50 Useful WordPress Plugins You Should Know

Nowadays, just about everyone can consider themselves a blogger. The tools and plugins made available online are making it even easier to break into the blogging scene. Competition is rife and you might do well to get help from any source you can find.

One of the ways is to get yourself plugins that will help make certain processes smoother for you and your readers. There are plugins for various purposes including to aid caching and image optimization, SEO, anti-spam, commenting, content-sharing, bookmarking and so on.

In this article, I have compiled a list of WordPress plugins that WordPress users might find a use for. Instead of searching in the Internet jungle, take your pick from the list of plugins below. The plugins are free unless stated otherwise.

Shortcut to:

• Caching plugins
• SEO plugins
• Anti spam (security) plugins
• Comment plugins
• Social-bookmarking plugins
• Statistics plugins
• Backup plugins
• Forms plugins

Speed Up & Caching Plugins

• CloudFlare – CloudFlare ensures better protection of your blog from spammers. It shows the correct IP addresses of commentors who are commenting on your blog. You can protect your site from online spammers and hackers, and it helps your website load faster as well.
• WP Rocket – An all in one WordPress optimisation plugin to improve your site performance with page caching, cache preloading, static files compression, CDN, and many more.
• W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache is a complete WordPress caching plugin available. It can improve your website’s performance by caching the pages, objects, minifying the databases by content delivery network support.
• WP Smush.it – This plugin reduces the file sizes of the images by using the Smush.it API from WordPress. The images are compressed almost without any loss and automatically in WordPress. It also has features to compress multiple images in bulk.
• WP Super Cache – WP Super Cache is a very fast WordPress caching plugin that generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. So instead of loading the heavy PHP scripts of your blog, your visitors will be served with these static html files which will make your blog appear to load faster.
• Cache Enabler – A fast and efficient plugin for page caching and page compression. The plugin is compatible with WordPress Multisite, Autoptimize, WP-CLI, and works with KeyCDN out fo the box.
• Hummingbird – This plugin optimise WordPress site by addressing several key metrics in Google PageSpeed Insights such as gzip text compression, minify and defer unused CSS, defer JavaScript, etc.
• Pantheon Page Cache – this plugin applies an advanced cache mecahnism that not only enables page caching but also allows you to accurately purge the cache more accurately.
• Simple Cache – This plugin makes enabling page caching simple with just a one-click instead of dozen of complicated configuration options. But you going more with the advanced option to enable object caching with Redis or Memcache.
• WP Redis – Enables WordPress to cache MySQL query to Redis. The plugin adds several new WP-CLI commands where you can enable or disable, and interact with Redis CLI.
• Redis Cache – Another good plugin to connect enable object caching in WordPress. On top of that, it supports some advanced stuff of utilising Redis such as Replication, Sharding and Clustering.

SEO Plugins

• All in One SEO Pack – This plugin is the first choice for new and inexperienced WordPress users, who want their blogs to be fully Search Engine Optimized without digging deep into SEO. It provides you with almost every function needed in just a single page.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This Google XML SItemaps plugin generates XML sitemaps for your WordPress blog, so that it becomes easy for crawlers like Google and Bing, to index your site better.
• SEO Pressor (Premium) – This plugin is a great WordPress plugin that can make on-page optimization easier than ever. It will take care of almost every single on-page factors of your posts and can help your site rank higher in the search results.
• Smart SEO (Premium) – This is a very simple SEO plugin that can make your blog SEO friendly with the SEO Scores it geneates for every single page. It has a very simple and effective admin panel that can seamlessly integrate into your existing WordPress admin panel.
• WordPress SEO by Yoast – This is one of the most complete WordPress SEO plugins available so far. You can perform almost any SEO functionality for your blog with the help of this invaluable plugin by Yoast. Not to be attempted by new users though.
• RankMath – Dubbed as the Swiss Army Knife of SEO plugin for WordPress, this plugin features, not only tools for SEO, but also Social Media Optimisation, Redirection tool and management, AMP and ACF support, and many more that will help on optimising your website to get larger audience out reach in both search engine and social media.
• The SEO Framework – SEO plugin providing the essential features to get your site optimised for the search engine. It’s fast, features a clean UI, extensible (check out the extensions), and ad-free.
• SEOPress – Aside of the essential features to do SEO, this plugin enables you to work with Excel or Google Spreadsheets that allows you to do the optimisation more efficiently.
• Slim SEO – A full-featured SEO plugin that aims to simplify doing SEO with WordPress. It has take care of most configuration automatically, so you do not need to deal with the complex options.

