12 Best WordPress Plugins For Blogs & Business Websites in 2019
Wondering which are the best WordPress plugins that you could use for your WordPress website?
Plugins extend WordPress to do anything you can imagine.
You likely have many plugins on your site, but does your WordPress blog have the essential plugins?
Let me point out a few plugins that will improve your site’s user experience and make WordPress admin tasks easier.
These top WordPress plugins are extremely useful for every blogger and webmaster on the WordPress platform.
Must Have WordPress Plugins For Every WordPress Blog & Websites
Note: Some hosts have issues with certain plugins. For example, W3 Total Cache is a very useful plugin, but it performs better with VPS hosting, whereas WP super cache works well with shared hosting.
Without wasting any more time, here are the best WordPress plugins for your new blog.
1. Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin
Having an SEO plugin is essential for any WordPress blog to rank higher in search engines. This helps you to drive free traffic from search engines.
This plugin is a serious must-have for every WordPress blog out there. I have never seen any other free SEO plugin come even close to being as powerful and effective.
With this one plugin, you can cover all of your on-site and on-page SEO.
This plugin comes in free & pro versions.
Watch the below video to learn how to set up the plugin:
2. WP Super Cache
Wouldn’t it be great if your site would load super fast?
WordPress is a memory-hogging CMS. To ensure WordPress doesn’t make your web server crash is by using a cache plugin along with powerful servers such as Bluehost or Kinsta.
There are many great WordPress cache plugins out there & WP Super Cache tops every one of them for its simplicity and effectiveness. It works great even on shared hosting!
Whenever a user browses your blog post, WordPress has to fetch that post from the WordPress database. This process needs far too many PHP calls. Imagine if 100 visitors tried visiting your blog, WordPress would be running 100x PHP calls to serve these web pages to everyone.
When you use a cache plugin, it creates a static HTML file of the web page & and allows WordPress to serve a page from this cache. This reduces the server load drastically & allows your pages to be served within a few seconds.
If you are on a shared hosting or VPS, you should be using a cache plugin.
You can download the plugin from the below link & follow the listed guide to learn about how to configure the WP Super Cache plugin.
3. Jetpack
Jetpack is a multi-option plugin which is power-packed with many features.
This plugin is made by the people behind WordPress & is one of the most well-maintained WordPress plugins you will ever encounter.
Here are a few things you will be able to do with the Jetpack WordPress plugin:
- Add a contact form.
- Track page views & search queries with powerful analytics.
- Monitor downtime and get notified when your site is down.
- Prevent hackers from brute forcing your blog’s login page.
- Provide social sharing buttons to let your reader share your blog posts.
- Auto-publicize your blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus after you publish any blog post.
- Show related posts to increase engagement & lower down bounce rate.
- Provide subscription options so that users can subscribe to your blog updates.
- Create a sitemap. However, I recommend you use the sitemap feature of Yoast SEO.
- Take daily backups of your blog using VaultPress
- Get a free CDN with Photon.
There are many more things that you will get with Jetpack.
Once you start using Jetpack, you can ditch many other plugins from your blog & lower down the total number of used plugins.
Here are a few guides & tutorials to learn more about the Jetpack plugin:
4. Akismet
Free your blog from comment spam!
WordPress comment spam is something that you will face from day one.
When you start a WordPress blog and you get some cheesy line in the comments, you should not get excited. It is likely a spam comment saying something like the following:
- “I love your blog and you’ve got excellent writing style.”
- “Your writing style is excellent and I have subscribed to your blog.”
- “Wow! This is so informative!”
Check the URL and you will realize that it’s leading to some spammy affiliate site.
Akismet is an official WordPress plugin from Automattic to prevent spam comments in WordPress.
It is the first plugin that you should install on any new blog. Your new blog will have the WordPress commenting feature, and if you don’t use this plugin, your blog will be filled up by spammers. The spammers only want to throw their links on your articles and don’t want to join the discussion.
This plugin will automatically move those comments that it considers spam into the trash can (deleting them after a select amount of time).
It is a must-have.
You need to grab a WordPress.com API, which you can get by creating a free profile on WordPress.com.
