Are you looking for the best WordPress plugins for blogs? Planning to start a blog and wondering which tools will help you grow your blog? If yes, then you’re on the right page.
Adding the right blog plugins can help you add numerous features and functionality to your blog, that too, without any coding. No matter if you’re a non-tech-savvy blogger, the WordPress blog plugins will provide you easy options to add all the features you need.
However, choosing the best WordPress blog plugins may be a challenging task. There are thousands of free and premium plugins to help bloggers with various blogging options. Beginners with no or little experience can get mixed up easily.
Therefore, to help you out, we’ve put together some of the best WordPress plugins for blogs. Below, you can find plugin descriptions, their features, and pricing as well.
How to Choose the Best Blog Plugins for WordPress?
Before jumping into the different WordPress plugins for blogs, you should consider some points that will help you choose the best WordPress blog plugins.
i) Features
Every niche of the blog requires a different set of features. For example, what you need for your personal blog, and what’s required for a tech blog may be different. So first, decide what you need on your toolbox.
You may need a simple, clean, and stylish blog layout with beautiful typography and image gallery options for a personal blog. But a tech blog requires more advanced options to present reviews, rating stars, tutorials, etc.
Even more, you may need eCommerce features if you want to make money online from your blog. And, affiliate marketing features if you want to earn commission by helping companies sell their products.
So, we suggest you make a list of features you’ll need to add to your blog. Then, you can start your search for the best plugins.
ii) Cost
WordPress offers you both free and premium plugins for blogs. Normally people would suggest using a free version if you’re a beginner. But that’s not so logical. What’s more important is whether the plugin has features you need or not.
If a free plugin includes all the features your blog needs, then there’s no need to buy a paid plugin. But if it doesn’t, then you should purchase the paid one offering the feature.
Similarly, you may be wondering how to manage the cost of all plugins if we’ve got a low budget? Don’t worry, there is another category of plugins called ‘freemium’. These are available both in free and premium versions, and free includes most of the fundamental features.
So, you can start with the free plan in the beginning, and later upgrade to a paid version once your blog grows. The good news is that most of the popular WordPress plugins are freemiums; download free from WordPress.org or buy paid versions from their own company sites.
iii) Support
Some plugins offer good support via text, emails, or even phone calls. Good support means that you can ask questions and queries, and it will be answered immediately.
Check support options available for every plugin you’ve enlisted. It’s important because you’ll need help from the plugin makers sometimes when customizing your blog. Install only the plugins with good customer support records.
List of 25 Best WordPress plugins for Blogs
1. Yoast SEO
Probably the best WordPress blog plugin for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Yoast SEO is a trusted and reputed plugin due to its amazing optimization features. Used by over 5 million websites online, it’s the #1 most used WordPress SEO plugin.
This plugin includes many features that help your blog articles rank higher in the search engine results. Also, it allows you to create search-engine-friendly URLs, add custom meta descriptions, and optimize your blog posts for certain keywords.
As search engines are widely popular, getting traffic from them is important for your blog’s overall success. The more you can bring visitors from search engines, the more sales and conversions will happen. Hence, this is an essential “must-have” plugin for WordPress blogs.
Features
- Checking of keywords in your blog articles
- Google preview of all your content
- Readability check for any errors
- Suggests internal linking
- 24/7 support for paid users.
Pricing
This plugin offers both free and premium options. The premium plan starts at $89( (ex VAT) for one site.
2. WPForms
WPForms is yet another best WordPress plugin for blogs. The plugin lets you easily create contact forms, subscription forms, surveys, payment forms, donation forms, etc. with a simple drag and drop form builder.
This contact form plugin is a popular one because more than 3 millions active websites use it. Similarly, you can also install this plugin and build a contact form on your blog. The form will help your blog visitors contact you with ease. Hence, that will enhance user interaction on your blog.
Features
- Easy drag and drop form builder
- Ready-made beautiful form templates
- Provides spam protection for your WordPress forms
- Easy to embed documents in pages, posts
- Compatible with email marketing services
- Integration with Mailchimp, PayPal, Stripe, etc.
Pricing
You can use this plugin with both free and paid version. For the premium version, the plan starts at $39-$299/per year.
3. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the popular WordPress backup and restore plugins. It lets you create backups of your blog and save it on remote storage locations like Google Drive, One Drive, etc. Installed on 2 million+ sites, it’s a popular plugin used by many bloggers, writers, and journalists to secure their content.
