15 Essential WordPress Plugins That every Blog Need

A new WordPress user can easily get confused about which plugin to use on their blog because there are plenty of free and premium WordPress plugins are available in WordPress Plugin Repository. Choosing the best plugins for your blog will helps you to get better rankings, visibility and experience on your website. Here I have listed the 15 Essential WordPress Plugins which you need for your blog.

These plugins can easily improve your experience with the WordPress website and will help you to improve both user engagement and retention. So, without wasting much time, Let’s check out the must have WordPress plugins which you must have on your blog.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast brings in all the important SEO related features to your WordPress site. it is the complete website optimization package. It comes with a massive range of features including the ability to add Open Graph data, XML Sitemaps and generate an SEO score on your posts.

Features:

•          Helpful page analysis functionality.
•          Basic on page SEO score.
•          XML sitemap generator.
•          Edit titles and descriptions in bulk.
•          Edit .htaccess and robots.txt files.

WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize keeps your blog running smoothly by optimizing your database tables, getting rid of old post revisions, and cleaning unapproved comments and other things you’ve thrown in the trash and all other things which are occupying the database without adding any value to your site.

Features:

•          Helps your site run faster
•          Optimize, repair and backup database

Editorial Calendar

Editorial Calendar plugin will give you the ability to visualize when your posts will go live and makes it easy to drag and drop them onto different days. It’s similar to how the calendar within the Edit Flow plugin works but without the extra editorial process functionality.

Features:

•          Change when a post will go live with the drag and drop interface.
•          Quick edit function works from within the calendar.
•          Manage posts for multiple authors.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. This plugin offers a number of options to optimize your site and if it is configured properly, you will definitely see a difference in terms of performance. this plugin can have a serious impact on load times.

Features:

•          Database caching.
•          Object caching.
•          Browser caching.

Google XML Sitemaps

It’s true that Yoast’s plugin generates a sitemap for you but Google XML Sitemaps make it easier for search engine crawlers to find the important pages and posts of your WordPress site retrieve it more efficiently. Google XML Sitemaps supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages and custom URLs.

Features:

•          XML sitemap generating.
•          Search engines index particular post types.
•          Notifies all major search engines.

Google Analytics Dashboard

Google Analytics Dashboard gives you the ability to view your Google Analytics data in your WordPress dashboard. Not only can you track visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration and referrers, but you can also enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.

Features:

•          Track visits and page views

iThemes Security

iThemes Security plugin is one of the most effective WordPress plugins for securing your WordPress setup. It’s straight forward to use and has a quick setup that makes a number of important security tweaks with a single click. It gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site.

Features:

•          Ban IP addresses and hosts.
•          Scans for changes to files.
•          Built in brute force protection.
•          Malware scanning.

Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin identifies any broken links that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects.

Features:

•          Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields.
•          Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
•          Prevents search engines from following broken links.

Duplicator

Duplicator nifty little plugin takes the stress out of migrating a WordPress site from one location to another. It enables you to effortlessly copy, transfer or clone an existing WordPress website to another location.

Features:

•          Transfers WordPress website to another location.

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. it’s best practice to manually add redirects via the .htaccess file

Features:

•          Monitor 404 errors.
•          301 redirects.
•          Other redirect types supported (301, 302 and 307).

BackWPup

BackWPup is an excellent free plugin to back up your WordPress site data (media files and database) into cloud services like Dropox, FTP, Amazon S3, etc. It’s completely free and simple to use with some very helpful features.

Features:

•          Supports remote backups.
•          Easy to use restore function.
•          Schedule backups to suite you.

Disqus

Disqus is a third party commenting system, which means comments will not affect your server. It does not affect your site’s page speed and comes equipped with anti-spam filters.

Features:

•          Moderate comments offsite.
•          Whitelist and blacklist commenters with ease.

SumoMe

SumoMe is a suite of awesome free marketing plugins for WordPress lead generation, audience retention and analytics. SumoMe differs to most plugins in this list because it’s primarily a web based app, which means you can install it on any HTML website.

Features:

•          Page level targeting
•          Integrates with most popular email providers
•          Responsive opt-in forms

Contact Form 7

Contact Form7 is the most popular and free contact form plugin for WordPress. it is very easy to use and provides you all the important features which you need on your contact page.

Features:

•          Multiple features While creating contact forms

AdSanity

AdSanity is a WordPress ad management plugin focused on ease-of-use. Adding new ads in Adsanity is very similar to adding a post. It comes with widgets and short codes support to display ads, so you can display ads in sidebars, posts and pages.

Features:

•          Time based ads
•          Short codes to display ads

I hope this article helped you learn about the must have WordPress plugins for your blog. There are a number of amazing WordPress plugins which are not listed in this list. These are essential WordPress plugins to get started with website. Do you any other plugin is essential for blog? I would love to hear your thoughts! Leave me a comment below and I may just add it to the post.