Looking for the best WordPress plugins for blogs? Then, this article is just the thing for you.
Along with a wide variety of WordPress blog themes, WordPress blog plugins equally help with their functionalities.
Blogs are one of the most popular and important elements of websites, as they help you promote your business and interact with visitors.
But you’ll need to make them as effective as possible, which can be done with plugins. Thus, this article lists some of the best WordPress blog plugins for an effective blogging experience. Let’s start!
Are you in a hurry? Well, here are our top picks for the best WordPress plugins for blogs!
What Kind of Plugins Do You Need for a WordPress Blog?
Choosing plugins for a WordPress blog could feel like too much work when numerous plugins are available in the market.
So, let’s review some of the plugins that are essential for blogs and contribute to effective blogging.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plugin: Your site needs to rank higher on search engines, as more traffic will be drawn to your site when you rank better on search engines like Google. SEO plugins can be of immense help for WordPress websites and even blogs. So, make sure to choose one for your blog.
- Contact Form Plugin: A contact form acts as a medium for communication between you and your audience. Thus, contact form plugins help you create forms to get quick responses or ask for your users’ contact information. Hence, ensure that you use the contact form plugin for your blog.
- Security Plugin: When you use security plugins on your site, your blog and its users are set to be secure from possible spam or hackers. Thus, the security plugin protects your blog from potential threats.
- Cache Plugin: Your blog’s content and performance should be top-notch and smooth. Cache plugins improve your site’s speed and performance, so using one on your blog is beneficial.
- Google Analytics Plugin: With Google Analytics plugins, you can monitor your blog’s progress and growth with the help of different statistics. You can understand your audience type based on such statistics., So, make sure you pick a Google Analytics plugin for your blog.
29 Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs
Now that we’ve settled on what type of plugins we need, let’s review the best WordPress plugins for blogs and decide which ones are best for us.
1. Everest Forms
Readers captivated by your blogs might want to contact you. And what better way for them to do so than through forms? First on our list is Everest Forms!
Whether you’re looking to create forms from scratch or add one from the library, the plugin allows you to do so with no hesitation.
This plugin’s user-friendly customization interface is equipped with drag-and-drop fields. Moreover, you can add an unlimited number of forms with multiple-column support.
Plus, your forms are fully responsive and can be used on any portable device, such as mobile phones and tablets.
Key Features:
- Shortcode to help add the forms in WordPress blog posts, pages, sidebars, and more
- Support from Google ReCaptcha to block the spam
- Redirect the user to a specific page after form submission
- View form entries from the dashboard of your website
- Editable form validation message
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from$48.3/year.)
You can view some more WordPress form builder plugins in one of our articles.
2. BlockArt Blocks
You must be familiar with the popular default block editor provided by WordPress, called Gutenberg.
Though it offers various blocks, such as Heading, Image, Video, etc., it still has limitations. You require a custom block plugin like BlockArt Blocks to overcome such shortcomings.
BlockArt Blocks lets you create content effortlessly and quickly expand your block’s range, saving you time and effort.
Above all, the plugin offers several blocks and sections to help you start from scratch without having to deal with the hectic coding process.
Key Features:
- Allows to copy and paste style of any block
- Caching plugin compatible
- There is no limit to layout possibilities
- Lightweight and super-fast in speed
- Offers responsive editing
Price: Free
3. Yoast SEO
If you have a blog, one essential thing you must do is focus on its SEO. Yoast SEO is one of the best and oldest plugins for improving SEO.
Yoast has many features that can improve your WordPress blog, including SEO. It can also optimize your keywords and synonyms.
The plugin also analyzes your blog’s readability and calculates the Flesch Reading Ease score so that your readers can better understand your content.
But if you want a Yoast SEO alternative, then Rank Math is an equally good SEO plugin that helps optimize your content with built-in suggestions.
Key Features:
- Keyword optimization for synonyms and related keywords
- Complete control over breadcrumbs for setting primary categories for posts
- No duplicate content with the help of canonical URLs
- Content Insights to check the match for chosen keywords
- Readability check from Flesch Reading Ease score
Price: Freemium (Premium version costs $99/year.)
If you want to know more about SEO plugins, read our article on WordPress plugins for SEO.
4. Spectra
Spectra began as a block plugin for WordPress and has evolved into a full-page builder. It has a free version, Spectra, and a premium version, Spectra Pro.
Both integrate seamlessly with the WordPress editor and provide a range of blocks, wireframes, and templates for building pages.
As Spectra works with WordPress, there’s very little performance penalty for using it, while the tools can help speed up page building exponentially
With over 30 blocks, your only limitation is your imagination. Think of any design you can, and Spectra will implement it on your site.
