This post was last updated on November 22nd, 2020 at 09:03 am
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There are thousands of WordPress plugins that you can choose freely and most of them are FREE. With so many plugins, you can be confused to choose the best and most profitable for your content and business.
SO, first, if you’re beginners, you must be wondering what is a plugin?
A plugin is a kind of software that you can add to your blog, which will enable more functions to your blog’s performance. It’s kind of magic! You just need to go to Plugins>Add New and search the plugin that you want, click the Install button, and activate it.
Then voila – the additional feature is added to your blog! Basically, the plugin makes your life much easier, as you don’t need to know much about tech stuff.
Just be aware that not all plugins are trustable. Pick the one from a reputable source that has some positive reviews and many people using it – and make sure that the plugins are compatible with your version of WordPress.
How To Add WordPress Plugins?
It’s really easy to do!
- Go to “Plugins” in the sidebar of your WordPress editor
- Click Plugins>Add new for install a plugin
- Find or type your plugin that you are looking for
- Click on the Install Now button
- Click on Activate
After you activate it, sometimes the plugin may end up in different places (still in the sidebar, though). Whether in the sidebar or you can find it in the Appearance or Settings. And sometimes plugins also require some settings to make it work on your blog.
Which Plugins Do You Actually Need?
As I said above, there are like thousands of WordPress plugins and when you just install – too many – of them, you risk to slow down your website. And it’s pretty bad for your visitors.
SO, I’m here to guide you, I put together a list of essential WordPress plugins you need and all of them are FREE to use.
Rank Math
I guess you heard about how important SEO is many times already. Yep. Here it is. The SEO plugin, Rank Math. Most bloggers may suggest you about Yoast SEO. Both of them are pretty similar. I used Yoast when I created this blog but … I guess that we don’t match with each other. Then I found Rank Math a month ago and so far I’m very satisfied with its performance.
Rank Math helps you to optimize your post, page, titles, anything across your entire blog so that search engine, eg. Google can easily find you.
The free version is already good enough forever, so you don’t need to upgrade into the premium version.
Related: SEO For Beginners – 8 Simple Steps To Improve Your SEO
Akismet
This plugin comes automatically when you installed WordPress. It is a MUST HAVE WordPress plugins for your blog. It protects your blog from spam or inappropriate comment. However, check Akismet very often as you won’t know if a good comment or something stuck in there.
Ad Inserter
Ad Inserter is one of the best WordPress plugins to make money blogging. The free version allows you to insert 16 contents of ads, forms, etc in every place on your blog.
Easy Google Fonts
It helps you to add google fonts to your WordPress theme. Since WordPress has limited fonts, you can use this plugin to get more creative when creating your site title, headline, sidebar font, etc.
Easy Table of Contents
To optimize your SEO, one of the important elements is a table of contents. This WordPress plugin adds a user-friendly and automatic way to create and display a table of contents generated from the page content.
Elementor
This plugin will help you to create high-end, pixel perfect websites at record speeds. I use this to design my homepage. You can add many elements at one page, from images, video, URL, anything – to get creative with your page.
GDPR Cookie Consent
When starting a blog, you need to have something that informs your visitors that you are collecting their information in the form of cookies – this plugin will help you with that.
Pretty Links
One of my fave WordPress plugins. Pretty Links will enable you to shrink, cloak, track, organize, share, and test all of your links on your own domain and server. This is such the best way to clean up your affiliate link, track clicks from emails, your links on twitter to come from your own domain.
Generally, increase the reach of your website by spreading these links on Facebook groups or comments on other blogs.
For example, I can share my Convertkit affiliate from this into this.
Insert Headers and Footers
This WordPress plugin allows you to insert code or text in the header or footer of your blog. Although it doesn’t really help with blog performance, it will help to make your blog a bit more admin-user friendly.
After creating a blog, you might need to insert code into the header or footer of your blog. For example, connecting Google Analytics, claiming your website on Pinterest, and other things. If you’re not tech-savvy, this can be challenging.
UpdraftPlus
Back and restore your blog, whatever it is! SO if something worse happened in the future, you won’t cry in the corner of your room because your blog crashing and you can’t retrieve all your hard work. You can connect this WordPress plugin to backing up your blog and its content to your Google Drive.
Wordfence Security
A WordPress plugin that will protect you from hackers and provide a shield to malware in order to make sure your blog site stays safe.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
You will definitely have hundreds or thousands of images on your blog. They help you to make your blog stand out. But, the images or graphics can also become the most common reasons for slowing down your blog. Therefore, you need to optimize them by using this plugin.
Optimized image means to reduce the image size without reducing the quality of the images. It gives you better user experience, better speed, and better Google ranking. They have both a free and paid version. The free one will allow you for up to 100 images per month and if you need more, you can buy additional credits.
Wrapping Up
Plugins can help you with everything from optimizing your blog’s speed, to back up your blog, to SEO optimized. They make your blogger’s life easy.
BUT, remember to install reliable plugins, useful for you and visitors, and comfortable to use. Choose the best one and don’t add too many plugins since they can slow down your blog.
Photo credit:Karen Alves
If you have any questions about choosing WordPress plugins, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.
I will be more than happy to respond to you! Although it might take me some time, I will reply to every single email.
If you enjoy this post and want to start a blog or know someone that wants to start a blog, I would be very grateful if you can share this with them!
Thanks for sharing, I have some of these plugins, I’ll try some others.
You’re very welcome!
These are great! Thanks for sharing
Good and helpful article! thanks for sharing!
Thank you for reading 🙂 Really appreciate it!
Thanks for the list. I have pinned it for future reference. There are a couple of plugins that I want to add.
You’re welcome! Thanks for stopping by 🙂
I’m always curious what others “must have” plug in list is! Thanks so much for sharing this, I have a few new ones to check out!
Thank you – there are so many plugins that I want to try but so far these are the best ones!
I totally agree with you. All of these plug ins are definitely essential! Thanks for sharing.
Yep, that’s true! Thanks for reading 🙂
These are some really useful and great plugins to have for your blog. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you, dear! 🙂
Some of my favourites here! I’ve actually just uninstalled Jetpack though, as it was causing some issues with my theme and was slowing my blog down. I did wonder whether I might have problems as a result – but fingers crossed, none so far. Would be interested in anyone else’s experiences with Jetpack 🙂
My blog kinda slows down – even before I have Jetpack, I’m not sure if it’s because of Jetpack or my computer or new theme or anything else from my plugins.
I will try to sort it out! Thanks for reading 🙂
Excellent post! I’m fairly sure I have these or some variant of them on my wordpress. The GDPR is a must!!
Thank you for reading! 🙂
Easy Google Fonts sounds great! x
Yeap! I use it because I need more fonts to give a look to my blog 🙂
I currently use almost all of these plugins and I can tell that they’re doing a great job! I’m using Yoast but I see many bloggers have switched to Rank Math and I’m thinking of following their example. All I see are positive reviews!
This blog post is really useful for beginner bloggers! After you’ve helped me so much to improve my Pinterest strategy and grow my traffic from it, I knew this article will be super useful!
Great job! <3
Thank you, Alex! I recommend to use Rank Math, it’s really friendly-user 🙂
I’m so happy I could help you with your Pinterest! Thanks for this awesome feedback xxx