23 Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs for Effective Blogging!

Looking for the best WordPress plugins for blogs? Then, this article is just the thing for you.

Along with a large variety of WordPress blog themes, there are also various types of WordPress plugins for blogs to help with their functionalities.

Blogs are one of the most popular and important types of websites as they help you to promote your business and interact with your visitors. But, you’ll need to make them as effective as possible which can be done with plugins.

So, in this article, we’ve listed some of the best plugins to choose for your site. Let’s get started!

What Kind of Plugins Do You Need for a WordPress Blog?

Choosing plugins for a WordPress blog could feel like too much work when numerous plugins are available in the market.

So, let’s go through some of the plugins that act as a big necessity for blogs and contribute to your goal of effective blogging.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plugin: Your site needs to rank higher on search engines as more traffic will be drawn to your site when you rank better on search engines like Google. SEO can be of immense help for WordPress websites and even blogs. So, make sure to choose one for your blog.
Contact Form Plugin: A contact form act as a medium for communication between you and your audience. Thus, contact form plugins help you create forms to get quick responses or ask for your users’ contact information. Hence, ensure that you use the contact form plugin for your blog.
Security Plugin: When you use security plugins on your site, your blog and its users are set to be secure from possible spam or hackers. Thus, the security plugin protects your blog from potential threats.
Cache Plugin: Along with the great content, your blog’s performance should also be top-notch. When you use cache plugins, your site will be great in speed and in terms of performance, so it’s beneficial to use a cache plugin on your blog.
Google Analytics Plugin: With Google Analytics plugins, you can monitor your blog’s progress and growth with the help of different statistics. You can understand your audience type based on such statistics., So, make sure you pick a Google Analytics plugin for your blog.

23 Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs

While publishing blogs, readers might sometimes be eager to contact you to ask you some questions about it. So, it’s necessary that you need to make a contact form and Everest Forms is one of the best plugins to add a form to your blog.

This plugin has a very user-friendly interface for customizations equipped with drag and drop fields. You can add an unlimited number of forms with multiple column support. The forms that you’ve created are also fully responsive and can be used on any portable device like mobile phones and tablets.

Key Features:

Shortcode to help add the forms in WordPress blog posts, pages, sidebar, and more
Support from Google ReCaptcha to block the spam
Redirect the user to a specific page after form submission
View form entries from the dashboard of your website
Editable form validation message

Price: Free or $69 for a Single Site License (Offers 30% on this price)

You can view some more WordPress form builder plugins in one of our articles.

You must be familiar with the popular default block editor provided by WordPress called Gutenberg. Though it offers various blocks like Heading, Image, Video, etc., it still has some limitations. To overcome such shortcomings, you require a custom block plugin like BlockArt.

In any WordPress blog, you need to have a custom block plugin to add rich content that contributes to increased engagement. You can quickly expand your block’s range with BlockArt and even save time and effort as BlockArt lets you create content effortlessly with its blocks.

Key Features:

Allows to copy and paste style of any block
Caching plugin compatible
No limit on layout possibilities
Lightweight and super-fast in speed
Offers responsive editing

Price: Free

If you have a blog, one of the essential things you must do is focus on its SEO. Yoast SEO is one of the best and oldest plugins for blogs when it comes to improving SEO. Most WordPress websites have trusted it because it’s frequently updated to be compatible with Google algorithms.

Yoast has a lot of features that can make your blog better, and not just SEO. It can optimize your keywords and synonyms too. The plugin also analyzes your blog’s readability and calculates the Flesch Reading Ease score so that your readers can understand your content better.

But, if you want a Yoast SEO alternative, then Rank Math is an equally good SEO plugin that helps optimize your content with built-in suggestions.

Key Features:

Keyword optimization for synonyms and related keywords
Complete control over breadcrumbs for setting primary categories for posts
No duplicate content with the help of canonical URLs
Content Insights to check the match for chosen keywords
Readability check from Flesch Reading Ease score

Price: Free or $99/year

If you want to know some more WordPress SEO plugins, we do have a list on it too.

While creating a blog, you’ll also need to add the images on your blog page itself. When your blog’s content keeps on increasing and you don’t compress the images, it can take a ton of space for a blog. This can also affect the site’s speed and lead to slow performance.

To help you compress your images on your blogs, you can use the Smush plugin. It’s regarded as one of the best image optimization plugins for your blog website. This plugin can really help you optimize your blog images and at the same time maintain their quality too.

