Looking for must-have plugins for your WordPress Blogs?
You are at the right place, keep reading!!!
I remember very well how crazy I was for the new software when I was a college student.
I used to search and download new software that can do something amazing.
This small software used to help me to finish my work fast.
I remember a software that can read everything that is written. I used that software like crazy.
Have you used this kind of software for fun to make your work easy?
Now we have a smartphone and we have apps. These apps also help us to do many things which are otherwise very difficult to do or even not possible to do with the phone if they were not there.
The point I am trying to make here is this software and apps make our work easy and fast.
Complex works could be done by just a few clicks of the mouse.
In a WordPress site plug-ins play the same role. They help us to do many complex things in our website in a very simple way.
So having important plugins for a WordPress website is extremely important to make our website more interactive and responsive.
In this post, I am going to talk about “10 must-have plugins to create an amazing WordPress blog”.
So let’s begin…
List of Important Plug-ins In WordPress Blog
Now I am going to tell you about all the plugins one by one. These are the very important plugins that can totally change the game of blogging for you.
These plugins will make your work easier so that you can focus more on ideation and content creation. So let’s begin.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most widely used plugin for on-page SEO of your blog. The plugin has 4.9 ratings on google with 27189 upvotes at the time of writing this post.
There are other similar plugins also available in the market. The most famous ones are:
- Rankmath
- All in one SEO
Rankmath is growing really fast and many bloggers switched from Yoast to Rankmath.
But it doesn’t mean that Yoast SEO is not worthy to use.
It is still the number one choice of many top bloggers.
So you can use anyone from the two in your blog. Both are really good plugins that will help you to do on-page SEO for your blog post.
They will recommend everything from keyword density to the readability of your blog, adding meta tag and description, image optimization, and much more.
So this plugin is definitely a must-have plugin and that’s why I keep this plugin at first place on my 10 must-have plugins to create an amazing WordPress blog list.
WP Smush
Imagine you are looking for information about a dishwasher.
You search the information on google. You got some search results.
You clicked on one of the links. But the site is not loading or it is taking so much time to load.
Images are not visible and take so much time on load.
Will you stay on the blog to read further or you will move to the next result???
I think the answer is obvious. Most of us will press the back button and will click on some other link.
So page load speed is a very important factor in the best user experience.
This plugin is used to compress the size of images in your blog.
This helps to improve the page load speed and ultimately improves the search engine ranking of your blog.
Better the page load speed, better the user experience.
The search engine focuses on user experience. If you can give the best user experience along with relevant information, you will rank on the top of the google search results.
Social media shares play a very important role in the visibility of your blog. They can make your post go viral and can help you to get tons of traffic.
So having social share buttons on your blog and in your every blog post is extremely important. This social sharing also improves the off-page SEO of your blog.
Share mesh is one such plugin which helps you to insert social share buttons on every blog post of your blog.
Every person who likes your article can share it immediately on their social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
The best thing about this plugin is you can choose a different headline of your blog post when someone shares it on their social media.
Like if from the point of view of your keyword research and SEO you frame a headline but you want one different headline for social media platforms which is more catchy and attention-grabbing but not that good in terms of SEO, then you can do it with the help of this plugin. Isn’t it an amazing feature. Right??
So, this is one of the must-have plugins for your WordPress blog to boost the social media visibility of your blog.
There are multiple tags that we need to put on our blog. Like tag for google analytics, Facebook
pixel, and many other platforms like an autoresponder.
There are multiple ways of doing it.
You can copy and paste the code directly in the header section of your blog by editing the theme code.
The second method could be by using the google tag manager. It is a little bit complicated.
But the quickest and easy method is by using a plugin.
You can down this plugin and place your Facebook pixel code or google analytics code in the header section of this plugin.
It will make the task easy and quick for you.
So it is also one of the must-have plugins if you want to track the activities on your blog by using various tracking code provided by Google, Facebook, and autoresponders.
W3 Cache
This plugin helps you to optimize your site for fast loading speed.
This plugin clears all the unused files which stay in your server when you install and uninstall any plugin.
It also minifies the pages of your blog so that they can load faster.
This is a free plugin and very popular to optimize your blog for better speed.
There is one plugin which is the paid plugin and alternative of W3 cache.
It is WP Rocket.
If you have the budget to invest in premium plugins then you can go with WP Rocket as well.
But you are looking for free options then W3 cache is by far the best option available in the market.
W3 cache has 1 million-plus active installations and 4.5-star rating given by 4500+ people.
So, just go and install this plugin to improve the performance of your WordPress blog or website. it’s a must-have plugin for any blog.
