The Most Essential Plugins For WordPress Blog

We all know that WordPress is the most widely used Content Management System (CMS) platform for website/blog. And technically known really great platform for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

I personally like WordPress as my blogging platform because of its flexibility and easy to use. Even for people who don’t have coding skill. There are thousands of free or paid Themes and plugins that you can add and install directly from the WP Admin panel.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the essential WordPress plugins for website blog that’s very useful for to optimize WordPress your site. For security and SEO.

A must have WordPress plugins to Install on Blog

Actually, I don’t install many plugins on my blog by the way. Plugins list you found in this list is the most important and essential only. For site owner, it is a must-have on their WordPress site. The recommendation list below is based on my personal experience so .. here they are.

Anti Spam Plugin

As a website owner, we will always deal with spam in the comment section. We all hate spam even spammer hate spam. So! to protect your site you need an anti-spam plugin. One of the most effective and its installed by default when you install WordPress is Akismet. All you need to do is activate it.

Generally, when someone adds a comment on your blog, Akismet will analyze if they look like spam or not and let you review it before you decide to approve or remove it. To use it you’ll need Akismet.com API Key. Don’t worry the key are free for personal blogs, but also available for paid subscription for businesses and commercial sites.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

You need your site to get rank high in Goole search result page right? so, you will need a plugin that can help you get better for your SEO effort.

There is a lot of SEO plugins out there. But here I only recommended two plugins that I use myself on my own sites.

Here they are;

All in One SEO Pack

Yoast SEO

Install only one of them, both are great and you can choose to use it as a Free or Pro/Premium version. I use YOAST SEO for this blog.

Sitemap

This is really important plugins for your website get properly indexed by Google and other search engines.

Google Sitemap XML

I’ve posted an article about how to make a website get indexed by Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You can read here How to Make New WordPress Blog Get Indexed by Google FASTER!

If you are using Yoast SEO, the plugin will automatically generate a sitemap for your website. So you don’t need another Sitemap plugin.

WordPress Optimization

Peoples love a super fast loading website they visit, so here are some great plugins you can install to optimize your website load speed.

W3 Total Cache

WP Super Cache

Hummingbird Page Speed Optimization

These plugins will improve the user experience of your site by increasing your website speed performance. By reducing download times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration etc.

Image Optimization Plugin

ShortPixel

Smush Image Compression and Optimization

What ShortPixel and Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugins do is improves your website performance by reducing the image size. So it can load faster.

Social

If a visitor land on our blog and interesting with one of your post and want to share it with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Then you need to provide them a tool for them for sharing your content with their friends.

There are so many social sharing button plugins you can search and add directly from WordPress admin panel, this is Social Plugins that I recommend.

Sassy Social Share

Simple Social Share

Monarch Social Sharing Plugin

Warfare Plugins

Sumo This plugin also very useful for collecting email list for your marketing efforts.

Conclusion (and another optional plugins)

There is a lot of other plugins created by awesome WordPress developers that maybe you need besides the list I’ve writte above. All kind of plugins on the list above is the most essential and a must have for website optimization based on my personal experience.

So if you guys have a good suggestion for another essential/basic plugins that I’ve missed please hit me on comment bellow I really love to hear that.

Okay! I think that‘s it for now, see you on next post about blogging stuff. Thanks for stopping by to read my post, hope it useful.

Happy blogging 🙂