[This article was originally published in June 2020 and has been republished with some of the best updates.]
There are thousands of WordPress plugins you can choose and most of them are free. With so many plugins, you can be confused to choose the best and most profitable for your blog and business.
First, if you’re a beginner, you must be wondering what is a plugin, right?
A plugin is a kind of software that you can add to your blog, which will enable more functions to your blog’s performance. It’s kind of magic! You just need to install and activate it, then voila – the additional feature is added to your blog!
Basically, the plugin makes your life much easier, as you don’t need to know much about tech stuff. Just be aware that not all plugins are trustable. Pick the one from a reputable source that has positive reviews and many people using it – and make sure that the plugins are compatible with your version of WordPress.
How To Add WordPress Plugins?
It’s really easy to do!
- Go to “Plugins” in the sidebar of your WordPress editor
- Click Plugins > Add new for installing a plugin
- Find or type the plugin that you are looking for
- Click on the Install Now button
- Click on Activate
After you activate it, sometimes the plugin may end up in different places (still in the sidebar, though). Whether in the sidebar or you can find it in Appearance or Settings. And sometimes plugins also require some settings to make them work on your blog.
Which plugins do you actually need?
As I said above, there are thousands of WordPress plugins and when you just install – too many – of them, you risk slowing down your website. And it’s pretty bad for your visitors.
I put together a list of essential WordPress plugins you need and all of them are FREE to use.
Akismet
This plugin comes automatically when you installed WordPress. It’s the first plugin that you should install on any new WordPress blog. It is a must-have WordPress plugin for your blog to protect your blog from spam or inappropriate comment.
The spammers only want to throw their links on your posts and this plugin will automatically move those comments into the trash can – deleting them permanently. However, check Akismet very often as you won’t know if a good comment or something is stuck in there.
Contact Form 7
When you search for contact form plugins, you will be bombarded with many options.
There are many premium ones (like Gravity), but Contact Form 7 is the simplest plugin to configure. It’s also useful because it shows things like referral sources which is very useful for knowing how your visitor navigated through your site before using the contact form.
One great thing about Contact Form 7 is the ability to customize it according to your needs. The form can be created, and every entry from it will be sent to your email.
You can also create multiple forms with multiple tables.
Easy Google Fonts
It helps you to add google fonts to your WordPress theme. Since WordPress has limited fonts, you can use this plugin to get more creative when creating your site title, headline, sidebar font, etc.
Easy Table of Contents
To optimize your SEO, one of the important elements is a table of contents. This WordPress plugin adds a user-friendly and automatic way to create and display a table of contents generated from the page content.
GDPR Cookie Consent
When starting a blog, you need to have something that informs your visitors that you are collecting their information in the form of cookies – this plugin will help you with that.
Insert Headers and Footers
After creating a blog, you might need to insert code into the header or footer of your blog. For example, connecting Google Analytics, claiming your website on Pinterest, and other things. If you’re not tech-savvy, this can be challenging.
This plugin allows you to insert code or text in the header or footer of your blog. Although it doesn’t really help with blog performance, it will help to make your blog a bit more admin-user friendly.
Jetpack
I’ve heard and read that the Jetpack plugin slows down your blog because of its features. But, that’s not the case for others who still using Jetpack for years already.
Jetpack is which is power-packed with many features. Here are a few things that you will be able to do with the Jetpack plugin:
- Track blog views
- Monitor downtime and get notified when your site is down
- Prevent hackers from brute forcing your blog’s login page
- Provide social sharing buttons to let your reader share your blog posts
- Show related posts to increase engagement & lower down bounce rate
- Provide subscription options so that users can subscribe to your blog updates
Once you start using Jetpack, you can ditch other plugins from your blog and reduce the number of plugins used.
No Self Pings
I’ve seen a bunch of WordPress plugins and no one has discussed how to stop pingbacks. Have you ever heard about it? When you link to any blog post from any other post on your blog, it sends a pingback. It will show in your comment section.
When I read someone’s post, sometimes I found a pingback in their comment section. Personally, I will install a plugin that saves me from a lot of headaches. No Self Pings plugin will stop sending pingbacks from the blog itself.
Pretty Links
One of my fave WordPress plugins. Pretty Links will enable you to shrink, cloak, track, organize, share, and test all of your links on your own domain and server. This is the best way to clean up your affiliate link, track clicks from emails, and your links on Twitter to come from your own domain.
Generally, increase the reach of your website by spreading these links on Facebook groups or comments on other blogs.
Rank Math SEO
Many times, you’ve heard about how important SEO is for your blog. Having an SEO plugin is essential for any blogger because it can help their blog rank higher in search engines.
This SEO plugin is a must-have for every blogger out there. With this one plugin, you can cover all of your on-page SEO, and the free version itself is already so powerful and effective for you.
Most bloggers may suggest Yoast SEO as well. Both of them are pretty similar. They will guide you well to create SEO-friendly content. I used Yoast SEO first but I guess that we don’t match each other. Then I found Rank Math and so far I’m very satisfied with its performance for two years more.
Rank Math helps bloggers to optimize their posts, pages, titles, and anything across their entire blog so that search engines, eg. Google can easily find them.
ShortPixel
You will definitely have hundreds or thousands of images on your blog. They help you to make your blog stand out. But, the images or graphics can also become the most common reasons for slowing down your blog. Therefore, you need to optimize them by using ShortPixel.
Optimized image means reducing the image size without reducing the quality of the images. It gives you a better user experience, better speed, and better Google ranking. ShortPixel has both a free and paid version. The free one will allow you to up to 100 images per month and if you need more, you can buy their additional credits starting from $9.99 for 10,000 images (one-time credits).
