When you start your WordPress blog, you’ll find yourself facing a decision about what plugins to use. There are so many to choose from it’s hard to know which ones are worth your time and money. And to make matters worse, everybody has a different opinion about it.
The thing is though nobody can give you an exact list of all the plugins you will need as this depends on your situation. Even so, there are still some requirements most blogs have in common. So without further ado, here is a shortlist of 6 must-have WordPress plugins for your blog.
Yoast SEO
The first one on this list is Yoast SEO, which is by far the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. The free version of the plugin packs plenty of useful features that will help you make your website search engine friendly. The premium version also provides functionalities to fix broken links on your website and control the display of your blog posts when people share them on social media.
Key features (free version):
- Enter your own meta title and meta description for each page or post
- Keyword density analysis – one keyword per page/post
- Content readability analysis
- Enable XML Sitemaps
Premium features:
- Custom Facebook and Twitter meta titles, meta descriptions and images
- Keyword density analysis – multiple keywords per page/post
- Redirect manager
- 1 year of access to 24/7 support
Pricing:
The premium version of the plugin comes with a price tag of $89 per year for a single website. If you don’t renew your annual subscription, the plugin will still work as intended, but you will lose access to support, and you won’t be able to update it anymore.
All In One WP Security & Firewall
Security is becoming increasingly important as thousands of websites get hacked every day. If you want to minimize the chances of your website being among them, you should take a few security measures.
All In One WP Security is a comprehensive plugin that offers many features to improve your website security and performance. It will help you fend cyber attacks, prevent unauthorized access to your admin area, and scan for security issues.
Key features:
- Brute force attack protection
- Database security and backup
- User login security
- Firewall
- Spam prevention
- Scanner
Pricing:
All In One WordPress Security is 100% free.
UpdraftPlus
Hackers, malicious code, or bad plugins can crash your website. To get it up and running as fast as possible, it is critical to keep backup copies of your website on another server.
UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress plugins for backup and restoration. It lets you easily create backup copies of your website, both on-demand and scheduled, and store them on a cloud server. You can then use these backups to restore your website in a single click.
Key features (free version):
- Scheduled backups of WordPress files and database
- Restore from backup
- Backup to remote storage (limited server options)
Premium features:
- Additional servers for remote storage
- Automatic backup before updates
- Website migration tool
- Advanced reporting features
- Support
Pricing:
The free version of the plugin will be enough for most websites. The premium subscription costs $85 for the first year (up to 2 websites). When you renew it, you get a 40% discount.
Akismet
We all hate spam. But if you allow users to comment on your blog, there is no way to avoid it entirely. Dealing with spam can be very annoying and time-consuming, and manually filtering out spam comments from real ones is not something you’ll want to do.
Instead, you can use a plugin like Akismet that will do it automatically for you. It will move most of the spam comments to spam, so they won’t pollute the rest of the comments that are waiting for your approval. This way, you will be able to focus on the genuine comments by real users, which will save you lots of time on review.
Key features (free version):
- Spam protection
Premium features:
- Advanced stats
- Priority support
Pricing:
The free version of Akismet is for personal sites and blogs only. For commercial sites, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan for $5 per month.
WP Fastest Cache
Users like fast websites, and so does Google. A caching plugin will speed up your website, save you bandwidth, and make your website stabler.
WP Fastest Cache is one of the best and most popular caching plugins for WordPress. It will improve your website performance by creating static copies of your web pages that get served to the user. It will also reduce file sizes for faster delivery.
Key features (free version):
- Web pages caching
- Browser caching
- HTML minification
- JS and CSS files minification
- Gzip compression
- CDN integration tool
Premium features:
- Better file minification
- Remove render-blocking scripts
- Batch image optimization
- Database cleanup tools
- Lazy load images
Pricing:
To get the WP Fastest Premium version, you will need to install the free version first. Later, you can buy it through the WP Fastest Cache Settings page for the price of $49.99.
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Google Analytics is a tool to collect website traffic data, which is essential if you want to improve your website. To enable Google Analytics tracking, you will need to embed a script to your website’s head tag. If you are not familiar with HTML coding, this may not be a simple task.
MonsterInsights will simplify this for anybody who is not a web developer. It will help you connect your website with Google Analytics in just a few steps. There is no coding required.
Additionally, MonsterInsights also comes with a built-in dashboard to display analytics data and reports inside your WordPress dashboard.
Key features (free version):
- Quick & easy analytics setup
- Google Analytics dashboard
Premium features:
- Advanced tracking features (events tracking, eCommerce tracking, affiliate link tracking, etc.)
- Custom reports
- Support
Pricing:
MonsterInsights premium plan starts at $199 per year for a single website.
So there you have it. Our list of must-have plugins. Are you using any of these and want to share your experience? Or perhaps you know of a good alternative? Please leave a comment.
