The best WordPress plugins that are essential for any website. Here are the best WordPress plugins for blogs and best WordPress plugins for beginners.
Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO plugin, and has helped millions of people like you to get ahead, and to stay ahead. Yoast SEO Free contains everything that you need to manage your SEO, and the Yoast SEO Premium plugin and its extensions unlock even more tools and functionality.
The Best WordPress Plugins Yoast SEO is packed with many useful features:
- Automated technical SEO improvements, like canonical URLs and meta tags.
- Advanced XML sitemaps; making it easy for Google to understand your site structure.
- Title and meta description templating, for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.
- An in-depth Schema.org integration that will increase your chance of getting rich results, by helping search engines to understand your content.
- Full control over site breadcrumbs, so that users and search engines always know where they are.
- Faster loading times for your whole website, due to an innovative way of managing data in WordPress.
Yoast SEO is famous for its state-of-the-art content and SEO analysis. Yoast SEO gives you:
- SEO analysis: an invaluable tool while writing SEO-friendly content with the right (focus) keyphrases in mind.
- Readability analysis: ensures that humans and search engines can read and understand your content.
- Full language support for: English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, Arabic, Swedish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Turkish, Czech, Norwegian, Slovak and Greek.
- A Google preview, which shows what your listings will look like in the search results. Even on mobile devices.
WPForms allows you to create beautiful contact forms, feedback form, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site. It comes with pre-built form templates and workflows which make WPForms the most beginner friendly contact form plugin for WordPress.
The WPForms Challenge guides you through creating your first form in under 5 minutes. We walk you through using the form builder all the way to adding a form to a page on your site! WPForms includes integrations for popular page builders like the WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg), Classic Editor, Elementor, and Divi making the whole process seamless.
WPForms is a 100% mobile responsive contact form solution, so your contact forms will always look great on all devices (mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop).
WPForms’ contact forms are also highly optimized for web and server performance because we understand the importance of speed when it comes to SEO, marketing, and conversion. We can honestly say that WPForms is one of the fastest WordPress contact form builder plugins in the world.
Jetpack makes WordPress sites safer and faster which helps to grow the traffic. Jetpack Security provides easy-to-use, comprehensive WordPress site security including auto real-time backups and easy restores, malware scans, and spam protection.
It comes with various essential features like brute force protection and downtime / uptime monitoring are free.
- Back up your site automatically in real time and restore to any point with one click. Unlimited storage for your backup. Great for eCommerce stores especially Woo.
- Manage migration to a new host, migrate theme files and plugins to a new database, easily duplicate websites, create full database backups, clone websites, repair broken websites by restoring older backups or easily set up a test site by creating a duplicate of your existing WP website.
- See every site change and who made it with the activity log, great for coordination, debug, maintenance, or troubleshooting.
- Automatically perform malware scans and security scans for other code threats. One click fix to restore your site for malware.
- Block spam comments and form responses with anti spam features powered by Akismet.
- Brute force attack protection to protect your WordPress login page from attacks.
- Monitor your site uptime / downtime and get an instant alert of any change by email.
- Secure WordPress.com powered login used by millions of sites with optional 2FA (two factor authentication) for extra protection.
- Auto update individual plugins for easy site maintenance and management.
Site Kit by Google brinsg Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google AdSense, and Google Speed to your WordPress sites and blogs.
Google describes it as: “Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free.”
Site Kit includes powerful features that make using these Google products seamless and flexible:
- Easy-to-understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard
- Official stats from multiple Google tools, all in one dashboard
- Quick setup for multiple Google tools without having to edit the source code of your site
- Metrics for your entire site and for individual posts
- Easy-to-manage, granular permissions across WordPress and different Google products
Supported Google tools
Site Kit shows key metrics and insights from different Google products:
- Search Console: Understand how Google Search discovers and displays your pages in Google Search. Track how many people saw your site in Search results, and what query they used to search for your site.
- Analytics: Explore how users navigate your site and track goals you’ve set up for your users to complete.
- AdSense: Keep track of how much your site is earning you.
- PageSpeed Insights: See how your pages perform compared to other real-world sites. Improve performance with actionable tips from PageSpeed Insights.
- Tag Manager: Use Site Kit to easily set up Tag Manager- no code editing required. Then, manage your tags in Tag Manager.
- Optimize: Use Site Kit to easily set up Optimize- no code editing required. Then, set up A/B tests in Optimize.
Smush WordPress plugin enables lazy load images, optimize & compress images. It is a great tool because image optimization is the easiest way to make your site load super fast.
The plugin optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress & improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the team at WPMU DEV.
- Lossless Compression – Strip unused data and compress images without affecting image quality.
- Lazy Load – Defer offscreen images with the flip of a switch.
