Is your website or blog powered by WordPress? If yes, continue reading else just move on and check out my other posts which may interest you. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. WordPress is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license from the Free Software Foundation.
If you’ve got no idea on what WordPress is, educate yourself. Here are some surprising statistics about WordPress :
- WordPress Now Powers 32% of the Web
- There are 55,913 WordPress Plugins with 1,253,649,315 Total Downloads
- 56 Translations of WordPress
- Famous WordPress Sites: NYT, Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy, People Magazine, National Geographic, Forbes
- More than 74.6 Million Sites Depend on WordPress
Statistics Courtesy – ManageWP
Below are some must-have WordPress plugins for blogs which you can use to enhance the performance, working and usage of your WordPress powered site. Almost all of them are available for free from the WordPress.org plugin repository except ‘WP Rocket’ which is a premium plugin.
Table of Contents
Jetpack by WordPress.com
Jetpack by Automattic – the people behind WordPress.com simplifies managing WordPress sites by providing you with visitor stats, security services, images CDN, and helping you get more traffic. Jetpack is an amalgam of various plugin functionalities.
Also Read: How to Supercharge Your WordPress Website with Jetpack Plugin
Akismet
Akismet, also by Automattic checks the comments on your posts/pages against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches.
AMP
This plugin adds support for the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, which is an open source initiative that aims to provide mobile-optimized content that can load instantly everywhere. AMP is spearheaded by Google. So better get started now and get your posts and pages AMP’d!
Also Read: How to Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages Project in WordPress.
Use Google Libraries
A number of the JavaScript libraries distributed with WordPress are also hosted on Google’s AJAX Libraries API. This plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google’s AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly.
WP-Optimize
This simple but effective plugin allows you to extensively clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without doing manual queries.
Yoast SEO
Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the Yoast SEO plugin.
WP Smush – Image Optimization
Resize and optimize all images on your website with the incredibly powerful and 100% free image optimizing tool, brought to you by the super-team at WPMU DEV, now with image resizing! Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed.
Their servers do all the heavy lifting. Strips the hidden bulky information from your images and reduce file size without losing quality.
WP Rocket
Caching creates an ultra-fast load time, essential for improving Search Engine Optimization and increasing conversions. When you turn on WP Rocket, page caching is immediately activated. Other features include but not limited to – cache preloading, images lazyload, static files compression, etc.
Also Read: How to Optimize WordPress to Reduce Server Overload.
Wordfence Security
Powered by the constantly updated Threat Defense Feed, Wordfence’s Web Application Firewall prevents your site from getting hacked. Wordfence Scan leverages the same proprietary feed, alerting you quickly in the event your site is compromised. Their Live Traffic view gives you real-time visibility into traffic and hack attempts on your website.
Also Read: How to Make WordPress Hack-proof.
Pretty Link Lite
Pretty Link enables you to shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Link is a killer plugin for people who want to clean up their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, their links on Twitter to come from their own domain, or generally increase the reach of their website by spreading these links on forums or comments on other blogs.
Also Read: How to Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress
External Links
The external links plugin for WordPress lets you process outgoing links differently from internal links and is the easiest way to ‘nofollow’ external links so that you can prevent your (SEO) link juice from flowing to the sites you’ve linked to in your posts. It nofollows external links on the fly and doesn’t alter the original HTML codes.
Author hReview
Add hReview and AggregateRating support based on schema.org, which help you increase search traffic by making SERP results more eye-catching. This plugin supports only the editorial rating submission (editor/author rating), this means customers and site visitors are not involved in the rating or review process.
Thanks for sharing. I have some of these plugins already and will check out the others. I found this post on the Bloggers Pit Stop.
You’re welcome Christie, great to hear that you’re already using some of the above mentioned plugins on your WordPress site. If you don’t mind, can you share your favorite WordPress plugins with us over here? Thanks.
Great tips. I have some of these plugins already, but there are some listed I need to check out!
#trafficjamweekend
Hey Barrie, glad that you’re already using some of the above mentioned WordPress plugins. It would be even better if you could share with us your favorite list of WordPress plugins.
I love plugin reviews, often I find plugins that I did not even know existed. Thanks for this review there are some here that I need to check out some more.
Kathleen
Blogger’s Pit Stop
Hey Kathleen, though my post is not a full-fledged review of independent WordPress plugins, I’m glad to hear that you found them useful. If possible, can you share your favorite WordPress plugins with us over here? That way, people stumbling upon this page can come to know about the hidden treasures in the WordPress plugin ecosystem.
Antony we will feature this post on the Blogger’s Pit Stop. I am sure more will find it helpful.
My favorite plugin is CommentLuv Premium, unfortunately, it is no longer available due to the owner’s ill health. It is the best comment system by far, I wish someone would buy it and take it over.
Another one I love is ‘Better click to tweet’ it is just so convenient and it makes it easy for others to tweet your keywords and main points.
Kathleen
Blogger’s Pit Stop
Thank you so much Kathleen, I guess blogger’s pit stop members really do love my posts. I hope they get much value out of it. By the way, thank you so much for sharing your favorite WordPress plugins with us.
Pretty Link Lite sounds pretty interesting. I may like to use that one but I do also worry about having too many plugins.
Hey Elise, it is not the number of plugins you install on your site that’s going to slow down your server. It’s the quality of the code that matters. If it’s a good quality plugin, you can definitely install it on your site without worrying about site performance. Currently, I’ve got 16 active plugins on my site. What about you, how many plugins are you currently using on your website?