WordPress plugins are great tools for adding and extending functionality to WordPress. The plugins will add awesome functionality to your site and. The WordPress has plugin repository of over 47000 for almost every function or feature you need on your website.
Although the kind/ niche of your website mostly determines what plugins you should have on your website, there are some plugins that every WP blog needs. Also, you’ll find multiple plugins for the same feature – all you need to do is to choose the best one for yourself that suits your project. You can find both free and premium plugins for WordPress while most of the plugins are developed as freemiums. A freemium plugin is a free plugin with an upgrading option to the premium version for advanced features.
20 Must have WordPress Plugins for your Website
#1 Jetpack
Jetpack is a popular WordPress plugin created by Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com. The plugin brings many of the most powerful features available on WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress sites and thereby contributing greatly to the improvement of WordPress powered blogs and websites.
It Creates and customizes your WordPress site from start to finish. Jetpack helps you with:
- Hundreds of professional themes for any kind of site
- Intuitive and powerful customization tools
- Unlimited and high-speed image and video content delivery network
- Lazy image loading for a faster mobile experience
- Integration with the official WordPress mobile apps
#2 MonsterInsights
With almost 15 million downloads, MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allow you to connect your WordPress website with Google Analytics, so you can see how visitors find and use your website, so you can keep them coming back. Simply put, we show you the stats that matter.
#3 WordPress SEO by Yoast
Yoast is the most widely used SEO plugin for WordPress. This is a free SEO tool which provides all the feature to optimize your website including XML sitemap for your website. It can help you to understand how well your post is optimized before you published it.
#4 WordPress Ad Widget
WordPress Ad Widget is one of the best Adsense Widget for WordPress. It is one of the easiest WordPress Plugin to display ads on your website. It allows you to display both text and images Ads. If you are new in content marketing this is the most convenient WordPress plugin for Adsense.
#5 IThemes Security
iTheme Security is also available for free and premium users. This security plugin for WordPress provides security from 30 different type of attacks and viruses. iThemes premium subscription starts with 80 dollars per year for bloggers and goes up to 150 dollars per year suitable for developers. Below are some of the feature of iTheme Security.
- Two-factor authentication
- Brute force protection
- Monitoring core files for any changes
- Ticketed support (for pro users)
- Logging user actions
- Locking the user for several incorrect login attempts.
#6 AddThis
AddThis Service was founded in 2004 and supports three hundred social media services. This plugin is exclusively for WordPress websites. AddThis plugin allows you to choose from the variety of icon sizes and designs.
This plugin comes with a subscription price of 12 dollars per month in which you can use additional features like floating media share bar. You can also see analytical reports on what people are sharing
#7 OptinMaster
OptinMonster is the most popular conversion rate optimization software. It allows you to convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers. If you want to grow your email list, then this is a must-have WordPress plugin in 2018.
#8 Analytify Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin
Analytify Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin allows you to get Google Analytics Dashboard on your WordPress Dashboard within a minute. It presents the statistics from Google Analytics in a beautiful way under the WordPress Posts/Pages at the front end, backend and in its own Dashboard.
#9 All in one SEO pack
All in one SEO pack is the most downloaded SEO plugin in WordPress. This plugin offers all the features needed to create an SEO friendly website. This is a beginner friendly SEO tool which helps you to optimize your website for search engines. It will automatically optimize the title of your post for search engines.
#10 Ad Kangaroo
Ad Kangaroo is an awesome WordPress plugin for displaying ads on your website. Once you install this plugin on your WordPress website, link your website to Google AdSense account and manage available ads easily right from your admin dashboard. Ad Kangaroo for AdSense is a free WordPress Google AdSense plugin.
#11 ALL IN ONE WP SECURITY
All In One WP security is another very famous plugin for your website security. It has an easy to understand interface for the people who are not very familiar with advanced security settings. This plugin implements latest security techniques and measure to keep your website safe and secure. The unique feature of this plugin is that it provides a meter on your dashboard that gives your site a score by measuring how secure your website is.
This plugin can also detect malicious code in your WordPress website and provides a security scanner to keep track of files and notifies you of each change in your WordPress system.
#12 ShareThis
Share this is another plugin for WordPress websites founded in 2005 and has been the top plugin for social media sharing for many years. Users can share your content on 120 different social media websites using ShareThis.
ShareThis offers the number of small and large social media icons and designs to choose from and also provides analytical reports to know when a user shared your content.
#13 Akismet
Akismet is yet another plugin developed by the people behind WordPress. It is one of the default plugins of WordPress that comes with every new WordPress core installation. It is basically an anti-spam plugin which checks all comments and filters out the spammy comments. The plugin is free for the personal site and blogs while you have to subscribe its monthly plans for commercial sites. The premium plans provide advanced security solution besides spam protection.
#14 GA Google Analytics Plugin
GA Google Analytics enables Google Analytics for your entire WordPress site. Lightweight and fast with plenty of great features. This is a lightweight plugin that inserts the required GA tracking code. To view your site statistics, visit your Google Analytics account.
#15 Premium SEO pack
Premium SEO is another helpful SEO tool for WordPress to create an optimized web page. This SEO plugin comes with minification tool which will help you to make your website quicker and offer a better user experience.
#16 Ad Injection
Ad Injection is one of very few WordPress plugins for Google Adsense which allows A/B testing. You can easily find out which variations of the ads are working best for you. Ad Injection also allows you to specify which visitors will see the ads. Along with the before and after post positions, you can display ads in random locations and sidebars.
#17 BULLETPROOF SECURITY
Another top plugin that helps to secure your WordPress website is BulletProof Security. This plugin secure your website from RFI, XSS, CRLF, SQL injection, and code injection hackings. You can set up this plugin with just one click.
Below are some features of BulletProof Security.
• A record of the number of login attempts
• File monitoring and quarantining of uploaded files
• Email alerts for a variety of user actions
• Alerts when suspected malicious activity affects your site
#18 Easy Social Share Buttons
Easy Social Share Buttons provide the most attracting interface for social media sharing. It allows visitors to share content using one of eight social media services. With the help of this plugin, users can share content via email also.
Each social media button comes with numbers of designs and you can see how many time your content is shared on top of each button.
#19 BackupBuddy
As a business owner, you cannot afford to lose your business and customer data in case of a hardware failure or an attack on your host’s servers. The first thing you should setup on all your WordPress sites is a backup plugin. We recommend using BackupBuddy because it is one of the most reliable and easiest ways to backup and restore your WordPress sites with just a few clicks.
#20 SUCURI Security
This security plugin is completely free to use security plugin in the WordPress repository. It provides security features like malware scanning, security activity auditing, blacklist monitoring, effective security hardening, file integrity monitoring, and a website firewall.
Sucuri Security plugin tracks all the user activities on your website starting from the user login to any change in data made to your site so that you can track and review the activity log in case of any breach in security.
