Choosing the best WordPress plugins for various site functionalities can be a daunting task, especially with 2,443,289 plugins to choose from. However, if you’re looking to edge your competitors this 2019, then it’s in your best interest to install the best relevant plugins on your WordPress site.
Wondering why?
Because there are already one billion blogs on the web. Therefore, you must pick up the best fit (be it a plugin, theme, content or whatsoever) for your online business to stay ahead of the competition.
WordPress is hugely popular among both beginners and developers to create and manage websites/blogs. The WordPress platform is successful, not just because of its free and open-source but its plugin and theme architecture makes it really EASY to work with.
There are top-notch WordPress themes which offer professional look & feel with necessary functionalities.
But we are more than seven billion people on earth. And we may need different functionalities on our WordPress sites/blogs. There comes the Plugin into the picture.
WordPress Plugins allow you to add and tweak your sites’ functionality. As such, adding social share buttons, securing site from malicious attacks, taking & managing site backups, building custom landing pages and whatnot.
The point is, you can do a lot with WordPress plugins without wasting your time to invent the wheel again.
Of course, what kind of plugins you need to use depends on the type of site you are working on.
Although, you must cover the basics including PageSpeed, Security, and SEO among others.
The good news is there is a plugin for almost every functionality. And to save you the time you’d have used to find these top WordPress plugins, we have a round-up of the best WordPress plugins you must have this 2019.
☲ Table of Contents
- Best WordPress Plugins for Your Blog/Website
- Yoast SEO
- Akismet
- UpdraftPlus
- Elementor Page Builder
- W3 Total Cache
- Autoptimize
- Social Warfare
- Monarch Social Sharing Plugin
- AddThis
- Yellow Pencil
- Bloom
- Sumo – Boost Conversion and Sales
- WPForms
- Slider Revolution
- Shortlinks by Pretty Links
- Easy Digital Downloads
- Insert Headers and Footers
- Smush Image Compression and Optimization
- Ad Inserter
- Wordfence Security
- MonsterInsights
- Code Snippets
- Wrapping it Up
Best WordPress Plugins for Your Blog/Website
Following is the list of the best WordPress plugins you should try to extend the functionality of your blog or website.
Yoast SEO
Search engine ranking is a necessity in today’s online battle for staying at the top of the game.
With search engine users set to rise, it’s important for your WordPress website to become more visible in search engine results page (SERP). To achieve this, you must do the Search Engine Optimization of your website.
Thankfully, Yoast SEO has all your on-Page SEO needs covered. This plugin provides all the tips you need to keep in mind when developing content, which will, in turn, improve your search engine rankings.
For example, it allows you to set a focus keyword which will appear several times in the article. In addition, this plugin will also analyze the page to see whether the keyword is used on image alt tags, headings, the meta tags like description, title etc and in the entire post.
Furthermore, it comes with a snippet preview which allows you a sneak peek of how your page or post will appear on search engine results. You can choose between the free and premium versions.
Yoast SEO comes with several setting options. Check out Complete Guide for Best Yoast SEO Setup.
Akismet
This is one of the best WordPress plugins available for free. In fact, developers at WordPress made it a default plugin that comes with every WordPress installation.
If your WordPress receives a lot of spam comments, you must set up Akismet WordPress plugin.
Its main job is to filter spam comments, thus saving you a lot of time. Also, Akismet keeps a history of such comments thereby allowing you to view them as the moderator.
Moreover, as a moderator, you can see the approved comments from each user, see their URLs and eliminate suspicious ones if any.
UpdraftPlus
Once in a while, you may encounter hitches with your site or hosting company. Such hitches could cause data loss and if you don’t have any backup, then you’ll end up incurring heavy losses. With UpdraftPlus plugin, you have the ultimate backup solution for your WordPress website.
Updraft WordPress plugin comes with automatic backup capabilities which allows you to backup & restore your site.
Updraft plugin integrates well with services such as Dropbox, email, FTP, Rackspace, S3, Google Drive and others to backup and restore your WordPress site.
If you already have a backup for your site, this plugin will make it easy for you to restore your site.
Also, the plugin comes with both a free and paid version. Obviously, the premium version offers additional features as well as priority support.
Elementor Page Builder
In WordPress, designing custom landing pages (be it a home page or a product/service page) has been a difficult task.
But with the progress of drag n’ drop WordPress page builders, things have changed rapidly. Now you can easily design a beautiful landing page using a WordPress page builder plugin with minimal effort.
If you’re finding it difficult to build web pages like a professional website, then you should make use of this amazing plugin called Elementor Page Builder.
With over 17 million downloads to its name, Elementor Page Builder ranks among the best WordPress plugins which allow you to create unique and personalized pages without writing a single line of code.
The drag and drop editor of Elementor also comes with a live preview and you can get access to this feature in both the free and paid version.
- Here is the Complete List of Best WordPress Page Builders.
W3 Total Cache
Site speed is important not only because users love fast loading websites. But the fact is search engines like Google ranks faster website higher as compared to slow ones.
To improve your website’s speed/load time, you should enable an effective cache or caching method.