It can be a helpful plugin for your blog as it’ll completely backup all your WordPress files, blogs, posts, themes, and plugins. Additionally, you can quickly restore all the backups from the control panel and get hold of all your saved files in case of any data crash.
Features
- Backups up to 100GB files.
- It supports both automated and manual backups.
- Import from elsewhere via drag-and-drop option Compatible with WordPress multisite networks.
- Completed scheduled backup logs provided
Pricing
Similar to other WordPress plugins, this plugin also offers you free and premium plans. The premium plans start at $70-$399/per year.
4. Wordfence
If you’re looking for the best WordPress security plugins, Wordfence is the one. It’s the most popular security plugin with over 3 million active installs and 5 out of 5-star ratings.
No blog on the web is fully secure. Hackers and intruders are lurking around all the time trying to access the admin area of websites. Due to which, website security has been the biggest challenge for website owners. But, with this plugin, your WordPress blog will be protected and secured.
Mainly, it includes a malware scanner, an endpoint firewall, an updated list of malicious IP addresses, etc. to protect your blog. Hence, it’s an all-in-one best security plugin for WordPress blogs.
Features
- Country Blocking: Block the countries with a high rate of hackers
- Two-factor Authentication for WordPress login
- Live monitoring of traffic and visitors
- Password protection
- Repairs damaged files
Pricing
It’s a free security plugin. However, you can get the premium version with added features and the price starts from $99/per year.
5. WP Super Cache
One of the popular caching WordPress plugins for blogs is WP Super Cache. Using a cache plugin on your blog will reduce its loading time and speed it up. Not to mention, this plugin has over 1 million active installs and is a great alternative to WP Rocket, a premium WordPress caching plugin.
Also, this plugin will help your blog by improving its performance. It serves cache files in 3 ways, Expert, Simple, and WP-Cache caching. Expert is the fastest method, followed by Simple and WP-Cache caching.
Features
- Easy to set-up plugin
- Multiple caching methods
- Provides 24/7 support
- Garbage Collection option available for outdated cache
- Provides CDN services
Pricing
This plugin is available for free.
6. Akismet
If you want a WordPress plugin that helps blogs to deal with comment spamming, then Akismet is the right choice. It’s a popular spam filtering plugin that has over 5+ million installs.
This plugin will protect your blog from spam comments, links that are harmful to your website. Also, this anti-spam plugin will examine all the harmful content and prevent them from entering your website.
Features
- Status history is provided for all the comments.
- Integrates with plugins like Jetpack and Contact Form 7
- It directly blocks the worst spam comments.
- Approved comments are shown to users.
Pricing
It’s free for personal use (non-commercial sites). For commercial blogs, it’s a paid plugin. The pricing for it starts from $8-$41/per year.
If you’re a beginner and want a free anti-spam plugin, we recommend Antispam Bee, which works equally well and is free of cost.
7. Site Kit by Google
Site Kit by Google is an official WordPress plugin by Google to integrate its marketing tools like Google Analytics, search console, PageSpeed Insights, etc. in WordPress. You can use it to get insights about your blog visitors, its performance on Google’s results, and the overall traffic.
This plugin lets you easily connect your WordPress blog with Google Analytics, Search Console, and other 4 tools by Google. Moreover, with this plugin, you get direct access to your Analytics stats dashboard from your WordPress admin dashboard. Also, your blog will benefit from this plugin, as it’ll provide useful insights, help you improve your content, and make your site successful on the web.
Features
- Quick setup, easy to use Google Analytics with WordPress
- One plugin for using 6 Google Marketing Tools
- Official stats of your website provided on the dashboard
- Metrics for your entire site and individual posts
Pricing
This is free and can be used by anyone.
If you want an alternative for adding Google Analytics to WordPress, we would recommend using MonsterInsights. This plugin includes easy options for setting up advanced trackings. You can get this free. However, advanced features are available only in the paid version at $99/per year.
8. Easy Social Sharing
Easy Social Sharing is one of the best and must-have WordPress plugins for blogs. It helps your readers to share your content on social media. It lets you display social sharing buttons of 18 different popular social media networks.
This plugin is packed with unique features like social count, multiple layouts, custom colors as well as various designs. Hence, you can easily place it anywhere on your blog at your desired position.
