17 Top Most Popular WordPress Blog Plugins

17 Top Most Popular WordPress Blog Plugins

These article contains the list of the 17 Top Most Popular WordPress Blog Plugins which we considered is good and the best for your blog.

Depending on your needs and the end user’s need, you will have to choose wise. But no worries! We’ve got your back covered with our list of wordpress blog plugins best to choose from.

There is nothing harder than choosing the right plugins for the right time. It always depends on how many of them are you going to use for your WordPress blog and how can it affect your site speed.

Optimizing your WordPress website speed  is most important, as it affects your SERP and SEO. The optimizations can be done easily, without much of hard work.

For checking your site speed and knowing what is causing slow resource loading, you may want to use Pingdom, GT Metrix or Google Page Insights.

EDITOR’S CHOICE WORDPRESS PLUGINS BEST TO CHOOSE FROM

Elementor 

For styling our blog posts and homepage we have always used Elementor. It is a really simple page builder, considered as user friendly with more than 5+ million downloads. Through my investigation Elementor & Divi are competitors, due to their pro features and the Divi Agency life time license.

Having Elementor free version is a wise move for a beginner or even expert in building/styling websites, as this plugin comes up with many free addons. You may have seen HappyAddons for Elementor, JetElements for Elementor, which are giving the feeling that you have a pro version of the page builder.

What you can do with Elementor is not only creating beautiful posts, but also create beautiful pricing tables.

The plugin is also compatible with big plugins, such as WooCommerce for creating an awesome B2B website, integrating payment gateways and keeping functionality and creating a good job website.

Elementor also works with Dokan for creating a multivendor website, allowing you to maintain and restock hundreds of small shops, depending on your needs.

Jetpack

We are really big fans of Jetpack as it is a multipurpose plugin, powering our blog and giving us everything we need, with a small impact on site speed. For those who do not know the secret power for Jetpack, allow me to explain.

Optimizing website speed and pictures with lazy load

Many people have been arguing if WordPress loads the task in a synchronical or asynchronical way. Well, if you check your site speed and how your resources load, you will get the idea that is synchronical. This leads to slower loading, but Jetpack has this covered with the Enable Site Accelerator.

This function is enabled in our website, even though we have a caching plugin and image optimizer plugin. It does not destroy any kind of code, mess up the loading time, crash pages or give any kind of error, which needs a fix.

Site Speed Accelerator comes up with 2 options, which are Speed up Image Load Times & Speed up Static file Load Times.

Allowing them will be a good idea, but after allowing, you can wait up to 30 seconds and check your website speed from Pingdom, GT Metrix or any other website, which was mentioned above.

Along with Jetpack’s optimization options, you get Daily Backup, Following blog comments, Enabling site spam protection, Auto update plugins and many other features, which can be found here.

Contact Form 7 

The name of the plugin, simply tells what it is doing. This plugin is a contact form plugin, which lets users ask questions, give suggestions, or any kind of other way to contact you.

The plugin can be a bit tricky to install, but you can follow our guide on how to setup Contact Form 7.

Along with the setup, you also get many possibilities to expand the functionality of this plugin, with the best extentions for Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7 is also compatible with WPML and can be integrated, by following this simple article, on how to setup ContactForm7 with WPML.

If Contact Form 7 isn’t the plugin of your liking, there is no need for panic. There are tons of plugins suited for a blog.

We have created a list of the best 15 contact form plugins.

WP Super Cache and Autoptimize

For keeping a steady and well optimized blog, you really-really need a caching plugin, to combine the CSS/JS/PHP files, minify them, clear you cache and load cached versions of your website, before expiry.

When I firstly started WordPress, I did not understand why is serving a cached static version of your website a must, but now I know and will explain it in a newbie friendly way.

Imagine that you have created a basic HTML/CSS website. This website will load in a blink of an eye, if you use only 1 path for CSS and HTML.

But why is that? 

The website doesn’t contain any changeable content or elements, which have to be re-downloaded again by the browser bots. It is simple. Basically if you learn how to cook eggs, you won’t need to re-read it a second time. Same is with the website.

But as WordPress is a dynamic CMS and you wish for a dynamic blog, then you will need a caching plugin to store the static version of your website, while the browser bots download the newer version to the user’s computer.

From all of the caching plugins, even the highly recommended W3 Total Cache by WPBeginner , I still would re-recommend using WPSuper Cache, as it is much easier and less painful to configure. Yes, it has less options and customizations than the W3, but that is why Autoptimize is being installed.

While WP Super Cache is caching pages for logged in visitors, and keeping those pages for a certain amount of time, Autoptimize is combining the CSS/JS/PHP and optimizing them for faster loading times.

Following our detailed guide on optimizing your website for faster loading times, will lead you to a flawless and non-problematic future, with fast speed and happy users.

Have I mentioned that users do not intend to stay on a website, that takes more than 3 seconds to load?

Well that is a myth, because their internet could be bad, or their phones could be old enough, so they can’t handle the loading time.

Do not listen to what famous bloggers say, as they simply create a new way to bait the user and brainwash him.

Check if your family is waiting 0,054 seconds for their desired website to load, or they can wait up to 10 seconds. You will understand that this is just a ranking factor for Google to put you high.

And again the site speed is not much of factor, since backlinks are everything that Google accepts.

Rank Math

As we were using Yoast SEO before, we managed to migrate all the existing SEO keywords and phrases to RankMath.

The reason for this, is because RankMath is compatible with Elementor and gives you a third column with optimizations, which can be done, while you are writing your post. This way is much easier for working on your posts and keeping your eyes on one page, rather than switching.

When starting with RankMath, you have a newbie friendly setup wizard, which gives you options, from which you need to choose.

You can link your google search console and google analytics without the need of a third party plugin, so you can track your results in a much easier way than before.

RankMath also has a special feature for keywords that Yost does not have. This is the number of keywords that can be included for SEO. For Example Yoast has only 1 keyword, which is called a keyphrase, but RankMath allows up to 4.

For more keywords, you will have to upgrade your plan. (bold)

Also in RankMath you can optimize your Schema Markup for better results, which in Yoast SEO was not included.

Smush

When uploading pictures on your website, even if resized, they are not cropped, and keep their original size. Although WordPress creates 3 sizes for the pictures that you upload, it still does not mean, that they are loading without a hastle.

For such purpose (moreover if you hold a photographer blog), you need a picture optimization plugin. Our top recommended plugin is Smush, as it is lightweight and gets the job done.

If you already had hundreds or thousands of pictures on your website, you will have to bulk optimize your pictures for long time and this process is done manually.

Smush has the limit to only 50 pictures per bulk smush in the free version, but this can be overcome by using Disable Bulk Smush Limit of WP Smushit.

When compressing and optimizing images, you also have the option to strip image data, which is recommended for the photographer blogs.

Lazy Loading is also included in the free version of Smush, but do not enable it if you have another plugin with the same option enabled (for example JetPack or Autoptimize), as this will bring many broken and missing images on your website.

USER’S CHOICE WORDPRESS PLUGINS BEST TO CHOOSE FROM

Comments – wpDiscuz

wpDiscuz is a brand new invention, suited for the world of commenting. It’s true that comments have a touch in SEO and gaining visitors to your website, so that is why this plugin came to us.

The features this plugin gives, are so good, that you would not even want to go for pro version.

Having this plugin on your website, is like owning facebook, but with a different design.

Most of the people were saying, “why do we need a commenting plugin, when WordPress has one?”

Well it’s really easy to answer this. And my answer to this question is “because it turns the world around!”

You get comment layout templates, or you can create your own. Which can bring more life to your website. Gives you a better and faster commenting experience, and includes lazy loading, which will help you with faster loading time on your website.

Some of the things that this plugin also has is, rating shortcode, which you can implement on your sidebar and get a user’s eyes on it.

The users comments are being kept for approval and spam checked, structured from newest to oldest and highlighted if a comment just came to your website, with a label ticket “new”.

Ultimate member – User Profile and Registration

Ultimate member is by far the best user friendly and compatible plugin, for a WordPress blog, which has over a million downloads and many positive ratings.

What this plugin gives you, is not only a simple register/login/logout form, but also the option to lock content for users that are not logged in.

Simply after setting up the plugin, you can show your users, which contents can be seen and what has to be done.

Ultimate Member also gives you the power, to manage your user tab and create a nice social profile, which can have additional information added and a backlink posted on to your profile, which would lead many users, to do and get yourself skyrocketed with registrations.

Keep in mind that this may lead to spam and marking your website as spammy in Google’s eyes.

Ultimate User can be integrated with :

MyCred – Allowing your WooCoomerce shoppers obtaining a virtual currency such as points, money or anything that you would like

Profile Tabs – Allowing to add custom profile tabs to your users

WooCommerce – Allowing to add login and register to your WooCommerce powered store

Followers – Allowing users to follow each other for growing a fan base and social sharing

MailChimp – Allowing users to subscribe to your newsletter and receiving daily, weekly, monthly newsletter

Friends – Allowing users to become friends on your website and communicate

Social Login – Allowing users to use their Google, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts in order to login to your website

OneSignal 

One signal is a push notifications plugin, having more than a 100,000 downloads and happy users, who get their engagement rates increased by over 43%! Sounds Incredible?

Well how do they get increased rates? 

Firstly, you will need to install and setup the plugin, so when a user clicks, he will get an attractive post at a certain time.

Normally a user would not come back to your website, out of the nothing, so this plugin intends, to send a notification, showing interesting for them content, which will increase the visitor return rate.

Many e-commerce websites, use such a plugin, or an abandoned cart plugins

This plugin is most suitable wordpress blog plugin as it gives you the options A/B testing, targeting visitors based on language, numbers and age.

Along with this you can set automatic notifications, which is not much recommended as everybody has different taste, and it is much better, to target users, to certain posts.

With the free version of OneSignal you can target up to 30,000 subscribers.

If you are an owner of a bigger blog, you should consider upgrading your hosting plan

Yoast SEO

Even though we had recommended Yoast to our readers and created a detailed guide on how to setup and how to achieve perfect seo, although we have transferred to RankMath.

Before we jump off to an explanation why Yoast SEO is good, you can see our comparison of Yoast VS RankMath

Yoast is a widely used, user recommended and award winning wordpress blog plugin best for it’s time.

It has over 5+ million downloads and hundreds of updates, which concentrate the user on achieving good SEO, without over optimizing.

By just following the simple steps given by Yoast, you can rank your post or website high, but this shouldn’t be your main purpose.

Even if you get both green lights, it doesn’t mean you will rank high. Nor following the 500 words post would help you so much.

As people say “Content is king” and Google is the one deciding, which post can rank on 1^st and 2^nd page, where you should be aiming.

To achieve good results with your content, Yoast SEO has the ability to determine if you have used your keyword fair enough and is it good to read. Just putting the same keyword, won’t achieve much.

In fact it will result in negative SEO and get you penalized by Google.

In order to rank high, it would be a better idea to concentrate on your content, as how many words have you used, check for the keyword density, to inform you for improvements on the SEO key points (but it does not target the exact word or sentence, that needs to be improved)

For better SEO results, you will need to improve the structure of your website’s H1 and H2 tags, add alt text to your images, build backlinks and share your website across social media.

Akismet Anti-Spam 

Akismet is by far the best anti-spam plugin and most useful amongst wordpress blog plugins best dealing with content spam and linking.

With more than 3+ million downloads, Akismet still leaves a bad taste in the spammer’s mouth, as they are searching for WordPress Blogs without spam controlling plugins, so they can kill your website success with their spammy links.

Although they think that inserting many links to one website at once, or using an automated bot service can help. This is a dream that will never come true.

After 2011 when Google released its update, to prevent spam, many websites had to disavow links or they were getting penalized.

The purpose of Akismet is to look after your WordPress Blog and keep it tidy and clean.

By filtering the spam and non-spam comments, you can have a nice authority blog, increasing good reputation and gaining thousands of backlinks in a blink of an eye.

Everything comes with time, and hurrying with black hat or grey hat techniques, will not give you positive results. In fact you will see the good results for some time, and then before you know, your website will be penalized.

The worst comes up if you get turned down for adsense or any of its alternatives.

Easy Social Sharing 

Easy Social Sharing is a key, because WordPress blog plugins best operation happens, when you have sharing options.

Not only Easy Social Sharing lets users to share your post through facebook, reddit, pinterest, google+ and 18 more social sharing media websites, but it also comes up with some pretty good features like:

You get 6 different designs layout, from which you can choose the one of your liking, or create a custom one.

You get social sharing count numbers, which can attract visitors and Google, showing how much social shares your post has.

Note: The more social shares into reliable groups or shared to reliable people, means the more visitors you will get to your website.

Floating sidebar panel, which sticks along with user scrolling or remains fixed, for more visitor attraction.

Popup Maker 

From all of the must WordPress Blog Plugins Best is Popup Maker along with OptinMonster.

Popup maker is a life and time saver, but if you want extended and more professional functionality, without much effort, the PRO version is the best choice.

Not only it lets you add popups, while user is scrolling his pages and an interesting event, post or deal, but it also has WooCommerce features such as:

• UpSell PopUps for WooCommerce (Currently for Premium Version)
• Greeting PopUps to Visitors (Currently for Premium)
• Cross-Sell PopUps (currently for premium)

As the plugin keeps expanding and we are currently in a bad situation with Covid19. This WordPress Blog Plugins Best feature is CoronaVirus/Covid19 announcements board.

OPTINMONSTER

OptinMonster has been said that is one of WordPress Blog Plugins Best bundle choice, but I personally will tell you the truth about this plugin.

Well, before reviewing the plugin features and purpose as one of the list from my WordPress Blog Plugins Best for the newbies or pro’s thirsty for more opportunities.

Well it is a good plugin. After all it is Popup Maker’s rival in this WordPress Blog Plugins war, but it is missing many key features.

The biggest idea of Optin Monster, which I am and will be against, is that even the free version needs premium version.

It took me 30 minutes to try and integrate Google Analytics with Optin Monster and see that it is just not worth my time.

In fact! As mentioned above RankMath gives the same purpose and feature and also gives the idea for Local SEO, which is definitely something you will be after, due to the reason that not every website is done for worldwide advertising.

There are small shops, which are only for the local area and need Local SEO, which is an easy to do thing. Competing with the world isn’t, but competing with your town’s competitors, can be much better.

Back to the topic, Optin Monster has some good features, which are for free users like:

• Exit Intent Popups and Onsite Retargeting

Over 67.4% of the visitors are currently abandoning a blog, while being excited for the affiliate offer this blog offers. Sounds like a big loss, if you are counting on getting some income, through affiliate products.

That is why a PopUp plugin is a must. Not only to return the visitors, but also to entertain them and grab their attention with a good deal, before your competitor does the job.

Optin Monster offers retargeting popups, depending on user geo-location and interest. This is a critical part, as if you have a blog about animals, and send a cat post, to somebody interested only in dogs, you may lose him to your competitor.

With Optin Monster you also have LightBox popups, Floating Bar popups, Full screen welcome popups, Content Locker popups and many more.

The popups can be triggered from user actions such as a click, intention to exit, time on site, or away from keyboard (also known as AFK).

SeedProd 

As part of our WordPress Blog Plugins Best choice for coming soon is SeedProd.

What is a Coming Soon wordPress blog plugin? Said in a simple way, this plugin allows you to create a coming soon page, which does not kick out users, when they try to visit your website.

From this plugin, you can achieve great results, as keeping you website active and gaining visitors, who will be notified about the upcoming update. Along with a notifications plugin and newsletter, people can stay tuned and be informed for each step that you will be taking.

As part of my strategies, this is by far the best one for an upcoming update or a brand-new website.

But how do I achieve this?

It is simple!

I just join many FaceBook groups, Follow as much as I can people on Instagram/Twitter and create as many pins as I can on Pinterest.

Why would I be helping somebody grow by doing all of this? (bold)

I am not helping anybody to grow. I am just planting the seeds, which will grow into flowers after some time. This is a simple investing with a big ROI (also known as Return Of Investment).

After I have finished my website, I only need to share a bit and contact some people, if they would like to exchange our emails. Sometimes these exchanges are worthless, but the effort can lead you to 1-2 people, which will become readers.

And finally before releasing the website, you can see how many people you have gathered.

