Free Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs – Make Your Site Delightful

Blogging opportunities are rapidly growing since the early development of the internet. In today’s life, most of the peoples are interested in blogs while some others are involved in creating blogs. Many people find WordPress as a convenient source to start blogging. The best WordPress plugins for blogs are also crucial in this process.

The WordPress authority claims that over 409 million people view more than 20.7 billion blog posts every month. So you can realize how many peoples are interested in the blogging industry. You must create a blog first to be a blogger. In this case, WordPress can help you a lot. Blogging websites can be easily created by using WordPress.

Peoples also tend to create WordPress websites for news, magazines, business, and portfolio sites. If you are an experienced developer, you should know that installing a WordPress theme is quite easy. But you have to be very careful while adding the WP plugins. Let’s see some details about WordPress plugins before we proceed to the next part.

Why should you use WordPress plugins?

For your kind information, plugins can help to add functionality in your blog website. WP plugins help the website owners as well as the readers to navigate through the site properly. You can make your WordPress blog more functional and sustainable by using a plugin.

Free Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs

If you want to extend the WordPress capabilities, you must install a plugin. It improves your website’s user experience and also makes the WordPress admin tasks a lot easier. WordPress plugins keep your blog healthy and prevent your site from getting hacked. Everything on your blog will run more smoothly and efficiently after using a plugin.

Considerations to choose the best WordPress plugins for blogs

There are a bunch of options available for developing your blog wonderfully. Especially WordPress plugins are the most common part of a website’s backend. Before you choose the best WordPress plugins for blogs, you should consider three basic things that we have listed below.

  1. Lightweight: Make sure that your plugins are enough lightweight to use. That means they should not take up lots of resources on your servers to slow down your website.
  2. Compatible: Your WP plugin should easily combine with other plugins. As a result, they will less likely cause conflict and mess things up on your blog.
  3. User-friendly: The plugin which you want to use on WordPress should come with an easy interface. They have to be easy to use.

Choosing a plugin also depends on the types of blogs that you are going to put on your website. If you are creating a blog website, you only should add the necessary plugins. Remember that adding excessive plugins might slow down your website. Anyhow you have to make a standard blog for the visitors.

10 Free Best WordPress plugins for blogs

Though you will get tons of plugin suggestions, we have collected some best plugins in the following list. Some of them are free, while others come with a premium membership option. All of these plugins are proven and tested with their latest feature. Only the best plugin will work quite well to enhance your blogs.

So let’s choose your perfect plugin from the list below without wasting your time.

1. Jetpack by WordPress.com

Jetpack by WordPress

This plugin is power-packed with multiple features, which is made by the “Automattic” (peoples behind WordPress.com). That’s why it should be one of the well-maintained WP plugins you will ever encounter. You can ditch many other unused plugins from your blog once you start to use Jetpack.

You must have a WordPress.com account to use this plugin and connect the blog plugin to your website. It is not only used for blogs, but it also can be used for other types of sites such as news, business, minimalist or magazine websites and so on. This plugin works well for malware scanning, spam filtering, and brute force attack protection.

Any kind of unwanted intrusions will be prevented in your website if you use Jetpack. Also, you should get back up in real time and push notifications or emails about the website downtime from them. These features can be very effective for your website.

There is another advantage that you will find in this plugin that is you may inspect or monitor various website data and statistics of your multiple sites from a single data. Your website can have better bandwidth and load faster for your readers after using the plugin because Jetpack helps to optimize your images.

There are more than 30 modules that you can activate in this plugin to help you run a faster blog. The modules are such as a picture CDN known as Photon, Site Stats, Related Posts, and quite a few more. We are providing a list of some basic things that you will be able to do with the Jetpack WordPress plugin.

  1. Track the page views and search queries with powerful analytics formula.
  2. Allows your reader to share your blog posts by providing social sharing buttons.
  3. You can add a contact form here.
  4. When you any blog post, it automatically publicizes it on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.
  5. Shows related posts to increase engagement and lower down the bounce rate.
  6. Provide options for subscriptions.
  7. Supported for creating a sitemap.
  8. By using “VaultPress,” it takes the daily backups of your blog.
  9. You will get a free CDN with Photon.
  10. Permits to manage multiple websites from one dashboard.
  11. It’s a powerful customization tool for the design you desire.
  12. Users get a faster mobile experience with lazy image loading feature.

You will get many more things with the Jetpack plugin.

3.Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO

This is one of the most successful plugins which can be used for blogging websites. It sets the industry standard for SEO plugins. There are plenty of features in the Yoast SEO plugin to help your blog’s rankings. This type of useful plugin can create maximum SEO impact.

