Top 20 Plugins That Every WordPress User Must Have

Top WordPress Plugins
Top WordPress Plugins

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the internet. I have used it for years, and I certainly can attest to its convenience and ease of use. WordPress is very compatible with the search engines. I have different WordPress blogs and like the easy to use features and speed which they offer.

Plugins are smaller programs which can be uploaded and installed on your WordPress site to assist you in many ways. The right plugins will be worth more than their weight in gold because they make your life much easier, and help you to do things that you might otherwise have never dreamed of.

Plugins offer you many advantages. I will discuss a few of them here; They make owning a blog convenient and eliminate unnecessary work. They help you to cover much more ground as far as production is concerned and in some cases will automate manual labor so that you don’t have to do repetitive tasks.

They increase the speed and efficiency of your work. They automate labor in some cases and can eliminate the mistakes that you often make when dealing with a large volume of work.

Plugins can also help to avoid practices which may be hazardous to the integrity of your blog. Some plugins prevent us from doing things that could be detrimental to the content as far as the SEO is concerned as well as practices which will breach the security of the blog and cause the website to malfunction.

There are some plugins which can help you to avoid both spammy comments on your blog. Other protective plugins will add levels of security to your site to help protect from hackers.

The following list will introduce twenty WordPress plugins which I feel are the best that you can possibly use on your blog. You may or may not agree with the choices here as the list is subjective. Each one is extremely helpful and when used correctly will make your blogging experience a pleasant success.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO

DISCLOSURE: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning when you click the links and make a purchase, we receive a commission.

Yoast SEO plugins are helpful because it will prompt you on what to do and what not to do in order to make your blog more successful by improving its rankings. As long as you follow the clear and straightforward instruction, you will have posts which are fully optimized. This particular plugin does more than any other SEO plugin that I have ever seen. It goes much farther than just prompting you on the number of words and letters to use for optimum length.

This plugin is a complete optimization package that allows you to optimize the basic elements of each page of your site because the meta is very important to page ranking. It is convenient, simple and easy to install.

BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy

This plugin allows you to backup the contents of your site and eliminating the possibility of inadvertently losing important information. This one is a must have plugin because there is nothing worse than losing all of the hard work that you put into your site. You store the backup information in the cloud and there is nothing that you have to buy. It gets many positive reviews because it is so easy to install and use.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache helps you to get the maximum speed and performance from your website. This enhances customer experience and SEO. A site which loads slowly will lose traffic from potential viewers. The search engines will penalize the site because one of the criteria for high ranking is ease of use. It helps you cache your pages and compresses them so that they will load at a much faster rate.

WPForms

WPForms
WPForms

WPForms is a plugin which allows you to create forms to support the purpose and objectives of your website. I have found that sometimes need to create forms which are specific and unique. It gets rave reviews for its versatility and ease of use. the regular version should be fine for the majority of WP users like you and me, but there is a pro version available for those of us who need to create more complex forms.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster
OptinMonster

If you need to use your WordPress site to gather business or personal leads, OptinMonster will work well for you. It is helpful when you want to increase your number of email subscribers. It helps you to capture the attention of casual users and offer them the opportunity to become permanent subscribers and quite possibly customers for life. You can use this plugin to conduct very complicated tasks such as split testing. It also gives you the ability to target the specific customers whom you feel will best be serviced by your brand.

Edit Flow

Edit Flow
Edit Flow

Edit Flow provides an excellent platform for you use in order to edit multiple posts thus saving you an enormous amount of time, effort, and probably money. It allows you to efficiently handle your editorial workflow. It will certainly keep you out of trouble by eliminating the possibility for human error.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy
Soliloquy

Soliloquy is a slider plugin which many say that it is the best one available. The slider allows you to place ads on your site in the form of a banner. Soliloquy is the fast slider and less intrusive. This slider has many features that allow you to customize the content of your ads to appeal to the perceived tastes of the customers which you want to target.

Sucuri

Sucuri
Sucuri

Sucuri is another one of those must have plugins. It is designed to improve the security of your site by making it more difficult for hackers and other unwanted persons to get access to your site. This plugin performs several different security functions which include the removal of malware, and the blocking of malicious attacks.

