Do you want to enhance your blog’s performance? If yes, then you need to install some of the powerful WordPress plugins for blogs.
Blogging has gained tremendous popularity in the recent decade. Bloggers from around the globe publish more than 70 million posts every single month.
To remain on top of your competition, you need to upgrade your blog consistently. So, plugins are an excellent tool for creating a high-yielding blog by providing an extensive range of functionalities.
Now, you must be wondering which of the plugins work best for your blogging venture! Depending on the category, there are a variety of WordPress plugins that work best for your motive.
We have provided a list of 30+ best WordPress plugins that work best for a multitude of purposes. Every blogger should install these fundamental extensions regardless of their blogging niche.
Table of Contents
Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins
Images are a great way to make your articles more engaging and interactive to your visitors. But there’s a cost. Images have a large size compared to the plain text; hence it takes longer to load and result in poor performance of your site.
To improve your site speed, you need to optimize your images. You can use editing software like Photoshop, Gimp, or any other software tool. While these softwares offer more control over-optimization, it is time-consuming, and many users may not be comfortable using them.
In the WordPress Repository, you can find several image compression plugins that can help you compress your images automatically based on your preferred settings. They can optimize your images in the media library and the images you upload without compromising the quality.
Here’s are a few recommended image compression WordPress plugins:
1. FileBird
FileBird is a well-designed plugin that helps organize your media files in the WordPress library into folders and subfolders. You can create unlimited folders and subfolders to put your files. When you need to insert an image into a page, a post or a custom post type, it is easy for you to locate the file and choose it from the folders you have. Another great feature of FileBird is that you can quickly drag and drop a file into folders, which does not change the file path. Therefore, the appearance of the file on your site’s front end is not changed, so it is safe.
FileBird is designed to work with all themes and plugins. It even supports multi-language plugins. You can have different files in folders of different languages. In addition, you can create a gallery using the FileBird gallery block. It lets you choose images from a folder to be presented. Moreover, when you remove or add more images into that folder in the admin dashboard, the front-end images are synced automatically.
You can upload folders containing files from your computer to WordPress with the help of FileBird. You can export folder structure and import it into the new site when moving your site.
Besides, FileBird lets you download all files of a folder as a zip file with just a single click.
2. ShortPixel
ShortPixel is one of the most popular image compression WordPress plugins with over 100k+ active installation and is continuously updated to provide better optimization for JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF documents. To use the plugin, you need to get an API key by providing your email address.
Along with advanced features, you also get more control over optimization settings. It stores your original image in a separate folder and compresses it as soon as the plugin is activated. ShortPixel also shows the difference between your original and compressed images. The free account limits compression for 100 images per month. For more than 100 images, they offer premium plans, starting from $4.99.
3. reSmush.it
reSmust.it is a minimal yet powerful image compression plugin. It automatically optimizes images during upload. Not only that, but you can also optimize your existing pictures from your media library in bulk.
In the plugin settings, you can set the optimization quality (default is 92), toggle automatic optimization on upload, enable statistics and logs. This plugin limits the optimization of images over 5 MB. It also has a feature to exclude individual images from compression and forced compression to optimize further.
4. Optimole
Optimole is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and featured-packed image compression WordPress plugins. To get the API key to start using this plugin, it’ll require your email address. It automatically optimizes your images, serves images via a fast image CDN, and uses lazy loading to display images to improve the site loading speed.
The plugin smartly picks the right image size for the visitor’s browser and viewport. It even downgrades the image quality if the visitor is on a slow speed internet connection. The free version allows optimization of 1GB of images (roughly 1000 images, assuming each image is 1MB) per month. It is generally sufficient for most bloggers. You can upgrade to their paid plans starting from $9/month if you want priority support and optimization for more images.
5. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer is the most downloaded image compression WordPress plugin with over 700k active installations. Unlike other image compression plugins, you don’t need to sign up to get the API key as it works without it. However, you can still sign up to unlock more features.
It offers JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF optimization along with an option for lossy and lossless compression. EWWW’s main benefit is that it doesn’t limit the file sizes or the number of images uploaded. It automatically optimizes the photos during the upload. It also compresses and optimizes your previously uploaded images in bulk with a single click.
6. Imagify
Imagify is one of the most advanced image compression tools. It automatically optimizes the images during upload. It offers three levels of compression: Normal (uses a lossless compression algorithm), Aggressive (uses a lossy compression algorithm), and Ultra (the strongest lossy algorithm).
The best thing about this plugin is that it stores your original images before optimizing them. Thus, you can always restore your images to their original version when needed. The free version lets you optimize 25MB worth of images per month, but you can upgrade to their paid plans, starting from $4.99/month, which offers 1GB of image compression.
Note: While image compression plugins make your life easier to optimize your images, I prefer to use online image compressor tools like TinyPNG, CompressJPEG, and Compressor to optimize my images before uploading. Once that’s done, they are further optimized with these plugins, eventually improving site performance.
