25 Must-Have (And Free) WordPress Plugins for Professional Bloggers

The backbone of WordPress that makes it one of the most beloved Content Management System of all time are its PLUGINS. It is because of these plugins that WordPress gains its functionality. I have been researching for quite some time to compile a list of best 25 plugins that can satisfy all your needs as a blogger and finally it is here 🙂

This article really took a lot of time to complete as I was trying to give it all in this 25 WordPress Plugins. I have put my time, hard work and experience into compiling this list and I’m sure you will love it. This list will help every new blogger to manage their blog and create excellent content. It practically solves 90% of all the daily problems that you are going to face at the start of your blogging career.

Before you scroll down to look at the list, let me tell you how this post is structured. The post has been divided into different categories. Each category holds the list of plugins under it. This way it would be easier for you find the exact plugins based on your needs. You can also bookmark this page for future references. Please let me know if you need it in some other form. I’m open to suggestions.

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Seach Engine Optimization Plugins

SEO is one of the most crucial parts of any website. It doesn’t matter how good your content is if it is not being read by the right people. To increase the reach of your content and ultimately your brand you need to optimize your content for search engines. WordPress has tons of free SEO plugins that will help you to quickly optimize your website to the best industry standards.

#1. Yoast SEO

This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team atYoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. The most important attribute of Yoast plugin is that it helps you to create the best content for the people.

This plugin is an All-In-One plugin to help you with your ever-evolving SEO needs. Yoast offers tons of free features and once you have installed Yoast plugin, you have to look no further. People are the live proof of its success. It has more than 5 million downloads and increasing.

I have highlighted some of its main features that helpme to write better-optimized content right from my WordPress admin panel.

Features Highlight

• Write better with YoastSEO
• Page Analysis
• Technical WordPress SEO Optimization.
• Meta & Link Elements
• XML Sitemaps
• RSS Optimization
• Edit Your.htaccess and robots.txt File
• Social Integration.
• Multi-site compatible
• Import and Export Functionality
• Import functionality for other SEO Plugins.

This is not it. Yoast is an ever growing community and offers a lot of knowledge based articles to everyone. Furthermore, they have their knowledge base which is acessible for everyone. Perhaps, you can visit their knowledge base to read more about it.

#2. All-In-One SEO Pack

This is another popular WordPress SEO plugin with more than 3 million downloads.This plugin was created byMichael Torbertin 2007. Here are some of its most useful features.

Features

• XML Sitemap support submit your sitemap to Google and Bing and improve your SEO.
• Image XML Sitemap submitted to Google and Bing to improve your Image SEO.
• Google AMP support (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
• Google Analytics support.
• Support for SEO on Custom Post Types
• Advanced Canonical URLs.
• Redirect attachment pages to parent post
• Automatically notifies search engines like Google and Bing about changes to your site
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY free plugin to provide SEO Integration for e-Commerce sites, including WooCommerce.
• Nonce Security built into All in One SEO Pack.
• Automatically optimizes yourtitlesfor Google and other search engines.
• GeneratesMETA tags automatically.
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs.
• For beginners, you dont even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything to optimize your SEO
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

One thing is for sure- You will be happy with this SEO plugin.

If you will ask me to choose between Yoast and AIOSEO, my choice will be Yoast anytime. Yoast UI is easy and it offers a lot more features for free as compared to All-In-One SEO Pack. Therefore, my vote goes to Yoast SEO Plugin.

#3. Glue For Yoast SEO & AMP

Do you know about the latest AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Technology?

Google is the name backing up The Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP offers minimal HTML and follows the best practices to speed up the page load and improve the overall web experience for mobile users. The AMP has recently become popular among the news channels and content creators who focus on delivering the content to their readers.

AMP follows some strict rules before displaying content on the screen. WordPress AMP Plugin was created to implement AMP with WordPress. AMP Plugin offers the minimal code required to create an AMP version from your existing database. In order to update and maintain its Meta Tags, the Yoast SEO: AMP Glue plugin integratesYoast SEOinto your AMP pages. This makes sure your meta-data is implemented correctly.

Yoast SEO: AMP Glue plugin also provides a simple way to customize your AMP pages.
It adds rudimental styling in the form of colors and link styles, so your AMP pages can maintain the feeling your main pages have. Anytime you are using WordPress AMP Plugin to create AMP version of your website, do not forget to install this plugin.

In addition to this, AMP for WordPress is an open source project. You can find its source code in their GitHub repository. Therefore, if you can code then you can use their source code to add additional functionality the way you want.

Image Optimization Plugins

#4. Smush Image Compression And Optimization

Image optimization is one sure way to reduce the page load speed. This is one important checkmark in Google Pagespeed Insight.Smush is a free tool that offers amazing optimization, image compression and resizes of the images.

Smush has been benchmarked and tested number one for speed and quality and is theaward-winning, proven crowd favourite image optimization plugin for WordPress. Here is the feature list of SmushIt.

