Many people are starting a blog nowadays without any proper research about the best WordPress plugin for blogs to be used on their blogs. They don’t consider it as important. But the WordPress plugin you choose will determine your blog’s growth. Because various factors are controlled by the plugins you choose.
A WordPress plugin gives a new functionality to your WordPress blog or website. It is a piece of software that can be installed on your WordPress site. Plugins can transform a boring website into a dynamic and trending one.
We have curated this list of best plugins by checking famous WordPress blogs. The worthiness of a blog depends upon the quality of it’s WordPress plugins and not on the quantity of WordPress plugins.
Must Have WordPress Plugin for Blog
So you’re launching a new WordPress blog and you’re wondering what options you have out there when it comes to plugins or extra functionalities that you can build into your website. Well you’ve come to the right place I’ve been using WordPress for over 2-3 years now and built several blog and websites with it.
I have pretty strong opinions on what constitutes a good WordPress plugin and what is not. But, overall I just love that WordPress offers thousands of free plugins so I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options out there. So in this blogpost I’m just going to share with you 8 WordPress plugins for blog that you need to install on your WordPress blog site.
If you’ve just launched your WordPress website you’ll see that they’ll probably have installed a couple of plugins automatically for you.
A Piece of Advice....
Out of those the worst plugin ever that you can have on your WordPress blog is jetpack and the functionalities of this plugin are not even necessary or you can replace it with other more specific plugins that will do a much better job without slowing down your website because if you didn’t already know, Jetpack plugin is known to massively impact your page speed in a negative way. So, the first thing I would do is go over to your WordPress dashboard find jetpack and uninstall and delete it immediately.
I promise it’s not going to mess up anything that you’ve already done or built on your WordPress website so far but it will give you that clean slate that you need before you start adding other plugins.
But without any further ado let’s get started the first WordPress plugin for blog that you will need. First is a backup plugin which will obviously back up your website so you always have a version of it stored somewhere safely. In case you ever need to recover an older version of your blog, it’s super helpful in case you get hacked and everything goes missing overnight. It also helps if you’re doing active changes to your website and you mess setting up you change it and you don’t know how to get back to it.
Source: WordPress.org
When it comes to backup plugin, I personally love and use Updraft Plus. It’s a free plugin or at least I use the free version and it’s more than enough. You can schedule backups on it, so if you want a backup of your website saved automatically every single day or week or month you can set that up. You can trigger manual backups as well as restore backups from the past super easy and it saved me a couple of times. Also you can transfer the website as it is from a domain to another domain name. You can store your backups in your Google Drive, FTP Server, Dropbox etc.
Source: WordPress.org
The next plugin that you want on your WordPress website is a security plugin, I recommend Wordfence plugin. Again, their free version does more than enough and this will block any hackers or malicious attempts on your website. Keep in mind that if you have a good blog host, it also helps to back up your website. That extra layer of security added to your WordPress blogs and to avoid getting your website hacked or in trouble make sure to always update your plugins regularly. So, if they release any new updates make sure to always click the update now link in them, otherwise these are perfect cracks for hackers to get in.
I always get notified by Wordfence plugin when somebody tries to log in whether they’re pretending to be an admin or trying to use brute force to get in to my website and then I’m able to block their IPs. So, if I see somebody trying to log in with an email address that isn’t mine pretending to be an admin or anything like that, I can go in and make sure they don’t have access to my blog anymore.
Source: wpwebsitetools.com
Besides these two essential plugins you also might want to consider getting an anti-spam plugin when you launch your WordPress blog and when it’s live you will get many spam comments. Once you have just launched your blog, for months and months you will get harassed with super spam comments with spam links and some of them are plain right obscene. The plugin that I use for this is called Akismet.
It is another useful free WordPress plugin for blog. You can install it very easily and it will filter out those comments for you. So if anything looks like a spam, they’ll automatically delete it or just keep it for moderation, so they don’t actually get posted onto your blog because the worst thing that could happen is these spam comments go live on your blogpost’s comment section. When somebody comes across your blog they might think that your blog is just another spam blog.
Source: WordPress.org
The fourth plugin that you will want to install for your WordPress website is an image optimizing plugin. Basically once you start publishing blog posts or uploading images to your website, it’s going to start impacting the speed of your blog because it has to load those images for viewers. Now obviously you can use less images but that’s just not possible especially when you’re trying to create engaging content. Photos are such a big part of it and by the time you have a hundred something blog posts live, you’re gonna have so many images there.
