Highly Recommended WordPress Plugins For Bloggers

There are tons of plugins for wordpress in order to help make your blog get more and more additional features like designing, SEO, sharing, security and so on. Finding the best that suits for your website is really hard so this post helps you with a list of most popular and highly recommended wordpress plugins for bloggers.

Why WordPress Plugins Are Great Or Your Site’s Worst Nightmare?

A WordPress plugin can seamlessly expand functionality or add completely new features to your WordPress site. From E-commerce, to interactive calendars and even creating a full blown WordPress powered social network, plugins can offer, in many cases, instant gratification with little coding work. But when it comes to WordPress security, plugins can also be a back door to malware and cyber attacks.

How can you minimize WordPress vulnerabilities and improve the security of your WordPress site?

Check Reviews And Ratings

Not all plugins are made from reliable sources. We always recommend to use premium or paid plugins developed by well rated development firms that offer regular updates and support. While there are certainly some great free plugins, in many cases, these come with a price as well. Updates are infrequent and not guaranteed. Sometimes developers take some shortcuts or write sloppy code. Premium paid plugins usually come with support and updates. They often have more features and the code is often clean and customizable.

Update, Update, Update

Even if you use premium plugin, you need to stay on top of updates. Many come with auto update features, so make that feature is enabled. Why is it so important to update or remove outdated plugins?

There are several key areas affected by outdated plugins:

--- Security

--- Performance

--- Bug fixes & Compatibility

--- Features

Security

Updates to WordPress plugins often increase security by patching vulnerabilities and strengthening against attacks. According to WPBeginner, 83% of hacked WordPress sites hadn’t been updated. According to page.ly’s stats, WordPress sites are frequently hacked due to “outdated versions of: PHP, WordPress, themes, or plugins”.

Performance

An updated site will perform better and often will improve the performance of WordPress itself, a plugin or theme.

Bug Fixes And Compatibility

After a major WordPress release, many plugins will get an update to ensure compatibility with the new version, or to make use of new features.

Features

Keeping your site up to date also gives you access to new features. For example, recent releases of WordPress have included big improvements to the UX of the admin screens as well as accessibility improvements. Plugins can do this too, which means that keeping things up to date gives you access to the latest improvements.

Best WordPress Plugin

1. W3 Total Cache

Each time a visitor comes to your wordpress site, it take resources from database increasing the server bandwidth and it cause your site to load slow. W3 total cache is a web performance optimization plugin that caches and compress all your pages, posts, images, feeds from database and loads webpages quickly and reduces server bandwidth.

Download W3 Total Cache

2. All In One SEO

All in one SEO is the most downloaded search engine optimization plugin that is easy to use, configure and customize. It automatically generates META tags and optimizes the titles for search engines. It is highly recommended for beginners. Also see Yoast SEO which has better features than All In One SEO.

Download All In One SEO

3. Google xml Sitemap

In order to tell search engines that you have a new updates in your blog you must use Google xml sitemap. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap in which Crawlers can easily analyse the complete structure of your site and will improve your blog visibility in search engines.

Download Google xml Sitemaps

4. Akismet

As a blogger, Akismet is a must use plugin in order to prevent your blog from comment spam. You need to get an Akismet wordpress key from here because this plugin checks whether the comment is a spam or not from the Akismet web service.

Download Akismet

5. Contact Form 7

Contact form 7 is simple and flexible and can be customized in any way as you want. It can manage multiple contact forms. This plugin supports Akismet spam filtering and CAPTCHA code.

Download Contact form 7

6. Broken Link Checker

When you blog you can only concentrate on your current post and feature! What happened to the previous post? Broken link checker is a great plugin that notifies you if there is any broken links, by checking all the post, comments and images.

Download Broken Link Checker

7. Wysija Newsletters

Managing and sending newsletters, post notification to all your subscribers made easy with this plugin. It has more the 30 templates where you can add post, images and social icons.

Download Wysija Newsletters

8. Social Media Widget

Show your Facebook page, Twitter profile, Linked in Profile, Google + account and more to your site visitors with a colourful animated icon in your sidebar with Social Media Widget. It supports more than 40 Social media websites, 4 icon styles and 4 animations.

Download Social Media Widget

9. Share This

Sharing is caring! All your post needs to be shared in social networks where tons of people connect together and sharing made easy with this plugin. It features Social Analytics, Open Graph Sharing, and the Hovering Bar!

Download Share This

10. Yoast SEO

WordPress out of the box is already technically quite a good platform for SEO, this was true when Joost wrote his original WordPress SEO article in 2008 (and updated every few months) and it's still true today, but that doesn't mean you can't improve it further! This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site's SEO on all needed aspects. While this Yoast SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. Yoast SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you're writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.

Download Yoast SEO

11. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery has been the industry's standard WordPress gallery plugin since 2007 and continues to receive over 1.5 million new downloads per year. It's great for general use, but powerful enough for the most demanding photographers, visual artists, and imaging professionals.