Features

• Optimize your images using advanced lossless compression techniques.
• Set maximum width and height and large images will automatically scale before being added to your media library
• Process JPEG, GIF and PNG image files.
• Optimize any image in any directory.
• Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload.
• Manually smush your attachments individually in the media library, or in bulk 50 attachments at a time.
• Smush all standard web-sized images 1MB or smaller.
• Smush images with no slowdown using WPMU DEVs fast, reliable Smush API.
• Global and individual settings for Multisite
• View advanced compression stats per-attachment and library totals.

And the best part is – All of this comes for free.

No Processing Load on Your Server

Smush does not even put processing load on your servers as all the compression processing takes place on their site. This helps to reduce the server load on your part + increase the compression speed as compression is done at their end and their servers and they have more processing power than yours.

I love smush it and have been using it for more than a year now.

#5. ShortPixel Image Optimizer

When it comes to image compression and optimization, ShortPixel will always hold its spot. There is no doubt that it is one of the best image optimization tools available to the WordPress community. It offers better compression rate when compared with other image compression tools and all of that comes for free (not exactly free).

ShortPixel is a premium plugin and to keep it working you need credits. However, you get 100 credit points at the start of every month but if you post frequent content that includes images, you are surely going to run out of it.

It has to offer tons of feature that can easily outweigh any other optimization plugin. Here is the feature list of ShortPixel.

Features

• compress JPG, PNG, GIF (still or animated) images and also PDF documents
• option to automatically convert PNG to JPG if that will result in smaller images. Ideal for large images in PNG format.
• option to freely convert any JPEG, PNG or GIF (even animated ones!) toWebPfor more Google love.How to enable WebP?
• option to include the generated WebP images into the front-end pages by using the <picture> tag instead of <img>
• compatible with WP Retina 2x allretina imagesare automatically compressed.How to benefit from Retina displays?
• featured images can be automatically resized before being optimized with 2 different options. No need for additional plugins like Imsanity
• CMYK to RGB conversion
• 24hstellar support(24/7) directly from developers.
• easilytest lossy/losslessversions of the images with a single click in your Media Library
• great for photographers:keep or remove EXIFdata from your images, compress images with lossless option.
• works well with both HTTPS and HTTP websites.
• you can run ShortPixel plugin onmultiple websitesor on amultisitewith asingle API Key
• Bulk optimize all the existing images in Media Library or in any gallery with one click
• works great foreCommerce websites using WooCommerceor other plugins.
• works great with NextGEN gallery, Foo Gallery and any other galleries and sliders.
• compatible with WP Engine hosted websites and all the major hosting providers.
• Also, compatible with WPML and WPML Media plugins and watermarking plugins.
• images that are optimized less than 5% are abonus.
• WooCommerce, WP offload S3 compatible.

I have tried it and it works great. The only thing to look for it is that you don’t exhaust your credit points.

#6. Compress JPEG & PNG Images

This plugin is made by the famous web-based free image optimizer TinyPNG.This service is well known to bloggers for offering lossless image compression and optimization. Before SmushIt, I use to compress all my images using TinyPNG and then upload it to WordPress Media library. I have seen compression rate of more than 70% with PNG images and between 50-70% for JPEG images. The compressions are completely lossless and do not affect the quality of the image at all.

How does it work?

This plugin does not cause any extra load on your servers as all the compression takes place on their servers just like SmushIt. As you upload images to WordPress media gallery, the image is converted into multiple sizes by WordPress itself and stored on the servers. The plugin then takes these images and sends it to TinyPNG web service for compression. Once the images are processed at TinyPNG, those compressed small size images are sent back to the WordPress and are replaced with the original images. This is how the whole compression process takes place.

This plugin offers some really good but minimal features which are expected from an Image Compression tool.

Features

• Automatically optimize new images on upload.
• Optimize individual images already in your media library.
• Easy bulk optimization of your existing media library.
• Resize large original images by setting a maximum width and/or height.
• Preserve copyright metadata, creation date and GPS location in the original images.
• Supports compression of animated PNG.
• Select which thumbnail sizes of an image may be optimized.
• Multisite support with a single API key.
• WooCommerce compatible.
• WP Retina 2x compatible.
• WP Offload S3 compatible.
• See your usage from the media settings and during bulk optimization.
• Color profiles are automatically translated to the standard RGB color space.
• Convert CMYK to RGB to save more space and maximize compatibility.
• Optimize and resize uploads with the WordPress mobile app.
• Dashboard widget with your total savings.
• No file size limits.

I have been using SmushIt for quite some time on my WordPress website, even before I was aware of this plugin. However, I have used TinyPNG service a lot in the past and my experience has been great.

WordPress Optimization Plugins

Did you ever check your blog performance in Google PageSpeed Insight?

Try checking your blog on different metrics and test its performance. If your website score is low then you must optimize your WordPress website for better performance and faster page load speeds. I have written a complete guide on How to SpeedUp your WordPress website for Google PageSpeed Insight Score.You can read and implement the techniques I have mentioned there to optimize my website.

In case you are not a technical person or your hosting provider does not allow you to make such changes in that case WordPress community has to offer tons of free optimization plugins that will definitely help you to rank better in the eyes of Google.

#7. Autoptimize

This plugin is the best when it comes to optimizing your HTML, JavaScript and CSS. I have a complete faith in this plugin and has been using it for more than 6 months now. Everything works fine and if you see bemyaficionado’s page source, you will see that everything is beautifully compressed and minified.