So you have to get this installed from the start but there are a couple of plugins such as Smush WordPress plugin for blog. This plugin will also look at images already uploaded to your website and create an optimized version of them, so it basically takes the image and without impacting any of the quality of the image they will resize it to make it smaller and easier to load for the little robots. This plugin was recommended by several tech guys that I’ve worked with. When it came to WordPress, they definitely know their stuff and how good these plugins can be for your overall site speed and efficiency.
Source: WordPress.org
The fifth WordPress plugin for blog that I recommend and that pretty much every blogger needs to have is a social sharing plugin. These plugins create social sharing buttons that you can add to every blog post that you have, making them easily shareable online. There’s nothing worse than going onto a website, loving what they have to share and then finding no buttons to share it anywhere. If you don’t make your content super easily shareable online people are not gonna spend their time copy pasting the link sharing it on social media writing a description for you that’s just not gonna happen, especially not as a new blogger. So adding those social sharing buttons in there and making it super easy for them to share is crucial.
I personally love Social Warfare and I use their pro version just because they’re worth it. You can then customize your buttons and how they look where they’re placed in your blog so you can put them at the beginning of each blog post or at the very end as well as sticky tab that shows. So people don’t have to scroll up and down again to find the buttons to share it and they have this extra cool feature where if people click to pin on a specific article instead of getting shown all the images that are on the page they’re just gonna get shown the images that I designate as pinterest optimized images I promote my blog on pinterest quite a lot so that’s one of the things that’s important to me but if you like the look of Social Warfare be sure to check it out.
Some Other Optional WordPress Plugin for Blogs
I’m going to share with you a couple of other optional wordpress plugin for blogs. Only install these if you need them and keep that in mind only install plugins that you need and that you can’t do or can replicate the function manually. Because ideally if you can do something without a plug-in, do it that way because it’s again going to save loading time and speed on your website but here are a couple of plugins that are worth it for me.
Source: WordPress.org
One of them is called Pretty Links and it allows you to create mask links or redirect links and I use them to create and share affiliate links. These links will be prettier instead of having a really ugly kind of spammy looking affiliate link. It is a very useful WordPress plugin for blog. I will be able to write it as genblogging.com slash word of my choice. It makes things super easy and it has saved my back a couple of times when it comes to affiliate programs and them changing their links so if you’re an affiliate for a program or brand and they move their affiliate program or change their affiliate links you had embedded.
For example I had a couple of those embedded in my amazon book I can’t really edit that overnight but I can still go in the plugin feature and edit where the link gets redirected so it’s super helpful especially if you’re planning to incorporate affiliate links or you just want short and sweet links that you can share online such as on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other places that people can either manually type in or they’re gonna get more confidence out of seeing the link starting with your blog URL first.
7. SEO WordPress Plugin: Yoast SEO & Rankmath SEO
Source: wpkube.com
Another plugin that you might need is an SEO plugin. Keep in mind that these are not miracle workers, they won’t automatically improve the SEO of your website but they help you understand it better. They give you the key places where to post your keywords, for example, there are two best SEO plugins that are quite reputable. One of them is Yoast SEO Plugin and the other one is Rankmath SEO Plugin.
Both are good and while I have my own SEO checklist at this point that I follow to make sure a blog post is optimized, they do come in handy for a couple of other features such as creating a sitemap or making it easier to edit my meta descriptions. Also, post tags play a key role in increasing your website visitors to your blog post. Check out our post on it here.
Source: Doteasy.com
Another optional WordPress plugins that you can install is WP Post Author WordPress plugin that will show your face and a short description under each blog post. You can use it if you have contributors for your website as well and then a related post plugin if you want to make sure that people spend more time on your blog. So, by the time they get to the end of a blog post they will check out other articles on your WordPress blog, rather than leaving.
With that being said thank you so much for reading and I hope you found at least one plugin that was helpful to you. If you’re looking for a specific plugin that does a specific thing leave a comment below and ask me. I might know just a plugin for you and as always if you found this helpful please do share the blogpost.
If you want to learn more about the blogging tools I use, I have a resource library for bloggers where I categorize everything to the dot. you can access everything for totally free. Snoop around to see what blogging tools I use and love. You can even find a couple of secret discounts in there if you buy through my affiliate links.
2,642 thoughts on “8 Must have plugins for your WordPress Site and Blog”