What are Plugins?

A plugin can be known as software that can add extra functionality to your WordPress website. A plugin can enhance the features of a WordPress theme, or you can completely add a new feature to your WordPress website. Different plugins add different functionalities to WordPress, and in this post, I will be sharing with you the plugins which will help you to make your Blog better and well-optimized.

1. Plugins to get rid of Spam:

There may be many essential plugins to get rid of spam. But I will be sharing with you those which are affordable and work amazingly well:

• Akismet:

This is the plugin that you will get when you install your WordPress on your web servers. You would have noticed that whenever we install WordPress, there are two plugins already available that are “Akismet” and “Hello Dolly.” But Akismet plays an important role and saves you from a big headache. When the bots or spammers make comments on your blog, it filters out those comments and puts the spammy comments in the spam folder so that you can also manually check if there isn’t any actual comment that went into the spam folder. I have been using this plugin since the day I started blogging, and this plugin has never let me down and has saved me lots of time.

• Clean Talk:

The Akismet plugin is created to stop the comment spam only, but the clean talk is far ahead of that. If you are using it then you need not worry about the existing spam comments, coming spam comments, and registration spam, it also stops spam widgets and subscriptions to your blog. But the only thing is that It is not available for free, you can try it for free for a few days, but then you have to pay $8 per year which is a small amount.

Recommended:

How do get rid of spam emails and spam comments?

• Email Address Encoder:

Now, this plugin is created to protect your email addresses from email harvesting robots. I must say that it is one of the essential WordPress plugins if you don’t want to receive spammy emails in your inbox.

2. Essential WordPress Plugins for Making Your Blog SEO Friendly:

Well, this is my favorite part. Because I have spent five years in the field of SEO only. There may be many Plugins for SEO, but I will be sharing which works best.

• Yoast SEO:

I think more than half of the bloggers will be using the Yoast SEO plugin. There are many things to share about it, but I will share the essential ones only. It gives us the opportunity to write better content, do proper On-page analysis, help to check the technical search engine optimization properly, Create an XML sitemap on its own, edit the .robots.txt file and .htaccess file itself, social integration, multi-site compatibility, and the best thing is that you can use Yoast SEO in your language. You can check the Image below for its working.

• All-in-One SEO Pack:

Well, I think if more than half of the bloggers use Yoast SEO then the rest of the Bloggers are using the All in One SEO Pack Plugin to do SEO for their blog. It almost has the same features as Yoast SEO but is used differently and has a different graphical view. And this plugin can be used in 57 languages.

3. Plugins for Commenting:

Commenting Plugin is one of the essential WordPress plugins. If your blog doesn’t have a commenting system on your blog, then your blog can’t be called a blog but will be known as a website that provides information about something. Although WordPress has its own commenting system, you can add another to enhance the features or to get more comments on your blog.

• CommentLuv Plugin:

This plugin is best known for making backlinks to the blog. Even I am using the Commentluv Plugin on my WordPress blog. You may also use this plugin to get backlinks to your blog. But the links will be Dofollow or Nofollow this will depend on the blog owner. However, I have collected a list of Commentluv blogs that you can use if you wish to use this Plugin for your Blog.

1. Disqus Comment system:

It is another one of the most popular and essential WordPress Plugins. I do believe that this plugin is more used than the CommentLuv Plugin. I have seen the plugin on many big sites with domain authority from 80 to 100. I don’t know whether this plugin helps to increase domain authority or not but it is used by many, and many bloggers are getting more traffic due to this plugin only. However, the owner of the plugin claims that comments made through this plugin are Indexable which is good from the SEO perspective. Now it’s your choice to use one commenting system from the above two.

Suggested post:

Some of the best commenting Plugins for your WordPress Website.

4. Essentials Plugins for Making Forms:

I will be sharing with you the plugins for creating the forms for your Blog. And three of them are good.

• Contact Form 7:

It is the easiest and one of the essential WordPress Plugins used by a wide range of bloggers. It is free and can be easily used by non-developers. Using it, you can create as many forms as you can use. It is so easy that you just have to copy and paste the shortcode on the page where you want to display the Contact form.

• Gravity Forms:

Gravity Forms are really good. There are some extra things that you can do with Gravity Forms instead of doing it with the Contact Us form. I have crafted a post on Gravity form. You check that “Review of gravity forms and complete guide about it.” I am sure It will be a great help for you.

• Ninja forms:

It is a little more advanced. You can add more than a dozen fields to your form. There are no limitations for emails, forms, actions, submissions, and forms. But the only thing is that it is paid. But you can try it for 14 days without any difficulty. Even it allows us to use its add-ons for free during the trial period. But in the end, I would recommend you to use Contact Form 7 if you are looking for a completely free plugin.