- Bulk Smush – Optimize & compress up to 50 images with one click.
- Image Resizing – Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed.
- Incorrect Size Image Detection – Quickly locate images that are slowing down your site.
- Directory Smush – Optimize images even if they are not located in the media library.
- Automated Optimization – Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload.
- Without Monthly Limits – Optimize all of your images up to 5MB in size, free forever (no daily, monthly, or annual caps).
- Gutenberg Block Integration – View all Smush stats directly in image blocks.
- Multisite Compatible – Offers both global and individual Multisite settings.
- Process All Your Files – Smush will process PNG, JPEG, and GIF files for optimum results.
- Super Servers – Smush images with no slowdown using WPMU DEV’s fast, reliable Smush API.
- Convert to WebP (Pro Only) – Upgrade and automatically serve images in Next-Gen WebP format.
- Configs – Set your preferred Smush settings, save them as config, and instantly upload to any other site.
- And many, many, more!
Social media plugin which let’s you add share icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom share icons of your choice.
This free plugin has a lot to offer.
The free social media plugin includes the following features:
- Pick from 16 different designs for your social media share icons
- Give several actions to one social media share icon (e.g. your facebook share icon can lead visitors to your Facebook page, and also give visitors the opportunity to like your page)
- Decide to give your social media icons an animation (e.g. automatic shuffling, mouse-over effects) to make your visitors aware of the share icons, increasing the chance that they follow/share your blog
- Make your social media icons ‘float’ or ‘sticky’
- Allow visitors to subscribe to your blog by Email
- Add ‘counts’ to your social media buttons
- Decide to display a pop-up (on all or only on selected pages) asking people to follow/share you via your social media icons
- Decide to display sharing-buttons and social media icons at the end of every post
- Select from many other customization features for your socialmedia icons!
The SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant provides instant recommendations for content optimization based on the qualities of Google’s top 10-ranking pages for your given keywords in a given location. Content professionals, bloggers and marketing experts can check if their texts or the texts of external writers meet various content-quality requirements in just a few clicks.
Features
- Overall score – checks the article’s general quality calculated according to metrics such as readability, text length, and target keywords.
- Readability score – evaluates your text’s difficulty based on the recommended Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease score. You will get recommendations for sentences and words that need improvement.
- Target keywords – shows recommendations regarding the given keywords, their volume and their difficulty.
- Recommended keywords – shows semantically related keywords, that should also be added to your text.
- Tone of voice – make sure that your writing is consistent with the desired level of formality.
- Plagiarism – validate that your writer has submitted original content.
- Linking – check your links for possible errors and problems.
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
W3TC is the only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress trusted by millions of publishers, web developers, and web hosts worldwide for more than a decade. It is the total performance solution for optimizing your WordPress Website.
W3 Total Cache can help you gain improvements in search engine result page rankings, especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL (at least 10x improvement in overall site performance). It enables an improved conversion rates and “site performance” which affect your site’s rank on Google.com with reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site; visitors view more pages.
The plugin comes with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support and WP-CLI support for cache purging, query string updating, and more.
All-in-One WP Migration is verifiably one of WordPress’ most trusted and utilized plugins for moving websites with absolute ease. All-in-One WP Migration comes loaded with newbie-friendly functions that allow you to migrate your WordPress website with little to no technical knowledge or experience.
Using the plugin is easy:
- Install All-in-One WP Migration plugin.
- Hit the export button to bundle your database, media files, plugins, and themes into one tidy file.
- Unpack the file at the new location with an easy-to-use “drag and drop” feature in the WordPress dashboard of your new website.
Follow these three simple steps, and your site will be live at its new location with minimal stress and zero downtime.
Features Spotlight:
- Supports custom uploads, plugins, theme folders, and more.
- Available in over 50 language translations – including Japanese.
- Accessible for individuals with disabilities (WCAG 2.1 AA Level compliant)
- No limitations on host or operating system.
- Supports a vast range of hosting providers.
- A long list of premium extensions that gives you the power to do more.
- Mobile device compatible.
- Intelligent and flawless auto-replacement of website url during import.
- Full product support.
- And lots more!
Classic Editor is an official plugin maintained by the WordPress team that restores the previous (“classic”) WordPress editor and the “Edit Post” screen. It makes it possible to use plugins that extend that screen, add old-style meta boxes, or otherwise depend on the previous editor.
This plugin adds the following:
- Administrators can select the default editor for all users.
- Administrators can allow users to change their default editor.
- When allowed, the users can choose which editor to use for each post.
- Each post opens in the last editor used regardless of who edited it last. This is important for maintaining a consistent experience when editing content.
In addition, the Classic Editor plugin includes several filters that let other plugins control the settings, and the editor choice per post and per post type.
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