WordPress is the most popular platform for business websites and blogs. It’s packed with many useful features we may need in our website or blogs. But what if we need new features which are not there in our WordPress Theme. That’s where we need WordPress Plugins to spice up our WordPress Website or Blog. As the WordPress community is growing and already grown a lot, We have got plenty of WordPress Plugins available in the WordPress Directories.
Here we have got the list of essential plugins for WordPress Website and Blogs, our aim is to shortlist the essential plugins from the ocean of plugins available.
Remember we can not have too many Plugins in our website or blog as it slows down our website and blog. Thus it becomes important to only include the essential plugins in our WordPress Website and Blogs that are actually required.
Essential Plugins for WordPress Websites and Blogs
1. Akismet
Akismet is one of the most popular plugins to protect our blog comment box from SPAM. It automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam. If you are not new to the blogging, you must be aware that as soon as your website or blog goes live it starts receiving Spam comments and over the time it increases only. It results in the wasting of our time managing those spam comments.
Although Akismet comes pre-installed with the WordPress, It requires you to register and get the API Key. Akismet is Free for personal blogs and also available as a paid subscription for commercial websites. Download Akismet.
2. WordPress SEO by Yoast
Now let’s talk about the SEO of your WordPress Website or Blog. WordPress itself is very SEO Friendly and also the WordPress Theme we are using might be very SEO Friendly but still, we may need some extra features the improve our website or blog in terms of SEO.
Here comes a plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast, Its a very popular plugin for Search Engine Optimization. This not only helps you in writing better SEO friendly content using focus keyword but also has many other features like Page Analysis, keyword analysis, Meta Links Insertion, XML Sitemap and a lot more. WordPress SEO by Yoast is the one simple plugin enough for your Website or Blog SEO. Download WordPress SEO by Yoast.
3. W3 Total Cache
Now comes the speed of your WordPress Website or Blog. Speed of your website or blog effects the SEO ranking of your Website or Blog. Google considers speed as one of the ranking factors, Faster the downloading speed, better SEO ranking for your website and blogs.
W3 Total Cache is a WordPress Plugin helps to improve the performance of your website and blogs. This not only improves the speed but also improves the user experience of your website and blog. It’s one of the must-have plugins for every WordPress site to improve the speed of your website or blog. Download W3 Total Cache.
4. BackUpWordPress
You don’t know when your website may crash due to any technical reason, maybe hardware issue or software issue. It’s better to take a precaution and do the backup of your website regularly. Taking backup manually is sometimes not possible.
BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a time schedule specified by you. Also, the good thing about this plugin is that this will email you the backup data as an attachment. This becomes an essential plugin for WordPress to ensure that you won’t lose your website data due to any happenings. Download BackUpWordPress.
5. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA (Google Re-Captcha), Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Contact Form 7 is the most popular Contact Form Plugin available in the WordPress directory. It is very simple to customize and easy to manage contact forms using this plugin. In case if you want to add contact form to capture leads, Download Contact Form 7.
6. ShareThis
It’s good to have a social sharing plugin in your WordPress Website or Blog to promote your websites and blog contents to Social Networks.
ShareThis does everything from providing share buttons for your blogs to providing Social Analytics of your WordPress Website and Blog. Download ShareThis.
7. Google Analytics by Yoast
Google Analytics helps you track the visitors to your website. It’s a free analytics tool from Google. It helps you keep track of your website and improve in terms of search engine visibility.
It has very Simple installation through integration with Google Analytics API, just authenticate, select the site you want to track and you’re done. This plugin uses the universal or the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking code Google Analytics offers. Download Google Analytics by Yoast.
These are the few Essential Plugins for WordPress Websites and Blogs. As we discussed earlier, we don’t recommend too many plugins for a WordPress Website or blog. These are the few must-have plugins for your WordPress websites.
Now Let us know which are your favorite WordPress Plugins that you use in your WordPress Websites and Blogs in the Comment Section Below.
