ThemeGrill AuthorLooking for the best WordPress plugins for blogs? Then, this article is just the thing for you.
Along with a large variety of WordPress blog themes, there are also various types of WordPress plugins for blogs to help with their functionalities.
Blogs are one of the most popular and important types of websites as they help you to promote your business and interact with your visitors. But, you’ll need to make them as effective as possible which can be done with plugins.
Thus, in this article, we’ve listed some of the best WordPress blog plugins for your site. Let’s start!
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 go through some of the plugins that act as a big necessity for blogs and contribute to your goal of 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 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 act 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: Along with the great content, your blog’s performance should also be top-notch. When you use cache plugins, your site will be great in speed and in terms of performance, so it’s beneficial to use a cache plugin on your blog.
- 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.
30 Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs
1. Everest Forms
While publishing blogs, readers might sometimes be eager to contact you to ask some questions about them. So, it’s necessary that you add a contact form to your blog and Everest Forms is one of the best plugins for this purpose.
This plugin has a very user-friendly interface for customizations equipped with drag-and-drop fields. You can add an unlimited number of forms with multiple-column support. The forms that you’ve created are also fully responsive and can be used on any portable device like mobile phones and tablets.
Key Features:
- Shortcode to help add the forms in WordPress blog posts, pages, sidebar, 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: Free or $69 for a Single Site License (Offers 30% discount on this price)
You can view some more WordPress form builder plugins in one of our articles.
2. BlockArt
You must be familiar with the popular default block editor provided by WordPress called Gutenberg. Though it offers various blocks like Heading, Image, Video, etc., it still has some limitations. To overcome such shortcomings, you require a custom block plugin like BlockArt.
In any WordPress blog, you need to have a custom block plugin to add rich content that contributes to increased engagement. You can quickly expand your block’s range with BlockArt and even save time and effort as BlockArt lets you create content effortlessly with its blocks.
Key Features:
- Allows to copy and paste style of any block
- Caching plugin compatible
- No limit on layout possibilities
- Lightweight and super-fast in speed
- Offers responsive editing
Price: Free
3. Yoast SEO
If you have a blog, one of the essential things you must do is focus on its SEO. Yoast SEO is one of the best and oldest plugins for blogs when it comes to improving SEO. Most WordPress websites have trusted it because it’s frequently updated to be compatible with Google algorithms.
Yoast has a lot of features that can make your blog better, and not just SEO. It can optimize your keywords and synonyms too. The plugin also analyzes your blog’s readability and calculates the Flesch Reading Ease score so that your readers can understand your content better.
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: Free or $99/year
If you want to know some more WordPress SEO plugins, we do have a list on it too.
4. Smush
While creating a blog, you’ll also need to add the images on your blog page itself. When your blog’s content keeps on increasing and you don’t compress the images, it can take a ton of space for a blog. This can also affect the site’s speed and lead to slow performance.
To help you compress the images on your blogs, you can use the Smush plugin. It’s regarded as one of the best image optimization plugins for your blog website. This plugin can really help you optimize your blog images and at the same time maintain their quality too.
Key Features:
- Compress the images without the reduction in 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: Free or $7.5/month
5. WP Rocket
Even when you produce SEO-friendly content, your page speed might still affect your blog. 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.
Additionally, the plugin is more than just a caching plugin as it also helps improve your PageSpeed score and uplift your 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, page caching
- Cross-origin support
- Supports third-party plugins like Jetpack, Yoast, and more
- WooCommerce compatible
- Multilingual ready
Price: $49/year for a Single Site License
6. Akismet Anti-Spam
If you don’t have any countermeasures for your blogs against spam, there are chances that your blogs can be filled with them. Spams 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 to deal with spam.
It’s an anti-spam plugin that examines all your comments and contact form submissions to find any sort of harmful content. It automatically analyzes the website and drops out the contents that might occur as 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 the storage
- Fast performance that saves a lot of time
Price: Free or $8.3 billed yearly
If you are interested in the best WordPress anti-spam plugins, please check our article on it.
7. Jetpack
Jetpack is probably one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs if you want to effortlessly manage your blog website. Developed by Automattic, Jetpack also provides you with various site statistics. With it, you can keep a track of the visitors or readers you get on your blogs and work out ways to increase them even more.
This plugin also helps in spam filtering, malware scanning, and brute force attack protection. So, unwanted intrusions are prevented on your website through it. Therefore, your blogs will also 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: Free or Choose from the following pricing plans:
- Backup: $9/month Billed Yearly
- Security: $24/month Billed Yearly
- Complete: $99/month Billed Yearly
8. UpdraftPlus
Even if you’ve installed security plugins and systems for your blog, your blog might be still vulnerable to illegal activities. It can still get hacked or crashed due to certain unfortunate malware. In cases like these, you’ll need a backup plugin and UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress backup plugins for your site.
