10 Top WordPress Plugins You Should Never Stop Using
September 4th, 2017 | by Ravi Chahar || 7 Comments |
With the presence of thousands of plugins in the WordPress repository, it’s hard to recognize the top WordPress plugins.
You can find many plugins for the same functionality but what’s the best for your website which doesn’t affect the page loading time.
It’s kind of challenging sometimes. And especially for the beginners, they get confused what’s the plugins which can help them start a WordPress blog.
In this post, you will learn the top WordPress plugins which should be activated just after installing WordPress.
Necessary WordPress Plugins You Should Install
The first and the biggest fear is if the website gets broken due to any plugin. People hear a lot of rumors about WordPress plugins.
You should understand that not every plugin is developed by WordPress’s developers. There are many third party plugins and it’s possible that they can conflict with any of the other plugins.
But here, you’re going to find a list of the plugins which can be used when you want to start your WordPress blog.
#1. Yoast SEO
The first thing comes to the mind as if what’s the best plugin for the SEO. As you know, SEO is what you need to make your website famous.
No doubt that Yoast SEO is the top rated plugin right now which can be used for your brand new website.
There are lots of features which will make you understand why everyone is crazy about this plugin. You will find this guide to install and setup Yoast SEO WordPress plugin helpful.
#2. Akismet
Whenever you have a look over your freshly installed WordPress website, you will notice that within a few hours, you get many spam comments.
You seek for the solution and here comes Akismet. It’s a spam comment protection plugin which will make you get rid of all the spam bots.
#3. WP Sweep
You all know that the database of your website plays an important role. Most of the people ignore its optimization and encounter with the poor page loading time.
Many people have complained that they have published just 50 posts and the database size is 60 MB.
Then I tell them a blog with 500+ posts is having the database only of the size 14 MB. Well, this is what the database optimization results like.
It’s always used to use a plugin for that. And WP Sweep is what you should use. Here is the guide to clean up your WordPress database.
#4. W3 Total Cache
No doubt that a caching plugin is required to boost your WordPress website speed.
To maintain a fast loading website, you should install a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache. It’s one of top WordPress plugins.
The best thing is that it’s free of cost. You don’t need to go for a premium plugin if you know how to use it efficiently.
Here is the guide for the best settings of W3 Total Cache plugin.
#5. Jetpack by WordPress.com
I am sure, you’re familiar with this plugin. This is one of the most famous plugins you will come across while using WordPress.
There are many features included which help you maintain your website properly. The best part is to see the stats of the visitors you get every day.
You can also use the inbuilt sharing buttons Jetpack.
#6. A Security Plugin
Well, it’s hard to tell you what’s the best security plugin because there are many. Let me mention a few.
You can install any one of them. All the plugins have some pretty amazing features. You would like to try iTheme Security because even its free version has tons of functionalities.
#7. Fast Secure Contact Form
You may be thinking as what don’t I mention Contact Form 7. Well, it’s up to you. You can use that too but as per my personal experience, Fast Secure Contact Form gives more freedom to handle the contact form.
You can design it from the plugin itself. No need to add any extra CSS anywhere in your theme or in the WordPress customize section.
#8. Social Warfare
It’s always recommended to make your content shareable. But how is that possible if you don’t add the social sharing buttons?
Social Warfare is the plugin for you. It doesn’t affect the page loading time of your website. It’s one of the top WordPress plugins you should use.
There are two versions, free and premium. You can use any depending on your requirements.
#9. Insert Header and Footers
The biggest problem occurs when people need to install Google Analytics or want to add a custom code in WordPress header or footer of their website.
Insert Headers and Footers is a plugin which solves everything. It provides the space for the header and the footer so that you can add the code wherever you want.
When you want to add your website in Google Search Console, you may need to add a <meta> tag in the header, well just copy and paste it in this plugin.
The same goes whenever you want any code to embed in the footer.
#10. Thirsty Affiliate
Eventually, you would need a plugin to handle your affiliate links. It would be hard to handle when you start publishing regularly.
You can be an affiliate of any web hosting.
You can add these links anywhere. While writing a post or show in the sidebar. There are also many WordPress theme providers you will like.
Use Thirsty Affiliate plugin to manage such links.
Install These Top WordPress Plugins For Better Website handling
I can understand how hard it is to choose the essential plugins when you start your own blog. That’s the reason I have crafted a list which can save you.
You can waste a lot of time just to find the plugins which can work well for you. Having a security plugin, a caching plugin, a comment spam comment protection plugin is really important.
These top WordPress plugins will make everything easy for you. And if you want to increase the features of your WordPress editor, you can use WP Edit plugin. If have any doubt, feel free to ask.
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It’s really important information for everyone who uses WordPress. I always install the plugins that comes with the theme and never thought for database optimization and to maintain a fast loading website with the help of these plugins. Many times website loading time becomes a problem for me specially in the cse of e-commerce sites. But from today onwards i must use these plugins to keep my website faster and updated.Thanks Ravi sir for such valuable information.
Hello, Ravi!
And thank you! ?
Well, I am using only the following plugins;
– Yoast SEO
– Akismet
… out of all the 10 plugins.
I am still not into the affiliate side of the blogging but ThirstyAffiliate seems the good plugin to have.
SocialWarfare is also the great sharing plugin and I love seeing it on many blogs. ?
So, thank you for writing about those plugins!
I will certainly check all of them and use which interest me. ?
~ Adeel
I love Yoast. I have been using it since Day One.
However, Akismet sucks… Anti-Spam is MUCH BETTER.
Give it a try. You’ll see what I mean.
I did a huge experiment with both plugins on Wording Well a couple of years back. You might want to check it. It’s called Help Me Determine if We Can Eliminate Spam Forever!
Find it at
Hi Ravi,
I couldn’t live without Yoast and Akismet. I am not sure what else is back in my blog but some of these things look interesting and I have to look into them.
Thanks so much for putting this together,
-Donna
Hello Ravi,
Great piece of information over here ?
Indeed plugins plays an important factor in our web site, they can determine the speed and loading time of our web site which
matters a lot.
Excessive plugins can make our web site slow and it can lead to the diversion of our customers.
I am aware of the Yoast and Jet pack plugins, as I am being using them for quite long.
Looking forward to try some new ones from your list.
Thanks for the share.
Shantanu.
Hi Ravi,
Great list of plugins, I can’t imagine trying to SEO optimize my blog without the help of the Yoast SEO plugin. I use it every time I write a new blog post.
I also use Thirsty Affiliates for my blog. It definitely makes it easy to keep track of all my affiliate links. I also love how easy it is to change the URL if an affiliate network changes it.
I actually had this happen. All I had to do was go into Thirsty Affiliates and change out the current link with the new link. Definitely a lot easier than trying to change every instance of that link on my blog.
If bloggers are using affiliate marketing for their blog, I definitely recommend looking into that one.
Thanks for sharing these plugins with us have a great day ?
Susan
Hey Susan,
Whenever someone asks about an SEO plugin. The first name is the Yoast SEO plugin which comes to the mind. It’s convenient and responsive for sure.
Handling the affiliate links can be hard sometimes. But Thirsty plugin makes everything so simple.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Enjoy your day.
~Ravi