Key Features:
- Free and premium versions
- Clean code with no performance penalties
- Lots of blocks and resources
- Ready-made templates and wireframes
- Popup, modal, and slider builders with Pro
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $49/year.)
5. Smush
When your blog’s content keeps on increasing, and you don’t compress the images, it can take up a lot of space. This can also affect the site’s speed and lead to slow performance.
You can use the Smush plugin to compress the images on your blogs. It’s regarded as one of the best image optimization plugins for any website.
It scans the images on your site, maintains their size, and removes any unwanted components.
This plugin can help you optimize your blog images while maintaining quality. As your site’s speed increases, your users’ experience improves!
Key Features:
- Compress the images without reducing their quality
- You can also resize the images with a specific height and width
- Bulk image compression with up to 50 images at a time
- Incorrect Image Size Detection to locate images slowing the site speed
- View Smush image stats directly in image blocks
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $3/month.)
6. WP Rocket
Your page speed might still affect your blog even when you produce SEO-friendly content. Users may not have a good experience with a slow site’s content.
That’s why you need to make your blog perform faster and better using cache plugins.
WP Rocket is a great cache plugin that offers a vast range of automatic optimization features for your site. It also helps improve your PageSpeed score and loading time.
With it, you can customize the settings per your requirements with advanced options like XML sitemaps, optimized Google Fonts, lazy loading for images, etc.
Key Features:
- Offers browser caching, GZIP compression, and page caching
- Cross-origin support
- Supports third-party plugins like Jetpack, Yoast, and more
- WooCommerce compatible
- Multilingual ready
Price: Cost starts from $59/year
7. Akismet Anti-Spam
Spam can contaminate your site and backend files through various comments or contact form submissions from users.
To reduce them, you can use the Akismet plugin – one of the best plugins for dealing with spam.
It’s an anti-spam plugin that examines all your comments and contact form submissions for harmful content.
Additionally, it automatically analyzes the website and removes any content that might be considered spam.
Key Features:
- Extremely easy backup and restore processes
- Status history for each comment to view where the spam was found
- Moderators can view the number of spam comments from each user
- Discard features that block the worst spam to save storage
- Fast performance saves a lot of time
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $9.95/month.)
If you are interested in the best WordPress anti-spam plugins, please check our article on it.
8. Jetpack
Jetpack is probably one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs if you want to manage your blog’s website effortlessly.
Developed by Automattic, Jetpack also provides you with various site statistics. With it, you can keep track of the visitors or readers you get on your blogs and work out ways to increase them even more.
This plugin also helps with spam filtering, malware scanning, and brute force attack protection.
Thus, it prevents unwanted intrusions on your website, and your blogs will be in safe hands.
Key Features:
- Powerful customization tools for the design you desire
- Faster mobile experience with lazy image loading
- SEO tools for Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com
- Top-notch security with brute force attack protection and spam filtering
- Ability to manage multiple websites from one dashboard
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $9.95/month.)
9. UpdraftPlus
Even if you’ve installed security plugins and systems for your blog, your blog might still be vulnerable to illegal activities.
You’ll need a backup plugin to avoid harm, and UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress backup plugins.
You can back up your content using UpdraftPlus in cloud databases like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud, and more. Then, you can click on restore to obtain it again with just a single click.
Using this plugin, you can also schedule automatic backups to back up your content to multiple cloud services.
Key Features:
- Automatic scheduled backup for your contents
- Use fewer server resources for faster processing
- Enables you to back up your content on multiple cloud services
- Easily duplicate or migrate websites with the help of Migrator
- Free, dedicated expert support
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $70/year.)
10. Wordfence
It is essential to keep your WordPress blog secure for yourself and your users. WordPress security plugins can tackle hackers, spam, or any other threat.
Although various security plugins are available, you can completely rely on Wordfence, one of the best ones.
The plugin offers malware scans, firewall protection, blocking, and much more. With Wordfence, you can monitor your traffic in real-time and login, log out, report 404 errors, and more.
Further, their two-factor authentication is handy for enhancing your blog’s login security.
Key Features:
- 24/7 incident response team
- Centralized management
- Offers country blocking in the premium version
- Delivers highly configurable alerts via SMS, Mail, and Slack
- Offers to compare your core files, plugins, and themes with the ones in the WordPress repository
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $119/year.)
11. ThirstyAffiliates
Affiliate links are one of the most common methods of monetizing a blog. To use them efficiently, you’ll need to cloak them.
ThirstyAffiliates is one of the best WordPress plugins for this.