This plugin is completely free to use and also offers some premium features for which you will have to pay to buy the licence. I have been using the free version for all this time.

Autoptimize is divided into 4 main sections,

• HTML

  This sectioncontains the configuration settings for the HTML on your webpage. You can click on the checkbox to enable HTML optimization and also you can choose to remove comments from the HTML page that might take some extra bits off the data.

  

• JavaScript

  The settings for optimizing Javascript on your page is straight-forward. Just have to check the optimize javascript checkbox and everything will be taken care of. However, there is a fair chance that you Javascript might break if you have not taken caution. Some plugins javascript might not load properly or break.

  I was facing the similar issue at first, then I had to remove the dependent files from optimization. This is what I have set for Autoptimize and everything works just fine.

  

• CSS

  Optimization is incomplete without properly optimizing CSS. Often times it is the CSS that cause slowness. Autoptimize can take care of it for you. You can simply enable CSS optimization in the Autoptimize CSS tab and it will take if for you from there.

  Autoptimize also gives various option to further optimize your website’s CSS apart from minifying it.

  It automatically detects and loads images in the background in CSS itself instead of sending another link to get the file. It does all that by including the images in the form of DATA-URI. This helps to reduce the page load size as it sends one less request to get the image. And as you know HTTP request is costly.

  You can also inline the CSS that you know must load at the very beginning of the page. This will help you to reduce the loading time for above the fold content. This will further help you to increase the google page speed insight score for your website.

This plugin is the best I have found so far. Give it a try and let me know the percentage of improvement in your website’s overall load time.

• How to Optimize Your Website for Google Page Speed Insight

#8. Merge + Minify + Refresh Plugin

In case if you are using a free theme like many others out there then there is a fair chance that your CSS & Javascript files are not compressed. And not only the free theme users, multiple plugins such as JetPack and WordPress itself puts out multiple CSS and JS files which are not minified or compressed and this increases the page load time.

Google is very particular about delivering well-optimized content over the web as it helps to improve the overall user’s experience and that is all that matters to Google. This plugin helps you to concatenate multiple non-dependent CSS files into a group and then minify those files together. This further helps to reduce the overall page size.

This plugin focusses on reducing the overall page request as HTTP requests are very costly. You can also enable HTTP/2 module with this plugin. HTTP/2 is an advance form of HTTP protocol. It helps to load multiple resources in a single request.

HTTP/2 Protocol

This is the advancement of previous HTTP (ver-1) protocol. As you know that HTTP requestsare very costly for page loads. And there were a lot of limitation with HTTP (ver-1) protocol. You could only load one request at a time was the biggest limitation.

Suppose you have 10 resources residing on the same server then there will be 10 individual HTTP request created in order to download those files from the server. This made no sense. It was like if a postman has to deliver 10 letters in the same house, he will have to take 10 trips back and forth the post office, taking only one letter at a time. It doesn’t make sense at all.

To remedy this limitation, HTTP/2 protocol was created. In this protocol, multiple files are pushed from the server directly to the client’s browser instead of letting browser ask for the files from the server. The server knows which files will be required by the browser and it pushes the files instead of letting browser ask for it. This can significantly reduce your page load time.

Reduces Page Load Time

It helped me to reduce page load time for my website by almost 2-3 seconds. This is a huge difference in the overall page load time. You can try it for yourself and record the time difference before and after the plugin. Do not forget to share the screenshot with me in the comments section below.

Here is the link to the HTTP/2 articlein case you are curious to know all about HTTP/2 features and optimizations.

Features

Here are some of the listed features of this plugin.

• Merges JS and CSS files to reduce the number of HTTP requests
• Handles scripts loaded in the header & footer
• CompatIble with localized scripts.
• Creates WP-Cron for minification as this can take some time to complete.
• Minifies JS with Google Closure (requires php exec) with fallback to Minify.
• Minifies CSS with Minify.
• Failed minification doesnt break the site. Visitors will instead only see the merged results
• Stores Assets in /wp-content/mmr/ folder
• Uses last modified date in filename so any changes to JS or CSS automatically get re-processed and downloaded on browser refresh.
• View status of merge and minify on settings page in WordPress admin.
• Option to enable http2 server push (thanks toDaniel Aleksandersen).
• Option to enable output buffering for compatibility and so footer scripts can be HTTP2 pushed.
• Ability to turn off minification, concatenation and to manually ignore scripts or CSS.
• Ignores conditional scripts and styles.
• Ability to specify cache directories.
• Ability to generate .css.gz & .js.gz files (Thanks to Marcus Svensson)
• Works with WordPress Multisite.

This is one of the best WordPress assets optimization plugin.

You should combine this plugin with Autoptimize to see the maximum optimization result. I’m using bot the plugins together and so far everything has worked like a charm. I was able to increase the page speed score by almost 15 points by using these two plugins.

#9. Broken Link Checker

Are you seeing a lot of 404 Not Found errors in your Google Search Console?