Key Features:

Compress the images without the reduction in quality
You can also resize the images with a specific height and width
Bulk image compression with up to 50 images at a time
Incorrect Image Size Detection to locate images slowing the site speed
View Smush image stats directly in image blocks

Price: Free or $7.5/month

Even when you produce SEO-friendly content, your page speed might still affect your blog. That’s why you need to make your blog perform faster and better using cache plugins. WP Rocket is a great cache plugin that offers a vast range of automatic optimization features for your site.

Additionally, the plugin is more than just a caching plugin as it also helps improve your PageSpeed score and uplift your loading time. With it, you can customize the settings per your requirements with advanced options like XML sitemaps, optimized Google Fonts, lazy loading for images, etc.

Key Features:

Offers browser caching, GZIP compression, page caching
Cross-origin support
Supports third-party plugins like Jetpack, Yoast, and more
WooCommerce compatible
Multilingual ready

Price: $49/year for a Single Site License

If you don’t have any countermeasures for your blogs against spam, there are chances that your blogs can be filled with them. The spam can contaminate your website and backend files through various comments or contact form submissions from the users. To reduce them, you can use the Akismet plugin – one of the best plugins to deal with spam.

It’s an anti-spam plugin that examines all your comments and contact form submissions to find any sort of harmful content. It automatically analyzes the website and drops out the contents that might occur as spam.

Key Features:

Extremely easy backup and restore processes
Status history for each comment to view where the spam was found
Moderators can view the number of spam comments from each user
Discard features that block the worst spam to save the storage
Fast performance that saves a lot of time

Price: Free or $8.3 billed yearly

If you are interested in the best WordPress anti-spam plugins, please check our article on it.

Jetpack is probably one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs if you want to effortlessly manage your blog website. Developed by Automattic, Jetpack also provides you with various site statistics. With it, you can keep a track of the visitors or readers you get on your blogs and work out the ways to increase them even more.

This plugin also helps in spam filtering, malware scanning, and brute force attack protection. So, unwanted intrusions are prevented on your website through it. Therefore, your blogs will also be in safe hands.

Key Features:

Powerful customization tools for the design you desire
Faster mobile experience with lazy image loading
SEO tools for Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook and WordPress.com
Top-notch security with brute force attack protection and spam filtering
Ability to manage multiple websites from one dashboard

Price: Free or Choose from the following pricing plans:

Backup: $9/month Billed Yearly
Security: $24/month Billed Yearly
Complete: $99/month Billed Yearly

Even if you’ve installed security plugins and systems for your blog, your blog might be still vulnerable to illegal activities. It can still get hacked or crashed due to certain unfortunate malware. In cases like these, you’ll need a backup plugin and UpdraftPlus is one of the best WordPress backup plugins for your site.

You can backup your contents using UpdraftPlus in the cloud databases like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud and more. Then, you can click on restore to obtain it again with just a single click. You can also backup your contents to more than one cloud service using this plugin with scheduled automatic backups.

Key Features:

Automatic scheduled backup for your contents
Use fewer server resources for faster processing
Enables you to back up your content on multiple cloud services
Easily duplicate or migrate websites with the help of Migrator
Free dedicated expert support

Price: Free or $70/year for 2 Sites

It’s essential to keep your WordPress blog secure for yourself and your users. You can tackle any possible hackers, spam, or any other threat with the WordPress security plugins. Although you can find various security plugins, you can completely rely on one of the best ones; Wordfence.

The plugin offers malware scan, firewall protection, blocking, and much more. You can monitor your traffic in real-time with Wordfence and monitor login, logouts, 404 errors, etc. Further, their Two Factor Authentication is handy to enhance your blog’s login security.

Key Features:

24/7 incident response team
Centralized management
Offers country blocking in the premium version
Delivers high configurable alerts via SMS, Mail, and Slack
Offers to compare your core files, plugins, and themes with the ones in the WordPress repository

Price: Free or $99/year

One of the most common methods of monetizing a blog is with the help of affiliate links. To use them in the most efficient way, you’ll need to cloak them. For this, ThirstyAffiliates is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs to cloak them.

You can easily cloak the affiliate links and use them on your blogs with the help of this simple blog plugin for WordPress. This plugin creates a new cloak link or a short link and redirects it to the unnecessary long affiliate link. You can also assign different categories to the links so that it’s easier to manage them as well.

Key Features:

Easy setup and interface to save you a lot of time
Option to group your affiliate links into different categories
Multiple safe redirect options like 301, 302, or even 307
Availability to add an image to the affiliate links
Built-in reports and statistics of affiliate links

Price: Free or $99 for a Single Site License

If your blog covers teaching, skills, and knowledgeable content, then LMS plugins are effective for your site. Using such plugins, you can set up online courses, quizzes, etc. without any hassle. Masteriyo is among the best WordPress LMS plugins offering a fast and smooth course-building experience.