WP Touch
Today having a mobile responsive blog or website is not optional, it is mandatory now. If your website is mobile responsive, you can rank better on google search results.
If you want to check if your website is mobile responsive or not you can use the tool by google to check it.
Now WPTouch is the plugin that will help you to make your website mobile responsive.
The best part about it is you can choose the dedicated theme for your mobile website by using this plugin.
So If You find that your website is not mobile responsive in the above test by google then you can install this plugin to solve this issue.
Having a mobile-friendly and responsive website will help you get more traffic, better user experience, more sales and conversions if you are selling something on your website.
So, All these cool features make this plugin a totally must-have plugins for your blog.
Pretty Links Lite
If you are monetizing your blog with the help of affiliate marketing then you know it well how important it is to use a link shortener like bitly.com to make those scary looking links clickable.
Now what if you can have your own customized links? Isn’t it great!!!
For Example, let’s say in my blog i am promoting Groove Funnels a funnel builder software as an affiliate then it can create a URL like www.TheRishabhJain.com/gfunnels.
It will redirect my website visitor directly to my affiliate offer or even to my opt-in page where first I just want to collect their emails.
So You can do all these cool stuff with the help of this magical plugin called Pretty Links Lite. you can even get the analytics for these customized links.
So, now you don’t need to worry about creating customized links. Just download this free plugin and start creating your own cool and branded looking customized links.
This plugin has 200,000+ downloads and 4.5 star rating in WordPress plugins repository.
It’s a must-have plugin for every blogger out there. That’s why it’s in my 10 must-have plugins list.
WP Review
If you’re running a review website or if you keep writing reviews of different products in your blog then you need some additional features to make your reviews more interactive.
WP Review plugin by MyThemeShop is a plugin that you can use to create awesome looking reviews in your blog.
This plugin will help you to create review boxes in your review articles. It also has the feature to give ratings to your products.
There are three different rating methods that you can use as per your need or liking.
Also, this plugin offers 19 different schema types to create rich snippets to increase the Search Engine Result Pages(SERP’s) visibility and can help you to get more organic traffic.
So if you promote affiliate products on your blog by writing their reviews then this plugin is for you. This is also a must-have plugin for your blog.
UpdraftPlus
You have created so much content on your blog but what if something went wrong with the server and all your data got lost? Scary!!! Right?
So having the backup of your website data is very important. To make this taks simple you can use the plugin like UpdraftPlus which can make things for you pretty easy.
But installing this plugin and creating your account twitch them, you can take the backup of your website on your Google Drive or OneDrive.
You don’t need to worry about remembering all the time to take backup manually. You can set the backup frequency daily, weekly or monthly and it will do the taks for you.
So having a plugin like this makes things quite simple and relaxing for us.
Even though I recommend taking the manual backup of your complete blog once or twice in a month is good practice.
This plugin has 3+ millions active installations and 5 star rating in WordPress plugins repository.
So just go with this plugin to take the backup of your blog or website data. Its a must-have plugin and that’s why I included it in my 10 must-have plugins list for WordPress list.
Optin Forms
Maybe you are getting thousands of visitors on your website every month or even every day but if you are not capturing their email addresses then you are missing out a big monetization opportunity.
More than 80% of your visitors may be not visiting your blog or website again. They have just found the link from somewhere, landed on your website and left it after spending a few seconds or minutes.
But if you can capture their email in that duration then you can bring them back to your blog or website by sending them an email reminder.
So having an optin form is quite important for bloggers, who want to monetize their blog traffic by selling some products of their own or even affiliate products.
For this purpose you can use the plugin Optin Forms. This plugin can help you to have a customized optin form on your blog.
There are many other options as well that you go with. I am also looking for some better options. I will tell you about it in any of my future blogs. Till then you can try this plugin. It will do the work for you.
Many email marketing tools like Mailchimp, Get Response, ActiveCampaign also offer customized optin forms. You can go with them too.
I am using Sendfox as an emailing software for my email marketing campaigns and capturing email addresses.
I will write a separate blog post on various available options for optin forms with their advantages and disadvantages because I did a lot of mugging for this problem.
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Conclusion
So In this blog post, we have gone through the list of 10 must-have plugins to create an amazing WordPress blog. We covered plugins for all the major functions that you need in your blog when you are just starting out.
I will keep updating the list and you can visit my blog to get an updated list. I do a lot of experiments with different plugins and in the process I learn so much.
I will share all my learning with you here in my blog. You can also subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get updates about all my learning every week. Click Here to subscribe to my newsletter.