UpdraftPlus
Back and restore your blog, whatever it is!
UpdraftPlus is the most popular WordPress backup plugin on the market.
If something worse happened in the future, you won’t cry in the corner of your room because your blog crashed and you can’t retrieve all your hard work. You can connect this WordPress plugin to back up your blog and its content to your Google Drive.
wpDiscuz
wpDiscuz is an innovative, modern, and feature-rich comment system to supercharge your website comment section. You also can choose which layout you want to use for your comment section!
WordFence
WordFence is another popular WordPress security plugin. They offer a free version of their plugin which comes complete with a powerful malware scanner, exploit detection, and threat assessment features. This plugin will protect you from hackers and provide a shield from malware in order to make sure your blog site stays safe.
Plugins can help you with everything from optimizing your blog’s speed, to backing up your blog, to SEO optimization. They make your blogger’s life easy.
But, remember to install reliable plugins, useful for you and visitors, and comfortable to use. Choose the best one and don’t add too many plugins since they can slow down your blog.
Do you have another must-have WordPress plugin for bloggers? Please leave your comment below.
Thanks for sharing, I have some of these plugins, I’ll try some others.
You’re very welcome!
These are great! Thanks for sharing
Good and helpful article! thanks for sharing!
Thank you for reading 🙂 Really appreciate it!
Thanks for the list. I have pinned it for future reference. There are a couple of plugins that I want to add.
You’re welcome! Thanks for stopping by 🙂
I’m always curious what others “must have” plug in list is! Thanks so much for sharing this, I have a few new ones to check out!
Thank you – there are so many plugins that I want to try but so far these are the best ones!
I totally agree with you. All of these plug ins are definitely essential! Thanks for sharing.
Yep, that’s true! Thanks for reading 🙂
These are some really useful and great plugins to have for your blog. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you, dear! 🙂
Some of my favourites here! I’ve actually just uninstalled Jetpack though, as it was causing some issues with my theme and was slowing my blog down. I did wonder whether I might have problems as a result – but fingers crossed, none so far. Would be interested in anyone else’s experiences with Jetpack 🙂
My blog kinda slows down – even before I have Jetpack, I’m not sure if it’s because of Jetpack or my computer or new theme or anything else from my plugins.
I will try to sort it out! Thanks for reading 🙂
Excellent post! I’m fairly sure I have these or some variant of them on my wordpress. The GDPR is a must!!
Thank you for reading! 🙂
Easy Google Fonts sounds great! x
Yeap! I use it because I need more fonts to give a look to my blog 🙂
I currently use almost all of these plugins and I can tell that they’re doing a great job! I’m using Yoast but I see many bloggers have switched to Rank Math and I’m thinking of following their example. All I see are positive reviews!
This blog post is really useful for beginner bloggers! After you’ve helped me so much to improve my Pinterest strategy and grow my traffic from it, I knew this article will be super useful!
Great job! <3
Thank you, Alex! I recommend to use Rank Math, it’s really friendly-user 🙂
I’m so happy I could help you with your Pinterest! Thanks for this awesome feedback xxx
This is really helpful, thank you for sharing. Some of these I already have, but others I don’t. So definitely going to be checking some of them out to see if they’re right for me 🙂
Kate | https://asimplesliceofkate.com/
Thank you Kate 😀
Love this list! I use a few of them but I definitely found more that I want to try out. I currently use Yoast SEO and it isn’t working for me that well so I might try out Rank Math haha. Thanks for sharing!
I tried Yoast at first then switched to Rank Math! I found it so comfortable to use and love it 🙂 basically, both of them are good for SEO. Thank you for reading x
Wow this is a great list, I will definitely forward this to everyone i know who blogs on wordpress!
Thank you so much Emma 😀
I love discovering plugins to improve my blog. I have a few of these but will explore others too 🙂 x
Thank you Caroline 😀
This is such a useful post… as I never know quite where to start with WordPress plugins!
Katie | katieemmabeauty.com
Same here haha thank you Katie 😀
I’m not on wp but on blogger. But checked it all. Haven’t planned on any switching yet but in case I do then I’ll get back to all this. I’m using commenting with discus but maybe by not being on wp it always asked me to log in so I was often left with not commenting at all. But I hope right now I do succeed. Plus a very good post. You mentioned all the essentials needed for blogging. ❤
Isa A. Blogger
Thank you so much Isa 😀
This is awesome! I’m going to go through my WordPress site and see if I have all these plugins!
Thanks for sharing this! I don’t have the option for plugins on my current plan, but once I upgrade I’ll definitely check some of these out!
Thank you so much for this post! It is great to get other bloggers perspective on what plugins they are finding useful. I will have to give a couple of these a try (like the Google Fonts)
I have some of these and alternatives for others. The question I would love to know the answer to is “how many plug-ins are too many?” I might have just a few less than what you shared and it seems like so much. But, I can’t think of what to eliminate. I guess time will tell. Thank you for the insight on the few that I didn’t know about (Header/ Footer).
Nice selection of plugins. Think you’ve missed a plugin for one of the most important things – caching.
Also, You’ve put a link to Akismet twice
Great blog post! I used to be with WordPress and used most of the ones you listed! Keep up the good work x
Love the list, and I use a good bunch of them! Especially Wordfence, my love. Saved my blog one than one time. It’s nice to see some Jetpack support too! I like having a little extra protection, a little of insight and also a lot of people and wordpress user still rely on jetpack to follow many of the blogs on wordpress.
I didn’t know of wpDiscuz or Short Pixels – I used to have Smush – but I’ll check them out in the future