Although 404 errors do not hurt your rankings directly it definitely has to do with the trust of your website. Page rank holds is highly influenced by the Trust of your website. The more trusted your website is, better you will rank on the Search Engine Result Page.

You must be wondering how hard it is to eliminate all the broken links from your website.

Well, Broken Link Checker is the perfect tool that will take care of “searching for the broken links”part for you.

Wait, there’s more to this plugin.

It does a wonderful job of listing all the broken links in the plugin page and provides you with the option to check the link and cure the link ot the same place. No need of digging down each post for the broken link. You can do that right from your plugin page. Isn’t that a handy tool to have.

Features

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
• Detects links that dont work, missing images and redirects.
• Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
• You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on.
• Without manually updating each post, the links can be edited directly from the plugins page.
• Highly configurable.

Link Actions

There are several actions associated with each link. They show up when you move your mouse over to one of the links listed the aforementioned tab

• “Edit URL”lets you change the URL of that link. If the link is present in more than one place (e.g. both in a post and in the blogroll), all occurrences of that URL will be changed.
• “Unlink” removes the link but leaves the link text intact.
• “Not broken” lets you manually mark a “broken” link as working. The feature lets you unmark the link from being broken. This thing helps because sometimes the pages do not load or website is under maintenance at the time of being scanned by Broken Link Checker. You can simply mark the link unbroken from the console and that link will be considered as valid. The link will remain not broken till the source behind the link changes.
• “Dismiss” hides the link from the “Broken Links” and “Redirects” views. It will still be checked as normal and get the normal link styles (e.g. a strike-through effect for broken links), but wont be reported again unless its status changes. Useful if you want to acknowledge a link as broken/redirected and just leave as it is.

This plugin is all that you need to take care of all the broken link on your website. It continuously monitors your website for any broken link and sends periodic emails in case it finds the broken links.

You can combine this plugin with the next plugin #10 to further reduce the count of the broken links which is out of the scope of Broken Link Checker.

#10. Redirection

This is another handy plugin to have in your plugins house. Do you remember the out-of-scope broken links for Broken Link Checker Plugin? Well, those modifications can be done by this sweet “Redirection Plugin”.

Sometimes you modify your existing post’s URL. Due to this change, all the old links from different website pointing to that post breaks. You need someone to tell them that “Hey, my post has moved to a new location”. Redirection Plugin does the job for you. You can insert the links or regex of the old post and provide a target url for the same. So, whenever the request comes for that post, it automatically redirects it to its new home. That way you keep the visitor to your website, plus it helps Google to build trust with you.

Features

• Redirect Manager
  Redirect particular incoming link to anywhere on your website.
• Conditional Redirect
  In addition to straightforward URL matching you can redirect based on other conditions:
  • Login status redirect only if the user is logged in or logged out
  • Browser redirect if the user is using a certain browser
  • Referrer redirect if the user visited the link from another page
• Full Logging
  It gives complete information on all the redirects taking place on your website.
• Track 404 Errors

I personally use this plugin to redirect all the incoming request from other domains to the post’s new home. It has worked like a charm so far. I never faced any problem with this plugin. Also, the User Interface is very easy to use. You don’t have to be a technical person to create a redirect on your website.

#11. WP-Sweep

This plugin cleans up all the cluttered and orphaned data in your database and makes more efficient. Over the time your database may accumulate lots of unwanted data. Data like post revisions, unused tags, spammed comments, auto drafts etc etc… This data makes your database bulky and hence affects the overall efficiency and performance of the database.The WP-Sweep comes to the rescue.

As soon as you install Sweep, it will automatically analyze the entire database for all the unused and unwanted data and prepare a report for you. It will present all the possible optimizations and leave the sweeping option to you. You can choose whether to sweep the data or not.

It is in your hand which data to sweep and what to keep.

You must be wondering why to choose Sweep when you already have a popular plugin WP-Optimize?

The reason behind using this plugin is that it uses WordPress native delete methods to delete the data irrespective of running the manual query which may leave orphaned data into the database. You can read the following article to get a good understanding of this plugin.

• How to CleanUp WordPress Database for Improved Performance

Features

• Revisions, auto-drafts,Deleted comments,Unapproved comments,Spammed comments andDeleted comments.
• Orphaned post meta, comment meta, user meta, term meta and term relationships.
• Unused terms
• Duplicated post meta, comment meta, user meta and term meta.
• Transient options
• Optimizes database tables
• oEmbed caches in post meta.

This plugin uses proper WordPress delete functions as much as possible instead of running direct delete MySQL queries.

Find the list of plugins below. All these functions are native to WordPress.

• wp_delete_post_revision()
• wp_delete_post()
• wp_delete_comment()
• delete_post_meta()
• delete_comment_meta()
• delete_user_meta()
• delete_term_meta()
• wp_remove_object_terms()
• wp_delete_term()
• delete_transient()
• delete_site_transient()

Do not forget to comment about your favourite cleanup plugin below.

Cache Plugins

#12. WP Super Cache

One of the most beloved plugins in my repository. This plugin really helped me to reduce the page load time of my website. Also, it takes off the load from the server and speeds up the process. You can see the real stats on Google PageSpeed Insight score.

How does it do it?

