Top 11 Must Have WordPress Plugins for a Successful Blog

In a wordpress blogging system, plugins are a way to add functionalities and design elements to your blog.

A basic wordpress blog has just enough features and designs to do the basic work. It does not have social sharing options, does not track traffic, and does not even have an option to include advertisements and banners. However, it still has enough options to get started and write something and publish it.

Once you have your blog up and running, it is time to install some of the important wordpress plugins to include the advance functionalities that a blog needs.

Here’s the top wordpress plugins to install on your blog:

1. Akismet – The comments section of a blog is where spammers are most active. If you don’t have any spam fighting plugin, soon there will be so much of spam that finding genuine comments will be almost impossible. To fight this ocean of spam, plugins like Akismet is very helpful. It will sort all the spam comments in the spam folder from where you can bulk delete them or they gets auto-deleted with in a months time.

This plugin comes auto-installed with a wordpress installation. Even if you un-install it, it will get automatically re-installed after wordpress is updated. You can’t get rid of Akismet but it won’t work as long as you don’t activate it.

2. Yoast SEO – For blogging SEO, there’s many alternatives to Yoast. However, this plugin has all the necessary features to make sure your blog posts are totally optimized.

As a blogger and an SEO expert, you already know the basic SEO. The on-page SEO requirements are simple and if you write carefully you can easily write SEO optimized posts without the need of any plugin. Just to make sure that you don’t miss out on any SEO advantage, plugins such as Yoast comes in as a helpful reminder to what perfections you need in your content to make it more search engine friendly.

3. Re-direction – Many times we make changes in posts, edit them or sometimes even delete them. There’s images that gets deleted, or category and tags that are removed. As we keep blogging, over the years, several links get broken.

Sometimes these broken links are ignored or wordpress itself at times, re-direct updated links to blog posts. To make sure that you don’t have links that takes you nowhere, is to make sure that such links are re-directed.

4. Optin Monster – Exit intent popups or basically any popup that asks for an email id and promises goodies in return for the subscription works really well in catching email leads.

This plugin, optin-monster is perhaps the best of the lot when it comes to catching email leads. The plugin is easy to configure and once it is activated, works smoothly and keep increasing the number of email subscribers.

5. Pretty Links – Most affiliate link are bad and ugly. The reason behind their ugly length is the various tracking parameters that are required for getting traffic insights. You can’t make these affiliate links look good directly. The easiest way to make these links look friendly is by using a plugin like pretty links.

Do Note that a lot of people do not like to signup from other people’s affiliate links. But if the link does not looks like an affiliate link, rather looks like a helpful outgoing link, a lot of people will click on it and buy stuff from the link.

6. Sucuri – WordPress blogs are often hacked by various hackers who uploads these codes and javascript which targets normal people on the internet. When search engines come to know about a site that is hacked, they quickly drop them from the SERPs. It is important to make sure that your blog is safe and secure and such plugins helps you to secure your blog.

7. Broken links checker – It is normal for a blog which is running for years, to have some links that goes nowhere. Changes happen and it is difficult to keep everything in track. In times like these, plugins like broken links checker automatically checks the whole blog for broken links and fix them.

8. Social share plugin – People are always lazy to take actions on their own. Even if your content is helpful and your visitor is genuinely interested in sharing your content, they still might not take the action of sharing your content unless you have a social sharing button ready for instant push.

There’s many plugins that does social share, some even have more features link click-to-tweet etc. or Pinterest sharing buttons on images. All these features are very helpful for your traffic because they let your visitors take social sharing action with minimum effort on their part.

9. Image optimization plugin – When it comes to lowering down the page weight, images are the ones that need to be taken care of first. Sure there are JavaScript that are bulky and they should be removed as well, but images are heavy and they are plenty.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to optimize all the images that you had ever uploaded on your blog. All you need to do is to install an image optimization plugin and run it. It will automatically make your images compressed and your blog will be loading faster instantly.

10. Caching plugin – A wordpress system has many scripts that keep the system running. These scripts are often bulky that kills the page loading times. To make your site faster, you need to keep a plugin that optimize these scripts and deliver your content faster.

11. Comments Captcha – While Akismet works all right in sorting the spam comments from the good ones, but even after that, some good comments end up on the spam folders and some spam comments escape it. The best way to make sure that no spam bot can post a comment is to add a captcha plugin to your blog.

The auto-bots usually never makes it out of the captcha and most spammers never bother with the captcha anyway. Thus, having a plugin like this helps to keep spammers way. WordPress is an open source platform where many programmers from around the world comes together to make wordpress a better place for bloggers. Any CMS like wordpress relies on plugins for adding more features to the system. Programmers always keep looking for ideas so that they can tap into a wordpress niche that does not have a plugin. This is one of those reasons why you might find a plugin on every topic that comes across your mind.