Once your blog up and running and you have the basics covered, you’ll realize there are some things your blog can’t do straight out the box. You may want to optimize your blogs for SEO and social sharing or reduce the number of spam comments you get.
After you’ve been blogging for some time, you may want to do more with your site. You may be looking to manage affiliate links or set up an e-commerce store. For any of these functions, you can use plugins.
Below is an extensive list of some of the best blog plugins you can get.
If you haven’t yet launched your blog, follow these steps to ensure success.
1. Contact Form 7
It is important for readers to be able to get in touch with you. Contact forms are usually preferred over providing your email address. One reason for this is that spammers scan websites and collect email addresses so they can add them to their mailing lists.
Contact forms prevent this. They also allow you to ask for the specific information which you want. This can help you to filter the queries you get. You can also use the form to let your followers know how long it is likely to take you to respond.
This allows you to build a good relationship with them. Contact Form 7 is one of the best WordPress blog plugins for staying in contact with readers and it is very simple to use.
2. WooCommerce
WooCommerce makes creating and managing an online store a lot easier than it used to be. If you want to make money from your blog, you may want to go the route of eCommerce. If you use WooCommerce, you won’t need to do everything from scratch.
It may take some time to get the hang of how WooCommerce works but there are many tutorials available. Due to its popularity, many other plugins and businesses support WooCommerce.
3. Yoast SEO
Search engine optimization is very important. However, you may not know exactly how to ensure you create content that search engines will be able to index. That’s where Yoast SEO plugin can help. Most bloggers will tell you it is one of the best blog plugins.
Yoast tells you whether you’ve optimized your text correctly or not by pointing out things like keyword use, internal and external linking and image alt text. Yoast also takes care of XML sitemaps.
4. WP-Polls
Polls are a great way to increase engagement on your blog. People usually love sharing their opinions and thoughts! WP-Polls is one of the best WordPress add-ons for getting feedback. It allows you to create and add polls to your sidebar or within a blog post.
WP-Polls can help to get excellent feedback from your audience. You can use this to inform new content or learn more about your readers.
Take our 3-Day Blogging Brush Up E-course to earn more from your blog.
5. W3 Total Cache
The speed of your site affects user experience and how search engines rank it. Caching can help to serve compressed files to your site and reduce the burden on your server. This means your blog will load faster for visitors.
Since website users often leave pages which take too long to load, W3 Total Cache can really increase the amount of time people spend on your blog. This plugin supports Google AMP, SSL and CDN services.
6. Envira Gallery
This plugin helps you create beautiful, response image and video galleries. The drag and drop feature makes it very easy to upload content and arrange it. Envira Gallery is optimized for excellent server and web performance so it won’t slow down your site.
The plugin is also designed to help improve SEO. The free version has lots of gallery options but for more advanced projects, there’s a premium version.
7. Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is another one of the best blog plugins. It creates XML sitemaps to help search engines better index your site. This can help to improve your SEO significantly.
These sitemaps make it easier for crawlers to see the full structure of your blog and retrieve it.
Every time you create new content, the major search engines are notified about the change.
Choose secure and reliable hosting for your WordPress blog with Bluehost.
8. Jetpack
Jetpack is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs and one of the first many bloggers install. It offers a group of features which are very useful including themes, image and video content delivery networks, and lazy image loading.
Jetpack also provides you with website statistics, spam filtering, malware scanning and more. You simply choose the features you need. Jetpack is a WordPress.com feature so you will need to have one of these accounts to use it.
9. ThirstyAffiliates
If you’re looking to make money blogging, you’ve probably at least considered affiliate marketing. ThirstyAffiliates can help you get started on the right note. If you already have affiliate links on your blog, you know they can get long and messy.
This WordPress plugin allows you to make those links shorter and you can include your domain name.
Not only is this more attractive, but it protects your commissions from theft. ThirstyAffiliates also makes it easier to insert your affiliate links into blog posts. Both free and paid versions are available.
10. TablePress
WordPress doesn’t have a built-in tool for adding tables so this is one of the WordPress add-ons which will be of great help. Ordinarily, you would need to know some HTML to add a table manually.
TablePress makes it easy to create beautiful tables which you can embed in posts, pages or text widgets by using a very simple shortcode. You don’t need to work with HTML at all. TablePress allows you to import or export tables to and from HTML, JSON, CSV, and Excel.
Sign up for our 3-Day Blogging Brush Up E-Course to improve your blog traffic.
11. Easy Google Fonts
Not every WordPress theme comes with cool fonts, but typography is a key feature of good design. If your website isn’t beautiful to look at, it may not keep visitors’ interests. The Easy Google Fonts plugin gives you access to more than 600 Google fonts so you create a more appealing site. You don’t need to know any coding, so this plugin is ideal for bloggers with minimal typography experience.