When a user visits your website, he sends a request to the backend server. The request is served by the PHP and appropriate HTML response is generated for the user. This response is sent to the user’s browser. This is the usual process that takes place.

WP Super Cache plugin comes in between the user and the PHP. When the response is generated for the user from PHP for the first time, WP Super Cache comes into the picture andreceives this response and generates a static HTML file before sending it to the user.

The next time when user requests for the same page, WP Super Cache directly serves the static resource page. This eliminates the PHP processing for generating the page while significantly increasing the performance of your website.

In-built Garbage Collection

The Garbage Collection job runs periodically and deletes all the stale cache files. You get to choose the Garbage Collection periodic time. A good starting point as suggested by WP Super Cache is a default 1800 seconds (i.e. every half an hour).

CDN

As you might already know that CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It is a network of servers situated around the globe which is used to serve the static content to the user of your website. This helps to reduce the network latency time as the request is served from the nearest CDN server.

Wait, You must be wondering what it has to do with WP Super Cache Plugin?

WP Super Cache is capable of providing a basic CDN Support.

It rewrites the URL of all the static files present in your wp-content and wp-includes folder to point at different hostname. By doing this you invite CDN networks for origin pull. CDN networks such as S3 and cloud front supports this feature. This enables CDN to download files from your server and cache them for a configurable amount of time.

#13. W3 Total Cache

This is another fantastic cache plugin which is recommended by many top-level website owners. This plugin has got all the features required to make your website load faster and more efficiently. Similar to WP Super Cache, this plugin also optimizes your HTML, CSS, JavaScript and store it in the cache.

How is this Plugin better than other plugins?

It is a complete package.

Unlike many other plugins out there which does one or two optimizations for your website, w3 Total Cache handles it all. After installation, you will see an instant reduction in the overall Page Load Speed of your website. You could measure it with many online available tools to see the optimization that this plugin does for your website.

In case you need a solid proof of speed, consider the following tools:

• Google Page Speed
• WebPagetest
• Pingdom
• DynaTrace (formerly Gomez) Performance Test

Features

• Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private/dedicated servers and dedicated servers/clusters
• Transparent content delivery network (CDN) management with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
• Mobile support: respective caching of pages by referrer or groups of user agents including theme switching for groups of referrers or user agents
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support
• Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on (FSD) CDN (by user agent group)
• Minification of posts, pages, feeds,embedded or 3rd party JavaScript andembedded or 3rd party CSS.
• Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag) with cache-busting
• JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location control
• Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
• Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)
• WP-CLI support for cache purging, query string updating and more
• Caching statistics for performance insights

My Preference

I prefer WP Super Cache over W3 Total Cache because I find Super Cache more time saving and less bulky, whereas, W3 Total Cache is filled with so many different options and settings that sometimes it becomes hard to get the perfect spot. You have to be technical in order to understand various settings and functionalities of W3 Total Cache before you can use it. That is why I lean towards WP Super Cache.

However, you should definitely try W3 Total Cache and see it work for you. Sometimes the default settings could do wonders for your website’s page load speed. Do give it a try and if you do not understand which settings to use on your website, please contact W3 Total Cache team and they will help you with it.

Comments Plugins

You get a lot of choices when it comes to comments Plugin in WordPress.

But before you move forward, there is one thing that I want you to know before opting for the comments plugin on your blog.

[bctt tweet=”You must know your audience before opting for comments plugin.” via=”no”]

Suppose, you are trying to create a community and you are expecting your audience to talk about your topics in the comments. You want them to have a healthy discussion in the comments section then you must choose a plugin which helps them do it in the easiest way possible.

I have compiled a comment plugin list which will help you to choose the best comment plugin for your WordPress website.

#14. Disqus Comments Plugin

This plugin is already famous and has an awesome fan following among the publishers. ProBlogger, MelyssaGriffinand also BeMyAficionado use Disqus on their website to increase engagement. It is serving me really good and I’m sure it must be serving them really good as well.

Disqus is a well-known comment service provider across the globe. It is a 3rd party service which requires you to register your website with them first. After registering your website with Disqus, a publisher id is generated. All you need to do is copy and paste their generated code into your website.

Disqus Admin Panel

You also get a Disqus backend admin panel from where you can manage and moderate all the comments and discussions made on your website/blog. Filter out the comments based on the filter. You can provide your own set of Spam Filters or you can use disqus’s default filter to filter out the spam comments for you. Disqus really does a good job in filtering out spam comments from the real ones. It saves you time and efforts to approve quality comments on your website.

Here’s is the screenshot of Disqus admin panel.

On the left side, you have all the configuration settings and tools that you will use to manage comments. You can very easily spam out the comments from actual one with just a click of a button. You can also ban the user from commenting in future just with a single click. Disqus also comes with a built-in Analytics system just for your comments (how great is that). With the help of analytics feature, you can track for patterns and blogs that get the maximum comments and make use of that in your future posts.

I remember one incident where my website was attacked by a spammer. Although, he was not able to publish its comments to my website he sure was filling my inbox very fast. I had to ban that user and for that, I had to log in to my server, find the commenter IP Address and ban it from posting any more comments. It was a hassle. With Disqus you get to do all this with a single click of a button.