5. To make the Website Mobile-friendly:

For making your Blog mobile-friendly, there are two plugins that I will suggest you install on your WordPress. As you must know Google recommends AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). So, there are plugins for the same.

• AMP:

As I stated AMP stands for Accelerated mobile pages. This Plugin helps you to make your WordPress site mobile-friendly. You need not write any code for it, just install it and your Mobile-friendly pages are ready to go.

• Glue for Yoast SEO and AMP:

Now, this plugin is a part of Yoast SEO, and is also important from an SEO perspective to use this plugin. The job of this Plugin is that accelerated mobile pages get proper SEO metadata from the main Yoast Plugin and the Accelerated mobile pages remain SEO friendly too.

6. For Making an E-commerce Website:

Although WordPress is a blogging platform, the developers have taken it to a higher level. So, that means we can easily make an E-commerce website using Plugins only.

• WooCommerce:

If you are using WooCommerce for your WordPress website, then you can sell anything online. It is a completely free plugin. It is the World’s one of the best and the essential WordPress plugins which gives full control to the developer as well as store owners to manage it properly. Some of its best features are that you can sell anything anywhere, and you can ship wherever according to your will. More importantly, there are extensive payment options that accept PayPal, credit cards, cash on delivery, and direct bank transfers.

7. Best Sidebar Widget Plugins:

For a Blog, a Sidebar is one of the really important things. So there must be good widgets that attract visitors and help them to find things easily. Even I have subscribed to many blogs to increase my knowledge, and I think if you are providing good information then your blog visitors will surely subscribe to you. So, I will be sharing two plugins here too.

• WP Tab Widget:

It allows you to display your popular posts, recent posts, comments, and tags all in one widget. Even I have been using this Plugin since the day I started this blog of mine. You can see the below screenshot for the same.

• WP Subscribe:

Every Blogger Needs a subscribe button or popup or a widget on the sidebar. And I assure you that there is no other subscribing plugin that looks better than this and attracts subscribers. You can also check the image of it below.

8. Essential WordPress Plugins for Sharing:

There may be tons of Sharing Plugins available, but I will share with you the two plugins only that I used and are free of cost.

• Share Buttons by AddThis:

This plugin helps to share your content on more than 80 social networking sites. It can be placed below or above the content, and even you can use this as a floating sharing button on the sidebar of your post. More importantly, you can select the size and style of your sharing buttons according to your will. The plugin is also responsive and also works well on mobile devices.

• AddToAny Share Buttons:

Is almost like the AddThis buttons but differs in some ways. Here we get the option of sharing with more than 100 social media sites and apps. It can also be placed after and before content and it provides the option of sharing the buttons vertically and horizontally on the Floating share bar. It is also mobile-friendly and doesn’t lower the speed of your website. And the best thing is that it supports the AMP pages of your blog which results in a better user experience and ranking.

9. Plugins for Speeding up Your Blog:

It is one of the ranking factors in Google. If the speed of your Blog is Slow, then chances are that your blog may not be given much preference instead the other blogs which have better speed than your blog will rank better than you. So these are the plugins that help in speeding up your blog which becomes an essential plugin ever.

• W3 Total Cache:

This Plugin works on caching. I have been using this plugin for years to speed up my WordPress websites. It is compatible with dedicated servers, virtual private servers, and even shared hostings. It also supports mobile pages. Many things can help to speed up your blog.

• WP Super Cache:

Another plugin that lowers the speed of your website. What it does is generate static HTML files instead of dynamic WordPress files and make the speed of your Blog faster. Using it, you can compress pages, rebuild the cache, and do some other things to speed up your blog.

Recommended:

A complete guide for speeding up your WordPress Blog.

10. For making Photo Galleries:

There may be an opportunity when you have to create a photo gallery on your blog. I thought of sharing a free plugin with you so that you can create a photo gallery easily.

• NextGen Gallery:

The NextGen Gallery is not only designed to create some galleries for your blog or website. It can do a lot more than that. It can be used to make a better website about photography. This plugin was created in 2007, and now people are using it, and now there are almost 1.5 million downloads. Its basic version is good enough, but the pro features are amazingly good. It is simple to use and implement.

11. For creating a Backup of your blog:

It is really important to have a backup of your website. So, that you can recover if anything happens in between. But there is a plugin that can help you to completely take a backup of your WordPress website.

• BackupBuddy:

We can say that BackupBuddy is one of the essential WordPress Plugins. It can help you to create a full-back WordPress website. You can back up your pages, settings, themes, Database, all your posts, Plugins, Comments, Users, media library, widgets, all files and directories, and even WordPress Core.

• My WP Backup:

Is an amazing plugin that can help you save all your images, posts, pages, and other things in one place. You can save your file to Dropbox, or Google Drive, and even the backup can be sent to your email too. It also has a pro version which can you get for just $27 with some extra amazing features by signing up.