You can easily cloak the affiliate links and use them on your blogs with the help of this simple WordPress blog plugin.
This plugin creates a new cloak or short link and redirects it to the unnecessary long affiliate link. You can also assign different categories to the links so that it’s easier to manage them as well.
Key Features:
- Easy setup and interface to save you a lot of time
- Option to group your affiliate links into different categories
- Multiple safe redirect options like 301, 302, or even 307
- Availability to add an image to the affiliate links
- Built-in reports and statistics of affiliate links
Price: Freemium (Premium version costs $99.60/year.)
12. WooCommerce
Blogs are also used to promote and sell products. Hence, if you need to sell products through your blog, WooCommerce will be perfect for you.
It has been one of the best blog plugins for WordPress for selling products for quite some time.
This plugin has all the features and elements that you will ever need on your blog to sell a product. You can easily set up WooCommerce on your WordPress blog and start selling immediately.
You may even customize and improve the selling process yourself with the help of the vast number of extensions available on the market.
Key Features:
- Easily set up a store or sell a product with just a few clicks
- Provides their own user account pages for smooth transactions
- Flexible and secure payments with multiple gateways
- Fully responsive, which enables you to manage the orders from your mobile
- Excellent support and documentation to help you anytime
Price: Free
If you’re interested in knowing about WooCommerce extensions, we’ve got you covered, too.
13. User Registration
In most blogs, people tend to add new registration or login options for users, which increases the interaction between the blogger and the readers.
Logged-in users can explore and use more features of the website, such as commenting on posts.
The User Registration plugin is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs that allows you to add registration and login options.
It’s also one of the easiest to use, as it has a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. You can even use its huge range of add-ons to increase the functionality of your blogs, too.
Key Features:
- Multiple design styles for forms
- Auto-login after registration to save time
- WordPress dashboard access based on the assigned roles
- Admin approval for registration
- Show/Hide label option in each field
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $79/year.)
We’ve listed some more WordPress user registration plugins. Please take a look at it if you want to explore more plugins.
14. Mailchimp for WordPress
Email marketing is also one of the major ways through which you can grow your blogs. To help you with it, Mailchimp for WordPress is the best plugin you can get.
It’s one of WordPress’s most popular email marketing plugins that can manage subscribers, send emails, and track results in bulk.
This plugin enables you to add more subscribers to your email list easily and helps achieve the target for your email campaign.
Further, it seamlessly integrates with all the major WordPress plugins, so you won’t have any problems while using it.
Key Features:
- User-friendly interface
- Translation-ready plugin which can be presented in any language
- Availability to modify the plugin with code snippets
- Multiple extensions to increase the functionality
- Awesome support and well-documented
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $99/year.)
15. Newsletter
Using newsletters on your blog is also one of the great ways to gather more readers and keep your current users engaged. For this, you can use the Newsletter WordPress plugin.
As the name suggests, it’s one of the best WordPress plugins for newsletters.
The plugin’s drag-and-drop composer makes building newsletters easy. You can create unlimited newsletters; the plugin tracks them and provides stats.
Moreover, you may extend the plugin’s functionality even further by adding a few extensions.
Key Features:
- Easy-to-use drag-and-drop composer
- Unlimited subscribers and newsletters with statistics and tracking
- Subscription spam check with Akismet and captcha
- Delivery speed and fine control start from 12 emails per hour
- WPML and translation are ready
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts f$79/year.year)
16. MonsterInsights
You can track the growth of your WordPress blog based on various statistics with the help of the best Google Analytics plugin, MonsterInsights.
Further, you can understand your audience types and cater to them to boost your blog’s traffic.
Apart from that, it tracks your user views from multiple platforms and various devices.
This plugin also allows you to run advanced link tracking with custom options, including RSS tracking, Anchor tracking, and much more.
Key Features:
- GDPR Compliance
- Offers automatic tracking
- Customizable dashboard widget
- Offers real-time reports
- Integrated with WooCommerce, WPForms, CookieBot, etc.
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $99.60/year.)
17. Ajax Search Lite
A blog needs to have an excellent user interface to help readers search for particular content. In this case, a search plugin like Ajax Search Lite can contribute a lot.
It’s one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs to help your readers search for topics.
This plugin is much better than the default search bar, as it also provides category and post-type filters.
It’s also designed to ensure smooth animation throughout your blog when your readers use the search bars.
Key Features:
- Supports custom post types and field types
- Automation search replacement options
- Widget and shortcode-friendly
- Display images in the search results, too
- Frontend search settings boxes
Price: Freemium (Premium version costs $39 for a regular license on ThemeForest.net)
Want to explore more such plugins? Here is a collection of the best WordPress search plugins, too.