You get a single-page interface with Masteriyo, which lacks in other LMS plugins. This means you don’t have to switch between pages to complete your individual course. To add more, the distraction-free learning page is equally helpful in enabling your students to focus on courses.

Key Features:

Offers easy course navigation
In-built questions and answers section
Offers easy drag & drop course builder
Course progress bar
Compatible with WordPress themes

Price: Free or $199 for a Single Site License (Offers 75% off on this price)

Blogs are also used to promote and sell products. Hence, if you need to sell products through your blog, WooCommerce will be perfect for you. It has been one of the best WordPress plugins to sell a product for quite some time.

This plugin has all the features and elements that you will ever need on your blog to sell a product. You can easily set up WooCommerce on your WordPress blog and start selling immediately. It can even be improved according to your additional needs with its vast selection of extensions.

Key Features:

Easily set up a store or sell a product with just a few clicks
Provides their own user accounts pages for smooth transactions
Flexible and secured payments with multiple gateways
Fully responsive which enables you to manage the orders from your mobile
Excellent support and documentation to help you anytime

Price: Free

If you’re interested to know about WooCommerce extensions, we’ve got you covered too.

In most blogs, people tend to add new registration or login options for users. This also increases the interaction between the blogger and the readers. The logged-in users can explore and use more features of the website such as commenting on posts and so on.

User Registration plugin is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs if you want to add registration and login options to your blog. It’s also one of the easiest to use as it has a user-friendly drag and drop interface. You can even use its huge range of add-ons to increase the functionality of your blogs too.

Key Features:

Multiple design styles for forms
Auto-login after registration to save your time
WordPress dashboard access based on the assigned roles
Admin approval for registration
Show/Hide label option in each field

Price: Free or $79/year for a Personal Plan

We’ve listed some more WordPress user registration plugins. Please have a look at it if you want to explore more plugins.

Email marketing is also one of the major ways through which you can grow your blogs. To help you with it, Mailchimp is the best WordPress plugin for blogs. It’s one of the most popular email marketing plugins in WordPress that can manage subscribers, send emails, and track results in bulk.

This plugin enables you to easily add more subscribers to your email. Further, it can seamlessly integrate with all the major plugins of WordPress so that you won’t have any problems while using it.

Key Features:

User-friendly interface
Translation-ready plugin which can be presented in any language
Availability to modify the plugin with code snippets
Multiple extensions to increase the functionality
Awesome support and well documented

Price: Free or $11/month for an Essential Plan

Using newsletters on your blog is also one of the great ways to gather more readers as well as keep your current users engaged. For this, you can use the Newsletter plugin. As the name suggests, it’s one of the best WordPress plugins for newsletters.

The plugin has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop composer to build newsletters. You can build unlimited amounts of newsletters with it and the plugin will also track them and provide stats for them.

Key Features:

Easy to use drag and drop composer
Unlimited subscribers and newsletters with statistics and tracking
Subscription spam check with Akismet and captcha
Delivery speed fine control starting from 12 emails per hour
WPML and translation ready

Price: Free or $48/year for a Blogger Plan

You can track the growth of your blog based on various statistics with the help of the best Google Analytics plugin like MonsterInsights. Further, you can understand your audience types and cater to them to boost your blog’s traffic.

Apart from that, it tracks your user views from multiple platforms and various devices. You can even run advanced link tracking with custom options, including RSS tracking, Anchor tracking, and much more using this plugin.

Key Features:

GDPR compliance
Offers automatic tracking
Customizable dashboard widget
Offers real-time reports
Integrated with WooCommerce, WPForms, CookieBot, etc.

Price: Free or $199 for a Single Site License (Offers up to 50% discount)

A blog needs to have an excellent user interface to help the readers search for a particular content too. In this case, a search plugin like Ajax Search Lite can contribute a lot. It’s one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs to help your readers search for topics.

This plugin is much better than the default search bar as it also provides category and post type filters on the search bar. It’s also designed in such a way that it ensures smooth animation throughout your blog when your readers use the search bars.

Key Features:

Supports custom post types and field types
Automation search replacement options
Widget and shortcode friendly
Shows images in the search results too
Frontend search settings boxes

Price: Free or $36 for a Regular License

Want to explore more of such plugins? Then, there is a collection of the best WordPress search plugins too.

