25 Essential WordPress Blog Plugins You Need to Get Right Now

When you have so many WordPress plugins displayed in front of you, how do you choose the best?

When you choose the right WordPress plugins for your blog, they'll aid you to work smarter and faster, hence making your blogging experience more productive.

On the other hand, WordPress plugins can also hurt your blog. How?

Well, for a plugin to work, it needs resources. Meaning that with every blog plugin you enable, you slow down your blog's speed by a bit. Add too many of them and your blog will run slower than a turtle on a slippery slope.

So aim to use a maximum of 10 WordPress blog plugins, only the ones you need most considering your blogging goals.

We curated a list of the top blog plugins for WordPress out there. You'll find that most of them are free WordPress plugins but you'll also find a couple of premium options. If you're just starting out blogging, you might not find the idea of investing exciting, I know. But as your blog grows, you'll see that investing in the right blogging tools and plugins is the best way to make use of your money.

One of the best WordPress plugins to make it easy for readers to share your blog posts is Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons.

With this plugin, you get 16 social media icons designs you can choose from. Also, you have the liberty to place the social share buttons anywhere on your blog. You can opt to place them at the beginning of your blog post, at the bottom, or pin them as floating or sticky social share buttons.

Floating social buttons are very popular nowadays because they are effective. Your readers can hit the share button wherever they are on the page, maximizing your blog posts' social shares.

Pricing: Free

Another WordPress plugin for social shares that does an amazing job is Shareaholic.

It has all the right features social sharing buttons need. You can place them at the top of your blog posts, at the bottom, within the content, pop-ups, floating – everything.

One bonus is you can add share buttons to the images within your posts. Do I have to mention that having a Pin it button on your image will increase the number of Shares you'll get on Pinterest?

Also, from the same WordPress blog plugin, you can keep your readers longer on your blog by giving them more content to read next. Having a related content section at the end of your posts is a powerful blogging tip. With this plugin, you can choose the look of the section from a couple of already designed themes or you can create your own. You can also customize the content it's displaying by tags, author, and more.

Pricing: Free

One of the must-have plugins for WordPress is the Click to Tweet plugin developed by CoSchedule.

If you want to increase the number of tweets you get on your blog posts, this is the best way to do it. By using this plugin, you can add shareable quotes within your posts.

Pricing: Free

Your readers are not the only ones sharing your content across social media. You also have to keep on sharing your posts on social media profiles so you get more eyeballs on your content.

With the Revive Old Post WordPress blog plugin, you'll automate the process of keeping your old posts alive on Facebook and Twitter. You can set up how many posts you want sharing, the time between posts, you can exclude specific posts, and much more.

With the premium version of the plugin, you get more features like auto-sharing posts when published, sharing on multiple social media accounts, or creating custom post types.

Pricing: Free / Premium version

Allowing blog commenting on your blog is a good idea. Not only you get feedback on your blog content so you know what to improve. Receiving comments on your blog posts also signals Google that your content is engaging to your audience, hence boosting up your Google rankings.

One of the simplest and most effective WordPress plugin for blog comments is Disqus.

This plugin makes it easy to moderate the comments you receive on your blog so you can avoid spammers and trolls. It has a feature that automatically adapts the look of the commenting section to match your blog, it's supported on any device, and your readers can comment with images, gifs, and videos.

Another great feature of this blog plugin is that readers can log in with their social profiles like Facebook and Twitter.

Pricing: Free

An easy way to get rid of spam blog comments without having to do a thing yourself is by using the Askimet WordPress blog plugin.

This plugin automatically pushes comments into the spam inbox if it catches something suspicious. You can review those comments yourself later on.

Having a plugin to help avoid spamming is on the list of must-have plugins of WordPress as manually moderating comments yourself in real time is a time-consuming task. And as you'll see, with the growth of your blog, spam comments asking for attention will pile up.

Pricing: Free

Ever went to a blog and noticed a bar in the upper side of the blog asking for your email or showcasing a cool PDF? Well, I bet you've seen it a lot because that's one of the best ways to get more blog subscribers. It's also an easy way of A/B testing different call to actions.

You can easily get the bar on your own blog by using this blog plugin for WordPress called HelloBar.