On the back end, NextGEN offers a complete WordPress gallery management system with the ability to batch upload, import meta data, add/delete/rearrange/sort images, edit thumbnails, group galleries into albums, and more.

On the front end, the free version of NextGEN provides two main display styles (slideshows and thumbnail galleries) and two album styles (compact and extended), all of which come with a wide array of options for controlling size, style, timing, transitions, controls, lightbox effects, and more.

Download NextGEN Gallery

12. Google Analytics Plugin

The Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights allows you to track your blog easily and always stays up to date with the newest features in Google Analytics.

MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress with roughly 11 million downloads.

Download Google Analytics Plugin

13. WP Smush.it

Resize and optimize all of your images with the incredibly powerful and 100% free image smusher, brought to you by the super team at WPMU DEV!

Now with image resizing! Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed.

Our servers do all the heavy lifting. Strip hidden bulky information from your images and reduce file size without losing quality.

Large image files may be slowing down your site without you even knowing it. WP Smush uses WPMU DEV’s super servers to quickly smush every single one of your images and cuts all the unnecessary data without slowing down your site.

Download WP Smush.it

14. Better WordPress Minify

Allows you to combine and minify your CSS and JS files to improve page load time. This plugin uses the PHP library Minify and relies on WordPress's enqueueing system rather than the output buffer, which respects the order of CSS and JS files as well as their dependencies. BWP Minify is very customizable and easy to use.

Download Better WordPress Minify

15. Disqus Comment System

Disqus is truly revolutionizing the blog comment system, allowing you to instantly turn your blog into a social media community. Disqus allows you to create a much more interactive blog community that connects seamlessly with all of the top social media sites online. This is by far the best solution for adding comments to your blog and will help to keep spam out. There is also a few settings that can show related posts as well as some advertising to earn a little extra advertising revenue.

Download Disqus Comment System

16. iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.

Most WordPress admins don't know they're vulnerable, but iThemes Security works to lock down WordPress, fix common holes, stop automated attacks and strengthen user credentials. With advanced features for experienced users, our WordPress security plugin can help harden WordPress.

Download iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)

17. Duplicate Posts

Allows you to quickly and easily duplicate pages and posts. If you are building a site from scratch, this can really save you some time.

Download Duplicate Posts

18. Facebook Like Box Widget

Facebook Like Box Widget is a social plugin that enables Facebook Page owners to attract and gain Likes & Recommendation Comments from their own website. The Like Box enables users to: see how many users already like this page, and which of their friends like it too, read recent posts from the page and Like the page with one click, without needing to visit the page.

Download Facebook Like Box Widget

19. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Download WP Super Cache

20. Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Download Redirection

21. Digg Digg

With Digg Digg by Buffer, you have an all in one social sharing plugin for your blog. Display all social sharing buttons nicely on your blog and make it look amazing, just like Mashable.

Download Digg Digg

22. bbPress

Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked? bbPress is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, web standards, and speed.

We're keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add-on features through WordPress's extensive plugin system. What does all that mean? bbPress is lean, mean, and ready to take on any job you throw at it.

Download bbPress

23. Shareaholic

Shareaholic is the world's leading all-in-one Content Amplification Platform, which includes related content recommendations, social sharing, following, social analytics and site monetization apps such as promoted content, native ads and affiliate links. This module makes it a snap for any website — big or small — to engage and grow their traffic, market their content, gain insights, and monetize their audience, all from one powerful but easy-to-use dashboard. All our Apps are designed to work well together, on any website.

Download Shareaholic

24. Testimonials Widget

Testimonials Widget lets you randomly slide or list selected portfolios, quotes, reviews, or text with images or videos on your WordPress site. You can insert Testimonials content via shortcode, theme functions, or widgets with category and tag selections and having multiple display options such as random or specific ordering.

Download Testimonials Widget

25. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin that allows you to sell anything, beautifully. Built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, WooCommerce is the world’s favorite eCommerce solution that gives both store owners and developers complete control.

With endless flexibility and access to hundreds of free and premium WordPress extensions, WooCommerce now powers 30% of all online stores -- more than any other platform.

Download WooCommerce

26. Gravity Forms Directory

The Gravity Forms is the contact form plugin of WordPress which is friendly to the developers and beginners. It may be used to add different types of the online forms on the WordPress site. It has the powerful add-on that lets the user to create the online survey, the web directory and the user submitted forms. It can create anything that requires the input from the user.

Download Gravity Forms Directory

27. OptionMonster

The optinMonster is a leader in the lead generation plugin used by WordPress. You can see how it helps to increase the email subscribers up to 600 percent. It helps in creating the beautiful optin forms with the popups that are needed by the WordPress website and to convert its users into the subscribers. It is packed with the features such as the page level targeting, split testing and analytics with the exit-intent technology that allow the user to display the optin form when he wants to leave the site.