Installing a page builder plugin can be helpful for any WordPress website. And if you’ve spent a fraction of time with WordPress, you might know that Elementor is one of the popular page builders. Furthermore, it can be even one of the best plugins for blogs.

You can get used to using this plugin very quickly and modify any part of your blog within minutes. It has an excellent drag-and-drop interface through which you can make any changes you need for your blogs effortlessly.

Key Features:

Easy to use drag and drop interface
Highly customizable design options for your blogs
Fully responsive design and accessible on any mobile devices
Undo and redo action along with revision history
Built-in maintenance mode for special circumstances

Price: Free or $49 for a Single Site License

Your blog can either be just a blog website or can be included as a blog on any other type of website. Either way, the header section or specific popups are one of the first things that the readers notice. So, adding a Popup Maker plugin can really help the readers get hooked on your blog.

Popup Maker is one of the best blog plugins that allows you to create any type of popup you like and lets you display it anywhere on your blogs. Here, you can list the links to the latest published post or any other interesting areas of your blogs to keep the readers more engaged.

Key Features:

Fully responsive design suitable for any mobile devices
Opt-in form popups, slide-out pop-ups, banner bars, and many more
Compatible with major WordPress plugins
Dictate the frequency at which the user sees the popups
Auto open triggers to set a timed delay

Price: Free or $87/year

If you want to explore more of the best WordPress popup plugins, we’ve got a blog article for that as well.

Social media is an excellent source for blog referral traffic. However, when you manually re-share your content, it can be pretty time-consuming. Hence, with Revive Old Posts you can share each post automatically on social media platforms like Facebook.

Besides, it revives your blog’s articles from the archive and re-posts them to grow its reach. Also, you can set a schedule for your article’s publications as well. Thus, Revive Old Posts can be used in your blog to grow your social media followers, engage with existing followers and uplift your site’s traffic.

Key Features

Allows to pick a time between social media post sharing
URL shorteners compatible
Allows to choose maximum and minimum age of posts to share on social media
Can automatically generate hashtags
Integration with Google Analytics

Price: Free or $75/year for a Single Site License

As a blogger, you must also be active on most social media platforms. On top of that, you need to maintain your feed to make it more pleasing. Your follower count is set to increase more with a visually pleasing feed.

That’s where this Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed plugin will help you, as it connects to various Instagram accounts. You can combine them into one feed or split it separately. Also, this plugin allows you to add the Load More button so your site’s images won’t slow down.

Key Features:

Allows to show full-size or medium pictures from your Instagram feed
GDPR compliance
Fully responsive
Built-in shortcode options
Super easy set-up

Price: Free or $49/year for Facebook Feed Plan

If your blog has multiple authors, there might be a situation where more than one author works on a single post. On conditions that it occurs, you’ll need a plugin to present them as co-authors for a single post. Hence, Co-Author Plus is one of the best WordPress blog plugins to manage author names for a particular blog post.

This plugin enables you to assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types. The co-authors assigned are also allowed to edit the posts they are associated with the help of this plugin.

Key Features:

Assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types
Easy to use interface to help you quickly add the co-authors
Can be activated with WordPress multisite
Availability of template tags to list co-authors
Option to disable guest authors whenever necessary

Price: Free

One of the easiest ways to increase interaction with your users is by adding a comment section. To add the comments section, you can simply use a plugin. And wpDiscuz is one of the best WordPress plugins for this.

This plugin is quite fast and responsive and packed with a lot of exciting features. You can also disable or enable the comments depending upon your blog post. It also has comment list sorting where readers can view the comments according to the newest, oldest, or most voted comments.

Key Features:

Multilevel comment threads for detailed discussions
Anonymous comments without names and emails
Full integration with Social Media Login systems
Different date formats for the comments
Clean, simple, and responsive design

Price: Free

Wrapping Up!

These were some of the best WordPress plugins that we’ve gathered for your blog.

We hope that you use the ones that you need to get the best results for your blogs. However, we encourage you to not use all the plugins at once as all of them are not entirely necessary for your blogs. Using all of them at once might increase the load on your blog website and make it even slower.

If you’re wondering how to add a blog to WordPress, we do have a tutorial to create a WordPress website and a collection of the best WordPress blog themes to help you.

If you want to make your blog website even faster, we have some tips to speed up your WordPress website as well. Similarly, if you are looking for more plugins, we do have a list of the best WordPress plugins for your website too.

Also, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay updated on our recent articles.

Happy Reading!

Disclaimer: Some of the links in the post may be affiliate links. So if you purchase anything using the link, we will earn affiliate commission.