You can backup your contents using UpdraftPlus in the 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. You can also back up your content to more than one cloud service using this plugin with scheduled automatic backups.
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: Free or $70/year for 2 Sites
9. Wordfence
It’s essential to keep your WordPress blog secure for yourself and your users. You can tackle any possible hackers, spam, or any other threat with WordPress security plugins. Although you can find various security plugins, you can completely rely on one of the best ones; Wordfence.
The plugin offers malware scans, firewall protection, blocking, and much more. You can monitor your traffic in real-time with Wordfence and monitor login, logouts, 404 errors, etc. Further, their Two Factor Authentication is handy to enhance your blog’s login security.
Key Features:
- 24/7 incident response team
- Centralized management
- Offers country blocking in the premium version
- Delivers high configurable alerts via SMS, Mail, and Slack
- Offers to compare your core files, plugins, and themes with the ones in the WordPress repository
Price: Free or $99/year
10. ThirstyAffiliates
One of the most common methods of monetizing a blog is with the help of affiliate links. To use them in the most efficient way, you’ll need to cloak them. For this, ThirstyAffiliates is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs to cloak them.
You can easily cloak the affiliate links and use them on your blogs with the help of this simple blog plugin for WordPress. This plugin creates a new cloak link or a 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: Free or $99 for a Single Site License
11. Masteriyo
If your blog covers teaching, skills, and knowledgeable content, then LMS plugins are effective for your site. Using such plugins, you can set up online courses, quizzes, etc. without any hassle. Masteriyo is among the best WordPress LMS plugins offering a fast and smooth course-building experience.
You get a single-page interface with Masteriyo, which lacks in other LMS plugins. This means you don’t have to switch between pages to complete your individual course. To add more, the distraction-free learning page is equally helpful in enabling your students to focus on courses.
Key Features:
- Offers easy course navigation
- In-built questions and answers section
- Offers easy drag & drop course builder
- Course progress bar
- Compatible with WordPress themes
Price: Free or $199 for a Single Site License (Offers 75% off on this price)
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 WordPress plugins to sell a product 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. It can even be improved according to your additional needs with its vast selection of extensions.
Key Features:
- Easily set up a store or sell a product with just a few clicks
- Provides their own user accounts pages for smooth transactions
- Flexible and secured 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 to know 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. This also increases the interaction between the blogger and the readers. The logged-in users can explore and use more features of the website such as commenting on posts and so on.
User Registration plugin is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs if you want to add registration and login options to your blog. 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 your time
- WordPress dashboard access based on the assigned roles
- Admin approval for registration
- Show/Hide label option in each field
Price: Free or $79/year for a Personal Plan
We’ve listed some more WordPress user registration plugins. Please have 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 the most popular email marketing plugins in WordPress that can manage subscribers, send emails, and track results in bulk.
This plugin enables you to easily add more subscribers to your email. Further, it can seamlessly integrate with all the major plugins of WordPress so that 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: Free or $59/year for a Single Site License
15. Newsletter
Using newsletters on your blog is also one of the great ways to gather more readers as well as keep your current users engaged. For this, you can use the Newsletter plugin. As the name suggests, it’s one of the best WordPress plugins for newsletters.
The plugin has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop composer to build newsletters. You can build unlimited amounts of newsletters with it and the plugin will also track them and provide stats for them.
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 fine control starting from 12 emails per hour
- WPML and translation ready
Price: Free or $48/year for a Blogger Plan
16. MonsterInsights
You can track the growth of your blog based on various statistics with the help of the best Google Analytics plugin like 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. You can even run advanced link tracking with custom options, including RSS tracking, Anchor tracking, and much more using this plugin.
Key Features:
- GDPR compliance
- Offers automatic tracking
- Customizable dashboard widget
- Offers real-time reports
- Integrated with WooCommerce, WPForms, CookieBot, etc.
Price: Free or $199/year for a Single Site License (Offers up to 50% discount)
17. Ajax Search Lite
A blog needs to have an excellent user interface to help the readers search for a particular content too. 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 on the search bar. It’s also designed in such a way that it ensures 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: Free or $36 for a Regular License
Want to explore more of such plugins? Then, there 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 be even one of the best plugins for blogs.
You can get used to using this plugin very quickly and modify any part of your blog within minutes. It has an excellent drag-and-drop interface through which you can make any changes you need for your blogs effortlessly.
