7 Best WordPress Blog Plugins and Tools Every Blogger Must Have

Please note some of the links in this post may contain affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. As always any recommendations that I make are always based on my personal experiences with the product and I have not received any free products or anything else by these companies.

Here are my 7 essential WordPress Blog Plugins and Tools that I use on all my blogs and niche websites.

If you are new to WordPress or Blogging, plugins are just software that can be installed into WordPress which can help extend the functionality of your WordPress platform.

According to WordPress.org There are over 45,000 plugins available and 1.3 Billion have been install and downloaded.

Where to find WordPress Blog Plugins?

The best place to find plugins is to go to WordPress.org or from your WordPress Dashboard->Plugins.

Before you Install Any Plugins Do This

Whenever I find a new WordPress plugin to use on one of my blogs there are a few things I always check.

1. Ratings and Reviews – The first thing I is the plugin ratings. I usually make sure the plugin has a rating of 4 stars or above.

2. Active Installs – This is the number of times this plugin has been downloaded and installed. Which is a good indicator of how popular it is, as somethings ratings are not always accurate. The more installs it has, the more confident I am that it is a good plugin.

3. Last Updated – I also like to check on how often it is updated because plugins that have not been updated for a long time are vulnerable to hacks and bugs.

4. WordPress Compatibility – Always check if the plugin is compatible with the current version of WordPress you are running.

To find your current WordPress Version you can find it here Dashboard->Updates

5. Price – Most plugins are free to use. Some of them you can upgrade to their premium version for more advance features. But I usually find the free version is suffice for my needs. If you are buying a plugin make sure you aware of the pricing model as some of them can be subscription based.

All this information can be found on the plugin listing page.

However do be careful when installing any new plugins. Always test your blog to see if it is still working as previously, as sometimes it can cause problems.

If you do run into problems with the plugin, you can simply uninstall it.

How to Install a WordPress Plugin

Installing a WordPress plugins is super easy. From inside WordPress Dashboard just go to Plugin->Add New

Search for your plugin and click on the install button.

Usually on the plugin’s description page they will provide instructions on how to configure it. You can also checkout Youtube or Google or ask your friendly IT/Wordpress Guy.

Keep them Updated

Always keep your plugins updated to latest version. Having a plugin which is out of date can leave your site vulnerable of been hacked.

I had a client who didn’t realise he had to update his WordPress plugins and unfortunately his site(s) was hacked. It cost him over $300 to fix each one.

If you do use plugins keeping them up to date is very important. You can either DIY or pay for someone to manage this for you.

The following list are all my favourite plugins that I always install for every WordPress blog I build.

Improve Search and SEO

1. Yoast SEO

When it comes to search engine optimisation there are two parts – on-site and off-site optimisation.

The Yoast SEO is probably one of the best and most popular on-site SEO plugin on the planet with over 1Million+ downloads.

It can help optimise your title, descriptions, keywords and also install a xml sitemap which is a file used by search engines to intelligently crawl and index your blog.

Improve Website Speed WordPress Plugins

Your website speed is a very important factor in SEO and often overlooked by bloggers.

I use two tools to help optimise and speed up my website.

2. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is a caching plugin which will improve your blog performance on your hosting, help reduce download times of images, html, video and can be used to integrate with Content Delivery Network for even faster loading times.

WPBeginner gives a very good tutorial in how to install and configure W3 Total Cache.

3. SumoMe

SumoMe offer a range of tools to help grow your social media and email list. (“Makes me want to eat Sushi”)

I personally use SumoMe for its Share Bar. It makes it easier for people to share and like my blog.

Time Saving WordPress Plugins

4. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker is another great plugin which checks your blog for broken links.

It crawls your entire blog and reports on any existing broken links. This may be caused by incorrectly typing urls or the link is no longer available.

5. Akismet

I’m not sure about you but I personally hate spam, any spam and one thing you get a lot is comment spam.

Akismet is your life saver. It will stop most comment spam in their tracks and only leave real comments for you to review saving you countless hours of manually reviewing and deleting them.

6. Pretty Link

Pretty Link is another big time saver! For most of my links I always use a link redirection like Pretty Link because it allows me to easily to manage, track and organise my links.

Especially for affiliate links as they are often quite long and hard to remember. I always have trouble remembering what the link is.

For example my Bluehost affiliate link looks like this.

www.bluehost.com/track/livingonline/

With Pretty Link I can shorten this and customise the link.

So now it becomes

https://howimakealivingonline.net/bluehost

The best feature is if I ever need to change the link to something else I can simply update it in Pretty Link. Otherwise I would have to search for it manually in every single blog post.

Backup Your Blog

7. BackupWordpress

BackupWordpress is great simple plugin which automatically backups your files and database.

Always backup your blog!

Just imagine one day if your blog just disappeared! All your blog posts, images and files were completely gone because the server crashed or your site was hacked or worse your site was deleted!

I am not trying to scare you or anything but this kind of things happens all the time.

What Tools Do You Use?

Do you have any plugins or tools that you use for your blog you can recommend? Please share below.