WordPress is without doubts the most professional and outstanding blogging platform, it meets everyone’s needs from an individual blogger to a company and from a company to a corporation. WP has become a business and a platform which provides A to Z resources for making your website looking the most beautiful on the web. However, you need to take extra care of your overall WordPress content management system, because this is all in your hand and you can do many tasks to make your WP site user friendly and awesome i.e security measures, search engine optimization and the designing etc. This post will cover all the basic WP tasks by using the best plugins available for free in the default Plugins library. I’m using all these plugins myself for maintaining my blog’s security, SEO and speed of my blog. So I’ll share these must have plugins with you in order to improve your WP site/blog.
Top 20 WordPress Plugins every blogger must use:
The plugins list I’m giving you here is used by me for last 2 years and I update the plugins time to time as well as I remove and add the plugins if they have any problems, so you can do the same yourself. However, the plugins I’m sharing on this page are producing great results for me, so you can use them without any fear. Moreover, these plugins will cover the following aspects of your WordPress website:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Securing your blog from being hacked
- Designing your website
- Customizing your website
- Speeding up your site
- Socializing your site
- Protecting your blog from spamming
I’ll mention the category of the plugin with the name of the plugin for example if a plugin is used for SEO then there will be (SEO) in the bracket. Now Here is the list of the plugins one by one.
1. Akismet (For Spam comments)
This plugin is installed by default when you get your WP dashboard, however, you can activate it as soon as possible, it will protect your blog from spam comments and will save so much of your time. You must activate it by first going to get a key from Akismet website and then verify it.
#2. All in One SEO Pack (SEO)
This plugin covers all of your search engine optimization tasks for WordPress websites, you can install it for free, it will set your MeTa tags, description for home page as well as single posts. You can also make its setting according to your needs i.e if you want to noindex any specific page or you want to change the post frequency or priority for any content. Overall, it will cover most of the SEO for your WP site.
#3. Chap Secure Login (Security)
This plugin actually hides your password during the login to your WP dashboard, most of the WP sites are hacked using tools to catch the password, and this plugin therefore, make it very difficult for hackers to see your password.
#4. Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox (Social Media)
This plugin is very helpful if you want to increase your Facebook fan page likes/members via your blog/site, This plugin actually shows your FB fan page like box in a pop up box to the new visitors, you can make its setting to any period of time you want. Very useful for sites having less likes in the starting.
#5. Google XML Sitemap for Videos (SEO)
The best plugin for creating video sitemap on WordPress, you must install this plugin if you have YouTube videos embedded into your site, this plugin will make your job super easier. Here is the guide how to use Google XML sitemap for Videos.
#6. Google XML Sitemaps (SEO)
The sitemap for each and everything of your site on WP will be created and sent to search engines by this plugin (Google XML Sitemaps), this plugin is already used by millions of webmasters. So do use it from the starting.
#7. Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin (For avoiding spamming)
Spam comments is one of the worst things in WP, most of the time people use your comment form to post spam comments having their dirty links automatically, so you can easily stop this by using above plugin, this will actually add a Captcha which is only readable by humans, so no one will be allowed to post spam comments automatically using any bot/software.
#8. Login LockDown (Security)
This plugin actually does a simple job i.e making sure someone can’t try to login multiple times, you can only allow 1 to 3 time login attempts to each IP, so they failed to login then this plugin will block that IP for a specific time as per your setting.
#9. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) (Performance)
This Plugin will run a scan and will let you know how much memory and speed time does every plugin take while your site is being loaded in the browser, so you can remove some complicated plugins in order to make your site more speedy and fastly loadable.
#10. Primary Feedburner (Email Marketing)
This is a necessary plugin which will make your email list for your business, you can simply install & activate it and then copy and paste your FeedBurner URL in the box where it is asked, now from the widget area just add it in the sidebar of your site, visitors will subscribe to your upcoming posts via email.
#11. Replace WP-Version (Security)
This simple replaces your WordPress version, because mostly hackers try to find your WP version at the backend and then find the bugs in the plugins or somewhere and then attack, so this will change the WP version and hackers won’t be able to find the actual WP version you are currently using.
#12. Robots Meta (SEO)
If you want to noindex or nofollow any links, tags, Archives, categories etc which make duplicate content then you must use Robots Meta plugin to do this job.
#13. TablePress (Designing & Customization)
This plugin is best for you if you want to use Tables in WordPress pages or posts. You can simply create tables and then include wherever you want.
#14. W3 Total Cache (Speeding up)
This is one of the must have plugins, this will speed up your WordPress site and users will see a very fast site during browsing. It will cache everything i.e Database queries, Objects, Media, images etc when they are once viewed from a user’s computer, so it won’t let the browser request to the server again and again and using this plugin you’ll improve the loading time of your site by 20% to 40% very easily.
#15. Wordfence Security (Security)
This is another great plugin that looks after all security factors of your site i.e plugins, databases, malware attacks and many things more, you must use this plugin in order to be always on safe side.
#16. WP Smush.it (Speeding Up)
This is one more plugin that speeds up your blog by compressing your images and reducing their size to a reasonable amount. You can improve your blog speed by using this simple plugin.
#17. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (Relevant Posts)
This plugin is the best when you want to show the relevant posts below each post of your blog, this will display related stories to the visitors with a thumbnail of that post, if you want to increase your Page views then this plugin is the best solution for you.
#18. BackUpWordPress (Backups)
After all of your customization, optimization and security measures, you still need to always have a ready backup of your site, so whenever something goes wrong, you can easily restore the backup. This plugin does the job for you.
#19. Combine CSS (Speeding up)
This plugin will simply combine all of your CSS files into one, so the browser will only read the one file and will apply it on the page. It will save a lot of time and the page speed will be up.
#20. Combine JS (Speeding Up)
This plugin does a simple job by combining all of your JavaScript files into one file, so it makes it easier for browser to only one time request a single file and render it.
#21. Floating Social Bar (Social Media Sharing)
This plugin is also necessary because it will let the visitors share your posts over major social media networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. So you must install it as well.
Final Advice:
I use all these plugins currently on my blog and they are working just fine for me. However, you can install all of them or some of them according to your own requirements. If you want to just install any of the above plugins then copy the name of the plugin and search in the plugin directory on your WP dashboard, you’ll find the plugin, now just click install and then activate that plugin. Its all very easy as 1,2,3. I hope you’ll get great results soon.
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Thank you for Reading! Happy WordPressing 
