The world of blogging is vast and ever-growing. And if you’re a new blogger and you want to launch your blogging website. You can do this using tools like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. oust WordPress powers more than 35% of the World’s Websites.
Creating a site is easy to use with WordPress. But the biggest challenge is to manage and run a website. And plugins are very useful in this case. They can help you extend the features of your site.
There are more than 55,000 plugins available in the WordPress repository. And the amount of plugin can make you confuse about which plugins you want to use on your blogging site. You should only use the plugins that you really need. So when you’re a beginner, it’s going to be hard for you to pick those important plugins. That’s why I’ve compiled this list of 20 plugins that you need to install and use on your site.
Here are the 20 Amazing WordPress Free Plugins for Bloggers
1. Yoast SEO
SEO allows you to rank higher on the results page of search engines and to get more organic traffic to your pages. Although WordPress is SEO friendly out of the box, you can do so much more to boost traffic to your website using some of the best SEO practices.
It lets you write content with the best keywords ranked in the search engines. Yoast SEO also displays several ratings for readability and recommends changes to your posts. It allows you to incorporate meta tags, create sitemaps, link your website to the Google Search Console, customize it for social media and more.
Yoast comes with a powerful function of Redirect that allows you to quickly build 301 redirects that is extremely helpful. This also detects changes in URLs and generates auto-redirects, so that there are no broken links on your website.
2. Starbox – the Author Box for Humans
As a blogger, it is crucial that you use the author box to share the best of your personality, where people can learn more about you. Could connect, read more blogs of yours. Starbox – The Humans Author Box is one of the best WordPress author box plugins. It helps you to build beautiful looking author boxes using the themes and landscaping choices that have been professionally designed.
The best thing about this is being able to customize it quickly. You should incorporate social profiles to help users find themselves on social media. It also supports the display of rich excerpts in the google search results.
Placing such a beautiful author box helps improve the Author’s social proof and reputation. This also reflects the writers’ most recent entries. You can personalize your author’s page look and make it attractive.
This also comes with a drop-down theme that displays any author’s updates. Additionally, it comes with the information of the author on a side widget. Eventually, it will draw and activate your author’s box.
3. WP Paint
You’re going to have to use images in your posts to make them attractive. And images aren’t always perfect the way you want, so we’ve added the plugin WP Paint. WP Paint is an Image Editor plug-in for WordPress. This plugin helps you to crop, resize, rotate, and flip images. Additionally, you can add text, images, and shapes to your pictures.
It has an intuitive interface with a comprehensive array of image editing, photo manipulation, and photo editing features that resemble most popular Desktop-based Photo Editors.
You can also add filters, blur and gradient effects, adjust the colors and brightness of your images using the WP Paint plugin. The image editor is lightweight and works smoothly.
4. UpdraftPlus
It’s suggested to create a full backup before you take any big action on your blog such as updating WordPress code or changing a theme, upgrading a plugin, etc. If something goes wrong, then the backup can be restored.
And UpdraftPlus is one of WordPress’s most popular and reliable backup plug-ins. This helps you to set up and securely store automated backups on a remote location such as Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, email, and more.
It’s advised to take a daily backup because you can’t tell when your hosting fails and then you can lose all your progress in a short time. Therefore, all your hard work will be saved and can be recovered if you have a backup instead.
5. Comments – wpDiscuz
Comments are a perfect way to get to know your readers. They may also share their opinions and suggestions through the comment section. But some users also use the spamming and self-promotion comment method. And because of that, you need a plugin for the moderation of comments. Also, you should look for a plugin that makes it easy and encourages users to comment on your posts.
One such plugin is Comments – wpDiscuz. it completely replaces the native WordPress comments section with a better design. Also, the plugin offers features like a comment voting like Reddit.
Moreover, you can sort comments based on New, Old and most voted comments. It also supports multi-level nested comments so that visitors can easily follow specific threads of comments. Moreover, Social sharing buttons for users to share their comments.
6. Editorial Calendar
If you’re a blogger, you know the importance of the content. You need to remember a lot of stuff like blog topics, sharing, publishing, etc. Editorial Calendar is a handy plugin that reminds you of which blog post to write and when to publish it.