Best WordPress Site Speed Optimization Plugins
Loading speed and performance of a site are responsible factors that determine your ranking in search engines. A fast-speed site is essential to offer your visitors with excellent user experience as well. Studies say that a site that loads in less than 3 secs is more likely to perform better and retain the visitors. Thus, it also contributes to the lower bounce rate.
Besides affecting your site’s performance and costing you visitors, a slow-speed site also negatively affects your ranking. The users are most likely to leave the slow website even before it even loads properly.
There are many factors responsible for your site performance and loading speed. Some of the most common factors responsible are installing too many plugins, lack of image optimization, slower hosting configuration, and many more. You can check your site performance using GTmetrix (most recommended) or Pingdom to analyze the factors impacting your site. I suggest you analyze your site performance before using any caching plugins to compare the differences later on.
If your site performance score is low, you can optimize it using caching plugins. Enabling caching on your WordPress site can speed your site by 2x to 5x. Caching plugin makes a copy of the pages and posts after the first load and then serves the cached version to every subsequent user.
There are many WordPress optimization caching plugins that you can use to reduce page load time. Some of the popular WordPress site speed optimization plugins are mentioned below:
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the most popular and high rated WordPress performance plugins. It costs $49 for the premium version for a single site/year. The plugin is easy to configure and is frequently updated with new features. Some of the key features that make WP Rocket best among its competitors are as follows:
- User-friendly interface and easy to configure
- Database Optimization
- Built-in lazy loading for images and videos
- Integration with Cloudflare and other CDNs
- Ability to host Google fonts locally
- Google Analytics integration to load code from your server
- CSS, HTML and Javascript minification
- Advanced Caching rules
- Settings import and export
- Version rollback
WP Rocket WordPress plugin is a one-stop solution to reduce page load time and optimize your site performance. It combines features of several popular caching plugins under one roof to provide you the ultimate solution for WordPress site speed optimization.
2. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is the highest rated free WordPress cache plugin with over 1 million+ active installations. The plugin comes with a user-friendly interface and an excellent set of features that are easy to configure. The setting pages include a list of checkboxes and provide information boxes to explain each of the settings.
The key features are as follows:
- Minification of CSS, HTML and JavaScript files
- 1 click option to clear cache or minified files
- CDN, Cloudflare and SSL support
- Exclude pages and user-agents
- Cache Timeout to delete cache files after a determined time
- Advanced control for Admin to monitor cache files
- GZIP Compression and Browser Caching
- Caching option for logged-in users and many more
There is also a premium version with a one-time fee and lifetime updates with extra features like mobile and widget cache, image optimization, cache statics, database cleanup, Google Fonts Async, Lazyload, and many more.
3. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is another of the most popular WordPress site optimization plugins with over 2 million active installations. WP Super Cache is a product of Automattic team, the company behind WordPress.com and popular plugins like Jetpack, Akismet Anti-Spam, and VaultPress.
The plugin generates static HTML files from dynamic WordPress blogs served by a web server to all the users. This reduces the processing time of PHP scripts and boosts your site loading speed.
The key features are as follows:
- Support for multiple caching methods (Mode_Rewrite, PHP and Legacy)
- Serve static HTML files to reduce processing time
- Cache Rebuilding – cache and serves old pages
- CDN support
- Uses Garbage Collection process to clear out old files from the cache
Though the plugin doesn’t offer advanced settings like other plugins, its features are sufficient to optimize your site for better site loading speed.
4. WP-Optimize
Database Optimization is one of the essential factors to consider to speed up your site. WordPress creates tables and databases to store the data, which, over time, store spam, trash, post revisions, transients, junk files, and more. Too much buildup of such excessive data can slow down your site and admin dashboard. WP-Optimize is a database optimization that offers advanced features and settings for the WordPress database.
The key features of this plugin are as follows:
- Delete post revision
- Remove all auto-saved draft posts
- Checks database size
- Clean spam comments
- Clean unapproved comments
- Optimize database tables
- Retain data during clean-ups
- Database table statistics and many more
You can use this plugin in combination with other cache plugins except for WP Rocket (includes database settings in it). In case of error establishing a database connection in WordPress, here’s how you can fix them.
5. Asset Cleanup
Asset Cleanup is an underrated and powerful WordPress site speed optimization plugin. Often while using a theme, we install several plugins that are enabled and run across all pages. However, we don’t need all of them to load everywhere. This plugin makes the website load faster by preventing specific scripts and styles from loading on different pages. You can specify the plugins to load only on specific pages, which reduces the load time and HTTP request to the server.
Some of the key features of this plugin are as follows:
- Remove possible conflicts between plugins/themes
- Reduces HTML code of the actual page
- Minify CSS and JavaScript files
- Decreases the number of HTTP requests loaded
- Makes source code easier to scan
- Improve site performance score and site loading speed
- Makes easier to scan server access log files and takes less space on your server
- Disable WordPress default script files like wp-emoji-release.min.js,wp-embed.min.js, jquery-migrate.min.js, and more.
