21 WordPress Plugins To Elevate Your Blog
Do you want to take your WordPress blog to the next level?
Look no further! In this blog post, I’ll share 21 of the best WordPress plugins that can help boost your blog’s functionality, improve its design, and increase your readership.
From SEO optimization to social media marketing, these plugins will help you make the most of your blog and cut through the noise. Let’s dive in.
1. KadenceWP
Kadence is a popular WordPress theme that offers a variety of starter templates that can be used to quickly create a professional-looking blog, which can help to attract and retain readers.
You can try their free version or go premium to get the most value.
Kadence’s pre-built templates are fully customizable and responsive. Additionally, the theme is fully compatible with the WordPress block editor, making it easy for bloggers to create and edit content visually and intuitively.
Each template includes customizable layouts, responsive design, and easy integration with popular WordPress plugins, which can help bloggers create a website tailored to their needs.
2. Elementor
Elementor is a popular WordPress plugin that helps users create custom designs for their websites without the need for coding knowledge.
It offers a wide range of design options and templates that can be easily customized to suit the user’s needs.
Elementor is fully responsive and optimized for speed and performance, so the designs created with it will automatically adapt to different screen sizes and devices seamlessly.
PRO Tip: Once you’ve installed the Elementor plugin, you can also find its add-ons and install them to enhance your blog’s functionality and design.
3. Social Snap
Social engagement is one of the crucial SEO ranking factors.
The Social Snap plugin allows you to access 30+ social networks, enabling visitors to share your content via their favorite social app. You can customize the design of the buttons and place them wherever you want on your blog.
With the pro version, you will have more features like Click-to-Tweet, automatic URL shortening, and detailed reporting.
4. Strive Content Calendar
As a blogger, publishing content regularly and sticking to a schedule is essential. Strive makes this easy by directly adding a responsive content calendar to the WordPress dashboard. At a glance, you can see your published and upcoming posts for the month and schedule new posts with a few clicks. Posts are color-coded based on their editorial status, and you can drag and drop them into new dates to reschedule as needed.
In addition to the editorial calendar, Strive includes a few other practical features for bloggers, such as post statuses, custom checklists, and post revisions for republishing outdated content.
5. Rank Math
Rank Math is an effective SEO plugin widely used by bloggers. Its wide range of features, including keyword optimization, rich snippets, sitemaps, and performance analysis, can help improve a WordPress blog’s visibility and search engine rankings.
One of the key features I love about Rankmath is rich snippets. Rich snippets are a type of structured data that can be added to your code, which can help search engines understand the content on a blog better, leading to better SEO rankings.
Rankmath is available in free and paid versions – the free just works fine when you’re just starting.
6. Word Fence
Online is horrible; you can’t keep an eye on your blog’s security 24/7 to lock out the bad things that can happen. So the WordFence plugin comes into the picture.
The free version itself would do an excellent job of protecting your blog from brute-force attacks. If you cannot afford to get hacked, I suggest the premium version that starts from $119/year with 1 license.
7. WPCode
With WPCode, formerly known as Insert Headers And Footers, you can insert HTML code and scripts such as Google Analytics, custom CSS, and Java into your blog’s <body> or <head> section. You don’t have to edit your theme files or deal with an extra plugin to do the same work.
For example, you don’t need an additional plugin like Monster Insights to verify your Google Analytics tracking code.
8. Mailer Lite
Growing your blog without building an email list would not be easy. I get it; you might be thinking email services are costly.
Guess what! MailerLite is one effective and awesome list-building plugin that comes free of cost. In fact, I currently use the free one!
It has an automation feature that emails subscribers whenever you publish a new blog. Mobile-friendly newsletters, campaigns, rich text editor, photo editing, landing pages, signup forms, exit pop-ups, etc., all fall into a free plan.
9. Table of Content Plus
This plugin on your blog helps you keep your content organized and let readers find it with comfort. It acts as an information directory for your blog post.
The Table of content plugin plus plugin makes it easy for the readers to jump to a particular section they wish to read.
It has features like setting the table position, colors, what after heading it should appear in your blog post, etc. It also helps your SEO, as Google can fetch H1 and H2 headlines and feature them as snippets for search queries.
10. UpdraftPlus
No professional blogger would risk their blog by not having regular backups. Anytime anything could go wrong with your blog: new updates, server crashes, plugin conflicts, cyber-attacks, etc. Agree?
