WordPress offers some of the best plugins for adding and extending the current functionality of a WordPress website or blog. Therefore, we will discuss the “Must-Have Plugins for WordPress Blog” that you should use on your website or blog.
These plugins will offer you some of the best functionality to your WordPress website to make your website better overall. However, it’s your website type that will figure, which type of plugins you need. But security, SEO, and speed are some of the universal plugins that every blog owner should use. Ignore it and you’ll regret it.
Moreover, there are tons of handy plugins available in the WordPress framework which you can use to reduce your work. The WordPress Plugin Repository has more than 55,000 WordPress plugins and many are still in the development stage. Thus, there are plugins for every function and feature that you can imagine.
The best thing about WordPress is that it’s flexible. You will find multiple plugins for the same feature you need. Therefore, you will only have to choose the best you want for your website and install that plugin. You can find both free and premium plugins for WordPress. There are mostly free plugins. However, you can upgrade to the premium version for the advanced flexing.
Now let’s talk about the best WordPress Plugins for 2020.
Must-Have Plugins for WordPress Blog – 2020
This list includes some of the best WordPress security plugins, speed optimization, some marketing, and social media plugins and SEO plugins. They will make your website better than it already is. And you will surely want to try these plugins on your WordPress Website.
1. Everest Forms
A “Contact Form” is a must for every website. No matter how small or large your business or website is, you sure need a contact form. Your audience will interact will you using the contact form.
Moreover, with the use of contact form. it’s easy to reach out to you and provide feedback on your work if you have any business deals. Moreover, your audience can even provide you general suggestions. In this case, the contact form is a must.
To create a contact form, our recommendation is “Everest Forms“. First of all, it’s free. It’s a modern WordPress contact form plugin that allows you the customization of the end level. It has a drag and drop interface therefore, using it is super easy too. And It’s beautiful. It has general and advanced settings where you can easily drag and drop items to create beautiful forms.
This plugin lets you create an infinite amount of beautiful WordPress forms. Moreover, it’s in multiple design layout too. There are two layout settings “Default Layout” and “Class Layout”. Furthermore, it lets you create two-column WordPress forms with some advanced dropdowns, checkboxes, date and radio buttons with much more.
However, the best thing is that it’s available for free. It comes with a full set of features to allow you to build a full-fledged form. It also has a Google reCaptcha support, redirects page options, editable form validation messages and much more. All in all, it’s my favorite free plugin for the WordPress website.
2. Akismet
This plugin was developed by the people of WordPress. It is one of the default plugins that come with a new WordPress installation. Let me tell you something, it’s a must-have for every WordPress website or blog.
Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that checks all the comments and auto-filter out the spamming comments and content. Moreover, the plugin provides a brief status history for each comment so that you can learn which type of comments were found spammy by this plugin. Moreover, you can see the URLs in the comment body and also remove the suspicious links.
Akismet is free for a personal site, however, if you have a commercial site then you’ll have to subscribe to its monthly plans. The premium service provides a whole list of advanced security solutions in addition to spam protection. It is a must-have plugin to protect your WordPress Security.
3. Jetpack
This plugin is also designed by the geniuses of WordPress. The powerful plugin is a must-have for every WordPress website out there. Like the name, it does offer a variety of features that makes your website fly high in terms of success.
Jetpack is responsible for your site’s security, performance, traffic growth, appearance, image optimization and a whole lot more. The features that Jetpack provides is the enhanced distribution that will share your published content to search engines. This will help in incoming traffic for your website. Moreover, it can also rank your website.
All in all, it also protects your website security by eliminating all the brute force attacks. Moreover, it also monitors your website every five minutes and it’ll notify you if anything goes wrong.
4. Yoast SEO
Search Engines are the primary source of traffic for every website. The number of users on the internet is increasing day by way. Everyone uses search engines to find information. Therefore, will high competition and Search Engine Optimization or SEO is more important than ever. This is where Yoast SEO for WordPress comes in.
Yoast SEO is an awesome plugin that guides you toward success. It helps you create better content and improve the overall ranking of your website on search engines. It focuses on creating content that is SEO friendly and better overall. The main goal is to help the users to gain trust and gain rankings which they call “Sustainable SEO”. And it surely works. It provides you the blueprint towards success.
The first thing is that it makes you choose a focus keyword which you will have to choose appropriately in the article that you are writing. Page analysis feature checks whether you have used that focus keyword enough times and on image alternative tags, meta description. Heading and the whole post too.