One Click Installation

This plugin simply asks for your Disqus ID and set-up the entire comment system with just a click of a button. It is a one-click installation process that replaces your existing WordPress comment system with Disqus. Disqus does not take much time to setup and gives an out-of-box feature rich commenting system. And as I said you can also moderate the comments from admin panel in multiple ways before publishing it.

Features

• Syncs comments automatically to WordPress for backup and flexibility if you ever decide to switch to a different platform
• Loads asynchronously with advanced caching so that Disqus doesnt affect your sites performance
• Monetization options to grow revenue
• Export comments to WordPress-compatible XML to backup or migrate to another system
• Analytics dashboard for measuring overall engagement on your site
• Mobile responsive design

The Best Part – All of this Comes Free Of Cost.

If you are looking to build a community with active discussion then this plugin is this the best for your needs.

#15. Jetpack’s Comment System

Jetpack’s Comment System comes inbuilt with the Jetpack plugin. You can enable the comments by switching on the feature from the jetpack’s admin dashboard. This comment system (like Disqus) replaces the existing WordPress Comment system with itself.

Flexible Design and Feel

You can get more flexible with the overall design and feel of the comment system. In fact, you can design it any way you want. Simply overwriting the existing design of the comments. Here’s a snippet of Jetpack Comment System from my another website.

Spam Filtering

Jetpack uses Akismet to filter out spam comments from the real ones. Akismet is a well-known spam filtering plugin that is equally good as Disqus spam filtering and offers a great way to moderate comments before publishing it to your website.

Features

You do not get a lot of fancy features with this commenting system but it does serve the job of a good commenting. Many publishers prefer Jetpack comment system because of its ease and simplicity.

• Simple and Easy for commenters
• Option to log in and comment with their social account.
• Spam Moderation with Akismet
• Option to subscribe future comments via email.
• One Click Installation

If you are looking for a decent comments system then Jetpack is the best thing you can get for free. I really love this system because of its look, feel and simplicity and would never want it to change that. Although, if you are looking for an active community and discussion then Disqus would be a better choice.

Lead Magnets

I don’t know whether you have heard this term before or not. I first heard this term after a month of blogging so it is totally okay to not know it in the start. Lead magnets are is just another name for a bribe.

A lead magnet is an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information.In your case, you would ask for their email address in exchange for something valuable that would benefit them. There are many ways bloggers create lead magnets to grow their email list. Some of the popular ways of doing it are listed in the following article. Your primary job is to grow your subscribers because that is your ultimate trophy.

I have a few plugins that can help you with the same.

#16. MailChimp Subscription for WordPress

MailChimp is a newsletter subscription service which helps you to send out email campaigns to the list of subscribers. It offers various features like list segmentation. By List segmentation, you can segment a subset of people from the set and send more personalized emails to that segmented list of subscribers.

Another great feature of MailChimp is the Automation. You can create email marketing strategy to target newly registered user. Automation can help you to send a series of emails that would be sent to a newly registered subscriber. This can help you build a trust and a brand. All it takes is a one-time setup and after that, it will do everything for you. The automation feature is a really good deal with MailChimp service.

Features

The MailChimp plugin for WordPress can help you create subscription forms in minutes. This plugin can also be used in with many different form plugins. MailChimp seamlessly integrates with:

• Default WordPress Comment Form
• Default WordPress Registration Form
• Contact Form 7
• WooCommerce
• Gravity Forms
• Ninja Forms 3
• WPForms
• BuddyPress
• MemberPress
• Events Manager
• Easy Digital Downloads

Here is a wonderful video that explains it all.

You can also export your subscriber’s list in case you want to port to some other service. It is just a click of a button away. The weekly newsletter system could be made with the help of your WordPress blog RSS Feeds. MailChimp will automatically take the first 5 blog post from your RSS feed and send a weekly newsletter to your audience. This will definitely increase your website traffic and help you to build a loyal reader base.

• How to Embed MailChimp form on Your Website for Google PageSpeed Insight Score

If you are looking for a free solution to build your subscribers list then look no further. MailChimp is there to do this job for you.

#17. Jetpack Subscription

As you already know that JetPack offers tons of functionality to your website. Email subscription service is one of them. JetPack allows your website visitors to register themselves for the weekly newsletter through their subscription form that you can find in the widget area of your WordPress website.

JetPack subscription is 100% okay if yourmain objective is to build a subscriber’s list and send them weekly newsletters and new blog post updates. It really does a great job with that. But, if your objective is to deliver personalized content to a group of people trying to make a sale then JetPack is not what you would want in the first place.

With JetPack subscription you cannot send a targetted email campaigns or set autoresponders per say. That is why many bloggers start with JetPack Subscription and then later move to something serious that could offer them advance email campaign features.

JetPack is perfectly safe and a good option if you are just starting with your blog. It will definitely take away all the hassle of maintaining an email list and sending weekly newsletters to your subscribers. This would definitely help you to concentrate on much more important stuff in the beginning that is producing great content and pay attention towards marketing your blog posts to the right audience.