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 revision history
- Built-in maintenance mode for special circumstances
Price: Free or $49 for a Single Site License
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. Besides creating beautiful landing pages that convert your visitors into subscribers, it’s also useful for building coming soon and maintenance mode pages.
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 websites 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: Free or $39.50/year for a Basic Plan
20. Popup Maker
Your blog can either be just a blog website or can be 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 the readers notice. So, adding a Popup Maker plugin can really help the readers get hooked on your blog.
Popup Maker is one of the best blog plugins that allows you to create any type of popup you like and lets you display it anywhere on your blogs. Here, you can list the links to the latest published post or any other interesting areas of your blogs 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: Free or $87/year for a Single Site License
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 for 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 compatible
- Allows to choose maximum and minimum age of posts to share on social media
- Can automatically generate hashtags
- Integration with Google Analytics
Price: Free or $75/year for a Single Site License
22. Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed
As a blogger, you must also be active on most social media platforms. On top of that, you need to maintain your feed to make it more pleasing. Your follower count is set to increase more with a visually pleasing feed.
That’s where this Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed plugin will help you, as it connects to various Instagram accounts. You can combine them into one feed or split it separately. Also, this plugin allows you to add the Load More button so your site’s images won’t slow down.
Key Features:
- Allows to show full-size or medium pictures from your Instagram feed
- GDPR compliance
- Fully responsive
- Built-in shortcode options
- Super easy set-up
Price: Free or $49/year for Facebook Feed Plan
23. Co-Authors Plus
If your blog has multiple authors, there might be a situation where more than one author works on a single post. On conditions that it occurs, you’ll need a plugin to present them as co-authors for a single post. Hence, Co-Author Plus is one of the best WordPress blog plugins to manage author names for a particular blog post.
This plugin 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 the 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
24. wpDiscuz
One of the easiest ways to increase interaction with your users is by adding a comment section. To add the comments section, you can simply use a plugin. And wpDiscuz is one of the best WordPress plugins for this.
This plugin is quite fast and responsive and packed with a lot of exciting features. You can also disable or enable the comments depending upon your blog post. 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
25. 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. And 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:
- Checks for the broken links, images, and redirects
- Enables searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text, etc.
- Make broken links to display differently in posts
- Edit link directly from the plugin’s page without manually updating each post
- Prevents search engines from following broken links
Price: Free
26. 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’ll automatically create a redirect to the new URL. All in all, 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
27. Ad Inserter
If you wish to earn some good 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 at different places on your pages and posts. Some of those places include before or after posts, content, excerpt, above the header, footer, and so on.
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 and advert codes, etc.
- Easy copying, pasting, and settings of ads using an internal clipboard
Price: Free
28. 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.
Additionally, the plugin also offers 30+ social profile fields within the author box where you can display the social icons effortlessly. On top of that, 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: Free or $39/year for a Personal Plan
29. WPML
Do you want your blogs to reach people all around the globe? If so, WordPress multilingual plugin WPML can help. It’s a powerful WordPress plugin to build 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 also helps you optimize your site for SEO in multiple languages. Not to mention, WPML also works great with your favorite WordPress themes, plugins, as well as page builders.
Key Features:
- Reliable and secure WordPress multilingual plugin
- Translated to over 40 languages
- Flexible translation methods to fit your needs
- Multilingual SEO
- Seamless integration with popular SEO plugins
Price: $39/year for a Multilingual Blog
30. 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 comment spam on your blog website, the plugin will help you prevent them.
Once you install the plugin, you can easily override the comment settings throughout your website. Got multiple websites? Not a problem because this fantastic plugin will assist you to get rid of all the irrelevant comments on your entire network effortlessly.
Thus, with Disable Comments, you can get the power to manage the comments just the way you want.
Key Features:
- Easily disable comments on posts, pages, and media
- Hide comment-related section from the WordPress dashboard
- Stop spam comments in a click
- Option to delete comments by type
- Prevent irrelevant comments on the multisite network
Price: Free
Wrapping Up!
These were some of the best WordPress plugins that we’ve gathered for your blog.
You can use the ones that you need to get the best results for your blogs. However, we encourage you not to use all the plugins at once as all of them are not entirely necessary for your blogs. Using all of them at once might increase the load on your blog website and make it slower.
If you’re wondering how to add a blog to WordPress, we do have a tutorial to create a WordPress website and a collection of the best WordPress blog themes to help you.
If you want to make your blog website even faster, we have some tips to speed up your WordPress website as well. Similarly, if you are looking for more plugins, we do have a list of the best WordPress plugins for your website too.
Also, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay updated on our recent articles.
Happy Reading!
