Top 16 Must Have wordpress plugins list to Improve Your Website

Do you have any experience with the WordPress blogging platform? If that’s the case, this article is for you. It’s a natural question for any WordPress user to ask after installing WordPress on their web server. This article discusses the must have WordPress plugins to smoothen your blogging journey.

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that enables you to create a website from scratch or to improve an existing website. As the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress is used by millions of people every day.

There are many plugins available for WordPress, but not all of them are necessary for every website. To help you find the plugins that are essential for your site, and to save you time when installing them, we have put together a list of the 16 Must Have WordPress Plugins.

Which plugins should you install on your blog? Choosing suitable WordPress plugins from among the thousands of plugins available in the WordPress plugin repository is, of course, challenging.

Don’t worry; in this article, I’ve included a few must-have WordPress plugins, as well as my favorite plugins for installation on new WordPress sites. If you’ve just started a new blog, you’ll need to learn to use the WordPress dashboard to install plugins.

I’ll be modifying these lists regularly based on blog demand, and I’ll also be updating this list. Save this website and come back in a month to see if there are any new plugin lists.

These have to have WordPress plugins that aren’t independent of the rest of the site. Most of these are ready-to-use from third-party service providers and the free WordPress plugin directory.

Starting a blog and choosing the right plugins for your website takes a lot of time, and you should check it once you’ve installed WordPress on your new website. What plugins should you use to optimize your site based on your theme and niche properly?

What is a WordPress plugin?

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A WordPress plugin is an additional code that allows users to have other features on the website that do not align with the theme.

For example, if you were using a theme and if it did not have social sharing buttons, You can use a plugin for social sharing buttons to implement them on your website. Hence, a plugin is helpful to add additional features to your theme.

There are more than 50,000 (fifty thousand) free WordPress plugins on WP.

How will these plugin lists be helpful to you?

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Various plugins will help you build additional features required for the website for every niche or theme.

A few of the sites need to be ranked in search engines. For this, you have to use SEO plugins.

The list below is a well-studied must have WordPress plugins list, which will help you build your website without having to spend much time searching for the right plugin for the proper purpose.

Plugins help you optimize your search engine site, protect it against spammers, and improve the user experience.

Must Have WordPress Plugins for New Blogs

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After eight years of practical usage of numerous WordPress plugins, I updated my blog with a functional and up-to-date plugin. After installing a new WordPress installation, the following is a list of my must-have WordPress plugins.

Let us see one by one

1. WP Rocket: Best Caching Plugin

Another essential feature for blogs to rank first on Google is their loading speed. You can achieve this speed optimization by caching on mobile devices and tablets. WP Rocket takes care of CSS and JavaScript file optimizations as well.

It aids in the reduction of HTML size by reducing white spaces and improves website loading speed. With WP Rocket, you can disable the “lazy load” plugin, a built-in function of the WP Rocket plugin that optimizes pictures and speeds up website loading.

Exclude URLs from the WP Rocket dashboard if you don’t want them to be cached. You can also use WP Rocket to integrate your CloudFlare and Varnish accounts for faster page loads.

Here is my complete review of WP Rocket settings and review to find out more details about this plugin.

Features of WP Rocket:

• Easy to set up
• Ultra-fast cache loading time
• Cache Preloading
• Sitemap Preloading
• GZip Compression
• Database Optimization
• Google Font Optimization
• Remove Query String from Static Resources
• In-built Lazy loading feature
• Cloudflare integration compatibility
• DNA Prefetching
• Developer Friendly

2. Rank Math SEO – Best SEO Plugin

The most excellent alternative to the Yoast SEO plugin is Rank Math SEO. Rank Math is the most comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin, providing all of the features and tools you’ll need to boost your on-page SEO.

There is no need to install additional sitemap building plugins because it includes an integrated feature. Search engine optimization (SEO) aids in increasing the number of visitors to your website.

An SEO plugin is required for websites to have good SEO and rank #1 in Google. By optimizing any keyword, the plugin assists you in doing SEO on your behalf.

It recommends structuring keywords in your content and optimizing your images, external links, and internal links to obtain good SEO. A 404 monitor is also included in the rank math plugin, which checks for broken links.

It also consists of a directions feature, allowing 404 errors to be redirected to other vital pages. In this manner, the RankMath SEO plugin will assist you in avoiding two plugins, the Broken Links Checker and the Redirection plugin. The best WordPress SEO plugins are Rank Math and Yoast SEO.

WordPress sitemaps make it easier for search engine crawlers to find the necessary pages and posts of your WordPress site and retrieve them more efficiently

To find out more about this plugin, you can read my Rank Math SEO Plugin settings and review from my article library. The latest version of the Rank Math SEO is 1.0.68.