The plugin also works best in combination with a cache plugin like WP Rocket.
6. Lazy Load by WP Rocket
Lazy loading is an effective way to speed up your site. Usually, when a user opens a webpage, the entire page’s content is downloaded and rendered to serve the visitor in one go. Enabling lazy loading on your site loads the content only when the user accesses the part of the page that requires it. It saves memory and bandwidth and also improves the loading speed.
Lazy Load by WP Rocket is a popular plugin that displays images on a page when they are visible to the user. This reduces the number of HTTP requests mechanisms and improves site loading speed. The plugin works on thumbnails, all images, widgets, avatars, smilies, and iframes. The plugin is a must to use to enhance your visitors’ experience.
7. Perfmatters
While other plugins use caching to boost your site performance, Perfmatters uses a different approach. By default, WordPress loads lots of scripts and stylesheets that aren’t necessary for initial load and results in slow performance. Perfmatters makes it possible to disable the unwanted scripts, stylesheet, options with a click.
Like Asset Cleanup, the plugin allows disabling/enabling scripts on specific pages and only loads them when necessary. Using this plugin, in combination with a caching plugin, will improve your site performance.
The plugin doesn’t have a free version, and the paid version starts from $19.95/year.
Best Google Analytics Plugins for WordPress
Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that is useful for tracking the number of visitors who visit your website. You can monitor your website traffic to get an idea about your visitors, popular content, real-time stats, a ranking of your posts, and much more.
If you are using WordPress, you can integrate Google Analytics with your site to view all the insights without having to leave your dashboard. There are several free and paid plugins that you can use to integrate Google Analytics and monitor your site traffic.
Some of the popular and most used Google Analytics Plugins are as follows:
1. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is the most popular and highest rated plugin, with over 2+ million users. The plugin allows you to connect your site with Google Analytics by asking to enter the GA tracking code. After integration, it starts tracking visitors, downloads, external links, 404 error page hits, search results, referral websites, popular posts, and much more.
Some of the key features of this plugin are as follows:
- Quick and easy setup without any need of technical knowledge
- View real-time stats
- Shows stats of your popular posts, visiting countries, bounce rate, visitor per day
- Universal tracking to collect data from any device
The free version is limited, and the premium version starts at $99/year. It also offers various paid add-ons to provide a more in-depth analysis of your site. Overall, it’s a powerful and lightweight analytics WordPress plugin.
2. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics (formerly known as GADWP) is a free Analytics plugin for WordPress. The plugin has an active installation of 1+ million.
Like other Google Analytics plugins, it provides Google Analytics data right on your WP Dashboard. It includes sessions, organic searches, bounce rate, referrer traffic, page views, location, 404 errors, and much more. The plugin also allows customization of analytics tracking code through options and hooks to collect advanced data like downloads, emails, external link and affiliate links, cross-domain tracking, custom events, and dimensions.
Some of the key features of this plugin are as follows:
- Real-time number of visitors
- E-commerce support
- Shows sessions, organic searches, page views, and bounce rate
- Advance customization option
- File downloads and affiliate links tracking
- AMP support for Google Tag Manager
- Exclude user roles from tracking
- Page Speed sampling rate control
- Enhanced link attribution
- Global Site Tag (atag.js) tacking code
It offers many features that are only available in the paid version of some plugins. This plugin is free to use without any hidden charges.
3. WP Statistics
WP Statistics is another popular free Google Analytics plugin for your WordPress site. It is easy to use and configure, lightweight, and presents many features associated with Google Analytics, right in your WordPress dashboard.
It records all user data, shows search queries and redirects from popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex, supports GeoIP and provides overview and details pages for all kinds of data including browser version, country stats, hits, exclusions, referrers, searches, search words, and visitors.
Some of the key features of this plugin are as follows:
- Emailing statistical reports
- Number of Visitors coming from each search engines
- Statistics on Contents based on categories, tags, and writers
- Data Export in TSV, XML, and SCV formats
- Number of referrals from each referring site
- Hits Time-based filtering
Overall, WP Statistics is a perfect choice to monitor your site Google Analytics for free. It also offers a premium version, which includes real-time stats and more advanced reporting.
4. Analytify
Analytify is another simple Google Analytics plugin for your WordPress site. It features a one-click authentication process and then automatically adds Google Analytics tracking code to your site.
It includes all the standard Google Analytics reports and statistics and can be viewed directly from your WordPress dashboard. The free version provides tracking features like top referrers, page views, a list of top countries, social media statistics, and many more. The pro version offers advanced reporting and features. Some of them are real-time statistics, campaign statistics and tracking, WooCommerce support, Easy Digital downloads, email notifications, priority support, and many more.
Some of the key features of this plugin are as follows:
- 1-click authentication
- Enhanced GA add-ons for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
- Real-time statistics
- Mobile device statistics
- Shortcodes for custom statistics
- SEO optimization and allows to see traffic data for individual blog posts and pages
- Easily customization with CSS
- General Statistics of sessions, users, bounce rate, average time on site, average pages, pages views, new/returning visitors
The free version is limited, but the paid version offers flexibility to choose the essential packages depending upon your need. It has a variable pricing plan suited for personal use, small businesses, agencies, and developers.