Utility Plugins to Help Create Better Content

#18. Pretty Links

By far the best plugin I have forcreating quick and custom links to products and pages that I use very frequently. The main purpose of Pretty Link is to quickly create customize links to products or pages that you would most likely be sharing with the world.

Just imagine that you are an affiliate of some XYZ product. Now, you know that this product is great and will help others to solve their problems. You start out yelling at people to buy this product from your unique referral link. You would share your unique link all over the place. On top of that, your link would not be readable because unique links often times contain jibberish text which is hard to remember but easily recognizable as affiliate links. This could take away your trust and authenticity from reader’s mind. Pretty Links comes in to rescue.

• How to Start with Amazon Affiliate Program

With Pretty Links, you can create a custom link to your website domain that would point to that unique affiliate link. For example, the affiliate link URL looks something like www.example.com/jhweshdflsuthat is hard to remember. You could create a custom link (say, www.yourwebsite.com/recommends/XYZ/) that would redirect the landing user to the affiliate link. This way you will not expose the actual affiliate link of the product but share your website’s link with everyone and everywhere. This way you will make trust, brand and people will see your website’s URL which would make them familiar with your website even more. It is a win-win situation.

Features

• Gives you the ability to create clean, simple URLs on your website that redirect to any other URL (allows for 301, 302, and 307 redirects only)
• Generates random 3-4 character slugs for your URL or allows you to name a custom slug for your URL
• Tracks the Number of Clicks per link and unique Clicks per link
• Provides a reporting interface where you can see a configurable chart of clicks per day. This report can be filtered by the specific link clicked, date range, and/or unique clicks.
• Download hit details in CSV format
• Intuitive Javascript / AJAX Admin User Interface
• Pass custom parameters to your scripts through pretty link and still have full tracking ability
• Enables you to send your pretty links via Email directly from your WordPress admin
• Select Temporary (302 or 307) or Permanent (301) redirection for your pretty links
• Cookie based system for tracking visitor activity across clicks
• Organize Links into Groups
• Create nofollow/noindex links
• Turn tracking on / off on each link
• Pretty Links Bookmarklet

This plugin is really amazing and useful to create short links with your website’s domain and monitor how your links are performing for you. This is a must-have plugin for you if you are into affiliate marketing. Therefore, you must have it in your plugins repository.

#19. Amazon Associate Link Builder

This plugin is the odd one on my list of 25 WordPress Plugins because it is not necessarily required by every blogger. I have still included this plugin here because I saw many blogs which are affiliated with Amazon in one way or the other. Well, this plugin is for those who are affiliated with Amazon and has registered themselves for Amazon Product API.

With the help of this Amazon Associate Link Builder Plugin, you can include the products link directly from your WordPress editor. You will no longer have to leave your writing zone or momentum to search for a product link. On top of that, you can provide custom CSS for the products that appear in your blog posts. This, in turn, makes it more friendly to your website and your audience will love it.

I have been using this plugin for more than 3 months now and I’m really happy with it. Especially the custom CSS feature is amazing. I get full control over the look and feel of the product link and image.

Finally, the most important part, if you want to become Amazon Associate then I have written a comprehensive guide that you can follow in the link below… :p

• How to become an Amazon Associate- A complete guide with images

Note Point

This plugin is currently in Beta Form. So if you are using this plugin then you must take the complete responsibility for it. Therefore, every update has the potential to break your website. Hence, I would suggest you not to update it as soon as it comes with theupdate. Wait and watch the response. Once everything looks good to you then proceed with the update. This plugin hadbroken my website once and then I had touninstall the plugin manually to bring my website back to normal.

#20. Better Click-To-Tweet Plugin

How many times have you felt the need for more social shares?

I’m sure your answer would be every time.

This is the same exact feeling I have whenever I hit on that publish button. I want more and more people to read my blog post and share it with their own circles. But, it is a difficult job to make people share your post. Often times your post is not up to their expectations and other times they simply do not see the share button when they want to. Better Click to Tweet plugin has helped me to increase social share by almost 5 percent.

What does it do?

This little plugin helps you to insert tweet buttons with text on your blog post so that people can directly click on that link to quickly tweet it on the twitter. This not only helps you to increase your social shares but also helps the person to tweet something useful and interesting on their profile which others can read. Hence this is the most important plugin that could be used to increase your social shares.

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The plugin is fairly easy to use and it is always there where you can find it – Top of your WordPress Editor.

Features

• Fully Customizable if you the CSS.
• Easilyremove the via
• Selectivelyremove the URLfrom the resulting Tweet
• For the SEO-conscious:make links nofollow.

Therefore, I would strongly recommend this plugin to every new blogger from day one. It could really make a difference in your social presence and shares.

Let me know if you find it useful in the comments section below.

Increase Social Share Plugins

#21. Highlight And Share

Have you ever copy-pasted a piece of text from some blog or website because you really liked it and wanted to share with someone?

Well, I’m sure you have and this plugin will convert similar users into a full-fledged social share.

How does it work?

The code resides at the client’s browser (javascript). As soon as the user selects some text from your blog, this script immediately provides him with different options to share on multiple social networks. Check out the image below,

By installing Highlight and Share plugin, you are giving your users a chance to share your content directly on their social media page or via email. This would result in an increase traffic and social shares.

