Would you like to know the WordPress plugins you need to install, either from us or on your WordPress site? So read on.

Well, it’s been a while since we shared a list of WordPress plugin essentials that we use to run our website.

So, if you are running a WordPress website and wondering what the must-have WordPress plugins are, you have come to the right place.

20 Essential WordPress Plugins for Bloggers in 2024

Akismet Anti-Spam

 

The Akismet Anti-Spam plugin is one of the most downloaded plugins with over 5 million downloads, and it checks your comments and submissions from the Contact Form against their global spam database to prevent spam comments from reaching your site.

As your blog grows in popularity, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually manage spam comments. This is where a plugin like Akismet comes in handy.

Just check your comment spam folder regularly because in some cases the Akismet plugin even sends actual comments to your spam folder.

If you are still seeing a lot of spam comments even after installing this plugin, you can try the Antispam Bee plugin, which effectively blocks spam comments and backlinks without a captcha.

SEO plugin, RankMath

 

We recently started using the Rank Math SEO plugin. Previously, we used the premium version of Yoast SEO. So why did we abandon Yoast SEO? The reason is simple: Rank Math is completely free and offers a ton of additional features.

If you are already using other WordPress SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO, the AIO plugin, SEOPressor, etc., you can easily import all your settings into Rank Math with one click. It also provides you with a simple setup wizard that will help you get started with the plugin very quickly.

It offers you amazing features, such as:

• ability to optimize your content with up to 5 keywords
• Track the position of your keywords in search results
• allows you to automatically add ALT and title tags to your images
• offers a redirect handler
• offers you a 404 monitor and helps you fix 404 error pages
• And the list goes on

Overall, the Rank Math SEO plugin is one of the most important WordPress plugins for all types of bloggers and SEO professionals.

WordPress AMP Plugin

AMP (which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages) is designed as an open standard that allows any publisher to load pages very quickly on mobile devices.

Simply put, AMP speeds up your website’s page load time by one second of the overall page load speed by enabling AMP caching.

While there are many plugins available to enable AMP features on your sites, this is the official AMP plugin for WordPress that supports fully integrated AMP publishing for WordPress sites.

This plugin also gives you granular editor controls and automatically removes most unused CSS to keep the total under AMP’s 50KB limit.

That being said, this plugin does not offer you a mobile version of your website, but the AMP version is offered to visitors who visit your sites from their mobile devices using platforms like Twitter, Google Search, etc.

Scattered Check Link

Backlinks are one of the main reasons why most blogs struggle to get traffic from search engines. Most blogs often suffer from broken links, which are dangerous and can negatively impact your site’s overall SEO, so you should always make sure to fix them.

This is where a simple yet powerful plugin like Broken Link Checker comes in handy for WordPress blogs.

Once you install and activate this plugin, it monitors all the links in your posts, pages, and comments and detects broken links or missing images and redirects. It also notifies you via your WordPress dashboard or email, so you can fix them as soon as you find them.

Classic Editor

If you are used to the previous editor, the Classic Editor plugin will suit you, which by default hides all the features available in the new block editor, i.e., Gutenberg.

This is also an official plugin maintained by the WordPress team that simply restores the previous WordPress editor and also provides you with an “Edit Post” screen so that you can write and edit posts instead of using the latest Gutenberg blocks.

Since WordPress updated its version with the latest block editor, we are using this classic editor plugin to restore the previous WordPress editor because we liked it the most.

Contextual Related Posts

Want to reduce your bounce rate? Then start displaying relevant blog posts below each post you publish.

The WordPress plugin allows you to display a list of related posts on your website, with the list based on the title and content of the posts, making them more relevant.

Contextual posts attempt to increase relevance by matching posts with context. For text articles, it works out of the box and has a simpler settings page. It uses images inside a post as a thumbnail when no featured image or post thumbnail is found.

There is no template for displaying thumbnails in the plugin. Instead, it simply displays thumbnails of the images in a bulleted list. You can add your own CSS to style it if you want.

Contact form7 &  WPForms

If you want to create a contact form on your WordPress blog, this plugin Contact Form 7 and WpForm is for you and offers you a drag-and-drop WordPress form builder. It is also the most downloaded contact form plugin in the WordPress directory, with over 2 million downloads.

It not only allows you to create contact forms, but you can also easily create contact forms, subscription forms, and checkout forms using this plugin.

Easy affiliate links

The majority of BlogPasCher’s income comes from selling affiliate products, and we make sure to optimize our affiliate links for the best user experience. We currently use the Easy Affiliate Links plugin to help you easily hide your affiliate links.

This plugin is compatible with both the classic editor and the new Gutenberg block editor, and you can also shorten and shorten your affiliate links (if you want).