In simple words caching refers to storing a website’s data temporarily so that when the user loads the same website (web page) afterward, it’ll load faster. And temporarily stored data is called ‘cache’.
Since the website is visited using a web browser on the computer, phone, etc. caching can be enabled at the web browser level. Such a caching method in the context of websites is generally called browser caching.
W3 Total Cache is one of the best WordPress plugins to leverage caching to speed up the WordPress site.
This plugin offers several caching methods including database, browser, object, and page caching. In addition to that, it allows CDN integration which further reduces load time.
Remember, page speed of websites is one of the ranking factors which search engines consider to show search engine results. That means, the faster the page speed, the higher your rankings.
Autoptimize
Do you want to improve the page speed performance of your WordPress? And looking for an efficient plugin for the same.
Well, Autoptimize is the plugin you need.
Autoptimize offers several features to improve page speed. It is capable of minifying, combining & caching of scripts and stylesheets. And it can inline necessary CSS, defer CSS & JS and minify HTML to improve speed performance.
In addition to that, this WordPress plugin can also be used for lazy loading images, optimizing fonts and can eliminate emoji support for better page speed.
Overall, it’ll help you optimize your website’s performance even if you’re on HTTP/2.
There is no denying fact that social media is a great source to derive more traffic to your website.
With the emergence of social media platforms, the battle for supremacy is now fiercer than before. In today’s time, you must offer social sharing options to your site audience.
Social Warfare plugin is one of the best WordPress plugins for this purpose. It allows you to add share buttons on your WordPress site so visitors can easily share content on their social media platforms.
Moreover, it displays the number of shares so you can brag about your content and pull in more business. The free version comes with the basic social buttons. However, the paid version comes with extra features such as:
- Share images specific to Pinterest
- Click-to-tweet
- Numerous customization opportunities
Also, if you ever change your domain name or migrate to HTTPS, you can get your lost share counts.
Importance of social media for the success of a website/blog can be emphasized enough. Especially if you are struggling to get traffic to your website.
Sometimes all you need is a viral article/blog post or video to get thousands of visitor to your website.
If you want to elevate your social media sharing to the next level, then Monarch Social Sharing plugin is the right tool to have.
Monarch Social Sharing Plugin offers sharing options of over 20 social media networks.
Furthermore, you can choose where to place the buttons from 5 different locations on your website.
Your readers can also share images over their social networks with ease thanks to hovers over image (media) elements.
AddThis
This is another good social sharing plugin which allows you to promote your website on social platforms.
AddThis WordPress plugin enables your audience to share the content over 200 social networks.
Also, you can easily customize look and feel of share buttons to make them appear as desired on your website. For instance, you can choose custom HTML, inline and sidebar.
Yellow Pencil
Do you need to tweak your website’s appearance? Why not go for one of the best WordPress plugins to customize WordPress easily?
Yellow Pencil Plugin allows you to edit your website’s CSS code. The plugin comes in two versions i.e. free version and a premium one.
The free version of Yellow Pencil WordPress plugin offers all basic CSS stylesheet customizations to alter the appearance of your website.
However, the pro version, in particular, opens a new world of properties including over 800 fonts, attractive color palettes, over 50 animations, and at least 300 background patterns to choose from.
Bloom
Are you trying to scale up your email list for your website or blog? Or you own an e-commerce website? If yes, then Bloom WordPress plugin will help you build opt-ins and pop-ups.
You can create different types of opt-in forms using Bloom WordPress plugin. In addition, you can create page-specific forms. With this, you can target a specific blog audience.
For those who own e-commerce websites, you can create a trigger which will display a pop-up or a form at a particular stage. For example, when a visitor buys a product or signs up.
Sumo – Boost Conversion and Sales
This is another good WordPress plugin for boosting conversions and sales. With Sumo WordPress Plugin you can
- Grow your email list by creating beautiful popups/opt-in forms, notice bars, etc.
- Sent emails to subscribers – even you can automate email campaign.
- Enable easy social sharing options to allow the visitor to share your content/product.
- Integrate WooCommerce to promote offers and discounts with intuitive forms.
Furthermore, visitors can tweet a highlighted text with ease. While the free version is available for small websites, you’ll need a SumoMe paid plan for extra features.
WPForms
Forms are really come handy to communicate with your website’s visitors. You may need several types of forms – like contact form: visitors can use to reach out to you, then there are email subscription/opt-in forms and feedback forms, etc.
WPForms is another plugin which makes it to the list of the best WordPress plugins.
This user-friendly plugin comes with a drag and drop form builder which makes it easy to create contact, online order, payment, and email subscription forms.
In addition, WPForms can integrate with payment and marketing platforms, thus allowing you to create forms in under 5 minutes. Besides, you can also customize registration forms and login pages.
Slider Revolution
Sliders add visual appeal to your website, thus help to engage your visitors. There’re numerous plugins out there, but Slider Revolution ranks among the best WordPress plugins in this category.
Slider Revolution WordPress plugin offers to create different type of slider designs including a full screen, full width, slow, fast, captioned and responsive slider, etc.
Moreover, you can customize, the transitions, buttons, links, typography and the animations, etc. as per your preferences.