All you have to do to get this amazing plugin is to register for an account on the HelloBar website, install the plugin via WordPress, and copy paste a code. You're good to go in a matter of minutes.

Pricing: Free

At its core, SumoMe is a plugin developed for increasing one's subscriber's list. You can integrate it with all major email services, create forms, pop-ups, push notifications, welcome mats, and much more.

Still, it goes beyond collecting email lists. You can also enable social shares buttons on your images and readers can directly share the text they highlight in your blog posts.

Pricing: Free

One of the best WordPress plugin for blog subscription is Gravity Forms. Even though it is a premium plugin, it's worth the investment.

You can quickly and easily create forms to embed on your blog with the aid of the built-in tools. They have a variety of form fields you can choose from, allowing you to create the right forms for your reader's needs.

If you'd like to give this plugin a try before you commit to the investment, you can sign up for a free demo on their website.

Pricing: $59 / Year

Ranking your blog posts high in the search engines is key for bringing more traffic to your blog.

Wherever you're looking for blogging tips, you'll see one of the most important SEO blog tips is to use an SEO WordPress blog plugin. WordPress SEO by Yoast is the best in the game. It will guide you through all the checkmarks you need to hit in order for your blog posts to be properly optimized for Google.

Besides making it easy to take care of the technical aspects of SEO like setting the XML Sitemaps, setting canonical URLs, templating the title and meta description for consistency, WordPress SEO by Yoast also guides you with your content SEO. This WordPress plugin analyzes the content and tells you if you used enough keywords, if you have keywords in all the right places, highlights repetitions and passive voice, and more.

One powerful aspect of this tool is the box displayed beneath the blog post. It lets you add your own meta description and SEO title and shows you how they will display on the Google results page.

Pricing: Free (There's also a premium version for more features)

Links are one of the most important aspects of high ranking in search. And taking care of them can be a daunting task.

If you've been blogging for a while, you probably got tons of links on your blog. And a lot of them might not be up to date anymore, or guest bloggers might've added links you don't approve. Imagine going to each post and every link, manually, yourself. It's time-consuming and frustrating.

This WordPress blog plugin called LinkPatrol scans all your blog and gives you reports containing all the links sorted by a variety of aspects like the domain, the anchor text, or the author who posted them. From there, it's easy to nofollow the links you want without having to go through each post individually.

If you're just starting out blogging, the investment might not worth it yet. But you should consider this plugin if you already have a significant number of posts up.

Pricing: $50 one time fee

This is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs and websites and it's developed by WordPress itself. Jetpack is an all in one plugin containing tools for design and customization, marketing and security.

With this blog plugin, you'll get share buttons, contact forms, related posts, blog themes, customization tools, SEO optimization, and a lot more.

The most useful feature of the Jetpack plugin is its built-in analytics report. It makes it easier for you to check your blog's stats directly from your WordPress dashboard without having to open up Google Analytics each time.

Pricing: Free

Another way to check your blog stats directly in WordPress without opening another tab for the Analytics is by using the plugins developed by MonsterInsights – the Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin.

Pricing: Free

Having a well-performing blog is essential for search engine rankings and for keeping visitors on your blog.

One of the best WordPress blog plugins to enhance your blog's performance is W3 Total Cache. Unlike other cache plugins, this one takes care of more aspects than just caching. It reduces the CPU usage and bandwidth consumption and doesn't require any modification to your blog theme.

Pricing: Free

Hummingbird is an amazing WordPress blog plugin to boost your blog's performance.

This plugin scans your blog and finds any files that are slowing down your blog. You will receive tips on what you have to fix in order to improve your blog's speed. For quick optimizations, the plugin even has a one-click button to get to fix the issues.

Pricing: Free

Images take a lot of space on a blog and can cause the page speed to slow down considerably. That's why it's crucial for you to optimize all the images you upload on the WordPress blog before you add them to your posts.

One of the best plugins for WordPress is this free, powerful plugin for image optimization called WP Smush.

This plugin resizes, optimizes, and compresses all your images before you add them to your media library. The images won't lose their quality and you don't have to do a thing yourself.

Pricing: Free

Once you start adding posts to your blog, the database will start to store data. And it can get clogged up quicker than you might think. For example, each time you edit a blog post, a revision of that post is saved. Meaning that if you edited a post 10 times, you'll have 10 revisions saved making nothing but occupying space and affecting the performance of your blog.