18. Elementor
Installing a page builder plugin can be helpful for any WordPress website. And if you’ve spent a fraction of the time with WordPress, you might know that Elementor is one of the popular page builders.
Furthermore, it can even be one of the best plugins for blogs.
You can quickly get used to using this plugin and modify any part of your WordPress blog within minutes. Its excellent drag-and-drop interface makes the changes you need for your blogs effortless.
Plus, it has a lot of flexibility to create and implement your favorite designs on your website.
Key Features:
- Easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface
- Highly customizable design options for your blogs
- Fully responsive design and accessible on any mobile devices
- Undo and redo action, along with a revision of the history
- Built-in maintenance mode for special circumstances
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $2.99/month.)
19. SeedProd
As a blogger, you might also want to create high-converting landing pages for your site. SeedProd is the WordPress plugin that lets you do exactly that.
It’s useful for building coming soon and maintenance mode pages, as well as beautiful landing pages that convert visitors into subscribers.
That’s not all. This multi-functional plugin can also be used as a WordPress website builder.
It means you can use its intuitive drag-and-drop feature to edit every part of your blog website, like headers, footers, archives, global parts, and more.
Key Features:
- Super-fast drag-and-drop page builder
- Beautifully designed pre-built templates and layout sections
- Revision history, undo and redo options
- Live previews of the pages
- Integration with popular email marketing tools
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $39.50/year.)
20. Popup Maker
Your blog can be a standalone website or included as a blog on any other type of website. Either way, the header section or specific popups are one of the first things that readers notice.
So, adding the Popup Maker plugin can really help your readers get hooked on your blog.
Popup Maker is one of the best blog plugins that allows you to create any popup you like and display it anywhere on your blogs.
Here, you can list the links to your blog’s latest published post or any other interesting areas to keep the readers more engaged.
Key Features:
- Fully responsive design suitable for any mobile devices
- Opt-in form popups, slide-out pop-ups, banner bars, and many more
- Compatible with major WordPress plugins
- Dictate the frequency at which the user sees the popups
- Auto-open triggers to set a timed delay
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $99/year.)
If you want to explore more of the best WordPress popup plugins, we’ve got a blog article for that as well.
21. Revive Old Posts
Social media is an excellent source of blog referral traffic. However, when you manually re-share your content, it can be pretty time-consuming.
Hence, with Revive Old Posts, you can share each post automatically on social media platforms like Facebook.
Besides, it revives your blog’s articles from the archive and re-posts them to grow its reach. Also, you can set a schedule for your article’s publications as well.
Thus, Revive Old Posts can be used in your blog to grow your social media followers, engage with existing followers, and uplift your site’s traffic.
Key Features:
- Allows to pick a time between social media post-sharing
- URL shorteners are compatible
- Allows users to choose maximum and minimum age of posts to share on social media
- Can automatically generate hashtags
- Integration with Google Analytics
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $99/year.)
22. Co-Authors Plus
You may have a few more hands to work on your blog. You’ll probably have to present them as authors to get them to recognize their work.
Co-Author Plus is one of the best WordPress blog plugins for managing author names for a particular blog post.
The plugin functions with 5 blocks that provide the co-author’s information to help them get recognized better.
It enables you to assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types. The co-authors assigned are also allowed to edit the posts they are associated with the help of this plugin.
Key Features:
- Assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types
- Easy-to-use interface to help you quickly add co-authors
- Can be activated with WordPress multisite
- Availability of template tags to list co-authors
- Option to disable guest authors whenever necessary
Price: Free
23. wpDiscuz
Adding a comment section is one of the easiest ways to increase user interaction. You can use a plugin to add the comments section.
wpDiscuz is one of the best WordPress plugins for this task.
This plugin is quite fast, responsive, and packed with many exciting features. Depending on your blog post, you can disable or enable the comments.
It also has comment list sorting, where readers can view the comments according to the newest, oldest, or most voted comments.
Key Features:
- Multilevel comment threads for detailed discussions
- Anonymous comments without names and emails
- Full integration with Social Media Login systems
- Different date formats for the comments
- Clean, simple, and responsive design
Price: Free (Addons for the plugin is sold separately)
24. Broken Link Checker
Broken links on your blogging site have a negative impact on your users. Further, it also affects your site’s SEO and ranking on search engines.
That’s why you need to use the Broken Link Checker for your site.
Broken Link Checker is an awesome WordPress blog plugin that checks for broken links and notifies you either via email or dashboard.
