One of the unique things about using WordPress for your blog/website is the different number of plugins you can add to it. A plugin is actually a small piece of software or add-ons you can install on your blog in order to perform different functions, such as to automatically add a Facebook like box on your posts.
In this post, I will be sharing with you the plugins I use on Top blogging coach when we start a new blog to give you a clue of the incredible things that plugins can do to your blog.
All in One SEO Plugin: Best SEO WP Plugin
All in one SEO plugin is the most powerful plugin to make your website/blog SEO friendly. This plugin is widely accepted and used by various bloggers and internet marketers to implement various SEO elements. Through this plugin – the bloggers/web developer can implement the various SEO elements which are important from the technical SEO perspective for a blog to rank in the search engines. This is the first plugin that you need to install while planning your SEO strategy / setting up the technical elements of your blog.
Features of all in one SEO plugin listed below
- Redirect Checker: Here you can set the redirect rule on any of the blog post/category pages to a new URL, the implemented redirect should be 301 SEO friendly.
- Sitemap Generator: AIOSEO plugin can be used to generate the different types of sitemap files, being a news sitemap, video sitemap, image sitemap.
- Rich Snippet Schemas: You can implement the different types of schemas using this plugin like rating and reviews for product pages, breadcrumb schemas etc, all these are required to increase the CTR of your web pages in search results and can be monitored through the search console panel.
- Robots.txt Editor: Through this plugin, you can configure and set the multiple rules in robots.txt as per your requirement and take complete control of the file.
- Basic SEO Checklist: All basic SEO elements like page title, meta tags implementation, SEO-friendly URL pattern, pagination meta tags etc can be managed through this plugin.
- Google Verification Code: With this, you can verify your website and connect your website to the google search console
WP Rocket: Best WP Plugin for reducing the page load time
Website speed is an important factor for ranking any website/web page in search engines. If the page is not opening on time or takes a lot of time to load, then this will impact the core web vitals (monitored through the search console) and actually impacts the ranking of the website in the search engine. WP Rocket is the best plugin used by millions of websites to boost the load time of the website by improving the core web vitals etc. No coding skills are required, all you need is to install the plugin through the WordPress backend and set up the same.
Features of WP Rocket plugin:
- Reduces the Page Load time of the website / Web Pages.
- Load the Images at a much faster speed.
- Compatible for WebP Images as well.
- It offers imagify service to optimize your images and load your images at a faster speed.
- Make your files lighter
WP Form: Best WP Plugin for designing contact forms
The contact us form is the most important element of any website/blog to get the user/visitor information. To design a form in the front end and coding at the back end for data processing needs a lot of technical skills/techie for development. WP Form is the best built-in plugin that can be used to store your customer information for further processing.
Features of WP Form plugin:
- Easy to use interface with 300+ inbuilt templates.
- Payment gateway integration is only a few click processes.
- The drag and drop feature can help to create any type of form with a file upload feature.
- Over 5 Million websites use this plugin across the world.
- Track the user Journey and Geo Location of the visitors.
SeedProd – Best Landing Page Plugin for WordPress
SeedProd is one of the best Page Builder plugins used by various bloggers to create different types of pages as per the business requirement. This is very easy to use, all you need to install a plugin and use it. You can create high-quality web pages without knowing the technical coding. The drag and drop feature of this plugin can easily create / design the pages whether it is a sales page, lead conversion page, coming soon etc. Over 1 million blogs/websites are using this plugin to create landing pages and generate revenue.
Features of SeedProd plugin:
- The drag and drop feature can help bloggers easily create/design landing pages.
- Over 150+ inbuild landing page templates to use.
- Creates responsive and Mobile friendly pages which are good for SEO.
- Over one Million websites use this plugin across the world.
- Easy to integrate the conversion tools like checkout, carts etc in the case of Woo Commerce Integration, Recaptcha integration to prevent spam, Dynamic insertion of text / dates on your pages etc.
- Live Preview of the pages at the staging server for checking before it goes to LIVE.