Floating Social Bar

Floating Social Bar
Floating Social Bar

Floating Social Bar solves the problem of which social networks allow access to my site. It ignores the sites which are least popular and offer no viable advantage to you. It also eliminates the unnecessary scripts which slow down your site. It cuts down the number of social networks to the few that actually offer you an advantage.

Disqus

Disqus
Disqus

I have found Disqus to be a very good plugin for garnering all the important comments that we need to get customers to interact with our site. It is popular and will draw visitors to your site. When you combine it with controversial content, it will work wonders for you and your traffic flow.

AdSanity

AdSanity
AdSanity

AdSanity allows you to manage multiple ads quickly, efficiently, and conveniently. It allows you to monetize your site by adding ads which will pay you a small amount of money each time one of your customers click on them. It is not going to make you wealthy by any means, but I suggest that you utilize it because it won’t cost you anything. It allows you great flexibility in the way that you allow the ads to be displayed. It also allows you to track customer interaction with your ads with graphs and statistics.

Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery

This plugin is designed for the WordPress user who utilizes a number of photo images. It helps you to create multiple image galleries with beautiful unique special effects. Customers rave about the ease of use of this plugin and the plethora and quality of special effects that you can use it to create. It comes with a comprehensive users guide and will certainly help to take your WordPress site to the next level.

Login Lockdown

Login LockDown
Login LockDown

This plugin protects your site from intrusion by hackers. It limits the number of times that logins can be attempted before locking the potential intruder out. Hackers will often need multiple login attempts before they can successfully get access to your site.

Term Management Tools

Term Management Tools
Term Management Tools

Term Management Tools is the ultimate tool for the general organization of your WordPress site. Your site needs to be as organized and streamlined as possible to make it more efficient and SEO friendly. This plugin allows you to edit the categories, and other SEO specific contents of your site with ease.

TablePress

TablePress
TablePress

TablePress gives you the capability to insert tables into your site in just about any place where you need them. It also gives you the capability to export your table data to other sites when necessary.

WPtouch

WPtouch
WPtouch

WPtouch increases the capabilities of your site with a plethora of mobile features. This is critical because of the flood of mobile devices and users who are potential customers. If your website is not responsive and you will miss out on the opportunity to make contact with many new customers and/or followers. You can use it to meet your mobile advertising and e-commerce needs among many others. It also allows you to create and offer an app for your site.

Compact Archives

Compact Archives
Compact Archives

If you have a WordPress site, you should know that every post can be archived. The list becomes impossibly long if you have been blogging for a while. Compact Archives makes them easier to navigate, find by date or time, and by compacting them into an easy to navigate block.

ThirstyAffiliates

ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates

This plugin allows you to add affiliate marketers to your site to in order to monetize it. It helps you to manage all of your affiliates effectively. It handles all of the extra tasks which come with handling affiliates.

Display Widgets

Display Widgets
Display Widgets

Display Widgets gives you the capability of displaying widgets on any page of your blog site or hiding them from places when you don’t want them to be seen. It gives you the additional option of showing widgets to your logged in customers while hiding them from those who are not registered.

WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP
WP Mail SMTP

Last on our list is WP Mail SMTP. This plugin will ensure that your emails are correctly configured with the settings of the hosting providers. It saves you the headache of attempting to reconfigure your settings so that your messages will be delivered. If any of you have ever had to do this, you will know that it is a major headache.

Summary

There is such a wide range of plugins available to you and it is probably not possible to list them all. However, I am sure that you can see my point of how they can be helpful to you.

I suggest that you make a plan as to which direction you want your site to go and use plugins to compliment your vision. If you want to create an open and personable type atmosphere, you will want to use plugins that make it easy for your customers to have a conversation with you. In that case, you may want to collect as well as share information. Plugins used in this situation will have the purpose of removing barriers and encouraging interaction.

This concludes our list but keeps in mind that this list is not necessarily all-inclusive. You may have one or more differences of opinion which is fine, but I am sure that you will agree that each plugin mentioned here is truly something special.

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