Features:

• It is light-weight. It’s lightweight, and it’s fully optimized for speed.
• Simple Modular Interface Design: Simple User-Friendly Interface SEO Analysis in Depth
• Settings for advanced SEO
• Easy Setup with Rich Snippets
• 404: Creating an XML Sitemap for Monitoring
• Redirection
• Social Media Sharing created the feature.
• Simple text and. htaccess editor for schema configuration

One of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins is Yoast SEO. It’s one of the most popular WordPress plugins, making it simple to optimize your pages and posts for better search engine rankings. Yoast SEO’s base version is entirely free, and a premium edition with additional capabilities is also available. Yoast SEO also examines your material for readability and keywords, allowing you to strike a balance between high-quality content and SEO.

3. UpdraftPlus – Backup and Restore Plugin

Updraft Plus and backup and restore features are essential for any website to ensure that your data is not lost. With Updraft Plus, you can store your data on any drive, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or one drive.

UpdraftPlus allows you to save your backups to Google Drive with a single click at any time. If you wish to move your blog or site from one server to another, you may use UpdraftPlus to back up all of the data on the old server, then export the entire data set to the new server.

With UpgradePlus premium, you may get incremental backups, automatic backups before migration, and numerous storage destinations for your WordPress backups.

Features of UpdraftPlus:

• Quick restore (both file and database backups)
• Backup automatically on a repeating schedule
• Site duplicator/migrator: can copy sites and (with an add-on).
• Restores and migrates backup sets from other backup plugins (premium) (currently supported: BackWPUp, Backup WordPress, Simple Backup, WordPress Backup To Dropbox)
• Files and database backups can have separate schedules.
• Failed uploads are automatically resumed/retried.
• Large sites can be split into multiple archives.
• Select which files to backup (plugins, themes, content, other)
• Select which components of a backup to restore.
• Download backup archives directly from your WordPress dashboard.
• Full logging of the backup in Debug mode

4. Social Warfare – Social sharing Plugin

When users like your material, you want to encourage them to share it via their social network profiles and social sharing buttons. You can make it easier for people to share your material on social media.

The Social Warfare plugin also keeps track of the overall number of social shares on a given page and shows the figure next to the sharing buttons. There are free and paid versions of this plugin available.

For this blog, I’ve chosen to use the premium version. The free version is sufficient if you are a novice blogger. Choose the premium option if you want a social boost. This plugin provides attractively designed lightning-fast social share buttons. After switching from HTTP to HTTPS, it restored my old social share count.

After migrating my site from HTTP to HTTPS, it restored my old social share count. It’s a high-end feature.

Special features of Social Warfare:

• Attractive social sharing buttons
• No impact on page loading
• Easy to customize.
• Pinterest image sharing support
• Custom tweets support
• Sharable Quotes (Click-to-tweet)
• Supports Twitter tweet count
• Popular posts widget based on the social share
• 100% responsive
• Developer friendly
• great content protection
• Share count recovery

5. Pretty Links – To make Link shorten

When you display a link to another website page on your page, your user may not be interested in the connection. The lovely links will build a URL that will redirect to that URL based on your website’s name.

The attractive links plugin will also assist in creating no-follow URLs, which will boost your link SEO flow.

6. Thirsty Affiliate Plugin – To make Short links

Thirsty Affiliate is one of the top Pretty Links plugin options. It is a must-have plugin if you use your blog to promote affiliate items, and I’m using the free version right now. You must upgrade from free to premium if you require extra capabilities such as automatic keyword linking, sophisticated statistic reports, and affiliate link import/export.

Example:

I am promoting A2Hosting in my blog, and the affiliate link looks like this,

a2hosting.com/?aid=a3096c28

After using this ThirstyAffilaite Plugin, I go this short and intelligent link.

wordpress.bloggingden.com/go/a2hosting/

Here is the plugin, cloaking affiliate links into smart and readable URLs.

Features of Thirsty Affiliates:

• Thanks to an in-built affiliate link shortening/cloaking script, it’s easy to track link statistics and reports.
• The tool for selecting advanced links (You can directly cloak the affiliate link from the WordPress editor.)
• You can turn on the No-follow option. 
• Standard backup solutions are fully compatible. 
• You can add graphics, images, and banners to affiliate links.

7. Really Simple SSL

SSL is a security feature that allows your website’s URL to be HTTPS instead of HTTP. The hosting facility provides the SSL or enables it by integrating Cloudflare into your account.

However, by downloading the Simple SSL plugin, you may enable HTTPS on your website with a single click. As a result, instead of using Cloudflare SSL or the hosting SSL, you can use this straightforward SSL plugin. Most Web hosting companies offer free SSL certificates as part of their services.

Enabling the SSL function on the server-side to activate this plugin will take care of everything for you.

8. Google Analytics Integration for WordPress (GAinWP) 

Analytics is essential for tracking website traffic regularly. Your stats are automatically updated when you submit a sitemap to Google Search Console, which you can see in the Google Search Console dashboard.