Moreover, it suggests using proper text and images for better visibility and ranking on search engines like Google. It even helps you improve the way your post and your page look on the search engine. By modifying the snippet preview. You can create better headlines and catchy Meta descriptions to get the clicks for your website.
Moreover, it also has a readability feature that allows you to create a balanced content in terms of readability. Yoast SEO offers a premium version too. So if you want to take yourself to the next level, you should buy a premium pack.
5. User Registration
Another vital feature that you would not want to miss is “User Registration”. The register feature is available on the WordPress installation that can be turned on on the WordPress Dashboard.
Just go to the WordPress admin panel > Settings > General.
There you will see Membership and a checkbox that says “Anyone can register” option. In this way, you can turn on the WordPress membership feature. Once the option is available, you will be able to see the register option on the website’s login page. Therefore, users can register to your website by entering the username and password.
However, it’s not all that good. First, it’s not user-friendly and everyone will have to know about the URL to get started. Moreover, you cannot even collect the user’s information as it just contains a username and password field. That is why you need the virtual WordPress Registration plugin. This is why you have a free plugin called “User Registration Plugin”.
It’s a free drag and drop registration plugin for WordPress and it allows you to use some amazing features. You can create beautiful forms for front-end users. Normally, it will take only a few minutes.
Some of the main features are registration forms, ReCaptcha Support, email notification. Also, you even go all out by buying the premium version of this plugin.
6. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the best and most recommended WordPress plugins if you want to sell products or anything on your website. It has the potential to create a whole online store. Moreover, it has a lot of features to get your website started as an online store.
If you own a website and you need to sell something then WooCommerce is a must-have plugin for your website. You will need it sooner or later.
You can provide your customers with will many options through the online store. There are extended shipping options, flat rates, and pickups. It has a lot of payment options for your customers too. The user can checkout with the use of credit cards, cash on delivery or even PayPal. Therefore, WooCommerce is a very intuitive way to start an online shopping business. You will attract your customers and be appreciated by them.
You can just download the plugin and run the setup wizard. There are endless features and possibilities for your online store that WooCommerce keeps in mind. If you buy the premium version, you will also have a lot of add-ons according to your demand.
7. Nivo Slider
Most of the websites use multiple images. Especially the commercial websites, it’s better to showcase more than on image at the time. It’s time friendly and visually better. Some people might wish to show their multiple work samples or products at the same time. Nivo Slider has got you all covered.
With WordPress, it’s the easiest thing to do. You can download Nivo Slider for free. It is one of the best and the popular plugin you can find out there right now. Nivo Slider has been download for more than 3 million times since its inception. It lets you add post slider, image sider or even a slideshow if you want. Moreover, it’s user-friendly and has a great design structure to work.
8. W3 Total Cache
Caching is one of the top ways to improve the overall website’s performance. The basic concept of caching is storing the website data temporary in cache so that if anyone accesses it, it will load at a very fast rate and at the same time for the user that opened the same page. Cache is just a place to store temporary data if we talk about computers.
Now, to enable caching in WordPress, you can use the WordPress caching plugins. Caching plugins will cache the post and pages on your websites as HTML static files that are going to be served to the users. This decreases the page loading time dramatically and will help you optimize the website’s performance overall. Moreover, speed does have a big effect on your Website’s SEO too.
W3 Total Cache WordPress plugins are used by most of the users. It’s the best caching plugin available for WordPress. The features include page caching, database caching, browser caching and a lot more too. Moreover, it even lets you integrate CDN service that will help you save the bandwidth up to 80%.
With better loading times, Google will give you an edge in search results too. You will eventually get high traffic and a high conversion rate. W3 Cache is a must-have for every WordPress website.
9. VaultPress
As the name suggests, VaultPress is all about security. It’s a security-oriented WordPress plugin that can create real-time automated backups for your website. VaultPress enables you to create some super optimized backup regularly and store your websites in just a matter of seconds with one click.
Moreover, the plugin also scans and detects dangerous files that reside on your website and it automatically emails the admin that something is wrong with your website. Furthermore, it’s easy to review suspicious codes with the use of VaulPress with just clicks.
Also, the plugin comes with an in-built spam protection feature. With the use of Akismet support, you can use the anti-spam support to prevent any spam available of your website that requires no user involvement.
VaultPress comes with a variety of subscription packs with Jetpack. Combining the two services you can have undefeatable internet protection. The plugin itself is good and is often praised by the professional. Therefore it’s a must-have in terms of security.