UpdraftPlus is a popular WordPress plugin that provides backup and restoration functionality. Some of its key features include:
- Automatic backups
- Multiple storage options
- Easy restoration
- Migration and cloning
- File and database backup
Note: If your web hosting provider offers a free backup option, you don’t have to install this plugin.
11. Really Simple SSL
When you install Really Simple SSL, it will automatically trigger the settings of your website and configures it to run over HTTPS.
Note: Consider this plugin only if your hosting provider suggests it or if you’re getting connection issues. For example, if your blog runs on both HTTP and https versions.
12. Thirsty Affiliate
Do you want to monetize your WordPress site with affiliate marketing?
Then ThirstyAffiliate is for you. Simply install this plugin and give a professional look to your Affiliate Links.
The plugin also provides a central location to manage all of your affiliate links, making it easy to organize and keep track of them.
13. Imagify
Large or high-resolution images can take longer to load, which can slow down the overall speed of your blog. Additionally, if images are not properly optimized for the web, such as by compressing them or reducing their file size, this can further slow down the loading time of a website.
To improve blog speed, it’s important to optimize images by compressing them, reducing their file size, and loading them efficiently. This can be done using Imagify, which compresses your images as you upload them.
Moreover, you don’t have to lose your bandwidth and storage by optimizing Images; Imagify uses its own servers.
14. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is ranked the best and fastest cache plugin to optimize the speed performance Site speed is vital for SEO. WP Rocket will cache your content and images, so loading takes less time.
Faster loading = easier to crawl and rank in Google.
If you have the budget, you can skip the Imagify plugin and assign its task to WP Rocket, as it optimizes your media. The speed encourages busy visitors to read your content easily without hassle.
15. Wp Forms
WP Forms is a drag-and-drop builder that lets you create forms with a few clicks – such as contact forms, email subscription forms, registration forms, and payment forms such as PayPal donations.
You can start from scratch or access pre-built form templates to build customized forms in seconds. They look great on mobiles, tablets, and computers.
With the form notification feature, you can respond as soon as you get a lead or a subscriber. The forms come with built-in spam protection with Captcha technology.
16. GDPR Cookie Consent
The WordPress Cookie Consent plugin would be a great solution to easily comply with the GDPR law. Its intelligent features save you loads of time and effort that you will have to spend on it when you do it manually.
The most essential feature provided by the plugin, as per the GDPR guidelines, is the cookie consent banner. You can style it as you wish, along with buttons that allow users to either ‘Add’ or ‘Reject’ cookies on your website.
You can also conduct a cookie audit using the plugin and list all the cookies to your cookie policy using a shortcode. An automatic script blocker is another prominent feature offered by the plugin. With the help of this feature, you can automatically block the cookies of several third-party plugins such as Facebook Pixel, Smashbaloon, etc.
17. Revive Old Posts
Social media is a great way to drive visitors to your blog. However, manually re-sharing your material across your social networks can consume a significant amount of your time.
Revive Old Posts plugin handles these responsibilities by automatically posting your fresh posts on Facebook and Twitter to increase their visibility. In addition, you may schedule your articles, incorporate hashtags, and track clicks.
It is entirely free to get started with limited features. You can upgrade to the PRO plan when you need more of it.
18. Hubspot
The HubSpot WordPress plugin is a free plugin that allows you to integrate your WordPress blog with marketing, sales, and service tools.
The features include forms and popups, Live Chat, Page analytics, email marketing workflows and analytics, CRM to manage leads and track engagement, and seamless integration with over 1200+ apps such as Stripe, WooCommerce, etc.
The best part is that the Hubspot plugin is simple and free.
19. Broken Link Checker
Broken links return 404 pages to your visitors, which disappoints them and is also bad for SEO.
The Broken Link Checker plugin automatically checks for broken links on your blog and allows you to fix them from the dashboard, eliminating the need to manually check each post.
20. Akismet
This plugin ensures that all spam comments are filtered from your website daily. Akismet has been dealing with spam since 2005.
On average, it fights eight million spam pieces hourly. While the plugin has free and premium versions, free works fine if you’re just starting out. They also allow you to select a plan per the size of your business and the number of your websites.
21. WP Sticky
The WP Sticky plugin allows you to make any element on your page/post “sticky” as the user scrolls down the page. This means the element will remain visible even if the user scrolls past it.
This can be useful for many things, including highlighting a particular item, such as a product or promotion, to increase its visibility.