Anti Spam and Security Plugins

• Akismet – Akismet is possibly the best way to protect your website from web spam. Akismet filters comments and trackback spam, so that you can focus more on managing other important things. It runs on autopilot and provides 24-hour protection.
• AntiSpam Bee – AntiSpam Bee is a spam protection plugin that is made up of sophisticated techniques to handle digital rubbish and protect your website from every potential threat.
• Wordfence – Full-featured Security plugin for WordPress. It provides firewall that’s capable of identifying and blocks malicious traffic, checking core files, themes and plugins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects and code injections.
• Zero Spam – Plugin that’s capable of blocking 99.9% of spam without sacrificing user experience with captcha or other difficult questions.
• Better WP Security – A plugin that allows you to enable essential security measures for your website, such as rewrite the login URL, changing the database prefix, , in just clicks of buttons.
• WPScan – Use this plugin to scan your WordPress installation on a daily basis to find security vulnerabilities in the plugins, themes, or the WordPress core itself.

Comments Plugins

• CommentLuv (Free/Premium) – Comment Luv helps you to increase comments and traffic to your blog and also gives the opportunity to your blog of going viral in Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. It also reduces spam, shows stats of links being clicked, allows commentors to use their name in comments, and many more.
• Disqus – Disqus is a powerful commenting system that helps you to build an active community of users by effective tools and features like Realtime Comment System, Social Integration, The Community Box, etc.
• IntenseDebate – IntenseDebate is a commenting system that has features such as innovative discussion tools that can make conversations more fun and increase reader engagement.
• WP Ajax Edit Comments – This plugin enables users to edit their own comments within a certain period of time. Users can also move, mark as spam, blacklist, moderate or delete a particular comment.
• Comments Like Dislike – Easily add the Like and Dislike button to WordPress native comment system. You can configure the button placement, the icons, and the colors.

Social Bookmarking Plugins

• Share Buttons by Lockerz  – Share Buttons make sharing articles in your site easy and simple, by providing a drop-down menu with more than 100 social networking and bookmarking sites to choose from and share to.
• Novashare
• Ocean Social Sharing

Stats Tracking Plugins

• Clicky (Free/Premium) – Clicky is a real-time web analytics for tracking your website’s visitors. It has great features like Real Time Analytics, Visitor Segmentation, Twitter Analytics, Mobile Version, Video Analytics and many more.
• Extended Google Analytics for WordPress (Premium) – This plugin adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics tracking for your WordPress blog. It has other features like event tracking for downloads, tracking of outbound links and linking Adsense to analytics.
• Google Site Kit – An official plugin from Google to connect your site to multiple Google products and get a comprehensive insights. This plugin, at the moment supports these tools: Search Console, AdSense, Analytics, PageSpeed and the Tag Manager.
• WP Stats

Backup and Database Management

• BackupBuddy (Premium) – BackupBuddy is a complete solution, which can backup, restore and migrate WordPress sites with ease. It can backup your entire WordPress as well as install, restore it with a single click, or migrate from one domain or server to another in a few clicks.
• VaultPress (Premium) – VaultPress by Automattic is considered to be one of the best WordPress Backup and Security plugins for "Every post, picture, and page. Every comment, revision, and setting. Everything." in the market. It is perfectly suitable for personal, professional, small and medium business sites.
• WP-DB Manager – This plugin allows you to repair, backup and restore your databases. It also supports automatic scheduling of backups and optimization.
• WP-Optimize – WP-Optimize is a simple yet effective WordPress cleanup plugin, which can clean your databases and optimize it without phpMyAdmin. It can optimize databases by removing post revisions, spam and unapproved comments.
• WP Migrate DB – This plugin that allows to migrate a database from one site to another easy and fast. The plugin is developed for scale so regardless the size of the database it’ll be able to handle it seamlessly.

Forms Plugins

• Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 plugin is a simple and flexible plugin that you can use to manage multiple forms, customize and mail its contents. It can also be punched with Akismet of CAPTCHA for spam filtering and so on.
• Contact Form 7 Grid Layout – this plugin add a capability to Contact Form 7 that allows you to arrange the form with a Grid layout with a user-friendly interface.
• Gravity Forms (Premium) – Gravity Forms is one of the best contact form plugins that can enable you to quickly design and edit forms right from your WordPress admin panel. It has various features like conditional logic, entry management, notifications, styles and layout, and many more that can give your forms a unique feel.
• Quform (Premium) – Quform is an easy way of building forms in a few clicks using the drag and drop form builder. This plugin ensures that you have the best form design and functionality without having to touch a single line of code.
• Ninja Forms – This plugin features a friendly drag-n-drop interface with more than 27+ type of fields. You can build almost any type of form from a simple contact form, regsitration form, MailChimp form, etc.
• Everest Forms – This plugin comes with a collection of pre-built templates and layouts allow that allows you to beuatiful unique forms.
• Caldera Forms – A very powerful WordPress plugin to create a form. It features an intuitive drag-n-drop interface, a handful of field types, conditional logic, auto-responder, and a built-in anti-spam.