If you have a WordPress blog then it is really important to make sure you are using the must-have WordPress plugins for your blog. As we all know that WordPress is one of the Best Blogging Platforms and when you start a blog you have to make it as perfect as you can so we use the best WordPress Plugins to make things happen to your blog. There are so many plugins available for WordPress that you can use in your WordPress website. Most of the plugins are free and the premium plugins are the paid ones. But in this post, I will show you the best and must-have WordPress Plugins that you should use in your WordPress Blog.
Best WordPress Backup Plugins
If you have a WordPress blog then the most important thing to keep in mind is to backup your WordPress blog from time to time because you may need it in some tricky situations if your website is hacked or accidentally locked. Backup is important because it downloads your website to your computer or any cloud server in a form of a file where it is kept safe and when needed, you can easily backup your website whenever any problem occurs with your website.
It is very important for you to note that there are many WordPress hosting providers that offer limited backup service so I will recommend you to backup your website by your own so below I have listed some free and premium best WordPress plugins to backup your WordPress website brandbookcloud.
1- Backup Buddy
Backup Buddy is one of the best and popular backup plugins for WordPress which is used for automatic regular backups of your WordPress blog and you can also schedule daily, weekly and monthly backups with Backup Buddy. It also gives you the option to save your backup directly to Stash (Backup Buddy’s cloud server), Dropbox, Amazon S3, FTP, Rackspace Cloud and you can also receive it directly in your Email.
2- VaultPress (By Automattic)
Vaultpress is the most recommended Backup plugin to use for your website as it is from the founders of WordPress. It is a premium plugin and will cost you an affordable small payment of $3.95/month or $39/year. It is very safe for your website as it can backup your website in few clicks if anything bad happens to your website.
It also provides you with automated daily backups with unlimited storage space and protects you from brute force attacks, spam in comments and pingbacks.
3- UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the best free wordpress backup plugin and provides you with the facility to create the complete backup of your website and downloads it to your computer. This plugin can provide you on demand backups as well as schedule backups. It can also automatically upload/store your backups to the cloud servers like Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, Email, FTP and many others.
Updraft also have a premium plan which you can choose and get some more extra features which have add-ons to migrate or duplicate site, search and replace database and it also gives you the facility to access the priority support.
Security And Maintenance Plugins For WordPress
It is very important to take a look at the security of your wordpress blog and protect your website from hackers, spammers and bots that try to login to your website by various ways. You should take a good care of your website maintenance and security to keep your website safe and healthy. Below I have listed the best security wordpress plugins to use in your blog make your blog stay safe filmotree.
4- Wordfence Security
Wordfence WordPress Plugin is my favorite and recommended plugin to use for the security of my blog. It gives you an extra protection by locking the people who are trying to access the login of your website and also blocks IP of users and bots that are trying to hack your website. You can receive notifications by email about the security of your website if anything suspicious happens with your wordpress site.
It also provides you with a premium version which gives you extra support and helps you whenever you are in trouble.
5- JetPack
JetPack is a powerful plugin which is by automatic (team behind WordPress) and it is added automatically when you install WordPress. It provides you with a bunch on features that can make your website look totally different and better than before. Jetpack takes of your website stats, security, performance, image optimization, social shares, website appearance and much more.
6- W3 Total Cache
This plugin is very powerful and improves the speed and performance of your website. W3 Total Cache is a plugin which stores cache of your website data temporarily to make your website load more faster for the users who had visited before. This will improve your search engine optimization.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) WordPress Plugins
SEO plugins are used to help you in generating website traffic. So I have listed some best wordpress SEO plugins which will help you to generate more traffic to your website. You can add your own keywords and description for search engine results to improve your search engine visibility and rankings.
7- WordPress SEO By Yoast (Free)
WordPress SEO Yoast is a popular and most powerful plugin for search engine optimization. It takes control of almost everything related to the SEO for your wordpress website. While you create your posts this plugin will help you choose the perfect wording and keywords to use in your posts to get ranking in google search results.
But you have to keep in mind that only installing this plugin won’t work for you until you use it properly and get benefit from it.