The editorial calendar is the basis for strategic blogging. That little bit of planning is a surprisingly long way to get the most audience out of your blog content.
In addition, you can see a month’s worth of posts at a glance. Juggle your calendar by dragging and dropping posts from day today. Edit the titles, contents, and publishing times of your posts quickly. Publish posts or manage proposals. See the status of your posts instantly. Manage posts from multiple authors more easily.
7. Wordfence Security
Wordfence is the most popular WordPress firewall and security plugin in the world. The UI is also very simple and user-friendly, so users want to use this plugin a lot.
It comes with useful security tools such as login security features and security incident recovery tools. This plugin is available for both free and paid modes.
In addition, it scans WordPress Core, Plugins and Themes for complete security checks. It also helps speed up your website by using caching techniques. Wordfence protects your website from brute force attacks, blocks traffic from a specific location, firewalls to block fake traffic, botnets and scanners. It also scans your hosting for known backdoors, scans posts and comments on any potential threats, monitors live traffic, and hacks attempts in real-time.
For complete security solutions, follow our 7 Best Email Plugins for WordPress in 2020.
8. W3 Total Cache
Caching can speed up your website for repeated visitors which results in better user experience. W3 Total Cache plugin is one of the most popular WordPress caching plugins available free. It has over 1 million active installations. And it comes with a lot of customization options that could be a little daunting to beginners.
It improves the performance of your server by caching every aspect of your site. It has features such as tab cache, page cache, object cache, gzip compression, code minimization, CDN integration support, and more. This also offers cache statistics that help you test all the details and how things work.
A lot of features can confuse beginners, but if you look one by one, it’s going to be easier for you. And the plugin is sure to yield good performance.
9. a3 Lazy Load (Page Speed)
Lazy loading is an optimization strategy that loads visible content but slows the uploading and rendering of content that appears below the fold. Lazy loading can have a profound effect on site speed if you use a lot of images.
A3 Lazy load is one of the most common plugins for lazy loading images, iframes, videos, and other features on your web. It has a lot of configuration options that you can choose how to load assets on your platform.
It is also tested to be 100% compliant with common plugins such as WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields and a variety of CDNs.
10, Newsletter
The Newsletter plugin is one of the most popular email marketing plugins for WordPress. The plugin is easy to install and use. Using the plugin you can create and send responsive and mobile-friendly emails.
It allows you to grow your mailing list and send newsletters without leaving your WordPress dashboard. You can place opt-in forms in the content or sidebar. Also, you can use a drag-and-drop builder to create emails to send to your subscribers.
You can set up unlimited emails and campaigns for the users with advanced features integrated into the plugin. Moreover, you can add features using the free add-ons.
For complete email solutions, follow our 7 Best Email Plugins for WordPress in 2020.
11. AMP for WordPress
This is the official AMP WordPress plugin. Built by the AMP Project Contributors. When it comes to the official development team, a certain confidence factor is established. And if you choose this plugin for your website, you won’t regret the decision. More than 400 thousand popular websites are currently using the plugin.
The plugin is mostly used by small companies, bloggers, official WordPress pages. Moreover, It is an open-source project that lets developers, experts work and develop it even more.
This plugin is fantastic for beginners. The setup process is straight forward and simple. Often, the plugin receives regular updates and the community & support offered by this plugin is fantastic.
12. All In One Schema Rich Snippets
Schema – All In One Schema Rich Snippets is the most popular WordPress schema plugin. After you have installed and enabled it, you will be redirected to the Getting Started tab. You’re going to get all the details on how you set it up.
It gives you a step-by-step guide on how to set it up that makes it really simple and fast for even a beginner.
Currently, it supports the following types of Schemas Review, Event, Services, Person, Product, Video, Articles, Recipe, Software Application.
Upon selecting the type of schema, you are asked to fill in some information fields to display the details in the rich snippets in the search results.
13. Shared Counts
Social networking is one of the easiest ways to build up your blog traffic and keep people coming back for more. If you want to get popular and increase your audience, you’ll need a plugin like Shared Counts to enable your guests to share their social media blog posts.