Shortlinks by Pretty Links
This plugin is suitable for all the affiliates (bloggers and marketers) who need to create simple and clean links. Which help win readers trust and improve the click-through rate of affiliate links.
Pretty Links plugin offers several useful features like different redirection methods, adding nofollow tag, link note, custom link for each affiliate link, forward parameters and more.
In addition to that, you can also track the clicks on every link. Nevertheless, if you want more features such as integration of Google Analytics, generating QR codes and URL replacement, you’ll have to get the pro version.
Easy Digital Downloads
Do you sell digital products on your WordPress site or planning to sell eBooks or a software/plugin via your WordPress site/blog?
Easy Digital Download can help you with setting up an online store for selling digital products – like ebooks/documents, software, graphics/images/photos, music/songs, or any other type of media file.
It handles everything at the backend – adding items, integrating payment gateway, making affiliates for your products, etc. And at frontend – displaying items, customizing the appearance and much more.
Easy Digital Downloads plugin supports (via free and paid extensions) several payment gateways including PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Payments, and others.
The premium plans come with added features which allow you to add email marketing tools, sell subscriptions, marketplace functionality, etc.
As a website owner, you may need to add some code to the header and footer of your WordPress site. This can be for various reasons, for example, inserting ad retargeting scripts, Analytics Tracking code, website verification etc.
You can easily add code to header and footer of your WordPress site using Insert Headers and Footers WordPress plugin.
The main advantage of using this plugin is that it gives you an opportunity to add code snippets without altering the theme files.
Therefore you can change/update your theme without the fear of losing the code you have added to header and footer files of the theme.
Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Images deliver the intended message faster and are easier to remember compared to words. Moreover, it is also a fantastic way to improve your search engine rankings.
However, images tend to occupy a huge chunk of storage space. As a result, make your website slower to load.
Besides annoying your readers or customers, search engines also don’t like slow loading websites.
To avoid such a scenario, you can compress and optimize your images without sacrificing their quality.
Smush Image Compression and Optimization (formally WP SmushIt) Plugin does exactly what you need i.e. compress, optimize image without losing quality.
In fact, it does compress and optimize your images during the upload of the attachments.
Moreover, you can apply compression and optimization via plugin settings page and media library as well.
Ad Inserter
Website or blog monetization by displaying ads is one of the oldest and popular methods to generate revenue.
Since advertisements are one of the successful revenue streams, you must try displaying ads on your website.
Ad Inserter WordPress plugin makes the process of placing ads on your website a lot easier.
Using this plugin, you can place/display ads on certain pages and specific areas (in-content ads, after/before specific para ads, etc.) on the page.
In addition, you can switch the ads and track their performance from a simple settings page of the Ad Inserter plugin.
Wordfence Security
Like any other online platform, WordPress is not full proof against malicious attacks. Therefore as a website owner, security should top your agenda at all times. It is crucial to have security defenses to deter such attacks.
Wordfence Security is one of the best WordPress plugins in the security field.
It offers
- WordPress firewall to block malicious requests.
- WordPress Security Scanner to check all the files for malwares, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects, sneaky URLs, and code injections, etc.
- Login Security by enabling advanced Two-factor authentication (2FA). And login Page CAPTCHA to prevent bots from logging in.
- Security Tools for live traffic monitoring to track hack attempts. Block attackers by IP or build-in advanced rules based on Hostname IP Range, User-Agent & Referrer.
With Wordfence Security, you can scan for malware, view the traffic on your website in real-time. This includes monitoring of logins and logouts, 404 errors, humans and robot-generated traffic.
Real-time traffic monitoring allows you to identify security threats in no time and take the appropriate action in defense.
To further enhance website security, this plugin comes with a firewall which stops any hacking attempts from known hacker networks and attackers. In addition, it also makes use of two-factor authentication while at the same time informing the user about the strength of their passwords. This prevents brute-force attacks as well.
MonsterInsights
This plugin is by far one of the best WordPress plugins which deal with analytics. The plugin acts as a bridge between your WordPress site and Google Analytics.
Therefore, you can know the exact patterns people visit/access your website. Furthermore, you don’t have to leave your WordPress dashboard to view these statistics, everything is right there.
With these statistics, you can make the necessary changes to your site in order to increase, subscribers, traffic and eventually revenue.
Code Snippets
If you love tweaking your site by editing functions.php file, then you should try this plugin called Code Snippets. It can really come handy for you. Let’s see how.
This plugin allows you to add code snippets to functions.php file without editing the actual file.
Yes, you read it right.
You can add and manage code snippets from the plugin settings page. Ever it offers to add description and tag to specific code snippet for easy management.
It isolates each snippet, thus allowing you to deactivate or activate single snippets without interfering with others.
Furthermore, the snippets remain intact even after you change the theme.
Instead, looking for solutions to display code in WordPress?
Wrapping it Up
WordPress Plugins are really useful to bring your imagination to life by adding, customizing and altering your site’s features and functionalities.
Remember, for any functionality you want to add, there’s almost always a plugin for it. But you should always go for a reliable and efficient one only.
Which is your favorite plugin out this list of best WordPress plugins? Have I missed your favorite one? Let me know via comments below.
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