Download OptionMonster

28. Edit Flow

The tool offers enough editorial workflow management system for the WordPress. It lets the user to see the editorial calendar, to assign the posts and to manage the authors or to leave editorial comments and many more. You may create the own custom post status or you may make the plan for your content strategy with the WordPress Dashboard.

Download Edit Flow

29. Soliloquy

This is the leading responsive WordPress slider that you can find at the market. Many slider plugins can slow down the website and this will make an impact on the SEO. With the Soliloquy, the slider plugin is faster and it will load other sliders with the fastest speed. It is packed with enough features and there is a free version which someone can try first.

Download Soliloquy

30. Sucuri

Sucuri is used in order to monitor the security of the website. Any website at the internet may be attacked or hacked by the malicious denial of the service attack. It is always better if you can be prepared instead of being sorry. Sucuri gives the real time alerts and the website security scanner which offers the malware removal service. You should take the look about the 4 reasons why you should use the sucuri in order to improve the security of WordPress.

Download Sucuri

31. Envira Gallery

In case you post many images or if you run a photography site, this is the plugin that you should have with you. This is a plugin for the responsive WordPress gallery and it allows the user to create many beautiful image galleries that have many powerful effects, responsive design and easy navigation. It loads faster and it looks beautiful in any device. The free version is known as Envira Gallery Lite and you can use it at once. You can see the guide about how to create the responsive WordPress gallery using Envira.

Download Envira Gallery

32. Login Lockdown

According to the default setting, the user may try different login in the website using different incorrect attempts as many times as he wishes to. The hack attempts rely on being able to break into the admin site through the use of the lists of the password. By using the limit login, it puts the limit on the number that someone can try to login before it closes. When the number of the attempts has been reached, then the admin area will be closed for limited period. You have to take a look for the tutorial and learn how you can limit the login attempts in the WordPress.

Download Login Lockdown

33. Term Management Tools

Tags and categories together with the custom taxonomies play the important role in how the content is sorted on the website. However, the first time users may not understand the difference that exists between the tags with categories or the best practices of the SEO when you have them. This is when the term management tool should be handy. It lets the user to merge and to make bulk edit tags, categories with the custom taxonomies.

Download Term Management Tools

34. TablePress

The WordPress post editor does not have the button that can be used in order to create the tables. If you are looking to insert the tables in the WordPress, you have to get the plugin for it. This plugin will let you to make the tables using the WordPress and you can add them to your widgets, pages and posts. You may also export the table data when needed. You can check the tutorials about how you may add the tables within the WordPress pages and posts without the need of writing CSS or HTML.

Download TablePress

35. WPtouch

WPtouch is used as a mobile suite and it helps the WordPress to have the feature that will give your website the powerful capabilities and features which normal responsive themes are not able to match. When you are looking to have a mobile version for your site, then this is the plugin to have. It comes with the built-in support for custom content, mobile advertising and eCommerce while it allows you to get the offer for your app on your site using the App Store. You should see the tutorial about how the WPtouch is used.

Download WPtouch

36. Compact Archives

By the default, the WordPress is going to create a long number of lists of the bullets for your monthly archives. When you had blogged for a certain period, when you add the monthly archives on the website, it will make the users to do a lot off scrolling. Using compact archives is going to solve the problem and it will be displaying the monthly archives in the compact block. You have to check out how you can compact the archives using the WordPress.

Download Compact Archives

37. ThirstyAffiliates

In case you are looking to make the affiliate marketing of the main source of your income using your site, then you need to have the link management tool for the affiliate. This is the best tool that you can have for your WordPress when it comes to the affiliate link management. It lets you to add the affiliate links, to auto insert and to cloak the links and to even export links. You can learn more about the use of this through ThristyAffiliates and add affiliate links in the WordPress.

Download ThirstyAffiliates

38. Display Widgets

There is time that you will need to hide or to display the widget on some pages. The display widgets let the user to hide or to show the widgets on the posts and the pages he wants. You may show the widget to the users who have logged in while others will not be able to see them. You have to take a look on the tutorial to learn how you can hide or show the widget on the WordPress sites.

Download Display Widgets

39. WP Mail SMTP

Because of the configuration setting with some providers of the WordPress, the WordPress email may not be delivered. If you want to solve such problem, you may need to use the WP Mail SMTP plugin. This allows the user to use the SMTP server in order to send the WordPress email without using the function of PHP mail. You may also choose to use the SMTP server of the Gmail so that you may send the WordPress emails.

Download WP Mail SMTP

40. BackupBuddy

This is a beginner friendly and easiest WordPress backup and it is also a migration plugin. It lets the user to set up the backup schedule automatic on the website. The backup can be stored on the cloud so that the user may sleep much easier by knowing that the content is backed up safely.

Download BackupBuddy

We are hoping that this article will help you to learn more about the plugins that you need for WordPress. If you like this article make sure to share it with your friends and subscribe to our blog for latest updates.

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