A Complete Guide on the Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs

WordPress is not only a popular blog platform, but it’s also the most popular CMS in the world. It powers 35% of the internet. Seeing as there are over 1.3 billion live websites today, this means around 455,000,000 websites use WordPress.

It’s not surprising as its blogging platform offers a lot of free features. It provides free updates, free templates, and free tools for customizing a blog of your own.

However, did you know that you can do more with plugins?

WordPress has thousands of plugins available in its repository. They can extend the features and capabilities of your blog.

If you want to find out the best WordPress plugins for blogs, keep on reading below.

1. WPForms

Whatever type of blog you’re running, you may want your readers to be able to contact you. You also need brands to have a way to contact you for collaborations, sponsorships, and more.

WPForms give anyone an easy and sure way to contact you. It’s one of the most user-friendly plugins that allow you to set up contact forms on your blog.

Not only that, but it can also help you create other types of forms. With this plugin, you can create online order forms, payment forms, and even polls.

If you want your website visitors to be able to log in, WPForms will also help you do that. It helps you create a WordPress user registration form and login page.

It only takes a few clicks in WPForms to create any kind of form you want.

2. Yoast SEO

When running a blog, you need to get your SEO strategy sorted out. A well-optimized blog will help you get to the top of search engine results pages (SERP). In turn, you get more traffic.

SEO is a broad subject, though, and it can be quite complicated at times even if you don’t take into account that Google likes updating its algorithms regularly, sometimes changing the whole SEO landscape.

That’s why you need all the help you can get – in the form of an SEO plugin, like Yoast SEO.

This plugin is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs as it offers comprehensive SEO solutions. It gives you a lot of tools to improve your on-page SEO by optimizing your titles, keywords, images, and more.

It also lets you generate a sitemap, optimize your content for social media, add meta tags, and more. It also watches out for broken links on your site, which can harm your ranking. It creates auto-redirects so your users won’t ever come across a broken page.

3. Akismet

Anyone with a website knows that spam is one of the most annoying aspects of having a blog.  Not only are we constantly bombarded with spam in our emails, but the comment sections of blogs are also prime locations for spams.

Even beginner blogs get some, which makes them more infuriating. New bloggers can get so excited for every comment they get, only to see a spam comment.

If you’re new to blogging, make sure you have Akismet Anti-spam from day one. It’s an anti-spam plugin that comes from Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

It analyzes the comments and then moves those that look like spam to the trash. It also filters contact form submissions and blocks spam. After some time, the items in the trash get deleted forever.

You’ll have access to the comments status history to see where the spam was before Akismet got to it.

4. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is another important plugin for WordPress bloggers to have. This tool is essential for growing your subscription list, enriching your leads, and consistently growing your number of returning consumers.

The plugin achieves this by enabling custom pop-ups, and custom subscription/email registration forms. Using this plugin, you can even customize which actions trigger specific pop-ups and forms that will appear and how.

It also features smooth integration with other plugins. This means you can easily integrate OptinMonster with WooCommerce, Shopify, and more.

5. WP Rocket

Speaking of SEO, did you know that the loading speed of your website and its pages is a ranking factor? If you have slow-loading pages, it not only brings down your rank, but it will negatively affect your visitors overall experience.

For the sake of your page rank and your readers, optimize your website so it doesn’t run slow. One of the best WordPress caching plugins is WP Rocket.

It reduces the loading time of scripts and contents, uses browser caching, defers the loading of JavaScript files, and is compatible with CloudFlare and other Content Delivery Networks (CDN). It leverages the latest best practices to help your pages load faster.

Compared with other WordPress caching plugins, WP Rocket produces the best loading speed results, and is also compatible with most shared hosting and different types of servers.

6. Jetpack

Jetpack is a multi-use plugin that rolls different solutions into one. It comes from the same people behind WordPress.com, so you know it’s well-maintained.

For one, it lets you put social sharing buttons on your blog posts. It can then auto-publicize your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. It can also show related posts on your content to reduce the bounce rate.

Your blog will need protection, too, and Jetpack will provide that. Jetpack offers brute force protection, malware scanning, and spam filtering.

If your site is down, it will notify you right away so you can fix the issue right away. In 2017, organizations lost an average of 100,000 USD for every hour of downtime on their website. Smaller blogs or organizations might lose much less money, but it’s money, nonetheless.

Jetpack has more features that you can check out on its page. In conclusion, it helps you reduce plugin clutter.

7. iThemes Security

You still need a comprehensive WordPress security plugin, though, as spammers are the least of the threats out there. That’s where iThemes Security comes in.

It identifies and blocks malicious traffic, prevents brute force attacks, protects your site at the endpoint, and more. It also has a security scanner feature, which checks the integrity of your core files, checks for security vulnerabilities, scans for malware, and so on.

It has a lot more security features to keep your site protected. It even has two-factor authentication and CAPTCHA for protection against bots.

Whenever something happens, it sends you a notification right away.

8. WooCommerce

Want to sell some items on your blog? WooCommerce is the plugin to download.

It takes care of everything you need on a website to sell. From the product listing to the payment page, it allows you to set up everything with only one plugin.

You can set up different types of products, from physical to digital goods. You can set the prices to have automatic taxes based on the user’s geo-location.

Have multiple product variations and limited inventory? Don’t worry, WooCommerce got that all covered.

The checkout process is fully customizable, as well. Upon checkout, you can accept payment via credit cards, PayPal, bank transfer, cash on delivery, and such.

Even if you want to turn your blog into an e-commerce website, it has the tools to do that. That’s why it has over 5 million active installations.

9. WPML

When your blog takes off, you will likely get visitors from all over the world. As you become more successful, you’ll need to provide translations so you can have an even wider reach. Google Translate is an option, but it’s auto-translate capabilities might not be acceptable for professional organizations.

The default settings of WP don’t allow you to create a multilingual website. It supports only one language at a time.

The plugin WPML solves this problem as it allows your site to become multilingual. You only need to select the languages from their list to add to your site. You can add or remove a language at any time.

You will be able to translate all areas of your site, including your posts, tags, categories, and so on.

10. UpDraft Plus

Backups are important no matter how big or small your blog is. You can lose all your data in a blink of an eye, and if you don’t have backups, you would have lost those data forever.

It’s unlikely to happen, but it’s not unheard of. If you or your hosting company get attacked by a hacker, you can lose everything you worked hard for.

Even with that risk, however, some people still avoid doing their backups because of how complicated it may seem. That’s why UpDraft Plus is one of the best backup plugins for WordPress — it takes the work out of it.

When you have this plugin, creating a backup takes only a few simple steps. You can easily create schedules to have your backups automatically run daily, weekly or monthly.

Download the Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs

These are only some examples of the best WordPress plugins for blogs. You can find more on the plugin page of WordPress, but you have to read the reviews first.

Don’t fret if it still seems a bit confusing. We’re here to guide you through it. If you need any help on your WordPress site, contact us today.