Best WordPress Backup Plugins
Creating a regular backup of your site is the best thing to do for your website security. Backups assure you of your site safety and rescue in situations when your site gets hacked or compromised.
If you accidentally messed up your site or your site is hacked, you can easily recover from the backup you create without any data loss. You can easily create a backup of your site using free and paid WordPress plugins.
Some of the popular and best WordPress backup plugins are as follows:
1. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the most popular free WordPress backup plugins. Along with millions of downloads, it has 2+ million active users.
With the free version, you can easily set up full, manual, or scheduled backups of your website files, including databases, plugins, and themes. You can choose to store your backup on the cloud or download it to your computer. The backup can be easily restored directly from your admin dashboard.
The free version of UpdraftPlus provides all the essential features needed for a regular user. It also offers a premium version with more functionality and flexibility. The premium version offers features like database encryption, advanced reporting, more cloud storage, backups non-WP files, and databases to multiple remote destinations, multisite compatible, and many more. The premium version starts at $70 (Personal, 2 site licenses).
2. VaultPress
VaultPress is a popular WordPress Backup plugin, a product by Automattic, the team behind WordPress.com.
VaultPress is a part of Automattic’s popular plugin, Jetpack. You will need a Jetpack subscription plan starting at $39/year to use VaultPress. With VaultPress, you can backup your site with daily or real-time syncing. It also conducts security scans regularly to identify potential threats and even fix them. If any malware or viruses are detected, then you can remove them with a single click.
If you are using the Jetpack plugin, VaultPress is an easy pick for you.
3. BackWPup
BackWPup is another popular WordPress backup plugin with over 600,000 active installs. The plugin creates a complete backup of your installation and pushes them to cloud storage like Dropbox, S3, FTP, and more. The site can be restored with a single .zip backup file created by the plugin.
BackWPup’s free version lets you backup your database, export WordPress XML, optimize the database, and check and repair databases. Along with that, you can backup in different formats like zip, tar, store backup to FTP server, Dropbox, S3, Microsoft Azure, and many more.
The premium version offers more features like storing backup to Amazon Glacier, Google Drive, restoring a backup with a click from the admin dashboard, encryption of archives, and many more.
4. WordPress Backup and Migration
This WordPress Backup and Migration plugin is one of the best plugins available for the backup and migration of your WordPress website. It comes with a user-friendly interface that lets you backup your entire WordPress site or only the data you want to backup, such as its database or specific files, etc.
It comes in both free and premium versions and lets you migrate regardless of the size of your website, which is one of the essential features that differentiate the plugin from the rest of the market.
Some of the key features of this plugin are:
- Supports both manual and scheduled backups (daily, weekly, monthly or at custom intervals)
- Backup to OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, FTP/SFTP
- One-click restore
- Automatic search and replace
- Supports database backup, file backup or full site backup
5. WP Database Backup
This plugin helps you create a backup of your database and restore it with a single click. You can either manually create a backup or schedule a backup. Then, the backup stores itself on cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and more.
The free version offers auto-backup features, set a backup frequency (days, months), multiple storage destinations, reporting of backups to an email address, searching and sorting of a backup list, a single click restoration of backup, and many more.
It also has a premium version starting at $22/year (cheaper compared to any other plugins). The premium version offers extra features, like excluding specific folders and files, set number of backups to store, automatic removal of old backup, email notification, multisite compatible, cloning and migration of site, and many more.
6. BackupGuard
BackupGuard is a powerful and feature-rich WordPress backup plugin. The process to create a backup, restore, and migrate your site is secure with this plugin. You get the flexibility to backup and restore your WordPress files, database, or both.
The free version of this plugin offers tons of features like a backup of files and database, option to choose folder or database tables to backup, selective files or database restoration, downloading of backups to a local computer, multisite network support, log files analysis, ability to exclude database tables, automatic scheduling of backups and many more.
The premium version offers more advanced features like fully automated site migration, multiple scheduled backups, upload to cloud storage like Google Drive, Amazon S3, OneDrive, email notification, background backup mode, and few others. Their premium plan starts at $19.95/year.
These plugins are highly-effective for saving your crucial website information from sudden threats. But, you don’t have to rely completely on plugins/add-ons to backup your website.
Check out this blog which explains how to backup WordPress sites using three different approaches.
Best WordPress Security Plugins
Each week malware or viruses infect millions of websites. Weak security of your site results in loss of your data, poor ranking and reputation in search engines, and access to valuable information. Hackers can easily penetrate your site and destroy it.
We often hear news about security breaches and exposure of data due to weak security. Securing your site is not difficult and requires only a couple of tasks to secure your site from hackers. You need to follow the best security practices, and WordPress security plugins make it simple.