There is a lot of unnecessary data stored on your blog like spam comments, pingbacks, expired transient options, trackbacks. And they won't get removed by themselves.

Here comes into place this free WordPress plugin called WP Optimized.

This plugin runs automatic clean-ups, removes all unnecessary data, and also keeps the tables in MySQL optimized.

Pricing: Free (They also have a premium option with additional features)

Having your data backed up is not something to overlook. It's quite easy to mess up the code on your blog by mistake and wake up with all your work gone. This can't happen when you have all your data backed up somewhere.

As WordPress doesn't have a built-in backup feature, you need to take care of backing up your blog yourself. You can either opt to back up your data with your blog hosting provider, or you can use a WordPress plugin designed for this task.

One of the best free WordPress blog plugins for backing up data is the UpdraftPlus plugin.

With the free version, you can backup your files and database directly into Google Drive, Dropbox, and more. It also allows you to set up automatic backup schedules.

Pricing: Free

As we're talking about the security of your blog data, you might have more trust in a premium WordPress plugin for this task.

BackUpBuddy does a great job at securing your data and it's worth each penny. This plugin will backup everything that's on your blog: all the files, the media library, the themes, plugins, and much more. It actually stores more data that most of the other related plugins.

You can schedule when the plugin should automatically run a backup. So if something goes wrong, you can restore your blog quickly from the plugin.

Pricing: $80 / Year

This is one of the blog plugins for WordPress that should be on your list because it will make writing and editing your blog posts in WordPress way easier.

With this plugin, you can configure the buttons shown in the Visual Editor and enable hidden buttons. This will give you more styling options and additional features.

Moreover, this plugin will fix some of the problems you may face when working in WordPress. Do you know that feeling when you work in the text editor, add all the tags necessary, only to switch back to the visual editor and find your code was removed? Rage is that feeling. Fortunately, TinyMCE has a setting that will disable the automatic removal of tags.

Pricing: Free

If you're not careful when deleting blog posts or changing URLs, you can lose lots of valuable traffic to your blog. Redirection is the most popular WordPress blogging plugin to take care of redirections on your blog.

This plugin keeps track of the 404 errors on your blog so you know when something needs fixing. You can manage the redirects quickly without needing prior tech knowledge.

Pricing: Free

Keeping track of your scheduled blog posts is not always an easy task. Of course, there are many ways in each you can keep an editorial calendar. Google Calendar, Slack, Google Docs, are just a couple of efficient ways.

But the easiest way to keep your blog posts organized is the Editorial Calendar WordPress blog plugin.

You can see a layout of all the posts that will be published and their dates, you can easily change your post dates by drag and dropping, manage your drafts, and many more.

Pricing: Free

You do have a contact page on your blog, don't you? If not, you should get to it and give your visitors a way to get in contact with you or else you'll lose on opportunities to connect with your readers and with fellow bloggers.

A great way to create a nice contact page is to add a contact form that makes it easier for readers to send you a message directly on the page. You can quickly do this by using the Contact Form 7 plugin.

Pricing: Free

If you have more authors on your blog or publish guest posts, you might want to showcase the author of each post so people know who wrote each piece.

With the Starbox plugin, you can add an author box at the top or the bottom of your blog post by choosing one of the built themes. You'll have the box set up ready in minutes and there's no coding required.

Pricing: Free

If you're looking for a free WordPress blog plugin to create your own content layout, look no more. With Page Builder by SiteOrigin, you can build grid-based page content responsive on any device.

With this plugin, you don't have to worry about learning how to code as it has a drag and drop interface. You can see every change you make in real time with the live editor.

It integrates with any WordPress theme so you can keep your content page the same even if you decide to change the theme. It also integrates the WordPress widgets and a couple of plugins.

Pricing: Free

Taking advantage of the huge library of blog logins WordPress has to offer is important. Plugins can make your blogging experience easier and more productive when you choose the right ones to use and don't abuse them.

So what is your favorite WordPress blog plugin of them all?

Or do you use other WordPress blog plugins worth mentioning in your list? If so, we'll be happy to hear your ideas. You can get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter.