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15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

A content management system like WordPress is like a paradise for beginners. There is a perfect assortment of elements needed to make your site look appealing, right from a wide array of free to premium themes to plugins that can quickly integrate various functionalities.

WordPress plugins are great tools for adding that extra functionality and giving that flexibility to your WordPress site. Additionally having the right set of plugins and tools can help you expand your online reach and search engine rankings.

The niche of your website will determine the type of plugin you should have on your website, but there are some essential plugins that every WordPress website needs. For instance, security, speed, SEO, contact form, etc.

There are over 52,000 plugins in the official WordPress directory, and choosing the right one from them makes it extremely overwhelming for a beginner.

In this article, we have brought to the limelight 15 essential WordPress plugins, a must for your website for every beginner out there.

Essential WordPress Plugins

Here is an experts’ handpicked collection of “essential” plugins that are must have WordPress plugins if you are just kickstarting your website.

Each of these essential WordPress plugins has been grouped into the functionalities they are made for, such as contact form plugin, social media plugin, google analytics plugins, etc., to make it easier for you to choose from.

WPForms (Contact Form Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

Every Website needs a contact form to make it easier for visitors to get in touch with you or to increase your subscribers. For this, WP Forms is one of the top WordPress plugins used for contact forms. It is a user-friendly plugin so even any beginner can create forms without the help of any developer. The easy and powerful drag and drop online builder allows you to create contact forms, email subscription forms, payment forms, etc. Furthermore, it has some powerful features that are unlikely in any other form builders, such as conversational forms, geolocation tracking, etc. All of these features make WP Forms a must have WordPress plugin for every beginner.

Akismet (Spam Protection Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that filters spam comments on your WordPress website. This plugin can help save your time by automatically deleting spam comments. The best part about this plugin is that it requires no extra effort; once installed and activated, it does its job effectively. To prevent your site from publishing any harmful or malicious content Akismet checks all the contact form submissions and comments against their global spam database. This easy-to-setup plugin is a must have WordPress plugin for all sites.

WP Rocket (Performance Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

WP Rocket is a very powerful tool when compared to other cache plugins. It is a top WordPress plugin in terms of performance building for your site. The caching option allows you to instantly improve the speed and performance with no technical knowledge required. Besides, it automatically turns on the recommended WordPress caching settings. This powerful caching plugin instantly boosts your website performance by automatically applying web performance best practices. This easy-to-use plugin helps your website to achieve a good PageSpeed score and clear the Core Web Vitals.

UpDraftPlus (Backup Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

UpDradftPlus is another popular WordPress backup and restore plugin that makes it easy to set up automatic backup and restore a website for every newbie WordPress user. The main advantage of this backup plugin is that it allows automatic backups which you can easily choose to store in remote locations like Google Drive, FTP, email, etc. Restoring backups is also easier as it allows you to do it straight from your WordPress Dashboard. All in all, it is one of the best free WordPress plugins and saves a lot of money and time.

Sucuri (Security Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

Security is the topmost priority for all website owners. Sucuri is one of the best free WordPress plugins that allows security and protection with a single click of your mouse. Sucuri is well-known among experts and cybersecurity professionals. The free version of this plugin allows you to scan your website with all the tools you need to keep your website away from any threats. Its features involve protecting your Website from DDoS, Malware threats, or any other type of attack. This plugin is highly recommended and is a must have security plugin for every Website. Furthermore, if you don’t have a budget constraint, then you can always go for the Sucuri premium platform.

Optimole (Image Optimization Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

It is a next-gen image optimization plugin, with features like optimizing images, making them take less space on the disk (without losing the quality), and serving them to CDN. Also, it moves all the computing to the cloud. As a result, your site loads faster, and you are consuming lesser server resources. It is a user-friendly plugin with an easy sign-up process for the API key. It offers a free tier as well as paid plans.