Features
- Live preview of the sharing designed icons
- Six different layouts are available
- Floating social buttons offered
- Four icon layouts available
- Easy dashboard settings
Pricing
It’s a free WordPress plugin.
9. Jetpack
An all-in-one blog plugin for WordPress that includes a wide range of features to improve your site’s traffic and performance is JetPack. This plugin was created by Automattic, the same people behind WordPress. It looks after the security, overall performance, backup, and management of your site.
With this plugin, you can also filter spams and keep track of the readers on your blogs. By doing so, you can also work out ways to increase your visitors by checking which posts get the most view and create similar content.
A package of amazing features, Jetpack is one of the most used plugins on WordPress blogs.
Features
- Provides backups of your entire content.
- Offers top security with brute force attack protection.
- Customizable tools available for designs
- Secure login with Two-factor authentication
- SEO tools ( Premium)
Pricing
Jetpack offers you two versions, free and premium. The premium version starts at $9-$29/ per month.
10. NextGEN Gallery
A WordPress photo and video gallery plugin that helps you upload, arrange, and create galleries on your blog is NextGEN Gallery. At the present time, it’s available in 21 languages and has over 800,000+ installations.
It has all the features which you’ll need to make your blog visually interesting. In addition to this, this plugin is also user-friendly and easy to use. Therefore, if you’re a beginner who wants to make your blog more exciting with images, then you can use this plugin.
Features
- Display styles of images available ( Thumbnail and Slideshow Gallery)
- Import of metadata available for images
- eCommerce features are available
- Image social sharing available
- Complete gallery management
Pricing
NextGen Gallery offers a free and premium version. The premium version starts at $79-$299/per year.
11. Smush
Another popular WordPress plugin that compresses and optimizes images is Smush. It’s created by the superteam at WPMU DEV and has around +1 million active installations. Moreover, it is multilingual and is available in 36 languages.
A blogger will find this plugin very useful as it’ll compress the image, maintaining the original quality. As a result, this will increase your blog’s speed of the page too. Fast loading sites are loved both by users and search engines.
Features
- Optimization and resizing of images
- Compatible with themes and other links
- No compromisation in image quality
- Image detection available for wrong sizes in blogs
Pricing
Similar to other plugins, Smush has both free and premium versions. The premium version starts at $19/per month.
12. Mailchimp for WordPress
Mailchimp for WordPress plugin is a very useful WordPress email marketing plugin. It’s a popular plugin and is used by over 2 million sites all over the world.
With this plugin’s help, you can connect your Mailchimp account with your WordPress site and easily create email subscription forms on your site and grow your email list. Also, you can send bulk emails to targeted readers, send newsletters, and manage your subscriber’s emails.
Features
- User-friendly interface
- Third-party extensions available
- Compatible with WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, BuddyPress, MemberPress, Events Manager, etc.
- Code snippets available for the modification of the that make a plugin
- Excellent support and documentation provided
Pricing
It is a free plugin. However, if you want a more advanced version of this plugin, they also offer the premium version. The price of these plans starts at $59-$149/per year.
13. Popup Maker
With the WordPress Popup Maker plugin, you can create popups for your blog. Popups are banners that pop up when a user is viewing your blog. They display email subscription forms, advertising, discount offers, notifications, etc. Moreover, with the help of popups, the blog looks exciting and makes your readers interact and stay for longer.
Also, the plugin offers multiple customizable features that give you the power to edit the popup location and switch it from the header section to some other blog areas. On these popups, you can list any new exciting updates, recent posts as well as links, and many more.
Features
- Fully responsive designs
- Compatible with many WordPress plugins
- Options available for popups (slide-out,banner bars,etc)
- Control over the frequency at which the users sees the popups
Pricing
It is available both free as well as paid versions. The pricing for the paid plan starts at $87-$147/per year.
14. PublishPress Authors
PublishPress Authors is a free WordPress blog plugin useful for multiple authors working on a single WordPress blog post. This plugin is mainly popular amongst bloggers, lecturers, book reviewers, and many more.
With PublishPress Authors, you can set multiple authors, co-authors, and also invite guest authors to your website. It’ll be easy to invite guest authors to your website, as they won’t have to create an account. Moreover, they can simply click on the guest author and work on it independently.
