast SEO quite hard to use actually so now I have another one on my site ? Great post nonetheless; you can never have enough lists of good plugins to use 🙂
Thanks Addie for sharing!