It’s always essential for any WordPress blog to have an SEO plugin to rank higher in the search engines quickly. It will help you to drive free traffic from these search engines. You should know that SEO is a big deal to get more revenue from your blog. You can’t go a long way without a good search engine optimization if you want to start a blog.

Even though a lot of things of SEO has changed, but a few things have stayed the same such as creating content that is optimized for Google search. If we pick this as an example, you should keep in mind that creating a content correctly can be great a hassle when you don’t know what you have done right and what is your mistake.

In this case, Yoast SEO WordPress plugin only can help you. It will help you in every step by telling if you have optimized your content correctly or not. You don’t have to use the extra XML sitemap plugins after using this plugin because it will also take care of that.

You may not seen any other free SEO plugin as powerful and effective as Yoast SEO. You will be able to cover all of your on-page and on-site SEO only with this one plugin. Yoast SEO plugin comes in free & pro versions. This plugin is used and trusted by most of the WordPress website owners.

Yoast SEO frequently updated their versions for better upgrades and to be compatible with the latest Google algorithms. It can optimize the images that you post on your blog. So your blogs will be ranked higher with the help of the keywords in the image titles and attribute also.

That’s why it is recommended as the top rated SEO plugin in WordPress. Now let’s have a look at some of the best features of this plugin.

  1. Full control over the “breadcrumbs” for setting the primary categories for posts.
  2. Keyword optimization ability for synonyms and related keywords.
  3. Analyzes the “Readability Check” and calculates “Flesch Reading Ease” score.
  4. With the help of canonical URLs, no chance of duplicate contents.
  5. Content insights function to check the match for the chosen keywords.

3. WordFence

WordFence

This is another favorite and one of the top security plugins for many WordPress bloggers. It can add an extra layer of protection by locking out people who try to hack their way into your website. It also blocks the IP addresses of bots which are trying to access your site.

If anything is going suspicious, then you can customize the email alerts which will be sent to you. Wordfence offers a premium version that gives you access to support if you want it. Their updated versions are designed to tackle the latest hacking and cracking techniques.

There is no better option if you need to protect your website against cyber-attacks and secure your WordPress blog. It can ensure your blog stays safe from hackers. This security plugin comes with some overwhelming features like scanning for vulnerabilities, blocking malicious networks, monitoring various metrics that could make your site more open to attack, and much more safety factors.

4. Akismet

Akismet

You can free your WordPress blog from comment spam by using this Akismet plugin. Spam comments in are the most irritating of all and comment spam is something that you may have to face from day one. You should not get excited when you get some cheesy lines in the comments section at the time of starting your blog.

They are most likely some spam comments. You can test the URLs of these comments, and then you will realize that it leads to some spammy affiliate site. It is an official WordPress plugin which can prevent spam comments in your blog. You must install this plugin on any new blog because a new blog may have the commenting feature.

Your blog will be spammed surely if you don’t use this plugin. Spammers will only try to throw their links on your articles, and they will not join the discussion. Akismet will automatically remove those comments which are considered as spam. These comments will be deleted permanently after some time.

This anti-spam plugin examines all of your comments and contact form submissions to find any harmful contents. The Askimet moderator records the status history whenever the spam is detected. Later you can view where the comments have been spammed or unspammed. Statistics showed that more than 400 billion spams are removed already by using this plugin.

Let’s see some of the key features of this plugin.

  1. There are discard feature available that blocks the worst spam to save the storage.
  2. Moderators can see the number of spam comments from each user.
  3. Effortless backup and restore processes.
  4. Faster performance can save a lot of time.
  5. Status history feature for every comment to view where the spam was found.

5. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache

If your site loads super fast, then it will be a great deal for your website. You should know that WordPress is a memory-hogging CMS. You can use a cache plugin like WP Super Cache along with powerful servers to ensure that WordPress doesn’t make your web server crash.

This excellent plugin is top rated for its simplicity and effectiveness. You have to install it, activate and check a few boxes to configure the plugins; then you are pretty much ready to go. It also works great, even on shared hosting. WordPress has to fetch a post from its database whenever a user visits your blog post.

However, this process needs so many PHP calls. But if you use WP Super Cache plugin, it creates a static HTML file of your web page and permits WordPress to serve a page from this cache. In this way, it reduces the server load drastically and let your pages to served within a few seconds. You also should use this plugin when you are on shared hosting or VPS.