Another benefit is that you can track all monthly and lifetime clicks for your affiliate products, which gives you a ton of information about which links are performing well.

iThemes security

Although we do not use security plugins on our BlogPasCher site, we already use a secure host that fixes our sites if they get hacked.

But if you are using other web hosts that do not have such outstanding security features, you can install this amazing and widely used security plugin called iThemes Security.

This is an ultimate security plugin that helps your site in over 30 different ways, including blocking WordPress, fixing common flaws, stopping automated attacks, and strengthening user credentials.

Really simple SSL

The HTTPS version must be enabled for each domain and website. This plugin solves most of the problems that WordPress has with SSL certificates.

All incoming requests are redirected to HTTPS, and you can also enable htaccess to redirect as it changes the site URL and home URL to HTTPS.

Additionally, it replaces all your insecure content from http:// URLs to https://, except hyperlinks to other domains. This plugin automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https so that the entire site switches to the SSL-secured version, i.e., HTTPS.

This is how it works.

• Get an SSL certificate (from hosts like Bluehost, or you can use free options like Cloudflare)
• Activate this plugin
• Enable SSL with one click
• Scheme Pro
  If you want to create reviews for your products and rank them in search engines like Google, you need to display rich snippets such as star ratings.

To get featured snippets, you need to integrate schema, and this will ultimately improve your overall organic traffic by organically increasing your CTR (click-through rate).

We are currently using the WordPress Premium Scheme Pro Plugin, which allows a product review where you can add a description of the product with the date of the review, the number of stars for the product, as well as the name of the reviewer.

 

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

Do you use a ton of images in your blog posts? If you use images on your blog without reducing their size, you are slowing down your page load time, which can negatively impact your search rankings.

This is why you should always reduce the size of your images for better image SEO. While there are many plugins and tools that you can use to optimize image size, ShortPixel Image Optimizer is one of the best image optimization plugins.

We use the same plugin to reduce image size here at BlogPasCher as it offers lossy and lossless image compression for all image types including JPG, PNG, GIF WebP, PDF, etc.

Not only that, this plugin also gives you another amazing feature called brilliant JPEG compression which is a very high-quality lossy optimization algorithm where you can compress images with a lossless option (i.e. without losing image quality).

Simple 301 redirects

301 redirects are used to PERMANENTLY redirect from one web page to another. There are many ways to do 301 redirects, such as editing your site’s htaccess file, but most of them are difficult for beginners (without any technical skills).

This is where a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects comes in. It is the most powerful and easy-to-use WordPress blog plugin as it helps you easily redirect any page or URL on your website or anywhere else on the internet.

This plugin is a lifesaver, especially when you are migrating your site to WordPress and cannot maintain the URL structure.

By setting up a 301 redirect from old pages to new ones, all incoming links will be transferred without much effort (without compromising link juice).

Contents Read more

If you create detailed articles, this plugin is a must-have because it automatically creates a table of contents. It can also generate a sitemap with a list of pages and categories for your entire site. You can create your style for the table of contents.

By default, this plugin will generate a table of contents if the page or post has at least four title tags, which are, etc.

 

WooCommerce – Best WordPress eCommerce Plugin

Plugin Stats:

• Downloads: 5+ million
• Rating: 4.5/5
• Notable features: integrated WooCommerce dashboard, quick setup wizard, support for multiple payment gateways
• Best suited for creating an eCommerce website
• Price: free, with optional add-ons starting from $6/month

WooCommerce is the best eCommerce WordPress plugin. It provides essential eCommerce functionality such as storefront creation, product listing, and order management.
Moreover, WooCommerce accepts major credit cards and bank transfer payments and integrates seamlessly with 140 region-specific payment gateways.

It comes with a quick setup wizard that guides you step-by-step. All you have to do is answer questions and provide details about your store, and the website is good to go.

Managing an online store with WooCommerce is easy as the dashboard is integrated with WordPress. Use the admin panel sidebar to manage your products, orders, or reports.

TablePress

TablePress is perhaps the most downloaded table plugin for WordPress sites. If you write a lot of product reviews, you need tables to provide a better experience and quicker access to products for your site visitors.

This is where a simple but very effective plugin like TablePress comes in handy. This is the same plugin we use at BlogPasCher and it allows you to easily create and manage tables on your site.

You don’t need knowledge of HTML as it gives you an easy-to-use interface where you can edit table data and insert tables into posts, pages, or text widgets. It offers you a simple shortcode that you can use anywhere you want to display tables.

VaultPress

The great thing about this backup plugin is that it backs up every post, comment, media file, and review, including toolbar settings on your site. All these backup files and data are stored on their servers so you can restore them at any time.

This plugin is designed and created by Automattic, the same company that runs millions of WordPress sites. Above all, it also protects you from all kinds of hackers, malware, accidental damage, and host failures.