Some of the popular best WordPress security plugins to protect your site are as follows:
1. Wordfence
Wordfence is one of the most popular WordPress security plugins with millions of downloads. As it currently secures 3+ million sites, it is one of the highest-rated free security plugins.
The free version offers powerful security features like:
- Malware Scanner
- Exploit Detection
- Threat Assessment Features
- A firewall that bans bad IPs as well as malicious login attempts made by bots
- Protection from brute force attacks by limiting login attempts
- Highly configurable alerts
Their premium plan starts at $99 and offers more advanced features like real-time firewall rule and malware signature updates and real-time IP blocking. The plan also allows the plugin to check if your site has been blacklisted for malicious activity and many more. They offer discounts on multiple licenses.
2. Sucuri Security
Sucuri Security plugin was developed by Sucuri Inc, one of the world’s top website security companies. Sucuri plugin helps prevent your website from hackers and offers tools to monitor and scan your site continuously.
The free version of the plugin offers a set of security features like:
- Security Activity Auditing to log all security-related activities on your site, including logins, failed login attempts, and more.
- Remote Malware Scanning to search for malware on your site
- Blacklist Monitoring to check whether your site is being blocked for security reasons or not.
- File Integrity Monitoring to detect any changes to your files.
- Effective Security Hardening to remove vulnerabilities such as removing your WordPress version display and protection of uploads directory.
- Post-Hack Security Actions to guide you to take necessary actions if your site is compromised.
- Security Notifications to ensure you don’t miss any suspicious activities on your site.
To use the plugin, you need the API key. You can easily generate it following the instruction you get after activating the plugin. The premium version is also available with advanced security features like firewall, CDN support, DDoS mitigation, and many more.
3. Limit Login Attempts Reloaded
WordPress is considered a secure platform, but it isn’t entirely immune to break-ins. Humans or bots can attack your site by trying various usernames and passwords until they get access to your site. Sadly, there is no default feature in WordPress to limit the login attempts to secure your website.
Limit Login Attempts Reloaded is a popular WordPress Security plugin that allows you to restrict login attempts. The plugin is 100% free and has an active installation of 1+ million and has a rating of 4.9 out of 5. The best part about this plugin is that it is super easy to use without overwhelming users with too many features.
In the plugin, you can define the number of attempts before the lockout, duration of the lockout, and set hours until retries are reset. You can also configure to get notification about the failed login attempts after the lockout. The IP whitelist and blacklist feature and GDPR compliance, make this plugin a must-have to make your site secure from attacks.
4. All In One WP Security & Firewall
The All in One WP Security & Firewall is the most featured-packed free security plugin with an easy interface. With no premium plans, the plugin provides a wide range of features to take your website security to a whole new level.
The plugin uses graphs and meters to explain how well the site is protected, based on the current security features and provides insights on measures to make your website safer.
The firewall protection is broken down into three categories: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced. This allows the user to apply firewall rules based on the requirement. The plugin adds firewall protection via the htaccess file(processed first before any code). The plugin strengthens security by protecting user accounts, blocking forceful login attempts, protecting against Cross-Site Scripting(XSS), monitoring your files, and so on.
5. iThemes Security
iThemes Security plugin (previously known as Better WP Security) is one of the popular WordPress security plugins with over 900,000+ active installations. The plugin claims to offer 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress website from attacks.
The free version offers decent security features like banning the site for possible hackers, protection against brute force attacks, automatic reports of IP addresses of failed login attempts and recognizing plugin vulnerabilities, obsolete software, and weak passwords.
In addition to the above features, it also includes features like:
- Strengthens server security
- Enforces strong passwords for all accounts
- Forces SSL for any page or post including admin pages
- Detects and blocks numerous attacks to your filesystem and database
- Turns off file editing from within WordPress admin area
The pro version adds an extra layer of protection to the site. Some advanced features like scheduling malware scan, two-factor authentication, Google reCAPTCHA, user action logging, import/export settings, and more are available in the Pro version. Their Pro version starts at $80 for a single user.
6. Defender
Defender is a pretty WordPress security plugin developed by the WPMU DEV team. After installing and activating the plugin, it scans the site and presents easy-to-walkthrough measures to strengthen the security.
The plugin is easy to use, and the dashboard provides the current status of security along with tips for what measures to take. The Two-Factor Authentication, IP Lockout, and Mask Login Area (to change default login path) ensure your site is secured against brute-force attacks.
The free version of the plugin offers the following features:
- Disable trackbacks and pingbacks
- Core and server update recommendations
- Change default database prefix
- Disable file editor
- Hide error reporting
- Update security keys
- Prevent PHP execution
- Prevent information disclosure
There’s also a premium version available with a free trial that adds an extra layer of security. With the premium version, the user can scan for file changes, vulnerabilities, and injected code in themes & plugins, monitor blacklisting by Google, and track events when changes are made to the website.
Best WordPress SEO Plugins
Search engines are a significant source of organic traffic for websites. SEO optimized websites generate more traffic and lead to the website providing an edge over the competitor. WordPress is widely known as an SEO friendly platform, and using an SEO plugin to optimize your site will rank better on search results.
