10 Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers (Mostly Free)

Easy to use, versatile, and reliable- WordPress checks all the boxes for blogging. However, more than just having the platform is required if you want to do better with blogging. So, what do you need? 

Let’s cut to the chase- you need some reliable tools, plugins, to be precise, because coding everything will take so long that you won’t have any time for the blog. So, getting plugins is essential. 

This automatically raises the question- which ones? There are thousands of plugins out in the market; Which ones are absolutely necessary?

To help you with the issue, we’ve brought you the list of 10 Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers (Must-Have). These plugins have a proven track record for enhancing user experience, improving site performance, increasing traffic and lead generation, and streamlining blog management. Whether you’re a novice or a pro, these tools will help all the same.

Let’s dive right into it, shall we? 

1. Ultimate Blocks

Ultimate Blocks is a Gutenberg Blocks plugin that is created with a focus on bloggers and marketers. With an array of customizable blocks tailored to content creators’ needs, this plugin can be a powerful tool in the hands of expert bloggers. Even if someone lacks the design or technical skills, don’t worry, as Ultimate Blocks need no coding skills to be operated.

The main attraction of this plugin is the diverse array of blocks. These range from the simple, like the divider block for clear content separation, to the complex, such as the feature box for showcasing product details. Other notable blocks include the testimonial Block for customer reviews, the table of contents block for easy navigation, and the Click to Tweet Block for enhancing social media engagement.

Another notable feature of Ultimate Blocks is the customization freedom it provides to the users. The blocks are intuitive and can be customized to match your brand’s aesthetic and style, making it a flexible tool for designers of all skill levels. Each block has various customizable features such as color, size, and typography options, ensuring you can tweak each detail perfectly.

This plugin has eyes for on-site reach. It comes with the review block, which is schema-enabled. This block will boost SEO by providing search engines with better information about your content. Structured data to help your site’s contents and offer relevant searches, potentially enhancing your website’s visibility.

Key Features

Provides 48 blocks, each for a different purpose.
Lightweight and blazing-fast performance.
Schema enabled.
Easy to navigate. 
Drag-and-drop block editor provides a simpler user experience. 
Highly Customizable.
Unique enabling/disabling block option.
Regular updates and support.

Price

Free | Ultimate Blocks Pro is priced at $69/year.

2. Rank Math

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a novice blogger, getting your content to rank high in search engines is no small task. It’s a challenge that requires more than just engaging content; it requires deep technical know-how. That’s where Rank Math comes to the rescue. Offering a vast range of features and tools, it provides an all-in-one solution for all your SEO needs.  

One of Rank Math’s standout features is its comprehensive SEO Suite. This suite comes with over 15 different modules, including local SEO & Google knowledge graph, XML sitemaps, 404 monitor, and redirections, among many others. It leverages over 30 SEO metrics, assessing keyword usage, readability, content length, backlinks, and more, identifying possible weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities, and clear-cut recommendations for improving your SEO score.

One feature that sets Rank Math apart is Content AI. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze your content and offers real-time SEO and content optimization recommendations. It doesn’t merely analyze keyword usage but extends its analysis to context, readability, and other complex factors that impact SEO. From providing readability scores to suggesting LSI keywords and smart links, Content AI can be a handy tool. 

Another impressive feature of this plugin is its social media integration. This feature allows you to add open graph metadata and Twitter cards to your posts, giving you control over the appearance of your content on social media platforms. You can customize the titles, descriptions, and images, engage your audience more effectively and increase click-through rates. 

Key Features

Provides support for 20+ schema types.
Unlimited focus keyword optimization.
Has 30+ detailed SEO tests.
Advanced redirection manager with 301, 302, 307, 410 & 451 redirection.
Automatic image optimization.
Has a powerful XML sitemap.
Content AI with AI suggestions.
1-click import from Yoast SEO, AIO SEO, & SEOPress.

Price
Free | The pro plan for Rank Math is available at $59/year.

3. Social Snap

We all know how powerful social media is when it comes to blogging. However, growing your blog’s social presence is challenging without the proper tools. In this regard, Social Snap is invaluable for users in maximizing social media efforts. Whether it’s creating exciting click-to-tweet snippets, personalizing follow buttons, or tracking social media success- Social Snap can do it all. 