PushEngage (Web Push Notification Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

This is the best plugin option in this category, for PushEngage allows you to leverage browser notifications in a personalized way. Once your subscribers accept to receive your notifications you can send them breaking news, flash sale offers, personalized price alerts, etc. You can send notifications based on what they search or browse on your site and get the timing right. Installation is super easy and it takes five minutes. It comes with powerful features like drip campaigns, dynamic user segmentation, powerful analytics, and more. The best part about this plugin is that it does not sell your data. This innovative plugin brings the power of email marketing into push notifications. PushEngage works on all major browsers and across all devices. All you have to do is install the plugin and kick back in your chair.

Redirection (Redirection Plugin)

There are times when you have to change your posts or article permalinks, but you forget to redirect them. For this reason, Redirection is one of the most popular and essential WordPress plugins to have. It allows you to create and manage redirection in a straightforward manner, without the need for any technical knowledge. This plugin helps you to manage all the 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors.

MonsterInsights (Analytics Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

With the MonsterInsights plugin, you can easily add Google Analytics website tracking services to your website. This essential WordPress plugin is user-friendly and extremely easy to set up. After installing and activating the plugin, all you need to do is click on ”Authenticate with your Google Account” and follow the instructions to get started. You can access data related to your website easily through the dashboard without logging into your Google Analytics account. It allows you to check all the basic stats like sessions and bounce rate, etc. You can also opt for the premium version to access more features.

Shared Counts (Social Media Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

It is a social media plugin that easily adds beautiful social sharing buttons to your website. It helps in increasing organic traffic and engagement when readers share your pages and posts on social media. It has features such as showing share counts, which helps you add social proof to your website.

User Registration (User Registration Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

User registration is an integral feature necessary for many types of sites. And there are carefully crafted simple and user-friendly plugins at your disposal, such as User Registration, to do the job effectively. This plugin comes up with amazing features so that you can make your WordPress site look professional with beautiful front-end user registration forms.

Newsletter (Emails and Newsletter Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

As the name suggests, this plugin allows you to create and manage newsletters. You can have an unlimited number of subscribers and send unlimited emails, and this is one of the best WordPress plugins out there for marketing. This out-of-the-box plugin is perfect for list building. You can compose, send and track emails without any hassle. It includes many features like drag and drop composer, unlimited subscribers and newsletters, subscription spam check, and more.

WooCommerce (e-commerce Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

If you wish to create an e-commerce website, then the WooCommerce plugin is definitely for you. It is the best E-commerce plugin that can help you sell anything on your website. A powerful e-commerce platform for WordPress, it includes features like free shipping, local pickups, flat rates, and many more functional features that make your e-commerce site feature-rich for your customers.

Yoast SEO (SEO Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

Yoast SEO is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins that guides you through creating better content and improving your ranking on search results. Regardless of the niche, this is a must have WordPress plugin for every website. It focuses on creating SEO friendly content that meets the search engine (Google) guidelines and is useful to the users as well. The goal is to sustain website ranking along with helping the global audiences with meaningful content. As a result, it is one of the best free WordPress plugins to have, especially for beginners.

Elementor (Page Builder Plugin)

15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Business Sites

Elementor is one of the best WordPress page builder plugins with such myriad active users for a reason. This fantastic Page Builder plugin ensures that it will be super easy to create WordPress pages with the ease of just a mouse click. This WordPress plugin can help you create anything from standard posts to sections, ranking tables, charts, and more. Moreover, this plugin is compatible with most of the WordPress Themes, making it a must have WordPress plugin.

Conclusion

After reading about so many different WordPress plugins, you might have a clear understanding that a lot goes into website maintenance, design, and other specifications.

With the help of above mentioned essential WordPress plugins, you’ll ensure a better-performing website.

We hope our comprehensive guide satisfies your concerns, cleared your doubts, and helped you by saving your time and money.

For further assistance with WordPress-related topics, check out our WordPress section.

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