Search Engine Optimization can be overwhelming for beginners and even for experienced users due to several ranking factors. Luckily, WordPress SEO plugins make it easier to improve SEO and optimize the site to rank better. SEO plugins help you identify posts and pages with high potential, fix broken links, reorganize site structure, see different ranking factors, and many more.
With the right WordPress SEO plugins, you can learn and implement the best practices for optimizing the site. There are several free and paid SEO plugins, and choosing one among them can be confusing. Here I have listed some of the popular and best WordPress plugins.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most downloaded WordPress SEO plugins with 5+ million installations and has received 25k+ five star ratings. The plugin offers tons of flexibility over your site’s content allowing you to write custom titles for your leading site, archives, category, and tag pages. It lets you set up titles, meta descriptions, and social sharing information for your posts and pages.
The plugin is beginner-friendly, providing analysis to pinpoint the errors and show your SEO score. The readability check, keywords analysis, and detection of duplicate content features ensure the user posts are properly optimized and avoid mistakes. It also includes Open Graph metadata, Twitter Cards, Sitemaps, and ping search engines whenever the user updates their site. The plugin is updated on frequently adding features, improvements, and fixing bugs.
Some of the key features of this plugin are:
- Multi-site compatibility
- Social media integration
- Pages and Posts analysis
- Snippet Preview to observe how your page will look in search results
- Meta and Title tag Optimization
- Website SEO Analysis
- Breadcrumbs integration to create simple navigation for users and search engines
The premium version is also available at $89 for a single site and completely worth it. The premium version offers some more advanced features like automatic internal linking suggestions, optimize your article for synonyms and related keyphrases, content insights, redirect manager and ad-free experience.
2. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack plugin, the closest competitor to Yoast SEO, has been in the market since 2007 and has over 2+ million active installations. The plugin is easy to use for beginners as the settings are accompanied by a tooltip that provides information on their purpose. It also displays links that take the user to the relevant page in their documentation for more detailed information.
Some of the key features of this plugin are as follows:
- XML Sitemap support
- Google AMP support (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
- Support for SEO on Custom Post Types
- Automatically notifies search engines like Google and Bing about changes to your site
- SEO integration for eCommerce sites including WooCommerce
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids duplicate contents
- Built-in API so other plugins can access and extend the functionality
It also includes an import tool to migrate the data and settings from another SEO plugin (like Yoast SEO) to the new one. It offers a premium version that starts from $57 for a single-site license that includes additional features, such as advanced support for WooCommerce, Video SEO module, access to premium support forums, access to video screencasts, and more.
3. Slim SEO
Slim SEO is a totally free simple and easy-to-use solution to have a good SEO-score website. If you are fed up with a tone of options, settings, and complicated configuration, just use this plugin. It will automate all the SEO work for you without asking you to deal with anything. It’s even lightweight and well-coded. Slim SEO helps you to auto-generate and optimize meta tags, XML sitemap, schema, … all the necessary features you need from a SEO plugin. Moreover, this free plugin has some advantages as it supports page builder and shortcode for meta description content and automatically adds alt text for images. Especially, Slim SEO allows you to add code from third-parties like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, … conveniently without touching code files or using Google Tag Manager.
The highlight features of this plugin:
1. Auto redirection
2. Automate XML sitemap
3. Add header footer code
4. Automatically add image alt text
5. Automatically add a back link to all feed item
6. Meta tags optimization
7. Auto generate united schema types”
3. Rank Math
Rank Math is a newbie in the WordPress SEO plugin industry. Developed by MyThemeShop, this theme directly competes with Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack. The data import feature from Yoast and All in One SEO pack makes it easier for users to switch to Rank Math without losing their earlier SEO optimization.
The user interface is easy to use, and setup wizard is easy to follow to set up SEO for WordPress in less than minutes. This lightweight plugin combines the power of multiple plugins and brings everything into one place to manage.
Some of the key noticeable key features of this plugin are:
- Clean UI with Modular Design
- Inbuilt 404 Monitor and Redirections
- One-Click Rich Snippet and Open Graph
- 5 Keyword Optimization
- Google Search Console Integration
- Contextual Help (tooltips, notices, help tabs, and such)
- Automated Image SEO
- XML Sitemap
- Automatic Ping Search Engines
- SEO Analysis Tool based on 40 Factors
- Local SEO Optimization
- Highly Customizable Breadcrumbs
- Compatibility Check with Site
- Control over the Title & Meta Description of all posts, pages or Custom Post types
- Bulk edit of titles and description of all contents
In addition to the above features, it includes many features that you can only find in the paid WordPress SEO plugin. Currently, many advanced features like Google Webmaster Central Integration, Keyword Comparison & Google Trends Tool, Video Sitemap, and Link Builder for Internal linking are in progress. The plugin is 100% free without any paid plans.
