Top 10 WordPress Plugins You Should Install on Your Blog

WordPress is considered as the most professional blogging platform to start your blogging career. Though Blogger is also a really great blogging platform that allows you to start your blogging career at no cost, it isn’t as dynamic as WordPress. The fact that there are many plugins for WordPress to do most of our task has made it the most sought after CMS tool.

There are hundreds of thousands of plugins in the WordPress directory from where you can download and install different plugins on your blog with some simple clicks. These plugins can do almost any task that you are in need of and even when you don’t know anything about PHP or coding, you won’t face any issues in working with WordPress. But for one single task, there might be hundred different plugins so how to find out which one is the best? To clear your doubts, today in this post, I am going to list the 10 best WordPress plugins that you should install on your blog without second thought.

10 Best WordPress Plugins that are Must Haves:

1. Akismet

Spam comments are the biggest headache for a blogger. Once your blog is getting indexed in Google and getting attention on social media sites, you will start getting lots of spam comments on your blog. This can happen even if your blog is just a few days old. You can’t manage all the spam comments on your own. So there is a free plugin called Akismet that filters the comments and assign the spam comments in the spam folder from where you can delete them directly.

Download Akismet – Link

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a normal practice that every blogger do to get his/her blog noticed in the search engines. So having a plugin that makes your task easy is a great way to save your time. WordPress SEO by Yoast is the best SEO plugin out there for WordPress blogs as it takes care of every SEO need of your blog. The best part about the plugin is that it is completely free.

Download WordPress SEO by Yoast – Link

3. Google XML Sitemaps

When your blog is new, you will have to notify the search engines that the content is being published and that your blog has been updated. The search engines bots won’t know about it unless you tell them. Sitemaps are an effective way to tell the search engines that a new post is published on your blog and is ready to get crawled and indexed. Google XML Sitemaps is the best plugin that automatically creates sitemaps for your blog whenever new article is updated on your blog.

Download Google XML Sitemaps – Link

4. W3 Total Cache

The performance, the loading speed of your blog is very important factor in deciding the success of your blog in the long run. W3 Total Cache is the plugin that will help you enhancing the performance of your WordPress blog. With some simple settings, you will be able to speed up your blog in no time. Plus you can compress Javascript and CSS files to increase the loading time tremendously.

Download W3 Total Cache – Link

5. WP Smush.it

When you publish an article on your blog, you normally add 1-2 images along with it to make the content more appealing. But this images are mostly not optimized and can be compressed to decrease the loading time. WP Smush.It can easily smush the images on your blog’s server and compress it to decrease its size so that it don’t take long to load the images.

Download WP Smush.It – Link

6. WP Optimize

Optimizing the database tables of your blog is a very tough task and if you don’t have complete knowledge on how to do it, then you will end up screwing everything on your blog. WP Optimize is a plugin that will help you optimize the database tables by removing post revisions, spam comments, un-approved comments that puts load on your server and help you in decreasing the server load time.

Download WP Optimize – Link

7. Jetpack

Jetpack is an all-in-one solution for your WordPress blog and it comes pre-installed whenever you install a new WordPress blog. This amazing plugin comes with many features like checking the stats of your blog, custom CSS feature, subscription options, sharing options and many more things. You won’t have to install different plugins if you use Jetpack on your blog. If it’s not already installed on your blog or you have removed it, then I recommend you to install the plugin immediately.

Download Jetpack for WordPress – Link

8. SEO Smart Links

You might have heard the benefits of internal linking many times from many bloggers. By internal linking, you not only provide more articles to your readers but you also create a strong path so that your entire blog is crawled and indexed properly. But adding internal links everytime might be a time-consuming task, mainly when you have thousands of posts on your blog. SEO Smart Links is the plugin that you need at such a time. You have to install it and then add the keywords and the URL of the article in the settings and then whenever that keyword will appear in the article, SEO Smart Links will add the assigned URL to that keyword and linking the post automatically. You can also nofollow all the external links on your site using this plugin.

Download SEO Smart Links – Link

9. jQuery Lazy Load Plugin

If there is even a small way to decrease and improve the loading speed of your blog then you should do it. jQuery Lazy Load plugin is a small plugin that loads the images in your article only when required. The images won’t load together, but as you scroll down the page, the images will load at that time. This will help you in improving the loading speed of the article and thus the blog.

Download jQuery Lazy Load plugin – Link

10. Limit Login Attempts

The security of your WordPress blog is very important because there are hackers sitting ready to pounce on your blog and hack everything from it. There is no guaranteed way to stop the hackers but you can at least do some little things that will limit them from taking your possession from you. Limit Login Attempts is one such plugin that protects your login form. You can install the plugin and add the number of re-tries allowed when someone enters a wrong password. If a person enters a wrong password multiple time, the login form will be locked for that IP address for the time that you save in the settings.

Download Limit Login Attempts – Link

These were the top 10 best WordPress plugins that you should install on your WordPress blog. I would say that whenever you install a new WordPress blog, the first thing you need to do is download all these plugins and install them.

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I know that there are many other WordPress plugins that can be included in this list, but these are the plugins that cannot be replaced and they are the best in the tasks they do. However if you think that there is some other plugin that can be considered as the best WordPress plugin then add it via your comments. I would love to hear your views on this!