8- Google Analytics Dashboard
It is a great time saving plugin for users who can directly check their analytics stats right from their WordPress dashboard. Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress helps you to easily connect to your Google Analytics account from your WordPress blog. You can see your analytics reports like page views and most visited posts from your WordPress dashboard. Well it is not necessary but it’s worth adding.
9- Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemap is the best sitemap plugin for wordpress which can easily create a perfect sitemap for your wordpress blog. WordPress SEO by Yoast also provides you with a sitemap facility but Google XML Sitemaps makes it a lot easier for us to generate a sitemap for wordpress.
To add the sitemap to Google webmaster tools you need to go to the plugin settings and copy the URL provided by it and past it in Google Webmaster Tools and that’s it! You have created and submitted a wordpress sitemap.
10- All In One Schema.Org Rich Snippets
As you might have seen some extra kind of information like star ratings, the number of reviews and images below some of the web pages present in the search results. They take a look at user interests and pick some extra information which the users might want to know such information and ratings are called Rich Snippets.
Rich snippets are the best way to get the beautiful appearance of your posts and pages in search engine results. These snippets highlight the main information about the page/post and this is the best way to get more clicks to your website in search engines.
11- WP Smush (Image Optimization)
To give some beauty to your wordpress posts we use images to attract the users attention but sometimes using a lot of images may need some storage and it can also slow down your website speed and might disturb your visitor.
WP Smush image optimization plugin is the best to use as it compress your images into smaller size and makes your website load faster. It deals with several kind of image formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF and compress it with its great tools to make your website performance better.
12- Internal Link Generator
Internal links are very important as it really works for the ranking of your website in the search engines like Google and Bing. Inter linking your content with your own website pages through relevant keywords is the best way to improve your website SEO and increase website traffic.
Internal Link Generator is one of the best SEO Plugins for wordpress. It automatically inter link the keywords to the related posts from your site. So in this way your site can create a lot of link juice (Internal Links) and this is how you can improve your website ranking.
You have the options in settings to set how many times a keyword should use the internal link and how many internal links to show in your posts.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
The Social Sharing wordpress plugins are used to display sharing buttons of your favorite social networks which can let your visitors socialize and share your posts on the top social networks to increase more visitors to your website.
13- Social Icons
There is no doubt that social media is the popular platform for users which are increasing day by day. So if you use social media in your website you can even increase website traffic from social networks and also promote your website.
Social Icons a free plugin which is here to help you with almost everything you need related to social sharing. This is one of the best social sharing wordpress plugin which can help you add social icons to your posts and pages via shortcodes and widgets. This plugin supports more than 100 social networks which you can add to your website for social sharing and you also have the choice to edit the social icons like round shaped, box shaped etc to make your website appearance more beautiful.
14- Frizzly – Social Share Buttons
You may be using a lot of plugins for your social sharing but using more and more plugins will also slow down the speed of your website and will also look messy.
If you want an all in one solution so I will recommend you Frizzly which is the best social sharing buttons plugin which you should use in your blog. You can add social share buttons of popular social networks like facebook, twitter, pinterest, linkedin and much more.
You can add these sharing buttons to your images, posts and pages as it will help your visitors to share your content more and more.
Subscriber And Community Building Plugins WordPress
These plugins help you in creating your own community and engage with your users and visitors. The subscriber plugins are used for building relationship with your readers as if they subscribe to your blog they will receive an email every time you create a new post on your blog.
15- MailChimp For WordPress
One of the most popular email marketing plugins for WordPress is MailChimp. This Email WP Plugin helps you get more subscribers in your MailChimp list through various ways. You can create your opt-in forms more beautiful as this plugin provides you with a lot of design options and you can also integrate it with your other forms in your wordpress like Contact form, Comment or Checkout brandbookcloud.
You can connect to MailChimp in seconds and you have full control over your sign-up forms as they are user-friendly, good looking, and also optimized for mobiles. You can integrate it with plugins like Contact Form 7, WooCommerce, Ninja Forms 3, and a lot more.
16- OptinMonster
Want more subscribers? If yes then this is the time to convert your visitors into subscribers with OptinMonster. It is the best subscriber plugin for wordpress to use in your WP blog.