4. The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework plugin is an interesting alternative to the above plugins. The plugin is an excellent choice for WordPress users looking for a fast, lightweight plugin without any ads or upsells. It primarily focuses on simplicity and doesn’t include the features that are not necessary for everyone. Free extensions are available who want additional features based on their requirements.
The plugin contains all the necessary SEO functions that you can expect in any SEO plugins such as support for custom post types, support for Open Graph and Twitter Cards, editing site title and meta description, and more.
In addition to the above features, it also includes:
- Local SEO
- AMP integration
- Color Coded Guidelines to improve your score
- Offers highly configurable settings
- Social Sharing Control
- Breadcrumbs for Google
- Comment caching for spammers
- Monitoring for SEO and uptime
- Redirects
- Incognito mode
The plugin provides an excellent experience with highly configurable settings and is worth considering if you are looking for beginner-friendly WordPress SEO plugin.Their premium plans start at $49 for two sites which is quite cheaper compared to other paid plugins.
5. SEOPress
SEOPress is a freemium powerful WordPress SEO plugin that is easy to use with a nice user interface to manage everything about SEO without any ads. The plugin is simple and fast, letting you manage all your title and meta descriptions for posts, pages, custom post types, and terms.
The plugin claims no footprints and anonymous data collection and is GDPR compliance. It also supports importing settings from popular WordPress SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, Rank Math, and SEO Framework. These plugins make it super handy to switch at any time without losing your existing SEO settings.
It also offers other additional features such as:
- Google Analytics with downloads tracking
- Custom XML Sitemap to improve search indexing
- Image XML Sitemaps to improve search indexing for Google Images
- Redirections in post, pages and custom post types
- Removing stop words and /category/ in URLs
- Content Analysis to write better SEO optimized posts
- Linking social media accounts
- Meta robots (noindex, nofollow, noodp, noimageindex, noarchive, nosnippet)
- Open Graph and Twitter Cards support
- Advance options for developers to customize the plugin as they wish
It also offers a premium version for $39 (cheapest WordPress SEO plugin) for unlimited sites with 1 year of updates and support. The premium version extends functionalities like local business SEO, breadcrumbs optimized for SEO and accessibility, Video & Google News XML sitemaps, Google Structured Data Types, WooCommerce & Easy Digital Downloads optimizations, redirections and 404 monitoring along with Google Analytics stats in your WordPress dashboard.
6. Broken Link Checker
Broken links are annoying to users, and they create a terrible user experience. In addition to this, it’s also bad for the website’s SEO and ranking on search engines. SEO isn’t only about optimizing your posts and pages with significant keywords and making out content readable. Avoiding a bad user experience to engage your visitors on your site is a crucial factor to consider.
Broken Link Checker is a popular and one of the most used plugins that monitor for broken links within your site. The monitoring is not limited to posts and pages but also checks in comments, the blogroll, and custom fields and helps in detecting missing images and redirects.
Some of the essential functionalities provided by this plugin are:
- Notification of broken links in the dashboard or by email
- Prevents search engines from following broken links
- Search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on
- Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page without manually updating each post
The plugin continually scans the site for finding the broken links. It is recommended to enable it, go through the scans, fix the broken links in batches, and then disable it to avoid impact on your site’s performance.
Best WordPress Advertising Plugins
The majority of blogs and websites rely heavily on advertisements to make money online. Bloggers can generate a good income source through Google Adsense, Affiliate Ads, or Direct Promotion of products. Sadly, WordPress doesn’t come with a feature to embed ads.
Thankfully, there are tons of free advertisement plugins that you can use to manage your ads. Using Ads management plugin, you can easily insert ads anywhere on your site, optimize your ads, and control its placement. While many paid plugins offer more flexibility and better support, there are a couple of popular, completely free plugins that you can use to manage your ads.
Here are some of the popular and best WordPress advertising plugin:
1. Ad Inserter
Ad Inserter is a free WordPress plugin that provides advanced advertising features for your website. With this plugin, you can integrate Google Adsense, Google Ad Manager, Amazon Native Shopping Ads, and other similar tools. This plugin also helps you insert tracking codes from Google Analytics, Matoma (Piwik), and others.
Besides, Ad Inserter allows you to insert adverts in different areas on your webpages. Some of that includes above the header, before or after posts, sidebar, footer, and more. You can even make the advertisement widget sticky, so it won’t move when your web visitors scroll through the page. You can also design a custom ad from scratch using its visual advert editor interface.
Some of the essential functionalities provided by Ad Inserter are:
- Option to enable/disable ads on individual pages/posts
- Includes internal clipboard for copy/pasting adverts or settings
- Troubleshooting feature with debugging of your site
- Advanced Options for inserting opt-in forms, header scripts, and more
- Generates advert code for banners and placeholders
Additionally, you can opt for the premium version of this plugin, Ad Inserter Pro. You get additional features for optimizing your website to generate more revenue. For instance, it provides anti-ad-blocking features and its related statistics. You can even perform the A/B testing that informs you which advertisement settings work best.
