20+ Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Bloggers

WordPress is the most popular and used content management platform in the present moment. However, WordPress brings a lot more into play. There’s a huge marketplace that thrives right now, as there are thousands of developers who promote their apps, WordPress themes, and plugins to millions of WordPress users. Taking advantage of the right Must have WordPress plugins will make your work and life more comfortable. You’ll be able to automate and delegate a lot of responsibilities to tools that were specifically designed to serve specific problems.

Well, if you’re a blogger, you need to understand that what lies in front of you is a pure goldmine. No matter what type of business you promote with your blog, you’ll need to leverage all your resources to optimize your performance.

Without further ado, here’s are the 20 must-have Free WordPress plugins for every blogger out there:

20+ Essential Free Must have WordPress Plugins for Bloggers

1. Jetpack

Jetpack is the creation of the WordPress team itself, and it is one of the must-haves on your list. Jetpack is basically a pack of useful “jets” that’ll improve the quality of your WordPress blog quite significantly.

I’m talking about website performance, image optimization, website security, website appearance, and much more.

2.  Yoast SEO

SEO is a very important aspect that every blog and business needs to consider. If you can be found by customers through simple searches, you will make money. Yoast helps you understand how to develop content that ranks. This plugin is full of awesome features that’ll change the way you create content forever.

Yoast SEO Alternatives 

1. All-in-one SEO Pack
2. Rank MAth

3 -CookieYes GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice Plugin

Do you find it hard to manage your WordPress website cookies to achieve GDPR compliance? 

This cookie consent plugin can provide you with the right help. Right from scanning, categorizing and displaying a cookie notice, the plugin would be a great companion in your journey towards GDPR compliance. 

In addition to the GDPR, the plugin also assists you in compliance with the DSGVO, RGPD, LGPD, CCPA, and CNIL  as well. With the plugin, you can create a cookie notice well matches your website’s style and add buttons that allow users to enable or disable cookie consent.

Other than a binary consent option you can allow your users to submit a granular level consent for cookies. Ie; users can enable or disable cookies on a category basis. You can also record users’ consent as required by the GDPR guidelines. 

Geo IP-based cookie notice exclusion, auto-script blocking of popular third-party plugins & services, compatibility with the majority of multilingual cache plugins, etc., make the CookieYes GDPR Cookie Consent and Compliance Notice plugin a great addition for all websites trying to get GDPR compliant.

4. Google XML Sitemaps

Here’s another SEO tool that WordPress users should leverage. In short, Google XML Sitemaps helps search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and obviously Google to detect and index your website using a different XML sitemap. The great thing is that every non-techy user can use it, as you just have to activate the plugin in order for a sitemap to be generated for your website.

5.  W3 Total Cache

Do you want to improve your user’s experience as well as your website performance? Storing your blog’s data in the cache is a great method of improving the load speed of your website. Google loves websites that present high-loading pages and the average customer loves it too.

Therefore, take advantage of this awesome plugin to speed up your wordPress Website.

3 Best W3 Total Cache Alternatives

• WP Super Cache
• WP Rocket
• WP Fastest Cache

6. WP Smush

WP Smush is an image optimization software, only that it’s also a WordPress plugin. All bloggers use images throughout their posts. However, not everyone’s optimizing those images. Neglecting such an aspect can significantly affect your website’s functionalities. WP Smush compresses and optimizes your images without sacrificing their quality.

Alternatives image optimization WordPress plugins:

• EWWW Image Optimizer, 
• Lazy Load
• Shortpixel

7. Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security is your website’s antivirus whose role is to protect your information, create backups, and help you maintain your website stable.

You get Firewall protection too, malware scanning, live traffic monitoring, and a few more very important features. Most big blogs use it, and that’s because the Wordfence plugin is always reliable.

Top Alternatives to WordFence

• Sucuri
• iThemes Security
• Bullet Proof Security

8. Broken Link Checker

Your blog may be great. Great content, awesome promotion, and stable sales funnel. However, certain problems might arise without your consent. I’m talking about broken links and broken pages. These are huge turn-offs for your website visitors, and you’ll lose value along the way. Broken Link Checker will obviously help you monitor and fix your URL and page errors in a matter of minutes!

9.  MailChimp WordPress

Email marketing is surely the most popular communication channel that most businesses use to develop and nurture relationships with customers.

MailChimp has developed a WordPress plugin that helps you incorporate opt-in forms and register subscribers to your highly optimized list. A must-have for every blog that’s doing email marketing!