Features
- Various Layouts available for different authors ( Simple list, boxed, centered, inline)
- Custom layouts for multiple authors ( Pro version)
- Multiple plugins provided ( Pro version)
- Addition of author’s box in widget areas
Pricing
PublishPress Authors is available in free and premium versions. The premium version has plans with prices starting at $69-$199/per year.
15. Really Simple SSL
Really Simple SSL is a WordPress plugin, which automatically detects and configures your WordPress blog to run over HTTPS. It does not require any technical skills.
It’s lightweight and performs at a perfect speed. Moreover, this plugin will also change the site URL and home URL to https.
Features
- Checks website for SSL certificate
- Provides premium email facility to customers
- Support ( Pro version)
- Provides redirection to https
Pricing
If you want a free version, you can easily download this plugin from WordPress.org. For a premium version, the pricing starts at $29-$159/per year.
16. WPML
WordPress Multilingual plugin (WPML) is a popular multilingual plugin for WordPress. Using the plugin, you can translate your content into different languages and set up a blog that can switch the language of your content according to users’ choice.
This plugin is lightweight, with a good page loading speed. Using this plugin, you can make your website available in multiple languages, benefitting international readers and customers. Therefore, it’s one of the most used WordPress plugins on blogs.
Features
- Translate your content fully in other languages
- Translation of themes and plugins
- Compatible with WooCommerce
- Options available for Custom languages
- Good support
Pricing
WPML is a paid plugin, with prices starting at $29-$159.
If you want a free multilingual plugin, we recommend Polylang. Polylang is a free multilingual WordPress plugin with similar features as that of WPML.
17. Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
Gutenberg is the new WordPress block editor introduced in WordPress 5.0. The plugin ‘Gutenberg Blocks – Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg’ is a plugin that provides a set of additional blocks for your WordPress Gutenberg editor.
Using Gutenberg Blocks, you can add unique and creative blocks to your posts and design your blogs without any codes or HTML. Moreover, to save your time, this plugin also provides you with designed starter pack sites.
Features
- Easy to use interface
- 20+ pre-built starter sites available
- Detailed base articles provided for beginners
- Available in 9 languages
Pricing
It is available for free.
18. AMP
Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP) is a technology that makes web browsing on mobiles faster. As more people are using mobile devices to browse through the web, using AMP has become really important.
To add AMP on WordPress, there’s a plugin with the same name ‘AMP’. It’s a WordPress plugin that helps to make your blog AMP-friendly. Hence, your blog will be fast, engaging, and easily accessible to mobile users.
Moreover, fast loading speed also improves your readers’ experience and engagement with the blog.
Features
- Three templates available for your site ( Standard, Transitional, Readers)
- Multiple themes are available
- Compatible with various plugins
- Support and documentation provided
Pricing
AMP is a free WordPress plugin.
19. LuckyWP Table of Contents
Wondering how to make a table of content on your posts, like the one at the top of this article? If yes, then LuckyWP Table of Contents is the answer. Used by 50,000+ WordPress websites, it’s a popular plugin for building the table of contents.
This plugin lets you create a beautiful, customizable table of contents for your blog articles and helps to make them more engaging. Best of all, the plugin is SEO-optimized. In short, you don’t have to worry about Google snippet and SEO analysis, because it’ll take care of them.
We use it on our blog and find it great. Proudly recommended, it’s one of the best and must-have WordPress plugins for blogs.
Features
- It offers two ways you can display the table ( Hierarchical or linear)
- Customizable font style, items font size, width, as well as colors.
- Numbers options available ( Decimal or roman numbers )
- Customizable labels
- Available in 32 languages
Pricing
It offers free and premium versions to its users. The premium version starts at $39/per year.
20. Redirection
Sometimes, you need to change the URL of your pages. When you edit and create a new URL, the old URL doesn’t work anymore. If the old link is placed anywhere on your site or on other sites and people click on it, then it’ll show a 404 broken page error.
Redirection is a free WordPress plugin to keep away from such broken links. Using this plugin, you can easily redirect the old broken links to the new URLs and point users to the well-functioning pages. Hence, it lets you free from broken links.
It’s a trusted plugin with over 1+ million installs and comes in 19 languages. As blogs have more dynamic content and more redirects, Redirection is a really useful plugin for WordPress blogs.
Features
- Tracks 404 errors
- Imports and export services available
- Full documentation available
- Filter offered for WordPress URLs
- This plugin is available for a different condition like IP address, browser, etc
Pricing
It is entirely free to use.