Features

• Enable or disable on main content and excerpts.
• Also, Enable or disable Facebook sharing or Twitter sharing.
• Customize the Twitter username used.
• Advanced: Override which content is selectable (using jQuery class notation without the dots).

Althoughthis plugin does not have a lot of features to entice somebody, it definitely does its job in style for which it was created. I have seen a measurable increase in my social shares from the time I installed this plugin. I would greatly encourage every blogger to use this plugin on their blog from day one. You never know which words written by you would be shared all over the place so always be prepared to turn that into a social share.

#22. Jetpack Social Sharing on Post Publish

JetPack also makes a mark when it comes to sharing your content with your social circle.

What happens when you click on that publish button after writing a fruitful content?

By default, only your blog post gets published and could be seen on your website. But, what if you want to intimate other people in your social circle about your new post. You will manually have to copy the link to the new post and publish it on your social media page or profile. It is a very tiring job especially when the content of that share is going to be the same almost everytime.

JetPack Sharing on Post Publish feature provides a way to automate that process for you. You just have to switch it on and all your social accounts. Now, when you hit the publish button, Jetpack shares the link and excerpt from your post to all the connected social platforms. This saves your time, efforts and ultimately money. People will be intimated about your new post from the second it was first published. This way you will generate early traffic from your social media following until your post is indexed by Google in SERP.

#23. Social Sharing Buttons by AddThis Team

Social Sharing buttons are like the icing on the cake. You have written an excellent content on your website, you are receiving constant visitors on that post but somehow your social shares are not increasing. This is what happened in my experiment without social share buttons. I saw a 15% decline in the total shares on my website in 3 months time. This is a drastic decline and now I’m going to add these back again and measure the increase.

AddThis team is doing an excellent job with their share buttons. They don’t just provide share buttons but also gives an advanced analytics of the total shares and visit to your blog posts. AddThis also offers side recommendation which you can see on The New York Times website. A study shows that side post suggestions can help you increase your traffic by 12% and that is a good number.

AddThis Admin Dashboard

To add AddThis share buttons to your website, you will first have to register yourself with them. You can visitaddthis.com to register and submit your website. Once you have submitted your website to them, you will get a small code snippet with your unique website’s id. This code is all you need. Simply copy and paste this code into your website’s footer area. That is all. Now, you can control your entire share buttons and their behaviour from AddThis admin dashboard.

The Plugin Way

Do you want an automated way to add share buttons without copy-pasting the code by yourself?

Simply install AddThis plugin to your WordPress website. By default, the script will be added to your footer section which is the recommended way of adding JavaScript to your website. Now reload your website’s homepage and you will start seeing the AddThis share buttons as per your configurations made from AddThis dashboard.

Contact Forms

#24. Contact Form 7

Our list is incomplete without mentioning our very favourite and very old and evergreen Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin. It has been downloaded more than 5 million times from the day it was first created. This plugin is so awesome that from the moment I have started using this plugin, I have never looked anywhere else. It has got everything to offer for free. The only thing that could stop you from using it is its UI part.

The UI part of this plugin is not very friendly. So if you are in a hurry and you want to create a beautiful looking form for your website, well, you cannot do that with this plugin. Sure you can create an average looking form very quickly but to style it you need some CSS skills. Check out the contact form 7 editor section,

There is no limit to using this plugin the only backside is that you will have to design the form by yourself. If you are okay with that then this plugin will become your favourite. It also offers AJAX form submitting combined with Captcha verification (if you are concerned about SPAM emails). This plugin is also compatible with almost every other plugin in your plugin repository.

Watch the plugin in action on my website’s contact page.

My Opinion

Contact Form 7 has been here for so long that it has a huge number of tutorials available on the internet. It also provides a great help through its documentation and support and community. You can totally rely on this plugin for your contact form needs… On top of that, it comes for free and it will always be.

This plugin has always stood out in comparison to other plugins out there in WordPress plugin repository. Therefore, if you are okay to design the form for your website on your own then Contact Form 7 will work wonders for you.

Try it for yourself and let me know your verdict.

#25. WPForms Lite

This is a really well-coded plugin for Contact Forms in the WordPress plugin repository. This plugin is used by WPBeginners on their website which means you can trust this plugin to handle heavy lifting on your WordPress website. Contact form does play an important role in your business. After allit is the contact form through which your potential clients contact you.

WPForms offers an easy drag and drop widget to quickly create your form and embed it anywhere you want. Watch this video to get a feel of it.

You can give a try to this lite version of WPForms which is 100% free and offers basic functionality. Its pro-version offers a lot many features to help you with almost every requirement. With this plugin, you wouldn’t have to hire any developer to create a contact form for your website.

Conclusion

I compiled this list of 25 WordPress Plugins for all the bloggers who have just become the part of the blogging community. I hope that this post will help you solve most of your common problems which you might not know at this stage of your blogging career but soon will help you as you gain more knowledge and skills.

Please tell me if you think I missed something crucial. I would be more than happy to add it to the list. Tweet and tell the world about it.

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