2. Advanced Ads
Advanced Ads is an advertising manager plugin that supports multiple ad networks. Some of them include Google Adsense, Google Ad Manager (DFP), Amazon Ads, and more. With this plugin, you get unlimited ads banners and change the Google Adsense settings directly from the WordPress backend.
You can even set a start and expiry date for specific ad banners. Advanced Ads plugin includes a lazy ad loading feature as well. With this functionality, the advert loads when the user scrolls and brings it to display on their screen. Besides, you also get dedicated Gutenberg blocks to build custom ads.
Some of the crucial functionalities provided by Ad Inserter are:
- Lets you track ad performance and share the report via URL or email
- Delivers advert from other ad plugins, like Ad Inserter, Ad Rotate, etc.
- Supports Geo-Targeting Add-on for displaying ads by geolocation
- Multiple ad placement positions, such as after paragraph, on the footer, and more
- Detects ad blockers and prevents your ads from getting removed
Moreover, Advanced Ads supports the Responsive Ads extension. With this add-on, you can display ads that render with flexible dimensions on multiple devices. Advanced Ads also integrates BuddyPress and bbPress plugins. With these plugins, you can create a community on your site and even monetize it with dedicated ad positions.
Others
1. Docs2Site
Unlike the other entries on this list, Docs2Site is not a plugin but rather a SAAS tool. This is an essential time-saving tool in every WordPress blogger’s toolkit. As a serious blogger, you want to spend as much of your time focusing on planning, creating, and improving your content.
Docs2Site is the perfect tool to boost your productivity. It eliminates the time it takes for you to upload and reformat your articles on the WordPress editor. Docs2Site exports files from Google Docs to WordPress with the formatting and images intact. You can save more than an hour on each article by exporting them with a single click.
2. JetBlog
One of the best blogging plugins is JetBlog that helps create awesome blog pages. This plugin allows you to order publications according to your needs with the custom WP Query, adds a visual effect, and builds archive templates to showcase the latest publications.
With the JetBlog plugin, you can add more interactive blog pages with video playlists, posts pagination or navigation, news ticker, post titles, and smart posts lists.
3. Blog Designer Pro
Blog Designer Pro is a feature-rich plugin that allows customizing the blog page or post. This plugin has 50+ blog templates from that you can pick a design that suits your blog. Additionally, you can create a custom post type and custom CSS box to changes the look and feel of the blog post.
Blog Designer Pro is the finest plugin that not only designs the blog page or post but able to design a single-page layout, archive page, search page, and many more. Moreover, a user can select multiple post categories and tags to display the posts categories or tags wise. Overall, it creates an opportunity for you to create countless blog layouts. It is also available in a free version. A must-have plugin!
4. WP Sticky
WP Sticky is a plugin that merges simplicity with effectiveness to allow you to make a sticky header, sticky menu, a sticky widget, or any element on your website sticky. It’s not a rarity that when you scroll down a website, you get carried away and it takes ages to return on the top and poke around the menu for example, but by making it sticky, it will stay on the top regardless of how long you scrolled and all buttons will always be within clicking range.
It’s highly versatile so you can use it for adding discount message boxes, promotions, social media buttons – you can play around with multiple possibilities and turn them on/off whenever you desire.
Everything can be set up within minutes, and the best part – it has an unlimited number of sticky elements allowed, so you can add as many as you want, wherever you want.
5. WordPress Users & WooCommerce Customers Import Export
WordPress Users & WooCommerce Customers Import Export plugin is a great option to migrate all types of users from your WordPress or WooCommerce site to another. This import-export plugin is a reliable tool for migrating user details or updating them.
It supports several filter options for export, such as user roles (user, customer, subscriber, guest, etc.), registration date, customer emails, etc., to help you export data selectively. Furthermore, along with the default user data in WooCommerce, you can import and export custom fields and hidden metadata.
6. Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg is an impressive block plugin for WordPress. It adds over 30 blocks to help expand the default blocks and help you design a website with ease.
The plugin includes over 75 website templates, form styler blocks, schema blocks and a range of other innovative blocks to help expand existing websites or build brand new ones. With a completely code-free operation, anyone at any skill level can use Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg to build amazing websites or add features to pages!
7. Presto Player
Presto Player is a powerful video player plugin for WordPress. It gives you complete control over how videos look, feel and play on your website. It’s a powerful, premium video player plugin that elevates website video to new heights.
This plugin supports multiple video sources and chapters and provides sticky player features, muted autoplay, email opt-in, calls to action, private videos, analytics and reporting. If the video plays an integral part in your website marketing, you need Presto Player in your life.
Wrapping Up
So, are you ready to scale up your blog with these highly functional WordPress plugins? We bet you are! Which of these extensions do you find the most essential for your blog? You can write down your selections in the comment section below.
Besides, installing all of these plugins might not be your ideal choice. If that’s the case, we suggest you pick at least one extension from each category. With this approach, you get a variety of powerful features and still manage to keep the blog lightweight.
Also, check out our article on Best Free WordPress Slider Plugins.