10. Redirection

Link – https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

You sometimes have to modify your permalinks. The problem is, you might forget to redirect them, so your users will end up in the wrong place, specifically on a 404 error. You really don’t want to upset your website traffic, so by managing your 301 redirections and 404 errors, you’ll save the user from a hustle.

11. Social Icons

If you want your blog to get big, leverage social media channels as properly as you can. Social Icons is a handy Social Media sharing WordPress plugin that will optimize your website with social signals and social icons.

Therefore, more people will be able to share your content by simply clicking an icon which is displayed throughout your content or web pages.

12. Vault Press

I really want to emphasize the importance of making regular backups. Your website’s setup and content should always be safe. Therefore, you should try Vault Press, a plugin that’s been developed by the WordPress team, which role is to securely store your website’s database on a daily basis you never risk losing it.

VaultPress alternatives

• UpdraftPlus
• BackupBuddy

13. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is very useful for driving more opt-ins. Unlike many opt-in tools, this one lets you carefully schedule the moment your pop-up shows up. It can be done during the reading session of a user, or it can be done after three minutes from the visitor’s arrival. 

The designs are also awesome, and you can benefit from an “exit intent” feature that seizes when people are about to leave.

14. CommentLuv

As the name suggests, this Commentluv plugin encourages commenting on your blog. Basically, you’re listing automatically listing the last post of a commenter, offering him/her a reward that consists of a backlink. That’s a great way to encourage new comments, as many bloggers will feel tempted by getting a new, fresh link back to their websites.

15. Disable Comments

If you don’t want comments, this plugin makes it very easy for you. With it, you can disable your comments globally, which means that no one can leave any sort of opinions or content on your website.

You also get options to disable specific pages and posts, so it’s all up to you.

16. WooCommerce

Mark Parson is the sales manager of BestEssays. Here’s his opinion concerning the Woocommerce plugin:

WooCommerce is surely a big hit. It is one of the most popular e-commerce WordPress plugins that allows users to develop professional online stores. You get tons of tutorials and discussions on every aspect that might challenge you. You have a marketplace of themes, and you get to benefit from the newest e-commerce online technology tendencies that exist in the marketplace.

17 – BlogVault

BlogVault is the most reliable way to perform a WordPress backup for your site.

It is super easy to set up and implement the best backup practices to give you complete peace of mind. It performs a full backup of the WordPress site, including files, database, plugins, themes, and uploads – not leaving out anything.

It offers a one-click auto-restore functionality that can restore your site from a backup easily if it is ever required. Further, it comes with a potent migration tool that can let you migrate your site to a new host or a new URL. It is the easiest way to backup, restore or migrate your sites.
One thing better than daily backups is real-time backups, a clear differentiator, offered by BlogVault.

BlogVault also supports multisite networks and is extremely reliable for extensive sites as well.

18 -WP-Optimize

This Wp-Optimize WordPress Plugin helps you clean up and optimize your database with just a few clicks. Revisions posts, Spam, and trashed comments are deleted just as quickly as unused data. For a squeaky-clean WordPress database.

19 – Thirsty Affiliates

Thirsty Affiliate plugin is a suite of affiliate marketing tools that help the average WordPress blog owner monetize their content with ruthless efficiency.

Also, you can turn those ugly affiliate link URLs into lovely links that use your website URL, but you can also extend this functionality with other amazing features like automatic keyword linking, stats, handy importing tools, geolocation links, and other great add-ons.

20- AdSense Integration WP QUADS

It is an Ad management WordPress plugin that offers a quick and easy way to post your ad and code into your blog post, and it randomly places ads with your posts based on preset criteria.

It has a straightforward setting page that is not complicated in any way. Putting AdSense randomly within a post is a good way to experiment with a variety of ad formats & placements besides optimizing your AdSense.

If you have many regular visitors who frequently revisit your blog, the randomization will likely catch their attention and get your ads a higher click rate.

21 – Login Lockdown

Login Lockdown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.

Currently, the plugin defaults to a 1-hour lockout of an IP block after three failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Administrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

22 – Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

So the major part is that Akismet checks all the comments and filter out the one that looks like spam. Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.

Takeaways

You really don’t have to download them all. Decide which one of these WordPress plugins could complete your type of work, see what fits and what doesn’t, and then try each one by one.

Become familiar with a few of them and make up your mind whether their premium versions are worth it, and whether these WordPress plugins will stay for long term or not. Also keep up with the trends, as new mind-blowing plugins will continue to be released as we pass through time.

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