It monitors all internal and external links of your posts, pages, comments, etc., and helps you fix them to improve SEO and provide a better user experience.
Key Features:
- Check for broken links, images, and redirects
- It enables searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text, etc.
- Make broken links display differently in posts
- Edit the link directly from the plugin’s page without manually updating each post
- Prevents search engines from following broken links
Price: Free
25. Redirection
As we can guess from the name, Redirection is a popular redirect manager plugin for your WordPress site.
It enables you to create and manage redirects for any broken links so that users reach other relevant pages/posts whenever they click on them.
Besides, you can easily configure this plugin to monitor when the permalinks of your blog pages and posts are changed.
Hence, it automatically creates a redirect to the new URL. Overall, it’s a powerful redirection plugin that helps reduce errors and improve your site ranking.
Key Features:
- Easily manage 301 redirects
- Keep track of 404 errors
- Conditional redirect options (login status, browser, referrer, etc.)
- Configurable logging options to view redirects occurring on your site
- No coding skills required
Price: Free
26. Ad Inserter
If you wish to earn revenue by placing ads on your blogs, Ad Inserter is a must-have plugin for WordPress blogs.
It comes with top-notch advertisement features and supports all types of ads, such as Google Adsense, Google Ad Manager, Amazon Native Shopping Ads, and more.
The best thing about this ad manager plugin is that it lets you insert ads on your pages and posts at different places.
Some of those places include before or after posts, content, excerpts, above the header, and footer.
Key Features:
- Automatic insertion of ads on pages/posts
- Disable ads on individual pages/posts
- Generate codes for banners and placeholders
- Advanced options for inserting opt-in forms, header scripts, tracking, ad codes, etc.
- Easy copying, pasting, and setting of ads using an internal clipboard
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from €20/year.)
27. Simple Author Box
Simple Author Box is one of the best WordPress plugins for displaying a responsive author profile at the end of blog posts.
It enables you to show the author’s gravatar, name, author description, etc., in a captivating manner.
The plugin also offers 30+ social profile fields within the author box, where you can display the social icons effortlessly.
Furthermore, Simple Author Box is fully customizable to match your theme’s style, color, size, and text options.
Key Features:
- Simple setup and easy-to-use
- Responsive and mobile-ready author box
- Ideal for guest posts and guest authors
- Manually insert the author box on your template file (single.php or author.php)
- Premium version for more advanced features
Price: Freemium (Premium version starts from $39/year.)
28. WPML
Do you want your blogs to reach people worldwide? The WordPress multilingual plugin WPML can help.
It’s a powerful WordPress plugin for building a multilingual site, as it enables you to translate all your posts, pages, custom post types, and even the theme’s text to the language you want.
Further, the plugin helps you optimize your site for SEO in multiple languages. WPML also works great with your favorite WordPress themes, plugins, and page builders.
As the plugin is compatible with WooCommerce, you can easily set up multilingual and multicurrency online stores and provide users with a localized purchasing process.
Key Features:
- Reliable and secure WordPress multilingual plugin
- Translated into over 40 languages
- Flexible translation methods to fit your needs
- Stable and secure
- Seamless integration with popular SEO plugins
Price: The plugin starts from €39/year
29. Disable Comments
Yet another free WordPress blog plugin on our list, Disable Comments, lets you enable or disable comments from any post type.
Hence, if you are sick of annoying comments spamming your blog website, the plugin will help you prevent it.
Once you install the plugin, you can easily override the comment settings throughout your website. Do you have multiple websites?
That’s not a problem because this fantastic plugin will effortlessly help you remove all the irrelevant comments on your entire network.
Key Features:
- Easily disable comments on posts, pages, and media
- Hide comment-related sections from the WordPress dashboard
- Stop spam comments in a click
- Option to delete comments by type
- Quick setup wizard
Price: Free
Wrapping Up with the Best WordPress Plugin for Blogs!
These are some of the best WordPress plugins that we’ve gathered for your blog.
You can use the ones that fit you and give the best results for your blogs. However, we encourage you not to use all the plugins at once.
You can experiment with one plugin at a time and measure its performance. Using all of them at once might increase the load on your blog website and make it slower.
Meanwhile, if you want to make your blog website even faster, we also have some tips to speed up your WordPress website.
If you’re wondering how to add a blog to WordPress, we have a tutorial on creating a WordPress website and a collection of the best WordPress blog themes.
Also, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay updated on our recent articles.
Happy Reading!
Disclaimer: Some of the links in the post may be affiliate links. So if you purchase anything using the link, we will earn affiliate commission.