OptinMonster is easy to use with its drag and drop builder which creates beautiful forms for you. You can have multiple type of forms like lightbox popup, floating bars, slide-ins, sidebar and much more. The greatest feature which I think in it is that it does not disturbs your visitors by popping up suddenly anyone visits your website but it gives some time for your visitor to read your content and when the visitor is about to leave they will see a beautiful popup which they will love to subscribe.
17- CommentLuv
Do you want to increase comments on your wordpress blog? Then CommentLuv have some special features which can increase your blog comments and traffic to your website. In order to get more comments you have to reward your readers so they will love to comment on your posts again.
CommentLuv is a free plugin which rewards your commenter’s with a link of the recent post they have made in their blog. They will love to get a backlink to their website and your comments will start increasing because everyone wants a backlink to their blog.
You can also try CommentLuv Premium version which have a lot of extra options which you can use in your blog. You have the ability to reward your commenter’s with extra links or you can check the analytics for where your commenter’s are coming from.
18- Comment Reply Email Notification
Sometimes we comment on a website and ask a question but if we get a reply on our comment we don’t know if someone replied or not and this is not good for your WP blog because it is a bad impression on your blog.
In order to get rid of that Comment Reply Email Notification is the best plugin for comment replies. Whenever anyone comments on your post they will get a notification email whenever there is a new comment or reply on that post. This is how you can improve your web traffic and show people that you are an active owner of the website.
19- Comment Redirection
You should introduce the community of your website to your new visitors but the best way to do that is using a Comment Redirection plugin which you will help you welcome a new user to your website’s community.
Comment Redirection is a free wordpress plugin and it does all the work for you automatically. You just need to set everything up in the plugin setting and afterwards when anyone comments on your post they will be redirected to a welcome to our community page which will show a great impression and a sign of thank you for the user who commented on your website.
Best Contact Form Plugins WordPress
The Contact Form Plugins are used in your blogs to create a perfect and beautiful contact form for your users to contact you if they have any questions or problems. There are several contact form plugins but i have listed the best contact form plugin for wordpress.
20- Contact Form 7
It is very important for every website to have a contact page/form because it is necessary for the visitors to contact the website owner in any kind of issue or questions.
Contact Form 7 provides you the ability to create multiple forms and manage it with this beautiful plugin. You don’t need to do any coding you can set up and customize everything in the settings page. This contact form supports Akismet filtering which can help from spam, Ajax powered submitting and Captcha.
More Recommended Plugins
I know i have listed a lot of plugins above but i want to give you more so I have listed some more recommended plugins which are essential to use in your wordpress blog.
21- Akismet
Askimet is a default plugin in wordpress that helps you to automatically moderate and check your blog comments. It helps you from spamming comments and securing your website from spammers.
22- Ajax Contact Forms
It is a great plugin which is built in with JQuery and it easily integrates into your wordpress blog. It is easy and simple to use and it also have a Twitter direct messaging feature which is built in it.
23- Login Lockdown
Login Lockdown is a very important and great security plugin that helps your WordPress blog to stay protected by hackers and it gives you every detail of every login made to your wordpress account.
24- SEO Image Optimizer
SEO Image Optimizer helps you to automatically add alt text and Title attribution to all your blog images and rank your images higher in search engines and this is a great way to increase website traffic from images.
25- CloudFare For WordPress
Cloud Fare protects your blog from spammers. It also shows the real IP addresses of the commenter’s of your blog. Cloudfare will protect your website from hacking and will also help you to improve your website speed and load it faster than before.
26- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
It is a related posts plugin which makes a related posts box on the bottom of your posts and shows relevant content inside your website. So it is a great plugin as it helps your users to stay on your site for longer and browse more content from you site.
27- Google Reviews
Google Reviews plugin is there to help you demonstrate your customers’ reviews on your website in the form of a clickable feed. The plugin contains the name of the author, a picture, and a link to your Google account so that new users could also share their opinion about your products or services. A great addition to any ecommerce business.
Did I Miss Your Favorite Plugin?
So these were the essential wordpress plugins you should have in your wordpress blog. If you think that I missed any plugin that should be added to a wordpress blog then help me and list it down in the comments below and I will surely add it to my list of must have best wordpress plugins. I hope you liked this post and if you have any questions you can still ask and don’t forget to share.