One of the most notable features of this plugin is its advanced sharing features. It allows content sharing through its easy-to-use, customizable social sharing buttons. Moreover, it offers the freedom to position these buttons wherever you prefer on your website, including floating sidebars, inline buttons, on-media sharing buttons, and through widgets and shortcodes.

“Click-to-Tweet” is another powerful feature offered by Social Snap. This feature lets you embed tweetable content right into your posts. This also allows you to share stand-out snippets of your content on Twitter with just a single click.  It’s a fantastic tool to drive engagement and highlight key points. 

Understanding how your content performs on social media is key to effective blogging. Recognizing this, Social Snap comes with an advanced statistics feature. It offers insights into your content’s social sharing performance, providing a breakdown of shares by networks, posts, and over time. It even allows you to track individual buttons’ performance, giving a clear understanding of what works best for your audience. 

Key Features

Supports 30+ social media platforms and apps.
Social share counter for visitors to see.
Buttons are customizable, with 4 shapes, 3 sizes, and unlimited color options.
Customizable Click-to-Tweet boxes, with 6 designed styles.
Provides in-depth engagement tracking.
Uses fast-loading SVG (vector) icons for better site performance.
Features social auto poster for automatically posting blog content on social media. 
Offers share count recovery.

Price

Free | Social Snap Pro is set at $99/year.

4. Fluent Forms

Making people sign up for something (subscription, newsletter, offers) significantly increases user engagement on your blog site. To do that, you need forms. However, building those from scratch is not efficient. To save you from the hassle, we’ve brought you Fluent Forms, which has all the functionalities you would ever need for your online forms, without any unnecessary complexities.

One of the significant highlights of Fluent Forms is the simplicity it offers while creating forms. With over 66 pre-built form templates, you can get started quickly, whether with a simple contact form, an event registration form, or even a complex multi-step form. Its drag-and-drop form builder enables you to make stunning forms without even writing any code!

Another fantastic feature provided by this plugin is the smart conditional logic. It will allow you to display or hide fields, steps, or form confirmations based on user input. This tool enables you to create more dynamic, interactive, and user-friendly forms, leading to better user engagement and conversion rates. Visitors won’t see any unnecessary fields on forms anymore!

But what about the more advanced users who like a more hands-on approach? No worries, as Fluent Forms offers plenty of customization freedom. You can use HTML blocks, proper orientation, tooltips, etc., to create your forms and tweak the settings. You can also add custom CSS to design them as you wish. 

Key Features

Easy to use drag-and-drop form builder.
Provides real-time email notifications.
Offers multi-column form layout for compact forms.
Has 66+ pre-built templates.
Smart conditional logic. 
Pdf generation from forms feature.
Built-in data visualization and analysis tool.
reCAPTCHA for human verification and spam protection for security. 

Price

Free | Single site license for Fluent Forms is $41 per year.

5. Jetpack

Security and site performance are big headaches if you’re a blogger. A technical glitch can erase all your hard work, or the site may run slower than expected. Jetpack has brought you an all-in-one solution to relieve you from all these tensions, designed to provide top-tier security, automated backups, website performance enhancements, and features to aid your site’s growth. 

Jetpack offers robust security features. Its real-time backups ensure your data is stored safely, and can be easily restored if any attack or accident occurs. This plugin’s malware scanning feature searches and destroys threats even before they can activate. On top of that, downtime monitoring and protection against brute force attacks will help your blog to be online, even under attack. 

Speed equates to user satisfaction. Understanding this, Jetpack delivers a range of performance optimization features, reducing load times, increasing the blog site’s overall speed, and, by extension, the SEO rankings. One of the notable features regarding speed is the site accelerator, which aids in faster image and static file loading. An advanced video hosting feature is also available for high-speed, ad-free video streaming.

Jetpack’s suite of growth features will help you understand the audience, increase site reach, and engagement. This plugin provides tools for SEO, social media sharing, and ad programs, which can help you monetize your blog. Jetpack also provides site stats and analytics, showing important insight, and helping you make a data-driven decision.

Key Features

Automatic real-time backup and restoration. 
Easy host migration management.
Automatic malware scanning and one-click removal.
Image CDN from Jetpack server to save user memory and bandwidth.
Automatic blog post publishing.
PayPal and Stripe integration.
Provides advanced site stats and analytics.
AI Assistant for generating content.

Price

Free | Complete Jetpack bundle starts at $24.95 per month. 