12. For Monetizing Ad Networks:

There may be tons of plugins for monetizing ad networks. But I will share the two that I have used and which have worked awesomely well for me.

• Quick AdSense:

This is an awesome plugin. With the help of this plugin, you can insert ads in your blogs anywhere. More importantly, it helps you to insert ads in all your posts at once. You can show the ads at the beginning of the post, in the middle of the post, or at the end of the post. And this plugin has also helped me to reach $100 using the Google AdSense network.

• Ad Injection:

This also looks somewhat like Quick AdSense. With some simple tags, you can add ads anywhere in the theme template. You can simply place the ads at the bottom, top, footer, and Random ads.

13. And at last All in One JetPack Plugin:

Now, this is the Plugin that every WordPress user must have. Because it contains so many tools in it and alone that can be used instead of many Plugins. There are a total of 28 features that this one Plugin provides. There is a long list of tools like beautiful math, Carousel, Comments, contact form, Custom CSS, Custom content types, enhanced distribution, Extra Sidebar Widgets, Infinite scroll, WordPress likes, Omnisearch, site stats, sharing, publicize related posts, data backups and much more.

Jetpack provides us with many features and helps us not to install multiple plugins to get the same features. But instead, we can get many features with a single plugin.

14. Some Bonus Plugins:

Some plugins are important but can’t be categorized under the above sub-heading.

• WP Smush – Image Optimization:

This plugin also helps to lower the speed of your WordPress website. It reduces the size of all the images and hence improves the performance of the website. This plugin is completely free and can be used to resize and optimize images. It also can Smush all your images at once and makes the speed of your website faster.

• Broken Link Checker:

This can be another SEO-friendly Plugin that helps to get rid of the broken links on your blog. It can detect broken links from posts, pages, and even comments. The best part of using this plugin is that whenever it detects a broken link, it automatically sends an email to the admin so that the broken link can be fixed as soon as possible. Taking care of broken links is considered a good practice of SEO.

• Page Builder by Site Origin:

This plugin is mostly used when we are making a Parallax page in WordPress. It has a simple drag-and-drop feature which makes it user-friendly. I have used it many times and is good enough to be used by a non-developer. No coding is required to handle this plugin, but I use this Plugin when I am not in the mood to write code, and it is SEO-friendly and works amazingly well.

• Triberr:

This Plugin is part of a community site named Triberr. This plugin helps to post the latest post on your blog to publish on Triberr and the Triberr community helps to get more shares for the post through the social media sites. I have written a post on how you can promote your blog using Triberr.

• WP-Drafts for friends:

I did not know about this plugin, but one of my friends Enstine Muki told me about this plugin. This Plugin is really good and helps to show your draft post to your friends without actually publishing your post. So, I thought it could be one of the essential WordPress Plugins and can help you to promote your blog post without actually publishing it.

• All-in-One WP Security and Firewall:

I would have listed this plugin in the above sub-heading. But I completely forgot about the security of WordPress. I know this is one of the essential WordPress plugins that every WordPress user must have. It helps you to enhance the security of your WordPress Website. It provides account security, Login security, database security, file system security, Blacklist functionality, user registration security, Firewall functionality, security scanner, comment spam security, and many more services. So, I recommend you install this Plugin for WordPress for sure for better security of your website.

• WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click:

I wouldn’t have added this Plugin to my list of essential WordPress plugins. But Someone copied my whole post and pasted it on his or her blog. For the first time, he removed the copied blog post, but again he copied two more blog posts, and this thing irritated me, I was looking for some solutions but rather than the solution, I decided to take precautions. So, I found this amazing plugin that does not allow me to copy the content from my blog. As soon as I installed this Plugin, I was happy and felt secure. It doesn’t even allow the other user to view the source code of the website or blog.

• MalCare – A Complete WordPress Security Solution

This is the most comprehensive security plugin that we have come across and we can’t recommend this to you enough. MalCare was developed after analyzing over 240,000 WordPress websites and it uses this collective intelligence to protect a site. MalCare offers a powerful malware Scanner and Cleaner along with a robust Firewall. Other notable features include Site Management, Site Hardening, White-Labelling, Client Reporting, and Backup. The array of powerful features makes it a must-have plugin on your WordPress site.

Suggested Post:

How to check duplicate content?

Why must you customize your WordPress Blog?

Finally What I want to say:

All the above plugins that I have shared are the essential WordPress Plugins for me. And I can’t run my blog successfully without these plugins. So use and enjoy this list of plugins. And do let me know through your comments which are the essential WordPress Plugins for you. I am sure that your opinion will make this post more valuable.

The post Essential WordPress Plugins for your Blog and Website appeared first on Tricky Enough.