- Use the 40+ blocks categorized under 3 categories like Standard Blocks, Advanced Blocks & WooCommerce Blocks to create your landing pages.
Constant Contact: Best Email Marketing WP Plugin
Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools to grow your audience. You can update your branded audience with the latest updates of your blog, by sending the newsletters to your audience based on his interest. If you are running an e-commerce site, you can send newsletters covering the deals of the day, deals for special events and festivals etc. The objective of Email marketing strategies is to achieve any one of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. There are multiple tools and plugins through which we can perform the email campaign for our website/blogs. Constant Contact is one of the best email marketing plugins that can be used by various top bloggers in the WordPress environment. With this plugin, you can create an effective email campaign strategy for your business.
Features of Constant Contact plugin:
- The easy-to-use drag and drop feature can help bloggers to design the forms easily.
- You can enable/disable the email notification for any of the built-in forms.
- This plugin can allow you to create an email list and then you can send the newsletters to them.
- You can track the performance of your email campaigns by showing you important metrics, including sends, opens, clicks, and more.
- There are multiple built-in templates with every plan which are easy to use.
- All built-in templates are mobile-friendly.
Elementor WP Plugin: Best Website Buider WP Plugin
Elementor is the built-in drag and drop platform used by bloggers for designing and developing websites without the help of a coder, all you need is to follow the steps and the website is just a few minutes away. With 90+ built-in templates to use for designing your WordPress website.
Features of Elementor Website Builder plugin:
- You can easily design your website with a drag and drop feature, without the help of a coder.
- There are multiple inbuilt 90+ web templates to use.
- The interface is more of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). During the design, you can see what is exactly visible to the user, once the website is published.
- All the interfaces are mobile-friendly and responsive.
- All themes and plugins are compatible with the elementor.
- Create your own online store with Woo Commerce
- With the theme builder, you can create your own website theme
- Create your own customized pop-ups using this elementor.
- Elementor comes with a free and paid plan (for complete access to the tool with advanced features and tech. support)
WP Super Cache
This plugin is very important for two reasons.
- It makes your WordPress pages load very fast. If you have a lot of graphics or big sites, this is critical to keeping your visitors from leaving too soon.
- It saves static versions of your blog and uses a lot less CPU processing than if you just used WordPress by itself.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
Akismet
Akismet comes along with WordPress and is the best anti-spam comment plugin available. It checks your comments against it’s database to see if it looks like spam or not. If it looks dodgy, they are automatically moved to your Comments admin screen where you can either review them manually or leave them to be deleted after seven days. Please note, to use Akismet you will need to obtain a free WordPress.com API key.
www.wordpress.org/extend/plugin/akismet/
WP DB Manager
Database management is something that most people ignore but it’s critical to give a second thought to it, especially with all the hackers that are everywhere today. This plugin has a lot of features in addition to backing up your database and automatically emailing you a copy of your database each day.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dbmanager/
WordPress Related Posts
This is a very vital plugin for keeping people on your blog. If they’re reading one of your articles/posts, the best thing you can do is to put more articles in front of them to keep them going through your site. This plugin is very good at that.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-relatedposts-plugin/
Google XML Sitemaps
In a short sentence, if you want your blog to be recognized by Google as quickly as possible, you MUST get this plugin. It generates a Google XML sitemap of your blog.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemapgenerator
Subscribe Me
This is a must-have plugin if you want your visitors to share your content. Essentially, what it does is it adds buttons to your blog that allows visitors to share your content on many social sites like Bloglines or Google Reader. This is a MUST have.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sem-subscribe-me/
Google Analytics For WordPress
The name says it all. If you use Google Analytics, get this plugin…period. Google Analytics for WordPress connects your blog to your Analytics account. Apart from the basic functions it also sets a number of custom variables that can help you in accessing your business stats even more.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-forwordpress/
Sociable
Sociable will help you to easily place links to your favorite social bookmarking websites on each post and page of your blog, making it easier for your readers to share your content and increasing the chances of it going viral! Its a must have.