You can preview the fonts in real-time before you make them public. If you want to give your site a new look, search for Easy Google Fonts in the WP plugin directory.
12. The Events Calendar
If you host events as an expansion of your blog or you promote other events, you probably want your readers to know about them. The Events Calendar makes it easy to create and display events in WordPress. You can organize your events and add important details like venue, time and attendees.
The plugin can be used for seminars, programs and virtually any type of event. It can help to increase the likelihood that your event will be well-attended by your audience.
Download Divi Theme, a futuristic visual page builder with endless customization options.
13. WpDiscuz
WordPress comes with a basic comments section, but you may want to customize it and make it look cleaner. WpDiscuz is one of the best blog plugins for doing just that. It allows you to give your comments section a more professional look and you can adjust the settings to suit your needs.
You can determine the information visitors need to provide when they comment and whether they have to log in, among other features.
Take our 3-Day Blogging Brush Up E-course to earn more from your blog.
14. Redirection
If you’ve been blogging for a long time and you’ve made a lot of changes to your site, you may need this. This plugin allows you to set up redirects for 301 and 404 errors on your blog. If you delete older posts and pages or change their URL, this comes in handy.
If you don’t set up redirects, visitors to your site will get an error message. They are unlikely to go searching further or stick around on your site any longer. Furthermore, broken links can lower your search engine result page ranking.
To avoid this, all you need to do is install Redirection and send all the traffic to the new URL.
15. Akismet
From the time your blog went live, you probably started to notice spam in your comments section. Spammers are often effusive with praise for your blog, but they don’t comment on anything specific.
They will likely include a link to another blog or a product or service. Akismet is an official WordPress plugin which is designed to prevent spam comments. It is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs.
Akismet is actually one of the first plugins you should install but it’s never too late to get it. It will move comments which look like spam into the trash. You can review them and delete them periodically or just let the plugin clear them after a period of time.
16. OneSignal
OneSignal helps to drive more traffic to your blog. It allows you to use push technology to encourage readers to subscribe for updates to your blog. Whenever you publish a new blog post, readers using Firefox, Chrome or Safari get a push notification.
You can also send manual push notifications to drive traffic wherever you want it to go. This type of service is becoming increasingly popular. If you are not already sending browser notifications, you may want to start with OneSignal.
17. Drip
Drip is a customer relationship management plugin built for eCommerce. If sales of a product or service are a key element of your blog, Drip can help you build the trust that is necessary before people are willing to buy.
It helps you to gather important information about each customer like their interests and behaviors and personalize your communication.
You can target specific customers with the product or service that is best for them. Drip also allows you to set up email sequences to recover abandoned shopping carts and increase conversions.
Click here for a free trial of ConvertKit and see how it can boost your email marketing efforts.
18. Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is the best page builder plugin for WordPress blogs. If you want to build a landing page, this is just the app you need. You don’t need to write any code. Instead, you can arrange a set of content modules which come with the plugin.
Beaver Builder has a text editor as well as video, photo and audio options. You can also add a sidebar to further customize your page. Both free and premium versions of Beaver Builder are available.
19. OptinMonster
Pop-ups can really help encourage subscriptions to newsletters, courses or giveaways. OptinMonster gives you much more control over how your pop-ups appear than some other plugins. For example, instead of having the pop-up appear as soon as someone visits your site, you can give them time to begin interacting with your content.
When pop-ups appear immediately, people tend to just close them so they can get back to reading.
Remember, visitors come to your site in search of specific information. You don’t want to interrupt them before they’ve had a chance to read it. You can even set your pop-up to appear when it seems the user is about to leave your site.
Sign up for our 3-Day Blogging Brush Up E-Course to improve your blog traffic.
20. ReferralCandy
This is another great WordPress plugin for store owners. Referrals play a major role in getting people to purchase. People are more likely to buy something if a trusted friend or relative recommends it.
ReferralCandy allows you to create your own referral program and reward your loyal customers with discounts, free products, cash or store credit if they refer your business to their friends. The plugin allows you to track referrals and distribute rewards automatically.
21. Proven
An additional way to boost sales is to use social proof. Proven helps to boost conversions by delivering a little pop-up to let visitors know someone just bought a product. It is easy to set up and you can even control who sees it when they come to your site.
Proven plays to the psychology of shoppers by showing you’re a trusted retailer. It is one of the best WordPress add-ons for eCommerce blogs.
Many of the functions you want on your WordPress blog can be achieved using plugins. However, not all plugins are created equally. Some slow down your site or make it less attractive to visitors. The 21 plugins in this list are all lightweight, beautiful and easy to use. In most cases, you don’t need to do any coding.
If you want to learn more about boosting blog traffic and monetizing your blog, take our 3-Day Blogging Brush Up E-Course.
[…] Choose your plugins smartly – use the following guide to identify some of the best WordPress functionalities. […]