This also helps on achieving time for your domain in case you want to get Google Adsense Approval

Beaver Builder 

Beaver builder is a one and only page builder plugin that you cannot miss. It is just like Divi and Elementor. A simple drag&drop plugin, which is highly appreciated by the beaver builders.

This plugin is fully integrated to work with almost all of the new WordPress themes as it keeps expanding and comes up with many pre-built templates, so you can start your designing in a second.

Also one of the best parts of beaver builder is that it does not take much of your site speed and can be integrated with each contact form plugin.

Beaver Builder is fully supporting without a problem multi sites and can be your number one friend in creating a stunning website.

When choosing your WordPress theme, you have only a limited number of changes that you can do, as most of the things are locked (if you are using a free version of the theme).

Beaver builder on the other side has it’s templates with a full customization feature. You can simply customize the layout of the header, footer, sidebar and any other part that you wish to be by your custom standards.

If you are into purchasing the Beaver builder premium, you will be getting premium modules and templates in your hands along with plugins that can be integrated.

Note: You do not need to own the premium plugin to integrate it with. You only need Beaver Builder premium and it is to unlock more features, which are recommended if your website is getting tons of visitors.

Still “tons of visitors” may be defined by 100,1000,10,000 or 1,000,000 per day, month or year.

It depends on your logic and thinking. Whatever somebody else says, do not go for his words, before thinking twice as this may result in a bad future for your website.

MemberPress (h2)

MemberPress is a unique membership plugin on the level of Ultimate Member. They serve almost the same purpose and have slightly different extras. As I had mentioned that UM can be integrated with WooCommerce, MyCred, MailChimp and others.

MemberPress can do the same, except for MyCred and some other plugins, which are still not fully compatible and may result in some bugs.

While MemberPress is good to be in the list of WordPress Blog Plugins Best to choose from, still it is mostly for forum websites, but it does not mean that you should be giving up on it.

Everything depends on your needs and if you do not need all the features that Ultimate Member can give you, then you should definitely go for MP.

Ultimate Member makes websites a bit slower, as it is mostly used for e-commerce and to maintain such a website, you will need to consider upgrading your current WordPress plan with your hosting.

This good for people who are using e-commerce plugins and hold blogs, as those plugins, are currently taking too much time to load the products.

Envira Gallery 

Envira Gallery is a good for photography call, if you wish to achieve a website like Deviantart. This is perfectly suitable for photography blogs, as you can create beautiful galleries.

It is not a plugin that only lets you to create a gallery, but it also lets you to categorize each of them and keep the users interested only in their own niche.

With this plugin you get many gallery templates, which can be customized by your liking. It is not a hard plugin, as it was made for newbies, with their drag & drop system, to ensure that it will be a hassle free work.

Envira Gallery comes with a bundle of addons, which you may find on their official website, lazy loading, which lets you to optimize the gallery to load on scrolling (loading is done smoothly and it does not bother the user).

As one more of its features, Envira has hundreds of pre-built templates, which are free to customize and do not require coding knowledge.

RafflePress 

How can a list of WordPress Blog Plugins Best to choose from, be a list without a giveaways plugin. And amongst all of the plugin, the greatest of all times (also known as G.O.A.T) has been chosen.

RafflePress is not like the ordinary plugins, which give you the opportunity to write some ordinary text, add an image to it and wait for users.

The plugin comes up with the free features of customizing the way your giveaway form would look like. The plugin does not expect you to have experience and coding knowledge.

You just need to have imagination or an idea, which you can build with their drag and drop builder.

The free version of RafflePress is holding you back from using cool features, but if you would like to unleash its power, you should consider upgrading you plan to its fullest.

With the full version, you can setup tasks, create stunning forms, or just use their pre-build for giveaways forms, pick any picture from their stock and use freely with no copyrights.

You can also add call-to-action buttons (also known as CTA) and encourage the users, to share your giveaway, for higher chances on obtaining the reward, which you are expecting to give to them.

RafflePress comes up with advanced tracking and retargeting, which lets you track the results of the user behaviour. This way you can retarget some of the non-interested users, to a giveaway that they would show interest to.

Conclusion

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See you soon!