www.wordpress.org/extend/plugin/sociable/
TweetMeme Button
Twitter is hot property right now and this plugin adds a button to each blog post you create and enables it to be retweeted easily. The button also provides a count of how many times your post has been retweeted throughout Twitter.
www.wordpress.org/extend/plugin/tweetmeme/
What Would Seth Godin Do
Seth Godin advocates using cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your blog. By using this plugin, you can display a message to first-time visitors asking if they would like to subscribe to your RSS feed or something else if you would prefer. You need to get this plugin ASAP.
www.wordpress.org/extend/plugin/what-would-seth-godin-do/
Contact Form 7
This plugin can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple mark up. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/
Gravity Forms
This lets you create and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building. Select your fields, configure your options and easily embed forms on your WordPress powered site using the built-in tools.
WP Opt-in
WP OptIn is a WordPress plugin that allows your commenters to subscribe to your email newsletter or autoresponder simply by checking a box automatically placed in your comment forms. The plugin integrates with Aweber, ConstantContact, or MailChimp to subscribe commenters without an extra subscription step.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-opt-in/
Digg Digg
Digg Digg is a plugin that integrates popular social buttons into a WordPress blog easily with its all-in-one social vote buttons. It is able to display counts for popular social buttons like Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1, Reddit, ddone, Twitter, TweetMeme, Topsy, Yahoo Buzz, facebook share, facebook like, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Google Buzz, Designbump, WebBlend, BlogEngage and Serpd.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/digg-digg/
As you can see, there are thousands of plugins available, most of which are free to download and if you can think of something you would like to do on your blog, then chances are there is a plugin for it!
How to Install and Activate a Plugin: Step by step process
- WP Rocket – The best for speed optimization
- Yoast SEO – The best for increasing organic website traffic
- Akismet – The best for spam protection
- Wordfence Security – The best to handle security concerns
- UpdraftPlus – The best for site backup
- MonsterInsights – The best for data tracking
- WPForms – The best for designing contact forms
If you want to learn SEO more in detail/want SEO services for your online portal/website, Pls email me at [email protected] with your requirement. I will reply in 24 – 48 hrs.
Dale Poyser says
Impressive list of plugins Theodore. BTW, the All in one SEO plugin has a section for Google and Bing webmaster verification, and it also has a section for Google Analytics. This means you can skip installing the google analytics plugin 🙂
A few to consider that I think are really effective are:
Shareaholic | share buttons, analytics, related content – Adds nice social buttons to your site and you can choose from A LOT
SharePress – SharePress automatically publishes your content to your personal Facebook Wall and the Walls of Pages you choose.
quick adsense – Quick Adsense offers a quicker & flexible way to insert Google Adsense or any Ads code into a blog post.
SEO Rank Reporter – Track your Google rankings every 3 days and view a report in an easy-to-read graph. Vizualize your traffic spikes and drops in relation to your rankings and get emails notifying you of ranking changes
Theodore Nwangene says
Thanks a lot Dale,
You’ve added more interesting plugins to the list. I just discovered most of the plugins you mentioned here recently and they are really awesome indeed. I will check out the ones I’ve not used now :).
Thanks a lot for stopping by dear and have a great week.
Sunil Thakur says
Hello Mr Theodore,I read your article and i love to read it.There you mentioned very good plugins but my must have plugins are W3 total cache,Askimet and Google Xml Sitemap.These are the most necessary plugins for every bloggers for their blog.Any way great post.Keep it up
Theodore Nwangene says
Hi Sunil,
I’m happy you like my blog and, those 3 plugins you mentioned are really helpful and very necessary. Thanks for coming.
Joseph says
Hi Theodore,
Thanks for mentioning top 15 word press plugins. In this list my favorites are digg digg, wp super cache, all in one seo and wordpress related posts.
Tusshar Rajput says
This is indeed a fantastic resource. Thank you for making this publicly available.
Happy Raj says
Thanks for sharing this. Very useful tips for me as a starting blogging….:)
Sam says
Thankyou so very much for taking time to jot down all these plugins. Its a great list and wordpress blog must have.
Sam