6. OptinMonster

OptinMonster

Many people want to use pop-ups on their site to encourage subscriptions because they work to engage more people. But the problem is all pop-ups cannot be created equally. In this case, OptinMonster is the best solution. This premium package plugin is a finely-tuned marketing machine which gives you total control over your opt-in process.

It lets you delay the pop-up until your visitor settled into reading your amazing posts in place of flashing a pop-up in front of your reader at the beginning of visiting your site. There is also extensive design options in this plugin, and the higher-tiered license allows advanced functionality such as exit intent.

That means it will wait to show your reader the pop-up window until it senses the visitor is going to leave your site. The “OptinMonster” plugin will be perfect if you want more email subscribers and are just not finding success without a pop-up because you can’t think a blog without an email list.

This great plugin helps you to capture emails. It also comes with many advanced features just like A/B testing, conditional pop-ups, geolocation targeting, and even email subscription forms, especially for mobile sites.

7. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps

As we said earlier, the Yoast SEO plugin generates a sitemap for you. But Google XML Sitemaps makes it a lot easier. You need to activate the plugin and go to the settings. Then grab the URL that the plugin uses for your sitemap.

After that, paste it into the “Google Webmaster Tools” utility. Isn’t it so easy? Your site might be not ranking even you have done everything you can do to optimize your posts for SEO. What should be causing the biggest issues for it and what’s the solution.

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin can change the things for you. It is one of the top plugins that can give your site just what it needs. Your website will be much easier for Google to crawl and read by creating an XML sitemap. These features can help your site to rank higher.

8. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7

There are many premium contact form plugins, but it’s the simplest plugin to configure. This plugin shows things like “referral source” that is very useful for knowing how the visitor navigated through your website before using the contact form. It’s also useful because you can customize it according to your requirements.

Another great thing about the “Contact Form 7” plugin is that the form can be created well, and all the entry from the pattern will be sent to your email. You also can create different and multiple contact forms with multiple tables by using this plugin. Then you can give these forms your preferred names.

If you install this plugin, you don’t have to design or special CSS code the contact form. With this plugin, you are allowed to make some of the boxes as “required” labeled. Here you can customize the input forms and drop down menus by the use of the short codes.

9. wpDiscuz

wpDiscuz

In order to increase the interactions with your readers, you might want to add something in your WordPress blogs. That’s why you should add the comments section, which can be one of the best ways to interact with your visitors. Then your users will be able to add comments after reading your blogs, whether they liked your contents or not.

Some of them may criticize your blogs in the comments, but it will encourage you to improve your upcoming blogs. The “wpDiscuz” plugin is one of the best plugins to add the comments section in WordPress blogs. You will get a comment system with customizable fields and forms if you use this plugin.

It is packed with a lot of exciting features and also quite fast and responsive. In this plugin, you may enable or disable the comments depending upon your blog post. It also comes with a “comment list sorting” feature. Here the readers of your blog can view the comments according to the newest, oldest, and most voted comments.

There is an option in this plugin, which allows your readers to reply to a comment and start a thread with it. By disabling the comments reply feature, you can close the comment threads if they are going a little out of your hands such as hateful, spam, and abusive comments. Now let’s focus on some of the great features of the “wpDiscuz” plugin.

  1. Fully integrated with “Social Media Login” systems.
  2. Effortless, clean, and responsive design.
  3. Anonymous the comments without names and emails.
  4. Multilevel comment threads are available for detailed discussions.
  5. Different date formats for the user comments.

10. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus

You may have to face a few technical difficulties for your blog in the future. For this reason, you might want to back up your blog. Sometimes all the security measures for your WordPress website can be vulnerable that you adapted. With the updates at any given time, there can be problems in your site or, it can be hacked.

In these situations, backing up your data can be quite helpful. The “UpdraftPlus” plugin only can help you to do this. It is one of the best plugins for blogs which is entrusted with more than one million downloads. This plugin will simplify the process of the backup and restoration for your blog.

By using it, you will be able to back up your files or contents in the cloud databases like Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud, and many more. You can save a lot of time because it allows you to have scheduled automatic backups. In this plugin, you also can backup non-WordPress files and database to multiple remote destinations.

You should check a few key features of this plugin.

  1. Easily migrate or duplicate websites by using the “Migrator” feature.
  2. Allows you to back up your contents on multiple cloud services.
  3. Free and dedicated expert support.
  4. Automatic scheduled backup for the WordPress files.
  5. For faster processing, uses fewer server resources.

Final Words

The plugins that we discussed in this post are not only the best, but they are always on the top choices for any website. You can use any of these best WordPress plugins for blogs to make your website more effective and powerful. If you apply these plugins, they can add another layer of functionality to your WordPress blog.

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