Are you looking for the best WordPress plugins to take your blog to the next level in 2021?
Powerful blogs have high authority, quality content, high search traffic, and a great user experience.
This article reviews the best blogging plugins on the market which helps across the board from user experience to SEO rankings.
12 Best WordPress Plugins for a More Powerful Blog – What Features Do They Offer?
Plugins are extensible applications that you can add to standard WordPress. Plugins add new features and improve existing ones.
They can carry out all sorts of tasks and even help with more complex tasks like creating a child theme for your site.
Good ones (all of the ones on this page) are quick and easy to use and don’t slow your website down.
Let’s dive into the list of best WordPress plugins for more powerful blogs.
- Hello Bar
- All in One SEO Pack
- Wordfence Firewall
- WP Rocket
- ShortPixel
- MonsterInsights
- UpdraftPlus
- Disqus Comment System
- Akismet Spam Protection
- Broken Link Checker
- Better Click to Tweet
- Thirsty Affiliates
Let’s jump into the detail of each plugin one by one.
Hello Bar
Hello Bar is a lead generation plugin.
It provides an interactive bar that runs along the top of your website and allows you to show your visitors customised messages. It allows you to convert visitors into subscribers and followers by showing the right message at the right time.
Hello Bar also offers social follow and share buttons to help you to grow your social media followers and encourage people to share your post.
Another great feature of Hello Bar is the geolocation targeting and A/B testing services.
Alternative: Sumo Smart Bar
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best easy to use WordPress SEO plugin. Over 2 million websites use it. AIOSEO is an all-in-one plugin that you can use to build search rankings to drive more traffic to your blog.
All in One SEO offers a powerful and easy-to-use on-page SEO optimization tool. It provides complete support for schema markup, local SEO, and WooCommerce SEO so you can get more clicks and search traffic.
All in One SEO also offers seamless integration with popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more. It also makes it easy to connect with Google Search Console, Google AMP and integrate many popular WordPress plugins.
Finally, it allows you to create an XML sitemap and optimize your robot.txt to improve the crawlability of your blog.
Alternative: Rank Math
Wordfence
Wordfence is the best WordPress security plugin in the market.
It includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner built from the ground up to protect the WordPress websites.
Wordfence protects your blog from hacking by scanning the live traffic for any malicious activities and blocks the IP of suspicious users.
Alternative: MalCare
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the fastest caching plugin for your WordPress blog. It allows you to instantly improve your WordPress website speed and performance.
You can use its simple interface to minify and combine HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Also, it provides image lazy loading, preloading, and WordPress Heart beat control.
It also comes with WordPress recommended functions like gzip compression, page cache, cache preloading, and seamlessly integrated Cloudflare for further performance enhancement.
Alternative: W3 Total Cache
ShortPixel
ShortPixel is an image optimization plugin that compresses your blog images to load more quickly. This is becoming increasingly important as page load time is part of the pending Core Web Vitals update.
Shortpixel reduces the size of images by up to 80% without any significant loss of quality. It also comes with lazy loading, bulk optimization, and image backup.
Alternative: Imagify
MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is one of the most powerful analytics tools for bloggers. It allows you to monitor your blog traffic and other vital stats within your WordPress dashboard.
It shows simple GA reports with your website’s number of users, bounce rates, organic searches, pages per session, and the like. You can even understand your website traffic behavior in real-time.
MonsterInsights also has the best Popular Posts feature, which allows you to show your popular articles anywhere on your WordPress site. You can also use Inline Popular Posts to show articles inside your content, sidebar, or at the end of your content. It also gives handy performance charts of different traffic channels to understand their performance.
Alternative: Site Kit by Google
UpdraftPlus
Before you can make any changes to your WordPress blog you need to make sure that you have a backup. That way, if anything goes wrong, you can quickly restore your website.
Updraft makes it easy to restore your website if you have a disaster. It also makes migrating your website to another hosting provider very fast.
UpdraftPlus allows you to create a complete backup of your blog within WordPress or any other third-party space. It also allows you to create scheduled backups.
Alternative: All-in-One WP Migration
Disqus Comment
The Disqus Comment system runs directly on your regular WordPress setup.
It makes managing comments incredibly quick and simple. For example, it allows you to turn off comments for individual posts in two clicks.
Alternative: Native Comments
Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet is a very powerful anti-spam plugin that helps prevent spam comments and spam form submissions to help keep your blog as clean as possible.
Alternative: Anti-Spam
Broken Link Checker
Broken link checker is a simple plugin that monitors internal and external links in your blog and alerts you when any links are broken. It adds a widget on the WordPress dashboard to highlight anything it finds. You can fix them from the same dashboard widget too.
Alternative: Semrush
Better Click to Tweet
Better Click to Tweet WordPress plugin allows you to use a simple shortcode for making an important piece of text tweetable (without leaving your website). It creates a clickable click-to-tweet button inside your content.
It’s a great way to enhance user interaction. It makes your article visually more appealing and also increases the number of tweets you get in the post.
Alternative: Highlight and Share
Thirsty Affiliates
Thirsty Affiliates is a popular easy to use WordPress plugin for managing affiliate links. Managing affiliate links can be a very time consuming.
It ensures that all your affiliate links work properly and automatically detects errors. It also keeps track of traffic and affiliate link clicks through a Google Analytics integration.
Thirsty Affiliates does this by scanning your content and automatically adding affiliate links to your specified keywords. It also checks your visitor’s location, and directs them to the correct country-specific affiliate links.
Alternative: Pretty Links
Conclusion
Hopefully, this article has helped you find some useful WordPress plugins for your blog.
Some of the plugins in the list are free, while others are premium. All of them add essential features to websites and come highly recommended.
As a minimum, we recommend that you install a security plugin, a backup plugin, and a caching plugin. Anything else is a bonus!
What do you think? Let us know if you think we’ve missed any other great WordPress plugins.