10. WP Smush
Images are awesome for your post or page. They can get the user’s attention easily. Moreover, uploading images helps you convey the message many times better than just text. They can make your page attractive engaging and better looking.
Well, do you know about one drawback of images? They can take a lot of storage and slow down your website. Therefore, you cannot simply ignore these two factors. It’ll not allow your website to rank up in terms of SEO. Here’s a good plugin for you. The WP Smush.
It’s a WordPress image optimization plugin that optimizes the images without reducing image quality. It optimizes all of your images such as JPEG, GIF or PNG with its advanced compression technique. It saves a ton of storage space. You can also bulk compress your images that will eventually save a lot of time too. You can bulk optimize up to 50 attachments at a time. The plugin is very essential to make your page and post look attractive while still being fast.
11. WP-Optimize
Wp-Optimize is yet another great plugin for WordPress. It optimizes the WordPress site. The main goal is that it automatically removes unnecessary data from WordPress
without even touching queries. It keeps your website database optimized for the best performance.
Many useless data can slow down your website and you might not even be aware of anything. With the use of WP-Optimize, you can have a lot of work done automatically. It removes all spams and unapproved comments, trash posts some comments trackbacks, and pingback spams. Therefore, it’ll always keep your database optimized and clean.
12. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Google Analytics is the best tool to understand website traffic. Understanding the audience and catering to their needs is an awesome way to improve user traffic. Therefore, it’s a great chance for Google Analytics plugin for WordPress website and it is one of the best plugins out there for this purpose.
It lets you monitor real-time statistics regarding your website. Moreover, using the universal tracking you can also track views from other platform and you can receive an interest report.
The plugin can track product popularity and conversion rates too. So, coupled up with WooCommerce it’s great too. The plugin is also integrated along with Google’s Adsense, therefore you can also check the ad performance too.
besides, you can also check download number, outbound link, and performance tracking. It’s an All-in-one analytical plugin.
13. Social Icons
Social media has been increasing day by day. In recent years there have been changes in the social media world. It’s used for marketing and incoming traffic too. Therefore, more people obtain news and other information through the use of social media. Therefore, social media marketing is essential for content marketing these days.
To boost social media reach, you can use the social media plugin called Social Icons. It is a free WordPress Plugin that provides you an easy way to display the popular social icons on your websites. You can add them on pages or posts or even widgets too. There are over 100 popular social media platforms on the plugin. Moreover, it’s easy to use and implement. You can just simply install the plugin and add social media icons on your website.
You can also resize the icon or make them square to rounded. Thus, you can edit them. The drag and drop interface makes it much easier to perform the task easily.
14. BJ Lazy Load
Having a lot of images can slow down your website. It might even take hours to load sometimes. This is probably the number one reason that most of the users leave a website. However, there is a solution to every problem in WordPress. The lazy load can make your website load a lot faster even if you have many images on the page.
To add this functionality you can use a plugin called BJ Lazy Load. It replaces all your images, thumbnails and other media with the temporary placeholder and it automatically loads the content as it gets close to enter the browser screen. It displays the images that only the user wants when he scrolls a page. Therefore, BJ lazy loads save a lot of bandwidth and speed up your website.
Moreover, it also works with text widgets, videos from YouTube that are embedded in your website. It is one of the best plugin for speed and SEO of your website.
15. Broken Link Checker
You might have a really good website with a good visitor and your business is rising. However, have you ever imagines how many people and visitors of your website have landed on broken links? It is possible that you can even lose a couple of followers too. It is the worst impression of your website. Devastating too. Therefore, we have a fix for you.
This plugin will monitor all the broken links on your website. Just install the free Broken Link checker and go to sleep. It’s because it’ll monitor everything by itself. The plugin will check all your posts, comments and other content which are expected to have some broken links. Moreover, it will automatically notify you if it finds any broken link. It reports on the missing images too and will inform you to fix them.
Moreover, the plugs have capabilities to prevent search engines from following or displaying broken links of your website automatically. You will get an email or notification on the WordPress Dashboard regarding the issue.
16. Redirection
When you change permalinks of posts and pages, you often forget to redirect them. This is where users will land on a page that’s not available because of the old URL that doesn’t even exist anymore. It is another way you can lose your website followers.
In cases like that, Redirection is just the right plugin for you. It helps you with all the redirections and it will keep track of all 404 errors too. It ads 301 redirection when post URL changes. You can also redirect all the URLs too.
This is why Redirection is useful when you are migrating from the old website to a new one.