Shared Counts is a free WordPress plugin that adds social network buttons to your blog. It makes it easy for your users to post social media content. This plugin helps to improve traffic and the engagement of your WordPress blog.
14. Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Analytics is the perfect way to learn about the performance of your website, visitors and much more. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights is considered a one-of-a-kind analytics plugin to help understand website traffic. It’s really easy to install and use. You can customize the plugin in just a few minutes.
MonsterInsights makes it simpler for you, straight from your WordPress dashboard. With just one button, you can activate the unique features of Google Analytics. No coding is required.
The plugin provides you with detailed reports on your website. Knowing the market and focusing on it is a perfect way to increase site traffic.
15. OneSignal – Web Push Notifications
It is important to let your subscribers know when you have posted a new post on your site. You can share email updates but it can take time. Web Push notification is a perfect way to easily share the update.
OneSignal is a popular Push Notification plugin that enables you to send users to push notifications, and they can return to your website. Although this plugin is for the E-Commerce website. However, you can use this on your site to share updates to your subscribers.
Supports Latest Browsers and both HTTP, HTTPS sites. You can also test your messages by A / B and check which versions have the best results. In addition, it can schedule messages to be delivered based on previous time readers have visited your site or their time zone. There is also a Real-Time Analytics feature that allows you to monitor your alerts and clicks in real-time.
16. Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is one of the best WordPress plugins for SEO. It’s a better plugin than anything else on the web to index the site to a special XML sitemap.
As soon as you activate this plugin, your site will be indexed automatically. The search engine bots start crawling as quickly as possible and retrieve the results more efficiently.
17. Aesop Story Engine
The Aesop Story Engine is one of WordPress’s loveliest tools. Named for Aesop, the master storyteller whose fables are woven into our collective consciousness, this device provides a versatile suite of interactive storytelling tools.
Aesop Story Engine has 12 Story Telling components to add interactive elements to your content: Audio, Video, Content, Character, Gallery, Image, Locations, Parallax, Quote, Timeline, Collections, Document Viewer.
The Aesop Story Engine lets you recreate a more vivid story reading experience for your readers by allowing you to quickly construct a captivating story with both visual and interactive components. Instead of one long block of text, the fullscreen backgrounds, colorful pictures, characters, audio clips, maps and more will bring your story to life. Moreover, Aesop Story Engine can be implemented with any WordPress theme.
18. ImageInject
ImageInject, previously named WP Inject, allows for quick insertion of photos and pictures in your WordPress posts. Check for any keywords of your choosing among several thousands of free creative Commons images, then select the best of them for the article you’re working on and insert them into your post or set them as the image featured! Best of all it’s super fast: Injecting a picture takes a total of 3 clicks!
It uses flickr and pixabay for image sourcing. It also lets you search for thousands of creative famous images and use each one in your posts. You can also insert multiple images at once and create whole galleries!
19. WP Dashboard Notes
Note-taking is very helpful when you’re working with several blogs or taking notes from your study, so you can use it later on in your posts. You can make beautiful notes with a pleasant user interface using the WP Dashboard Notes plugin.
Including simple text notes, you can also build a list of notes by drag-and-drop. The lists may also include checkboxes that make them suitable for making to-do lists.
Another fascinating aspect is that the notes are colored, allowing you to use a different color for each type of task you perform. This is going to make it easier for you to find the right message.
20. WPForms
WPForms is the most welcoming WordPress contact form plugin for beginners. It helps you to create a simple contact form, survey form, conversational form, and other ways to communicate with your guests.
As your blog evolves, people may want to get in contact with you to talk about blogging for visitors, showing ads, partnerships and other exciting opportunities. However, the last thing you want to do is post your email address on your blog, else your inbox will be filled with spam.
WPForms can help you create a customized contact form to defend yourself against spammers. The free version allows you to create a safe contact form easily, as well as a pro version with tons of templates and advanced features to help you develop your blog.
This concludes our list of the best blogging WordPress plugins.
You may not need to use any of the WordPress plugins and resources listed on our list, depending on your blog site, but it is very common for our readers to end up using at least 15 to 18 of the plugins that we have listed.
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