All in all, a great backup plugin is worth every penny. The personal plan costs just $39 per year, and you will get the following features:.

• Automatic daily backups with unlimited storage
• Brute force protection and availability monitoring
• Backup for 30 days
• Anti-spam for comments and pingbacks
• Easy site migration and automatic recovery with one click

WP Review Pro

If you monetize your site with product reviews, you should install this plugin.

This is a premium plugin from My Theme Shop that costs $67 per site and is the same plugin we use on our site.

You can do a ton of things with this plugin, including:

• Implemented extended snippets of 14 types (from books to films, games, etc.)
• Multiple star ratings, including stars, points, and percentages
• User Review Rating
• Google Places Reviews Integration
• It helps you create a product comparison table
• And the list goes on

WP Rocket

If you’re looking for a premium caching plugin to improve your site’s speed and performance, WP Rocket is for you.

We have been using this #1 premium caching plugin at BlogPasCher for over a year now and we are very happy with the results as it offers exclusive features like image lazy loading, JavaScript lazy loading, HTML code minification, CSS, and JavaScript file minification. , etc.

WP Rocket is not a free plugin, as it comes in three pricing plans listed below.

• A single plan that costs you $49 will give you 1 year of support and updates for the XNUMX website.
• The Plus plan costs you $99, and you get one year of support and updates for 3 websites.
  The Endless plan costs you $249, and you get one year of support and updates for an unlimited number of websites.
  It also offers you a 14-day return policy, so if you are not satisfied, you can request a return within 14 days.

WP-Optimize

Faster websites are everything. The speed of your website can make or break the success of your blog. If you want to improve the speed of your website, you need to regularly optimize and clean your databases.

WP-Optimize is the same plugin we currently use on our site to clean up our databases, and we only activate the plugin when necessary. It can be considered an all-in-one plugin because it not only cleans up your databases but also helps compress images and cache your site.

This plugin easily removes all unnecessary data, including deleted, unapproved, and spam comments, including pingbacks, trackbacks, and expired temporary parameters (which are not needed).

Yoast SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast is a must-have plugin for every WordPress blog today.

 

This is an ideal SEO plugin that will help you easily optimize your blog posts and pages for targeted keywords. Although their free version is sufficient for most WordPress users, we at BlogPasCher have been using their premium version for 2 years now and are very happy with their features.

Using the Yoast SEO Premium plugin, you can target 5 target keywords, while in the free version, you can only target one target keyword. It also gives you a social media preview where you can see how your post appears on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

You can optimize every post or page on your website because Yoast SEO comes with a powerful content analysis tool. You’ll find a Yoast SEO meta box with a snippet preview, target keyword field, and content analysis just below the post editor.

The snippet preview shows how your site’s title and description will appear on search engines. Yoast SEO automatically uses the title of your post as the title and the excerpt as the description, but you can edit it by clicking the “Edit Excerpt” button.

Simply enter a focus keyword into Yoast SEO, and this will allow the plugin to analyze your content for that specific keyword. You can also analyze the readability of the text you write and calculate the Flesch Reading Ease score.

social connection

If you run a blog, you should start displaying social media buttons on your posts to increase your social media shares (as this will also help you rank higher).

We’ve tried and tested many social sharing plugins over the years. We even recently purchased a premium plugin called Social Warfare, but it came with a ton of security vulnerabilities. So we decided to switch to another great social sharing plugin called Social Snap.

Also Read: 11 Best AI-powered SEO Writing Tools in 2024

Social Snap is the ultimate social sharing plugin for WordPress blogging that comes with over 30 social networks and apps to choose from, including Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, and more.

Ultimate Blocks: Gutenberg blocks plugin

Are you using the latest WordPress block editor called Gutenberg? Looking for the best Gutenberg block plugins for your WordPress site?

Here are some useful WordPress Gutenberg building blocks that you can use with this plugin.

Contents: If you want to generate a table of contents from your headings like h2, h3, and so on, this block will come in handy (and is a must-have block for those who create long-form articles).

Click to Tweet: If you want to generate more retweets, this is for you, where you can easily add tweetable content to your posts and pages.

Content Filter: This is an amazing block that allows your website readers to easily filter your content based on various filters so that they can easily browse and view your content.

Social Media Block: You can easily add social media buttons to your posts and pages using this block it also offers tons of customization options and you don’t need to install any other social sharing plugin if you use this block.

Rating Block: This is another great feature where you can add a review block with product name, features, summary, button, and star rating. It offers schema markup that will help you increase your organic CTR.

Final Thoughts on Essential WordPress Plugins

Although there are many plugins in the WordPress directory, most of them are not necessary. That being said, to maintain a powerful WordPress site, you need to install the core WordPress plugins described above.

So what plugins are you currently using? Did we miss one of your favorite plugins on the list? Share your opinion in the comments.