6. Akismet

As a blogger, spam is a continuous nuisance you have to face. We’ve brought you the perfect plugin for blog sites- Akismet, to save you from this disturbance. With over 5 million active installations, this plugin protects against irrelevant or intrusive advertisements, link spam, unwanted redirects, and malicious content in your website’s comments and contact forms. 

One of the biggest advantages of Akismet is its intelligent machine-learning algorithm. With it, the plugin can learn and adapt to every interaction on your website. It regularly analyzes millions of comments, pings, & form submissions and finds spam automatically. Its sophisticated system ensures that genuine comments aren’t flagged accidentally, and your blog users can enjoy a spam-free experience. 

Another critical feature of Akismet is its global spam database. The database regularly updates, knows about the latest spam trend, and acts accordingly. The plugin has removed over 500 billion (yes, it’s billion, not million) spam, and stored them on the database. And the best thing about the database is, it’s cloud-based, so your site won’t feel any effect in speed, conversion, or bounce rates, and will perform perfectly.  

The discard feature is another subtle, but valuable feature of this plugin. It can be called Akismet’s automated and deadly spam destroyer. Once this feature is activated, the most obvious spam is immediately discarded. This means it’s not just filtered; it’s completely deleted, freeing up precious space and resources. This also reduces the load on your server, ensuring optimal site performance.

Key Features

Automatically comment checking and filtering spam.
Provides status history for every comment.
Zero friction feature for operating without bothering users.
Links with hidden or suspicious URLs in the comment body are displayed.
A discard feature for instant spam deleting.
Cloud-based spam database for better site performance.
Provides a dashboard for monitoring.
Has a developer-friendly API. 

Price

Free | Pro plan for Akismet starts at $4.95/month,

7. Thrive Leads

If you want to grow as a blogger, email listing and lead generation are essential parts of your journey. Thrive Leads can do all of that and more. It’s the ultimate list-building solution, with a full suite of lead generation tools designed to boost conversion rates and multiply site growth. With various features and advantages, it’s an all-in-one solution for lead generation. 

Thrive Leads excels in providing a variety of opt-in form options. Whether you prefer attention-grabbing lightbox popups & sticky ribbons, or in-line forms nestled within your blog content, the choice is yours. Other options include slide-in forms, screen fillers, content locks, scroll mats, widget area forms, and more. Each form type is designed to maximize user engagement without hampering the user experience. 

What makes Thrive Leads stand out is its smart targeting options. You can target your audience better, by customizing offers to individual posts or categories. Furthermore, its advanced analytics and reporting tools provide critical insights about the forms’ performances, conversion rates, compare form performance, and monitor lead growth over time.

However, Thrive Leads doesn’t just stop there with providing reports. With its amazing A/B testing feature, you can easily create multiple versions of the same form, alter variables, and let the plugin do all the heavy lifting. The system will analyze the performance of each variation, and automatically allocate more traffic to the highest converting option.

Key Features

Easy to use drag-and-drop form builder. 
Plenty of opt-in form building options.
Advanced targeting options.
In-depth reporting and actionable insights.
User-friendly A/B testing engine.
Lots of pre-designed templates.
Integration with popular email marketing services, like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, or ConvertKit. 
SmartLinks & SmartExit for conversion boost.

Price

Thrive Leads comes with Thrive Suites package, priced at $300/year. 

8. WP Table Builder

How you display data is a critical factor in your blog’s content. Tables are a powerful tool for presenting and organizing data, but creating tables by coding on WordPress can be challenging. That’s what brings us to WP Table Builder, an easy-to-use, featuring intuitive table-building options.  Its design-centric, feature-rich, and user-friendly approach makes it a standout choice for any blogger.

One key feature that sets WP Table Builder apart is its drag-and-drop table builder, which is incredibly user-friendly. On top of that, this plugin offers complete control over every cell in your tables. This includes features for adding text, images, lists, buttons, and even star ratings in individual cells. Moreover, the plugin lets you adjust cell dimensions and alignment, providing complete cell management.

WP Table Builder has integrated import and export functions, allowing you to quickly move your tables between different websites. This functionality is convenient for web developers replicating tables across multiple sites. WP Table Builder will enable you to import and export tables directly from CSV or XML files. This feature is unmatched if you’re migrating tables or backing up data. 

Shortcodes are a crucial component of WordPress, simplifying and adding new features to your site. Since WP Table Builder allows for shortcodes within table cells, you can embed elements like videos, forms, and more into your tables. As a result, the tables will be more dynamic and practical, and your blog will look more catchy.