21. Cookie Notice for GDPR & CCPA
GDPR and CCPA are privacy laws that give rights to users, as to how their personal information is collected and shared with others. If you have users in the European region, then your blog should be GDPR and CCPA compliant.
Wondering how to make your WordPress blog GDPR compliant? If so, then Cookie Notice for GDPR & CCPA is the answer. It’s a free WordPress plugin created by dFactory.
This plugin will help you elegantly inform your users visiting your blog that your site uses cookies. Not to mention, Cookies are applications used by websites for authentication and storing website information.
Features
- SEO-friendly plugin
- Customization of background color available
- Compatible with multilingual plugins like WPML and Polylang
- Multilingual and available in 27 languages
Pricing
Cookie Notice for GDPR & CCP is a free WordPress blog plugin.
22. wpDiscuz
Comments are an important part of blogging. They provide an easy way to interact with your readers, discuss various things related to your articles, and grow engagement.
Therefore, wpDiscuz is a very useful and best WordPress plugin for blogs. It’s an amazing WordPress comment plugin to enhance the default WordPress comments system. In fact, with wpDiscuz, you can change the commenting style for the readers and visitors of your blog.
Moreover, it offers you features to change the commenting section’s layout and new features like Inline commenting, where you can add questions for your readers on any paragraph. Afterward, while reading the readers can answer it, and write down their feedback.
Features
- Modern comment layouts
- Fast commenting experience
- Clean user interface
- Anti-spam comments feature available
- Offers comment bubble
- Statistics of words of authors, readers available
Pricing
wpDiscuz offers a free and premium version.
The premium plans have 18 premium add-ons and cost about $99/per year.
23. WooCommerce
A popular eCommerce WordPress plugin is WooCommerce. Actually, it’s the #1 popular eCommerce platform used by over 28% of all online stores on the web.
Using this plugin, you can easily add eCommerce features to your WordPress blog and sell products from it. It provides a user-friendly admin panel with a product list, all the customer’s information, purchase history, etc. Set up a blog and also sell your products using this plugin.
Features
- Flexible and secured payment methods provided
- Sell any type of products from your blog
- A mobile app is available for IOS and android
- Extensive documentation available
- Compatible with JetPack
Pricing
It’s a free eCommerce blog plugin.
24. MemberPress
MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin. The plugin will help you create and manage membership subscriptions, and sell your products online. In fact, this is a renowned plugin recommended by many popular blogs and web hosting influencers.
This plugin is very easy to set-up, with easy and straightforward installation steps. Moreover, it is compatible with any popular WordPress theme and comes with a fantastic elaborative user manual.
Features
- Simple Payment Gateway with just API keys.
- Compatible with PayPal, Mailchimp, Convertkit, ActiveCampagin
- No HTML coding required for editing
- Flexible, customizable pricings
Pricing
Membership is a paid plugin. The pricing for it starts from $149-$349/per year.
25. Elementor
If you want to build beautiful pages on your blog, then Elementor is the best plugin for you. Created in 2006, it’s the best WordPress page builder plugin on the market with 5 million active installs.
With this plugin, you can create beautiful layouts, pages, blog posts, and your blog’s header/footer. If you love creating websites visually, you’ll love this plugin. Change images, headings, layouts of your website’s pages, and quickly shape your blog.
Features
- Various designing tools available
- Integrated with Yoast SEO, Mailchimp, Facebook.
- Availability of widgets (Basic, Pro, Theme, and WooCommerce Elements)
- Popup builder available
Pricing
This Plugin offers both free and premium plans. The premium plan starts at $49-$199/per year.
Conclusion
And with this, we’ve arrived at the end of this article, which was about the best WordPress plugins for blogs.
Among the WordPress plugins listed here, some plugins are essential for every type of blog. For example, Yoast SEO. It’ll help you rank in Google and optimize your blog by adding meta descriptions, media titles, and URLs.
Similarly, WPForms is a must-have plugin because contact form is a must. Wordfence and UpdraftPlus are important for security and data protection. Akistmet or Antispam Bee, use one for comment spam filtering. WP Super Cache or WP Rocket for caching.
However, you can install other plugins as per your blog’s need.
We hope this article can be useful to you in finding the best WordPress plugins for blogs. Also, check out our article on the best blogging platforms if you’re looking for a WordPress alternative for blogging.
Please do leave comments, and also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