Summary – Best WordPress Plugins for blogs in 2023
Hopefully, this list makes your life a bit easier when deciding which of the over 60,000+ WordPress plugins you should use on your blog to watch it roar.
What’s your favorite plugin? Want me to add anything to the list?
Let me know in the comments.
A great list of recommended plugins.
Social snap is a good content sharing plugin, it never misses count.
I will start using the elementor plugin now, I never too it serious before.
Thanks for sharing this with us!
Thank you for the kind words, Eniola. Elementor is must try plugin!
Hello Mudassir,
Very informative post. Thanks Mudassir for your awesome research and sharing this with us. A comprehensive list of useful and important WordPress Plugins.
After going through this post I am quite sure this post is definitely very useful for all the newbie bloggers as there are huge numbers of plugins available in WordPress and the newbies does not have such an in depth idea.
I really appreciate the way you have explained this article making the concept much easier. Few of these Plugins are new for me too and will definitely try these too. Keep writing more similar and informative post.
Thanks & Regards,
-Rijhu
Thanks for being so kind and supportive, Rijhu 🙂
Social snap is a good social share plugin but it is not that responsive in free version. Premium version is awesome.
Nice post 👍
True that, Abhishek. Appreciate reading through!!
Thanks, Mudassir for this amazing breakdown of these best WordPress plugins. You have poured a lot of valuable content into it. All are the best plugins and every blogger must-have.
Thanks & Regards
Suryakant
Hello Suryakant, Welcome to my Blog. I am glad you liked the post, appreciated 🙂
Hello Mudassir,
The list of WP plugins is really amazing. Rank Math, Social Snap, and Wordfence are really wonderful plugins. But, you should also include Kadence Blocks in the list as it is an outstanding WP editor plugin that eliminates the need of many plugins used for a single task such as Table of Contents.
Yes, Kadence Blocks is an amazing plugin – I use it too!
Thanks, I’ll include it, Nitin!
Thanks Mudassir Ahmed for the in-depth wonderful article you turned out here Very Informative Loved It Thank you Soo Much For Sharing It
Glad you enjoyed 🙂 Appreciate the support!
Hi Mudassir, how do you like Rank Math? I’ve used Yoast for years on 3 blogs and I have a new blog with RankMath. I really like them both and can’t decide about switching the others over to RankMath – Yoast expires in 2 weeks, I have to think fast! Your thoughts?
Hi Lisa, I used Yoast in 2020 and faced many technical errors (such as canonical issues) with it, so I moved to Rankmath, and I’m not sure how it has been upgraded so far.
I personally like Rankmath; it is easy to use and has many worthy features such as InstantPageIndexing, 404 URLs monitoring, Redirections, Sitemap submissions, meta titles management, Local SEO management, SEO analyzer, and more. Especially “Redirection” features help me set proper redirections for deleted contents and author pages without needing to signup for an extra tool. It is very essential to a website’s SEO.
I think Rankmath free version works just great as Yoast Pro if you’re planning a shift. The best part is you can also export your existing Yoast’s SEO settings to Rankmath.
Good luck!
Hi Mudassir, Have you seen a how-to on switching over? Thanks!
No Lisa, I went on my own!
I think RM has extensive Knowledgebase and YouTube videos that you can refer to for the switching.
Hey Mudassir! Some really important and good plugins here.
I recently shifted from GetResponse to MailerLite as it provides automations with the free plan (GetResponse doesn’t).
I want to suggest one more plugin – Converter For Media.
This plugin helps automatically convert all your images to webP format which is recommended for further optimizing your images.
Thanks for the list.
Ali from Infoverses.
Mailerlite is cool, I use it too!
Never knew about Converterformedia, seems like a productive plugin to optimize blogs for speed. Thanks for the suggestion, Ali. Have a nice day!
Hi Mudassir,
Great list you compiled. Rank Math rules, as does Word Fence.
Do you have a recommendation as to how many plugins are too many? I’ve heard that you can have too many plugins but from what I’ve gathered, the answer seems to be all over the place.
Dani
Hello Dani, it depends on a few factors, including the functionality you want, the server resources available, and the speed and performance you want to maintain.
A good rule of thumb is to maintain essential plugins only; the number varies for each website depending on its needs. Experts say that having too many plugins can slow down your website and increases the risk of compatibility issues.
I have never experienced such issues because I run on nine eight plugins only. However, I can put this – it’s crucial to keep your plugins up to date and regularly monitor your site for issues to ensure the plugins are not negatively impacting your site.
Thanks for reading the post and sharing your ideas.