5. OneSignals
This is a unique plugin for driving more traffic to your blog. OneSignals adds a new way for your readers to subscribe to your blog. It adds web push technology, and readers using Chrome, Safari, or Firefox browsers will get a notification to subscribe to your blog updates.
After that, whenever you publish a new blog post, your subscriber will get push notifications alerting them that there is a new post. You can also send manual push notifications to drive traffic to any specific blog post, landing pages or even an advertisers site.
Note: Here at ShoutMeLoud we use a paid tool called PushEngage. It offers better features, but it’s not free like OneSignals.
6. Social Snap
Social bookmarking has become a major ranking factor for SEO.
One rule of thumb for getting more shares is placing your social sharing buttons in prominent places. When readers see these options at the right time, they’re more likely to share your article.
SocialSnap is by far the top social media sharing plugin. It lets you add sharing buttons on both your desktop and mobile sites.
It supports all modern platforms like:
- Telegram
- Pinterest (direct on the image)
- …and many more
7. Contact Form 7
When you search for contact form plugins, you will be bombarded with many options.
There are many premium ones (like Gravity), but Contact Form 7 is the simplest plugin to configure.
It’s also useful because it shows things like referral source which is very useful for knowing how your visitor navigated through your site before using the contact form.
One great thing about Contact Form 7 is the ability to customize it according to your needs. The form can be created, and every entry from it will be sent to your email.
You can also create multiple forms with multiple tables.
Note: If you are using the Jetpack plugin, you need not to use this plugin. You can add a contact form using Jetpack.
8. WordFence Plugin
Now it’s time to secure your WordPress blog.
There are many security-related WordPress plugins out there & you can use any one of them.
However, WordFence is one of the top security plugins that can ensure your blog stays safe from hackers.
The features of this plugin are overwhelming, but essentially, this plugin ensures your blog doesn’t get hacked.
They roll out updates every now and then to tackle the latest hacking & cracking techniques.
9. No Self Pings
I have seen numerous lists of useful WordPress plugins on the web & it is surprising that no one has listed the No Self Pings plugin.
This simple plugin saves you from a lot of headaches.
When you link to any post from any other post on your blog, it sends a pingback. You don’t need such pingbacks & you sill have to manually delete them. With this plugin, your blog will stop sending pingbacks from the blog itself.
This is a plug & play plugin without any extra configuration needed.
<Download No Self Pings Plugin>
10. Easy Affiliate Links
This is a free plugin for WordPress which lets you manage all of your affiliate links.
You can read all about this plugin here.
Easy Affiliate Links helps to shorten and mask an awkward looking URL. It also helps in redirecting readers to your favorite affiliate programs.
For affiliate marketers, this plugin, along with SEO Smart Links, will add a lot of value to your site.
<Download Easy Affiliate Links>
11. OptinMonster
Can you think of a blog without an email list?
Well, OptinMonster is one great plugin that helps you capture emails.
This plugin offers many advanced features such as A/B testing, geolocation targeting, conditional pop-ups & even email subscription forms for mobile sites.
12. Broken Link Checker
Broken links are dead ends for search engines & bad for your website’s SEO.
Broken Link Checker is a free plugin that continuously scans your blog for broken links & allows you to fix them with one click.
This plugin also avoids sending pings to your own site when you publish posts with links to your own posts.
I have been using this plugin since the inception of ShoutMeLoud & it’s something every WordPress blog should use.
I have written this guide on how to use the Broken Link Checker plugin. Do take a look.
<Download broken link checker Plugin>
These 10 plugins are not only very useful, but they are one of the top choices for any kind of WordPress website.
They will add another layer of functionality and add features to your WordPress blog that will enhance both the user and the admin experience.
- You should also check out the list of WordPress plugins that power ShoutMeLoud.
Do you know of any more must have or basic WordPress plugins which should be on every WordPress blog? Let us know via the comments.
Don’t forget to share this list with others on Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp!
Here are a few hand-picked guides for you to read next:
- 5 Best WordPress Plugins For Creating Online Courses
- Cheap WordPress Hosting of 2019
- 7 Smart Ways To Reduce Your WordPress Blog Loading Time
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12 Best WordPress Plugins For Blogs & Business Websites in 2019 is a post from ShoutMeLoud - Shouters Who Inspires
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