Are you running a WordPress blog? If yes, then you should stick to this article. In this article, I am going to review the top plugins for WordPress that help bloggers do blogging efficiently.
Research shows that there are over 500 million active blogs and each day around 7 million blogs are published by bloggers around the world. This stat is enough to tell all of us that blogging is the future.
To manage millions of blogs, bloggers use content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Weebly and Wix. WordPress is the most popular platform among these and powers around 40% of the world’s websites.
To better optimize WordPress website, bloggers need to use some tools and these tools are known as plugins. Plugins are used by bloggers to manage various things like tracking the website visitors, optimizing the content, improving the site speed, and adding the social sharing button on the blog.
Here is the list of the best WordPress plugins for bloggers:
1- Yoast SEO
Yoast is a popular SEO plugin for WordPress. Having an SEO plugin is very important for every website to optimize the content for higher search engine rankings. Yoast SEO plugin provides various suggestions to make your website SEO optimized.
Related: What is SEO? Complete Guide to Learn SEO
Yoast SEO comes with both free and paid versions. The paid version costs $89.
Advanced Features Yoast SEO Offers To Bloggers
Yoast allows users to connect webmasters accounts of Google, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu by adding their verification codes.
You get different SEO recommendations to improve your content like interlinks, missing image alt tags, and title and description lengths.
Yoast SEO also helps you create a sitemap for your website. Even you can edit your website’s robots.txt and .htaccess file directly from the plugin dashboard.
Related: Online Sitemap Generators – HTML, XML (Tested And FREE)
Apart from the above features, Yoast SEO also offers other advanced features like Google snippet preview, schema configuration, content readability analysis, OG tags optimization, and controlling breadcrumbs.
Related: Best Alternative Search Engines Other Than Google
Yoast also allows you to use add-ons and integrations like Zapier and SEMrush.
Related: SEMrush Review – Top Features Compared
2- W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is an excellent website performance optimization plugin that allows you to improve user experience, reduce the website load time, use CDN (Content Delivery Network), enable browser cache, and minify resource files.
W3 Total Cache is available free of cost. More than 1 million WordPress users are already using it to optimize website performance.
Related: Best Ways To Increase Site Speed
Advanced Features W3 Total Cache Offers To Bloggers
By using W3 Total Cache, you can improve your website loading time by minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
It also allows you to enable CDN (Content Delivery Network) that improves your overall website performance.
Apart from the above features, W3 Total Cache also let you enable browser cache, database cache, object cache, page cache, and Opcode cache.
3- MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights helps you check website traffic, audience data, and traffic sources, like the top countries from where visitors are coming.
To access all these data, you need to connect MonsterInsights with your Google Analytics account. Anyone can use MonsterInsights free of cost.
Advanced Features MonsterInsights Offers To Bloggers
By using MonsterInsights, you can check total sessions and pageviews with date filters like last 7 days, 30 days or custom date.
You can also see the top-10 countries from where the majority of visitors are coming to your website. Also, you can check the top referrals from where the majority of traffic is coming.
If you have an eCommerce store then you can track the transactions, conversions, and revenue. Even you can check the top-performing products in your store.
Related: Best WordPress Plugins For Ecommerce Store
MonsterInsights also enables users to check the rankings keywords with clicks, impressions, CTR and avg. position.
4- Akismet
Whether you are a new or experienced blogger, comment spamming is something that you will definitely face in your blogging journey. People comment on various sites to gain comment backlinks and it is difficult for you to check which comment is genuine and which is not. Here, you can take the help of Akismet as it filters bad comments which seem to be spammy.
Related: Top Benefits of Blogging
Akismet is free to use. However, you can go with the Akismet Pro for advanced features.
Advanced Features Akismet Offers To Bloggers
It automatically checks all the comments on your website and filters out the spammy ones. There are over 5 million WordPress users using Akismet to remove spam comments from their websites.
With comment history, you can check which comment Akismet has detected spam and which are genuine.
5- Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is the simplest contact form plugin for WordPress with an easy to use and intuitive interface. With over 5 million active installs, it is a popular WordPress plugin. Also, it is available in over 60 languages including German, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, and Italian.
Contact Form 7 is free to use.
Advanced Features Contact Form 7 Offers To Bloggers
Contact Form 7 is a fully customizable contact form plugin that enables you to create forms according to your needs. You can add dropdowns, checkboxes, quiz, URL and buttons in your template.
You can also choose the message that you want to display after form submission by users.
To add extra customization, Contact Form 7 allows you to add codes.
6- Smush
Smush is an image optimization plugin for WordPress that you can use to optimize your website images and improve site speed. With a perfect 5 star rating and over 1 million active installs, it is one of the best image optimizers available on the web.
Related: Best WordPress Plugins For Image Optimization
Smush is available free of cost.
Advance Features Smush Offers For Bloggers
Smush allows you to optimize and compress up to 50 images at a time in bulk mode.
By using an image resizing setting, you can set maximum width and heights for all the images. After this setting, every image you upload will be automatically resized to the given dimensions.
You can also enable Smush for automatic image compression that means whenever you upload images, it will compress them automatically.
7- Pretty Links
If you have an affiliate blog or promote affiliate products on your website, then you need to manage lots of affiliate links. Here, Pretty Links helps you track and manage all your affiliate links efficiently. For every blog which is monetized by affiliates, it is one of the best link management plugins.
Related: Best Affiliate Marketing Plugins For WordPress
Pretty Links is free to use.
Advance Features Pretty Links Offers For Bloggers
You can customize your affiliate link. Just enter the target link and customize your pretty link as shown in the image below. Also, you can choose the redirection type like 301, 302, or 307.
Pretty Links also allows you to apply some advanced settings like adding a no-follow tag in the link, adding sponsored links, and enabling parameter forwarding.
After creating links, you can track the created links like how many clicks you are getting. You can also download the report as a CSV file.
8- AddToAny Share Buttons
To enable users to share your content, you can add a social sharing button for various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. AddToAny Share Buttons let you add social media buttons on your websites post and pages.
Related: Best Tools To Measure Social Media Engagement
The AddToAny Share Buttons plugin is free to use.
Advance Features AddToAny Share Buttons Offers For Bloggers
You can set the icon size, add social media buttons icons, enabling the universal button, choose the sharing buttons header/title, choose the button placements (top or bottom).
AddToAny also allows you to add floating social sharing buttons on the website vertically or horizontally at a fixed position (left or right), also choose the responsiveness of buttons, and icons size and margins.
Conclusion
Finally, we have covered all the top plugins every WordPress blog should have. All of the above WordPress plugins for a blog are free to use and come with tons of advanced features that will help you do better blogging. However, if you want more features then each of the plugins offers a paid version. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to the paid version to leverage maximum benefit.