By integrating the Google Analytics plugin on your website, we can view this Google Analytics in the Google search console dashboard on your website’s dashboard. In your dashboard screen, you can see real-time Google Analytics reports:

• Real-time number of visitors
• Real-time acquisition channels
• Real-time traffic sources details

With this plugin, you can also see your website’s Real-time traffic from the WordPress dashboard directly.

9. Easy Table of Contents – To create sitelinks

Assume you want to create a table content block similar to Wikipedia. It’s a helpful plugin for getting the table of contents for each blog post.

This table of content box code can be written for your blog if you know HTML coding, but it is difficult for newcomers. It will help you create a table of contents box for each of your blog’s articles.

10. TablePress – to create tables

You can edit table data from their spreadsheet-like interface. It comes with table sorting, pagination, and filtering-like features.

You can import the readymade excel sheets from your PC.

You can export existing data from your blog.

11. WP Table Builder – drag and drop Table creator

WP Table Builder is a mobile-friendly WordPress plugin. The table is then customized to fit the screen size of the device.

This plugin is ideal if you’re writing product reviews that include pricing or comparison tables.

It is available in two versions: a free and a premium version. The free version has a limited set of features. Upgrade to the premium version if you want more customization options, such as prebuilt templates.

Features of WP Table Builder

• Five advanced elements
• Prebuilt templates
• Use own tables as the template
• Full column/row duplication
• Drag & drop sorting/ordering
• Tooltips for list items
• Column/row separation
• Different border colours
• Padding & margin settings
• Set Empty Cells  

12. Elementor Page Builder

It comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop feature. Using this plugin, you can create an attractive home page, landing pages, lead generation pages, and more.

Compared with other page builders, it is also available in Free and Premium versions. For newcomers, the free version is enough.

But the premium version is more worthwhile than the free version. I am using the Elementor premium plugin on this blog. Awesome Plugin.

I tried several four-page builders on my blog to test them according to my requirements. I am impressed with those features, which do not affect page loading time.

The premium version has more features like quick support, tutorials, frequent updates, and security.

13. Cloudflare CDN – Security plugin

If you are using shared hosting or managed WordPress hosting, the bandwidth is limited. So you have to integrate your WordPress website with Cloudflare for better protection against dangerous SQL injection and identity theft.

If you use WP Rocket (Premium) or W3 Total Cache (Free) plugin, you can integrate the Cloudflare with this plugin. So you can stop using this plugin when you are using any one of these two caching plugins.

14. JetPack for WordPress – Powerpack plugin

It shows the all-time use of your website and detailed statistics for your website.

JetPack runs by integrating WordPress.com with your Jetpack account.

It also has a spam protection feature against comments and malicious login attempts, which Loginizer protects.

If your website is down, you will receive an email alert from Jetpack.

This Swiss knife plugin offers more than thirty options to protect your WordPress installation from hackers, bots, and other malware.

You can also upgrade your Jetpack account for security scanning and automatic backups, which come with the Jetpack version’s premium plan.

The Jetpack plugin improves your website’s speed and security, which is why it’s on our must-have WordPress plugins list.

15. Advanced ads – Ad Manager & AdSense Plugin

Another interesting feature with this plugin is that you can run an A/B test and hide/show the ads based on your category to make them visible in the proper places.

If you are running Adsense ads on your blog, this plugin is a perfect choice every time. The plugin comes with both free and premium versions.

The premium version comes with more features like selling direct ads, targeting ads by geolocation, placing ads within AMP pages, and helping you analyze the reports with their advanced reporting system.

Features of Advanced Ads:

• It injects the ads into the specified areas of your site.
• You can rotate ads to show different offers.
• You can schedule the ads with an expiry date.
• You can target ads to specific categories of people based on the logged-in status and user devices.

16. Akismet – AntiSpam Plugin

One downside of this plugin is that sometimes it skips spam trackbacks or comments or legit comments and lands in the spam folder. It happens most commonly due to past communication with an I.P or an email address. But you can constantly address this problem by examining your spam folder daily.

This plugin is trusted by millions of WordPress sites, big and small. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not.

Features of Akismet:

• Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
• Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
• URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
• Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
• A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

You can get the API key for Akismet by clicking here. This plugin is a great free option to reduce spam on your blog.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

The plugins on the list above are required for any WordPress blog or website.

Many of the must-have WordPress plugins are free, but they only allow you to use certain premium features.

You can purchase premium versions for better optimization of your websites.

In this blog, we have listed some of the best WordPress plugins to improve your blog experience. From Custom Fields to Social Sharing Buttons, these plugins will help you configure and customize your blog to perfection.

If you’re new to WordPress, or just want to make your blog look and feel better, make sure to grab and install these plugins! We hope you enjoyed this blog and find it helpful in improving your blog!

If you know of any other plugins that might be useful to users, please let us know about them in the comments section below.