Key Features

Pre-built table templates.
Has Gutenberg integration for easier use.
Has search and pagination options for a better user experience.
One-click auto migration from the TablePress feature.
Built-in lazy loading for images in tables for better performance.
Advanced cell management.
Provides CSS styling customization.
Import & export table in CSV and XML format.

Price

Free | Starter plan of WP Table Builder starts at $49/year.

9. WP Rocket

It’s tough to rank any blog without caching, as pages will load comparatively slower without it. Don’t worry; WP Rocket is here to do all the heavy lifting so that you can focus more on blogging. Once you activate this plugin, it automatically applies 80% of web performance best practices. So, right out of the gate, your website is already faster.

This plugin takes caching one step further with its preloading feature. When a page is published or changed, WP Rocket immediately keeps it in a cache rather than waiting for a visitor to view it. That means your site’s loading times are superb for all visitors from the start. Better SEO results are possible thanks to sitemap preloading, which ensures efficient crawling and indexing by search engines.

Optimizing website files is as important as caching. Considering that, WP Rocket brings its own file optimization features, which include minification and concatenation of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. By reducing the size of these files and combining them where possible, WP Rocket minimizes the amount of data that needs to be loaded, thereby accelerating page load times.

WP Rocket incorporates lazy loading as a built-in feature, as it’s vital for any speedy blog site. With this feature, the plugin only loads images, videos, and iframes as they become visible in the visitor’s viewport, rather than all at once. This saves visitors’ bandwidth and accelerates the perceived loading time, especially for pages heavy on multimedia content.

Key Features

Instantaneous cache action right after installation. 
Automatic preloading after every change in pages.
Offers GZIP compression for decreasing file size.
Provides database optimization feature.
Has image CDN for faster content delivery.
Cloudflare compatibility for consistent performance.
eCommerce friendly, bypasses the cache for shopping cart and checkout pages to avoid any disruption to the purchasing process.

Price

Single site license for WP Rocket is available at $59/year. 

10. BlogVault

Accidents can happen, such as system errors, glitches, or in more severe cases, attacks on your blog. That’s why keeping backups is essential. And it’d be safe to say that, BlogVault can be the best plugin for bloggers regarding site backups and security. From real-time backups to migration and staging, BlogVault dons tons of features, making it a foolproof solution.

What sets BlogVault apart from other backup solutions is its Bulletproof Backups feature. This feature ensures each backup contains every file, post, comment, revision, and setting- essentially the whole site. The process occurs in real-time, and the data is stored in an off-site server. So, even if the hosting service encounters issues, your data is safe and ready to be restored.

Two powerful aspects of the BlogVault plugin are its integrated staging environment and migration feature. Staging allows you to create a clone of your website in a secure and separate staging area. You can test changes, updates, or new designs without affecting the live site. Similarly, the migration feature enables you to migrate your site to a different host without downtime, or any data loss.

In addition to backup, BlogVault scans your site regularly for malware and other vulnerabilities, providing tight security. It offers real-time alerts and a one-click malware removal feature, so all the threats can be eliminated instantly. Its integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF) fights bots and spam, and the Threat Intelligence Network steps up in real time to stop new attacks.

Key Features

Incremental backups, even 500 GB of data.
Enterprise-grade data security with multiple data centers.
100% restoration rate.
One-click site staging for testing.
Site migration with minimum downtime and without data loss.
Real-time WooCommerce backups.
Advanced WordPress monitoring and activity log.
Malware scanning, one-click removal, and firewall for site security.

Price

Free | Basic plan for BlogVault starts at $399/year, with 30 days of backup.

Conclusion

Blogging is ever-evolving, and the dynamic is changing fast. So, to have a successful blog, you need to update yourself accordingly. However, managing the technical stuff can be a chore while creating content. That’s why we hope our list of 10 Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers (Must-Have) can be helpful to find out the help you need. 

The blogging plugins in this list can fill in for almost any management duty you can think of. Let that be SEO, lead generation, social sharing, security, or simply managing content- these plugins can do everything. Most of them have free versions; the best part is that experienced and novice bloggers vet all of these. So, even if you are an amateur, you can test many things out without spending anything. 

That’s it. If you’ve liked it, please share. If you ask anything about this write-up, we’ll happily answer! 

Good Luck!  

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