Best WordPress plugins can help you make your blog faster, safer, make more money, increase your traffic, or save a lot of time in blogger everyday life.
But among the thousands of free and paid WordPress plugins that are now available, there are many that you do not need and that are more damaging to your blog than useful.
Below we have compiled a list of what we think are the best WordPress plugins. We have explicitly made sure to select only those that you absolutely should know.
Most of the plugins listed do not process personally identifiable information. If they do, the description says what to pay attention to.
Too many plugins can slow down your website or make it more vulnerable to hackers. Even popular and well rated plugins that you do not expect. We advise you to only install and activate the plugins that are really needed.
Best WordPress Plugins
1. SEO
There are some best WordPress plugins that you can use to make Google your website even more. Here are some of the best ones.
1.1. Yoast SEO
Developer: Team Yoast
Price: Free
To WordPress important SEO functions, such as. For example, adding Meta Title and Description or XML Sitemaps, every WordPress installation needs an SEO plugin.
Yoast SEO offers just that and some useful additional features. Keyword and readability analysis is also great for beginners who are new to keyword optimization. Best WordPress plugins
Alternatives: If you can do without the keyword analysis, you can alternatively install the All-In-One SEO Pack or the German wpSEO plugin , which, unlike Yoast, are more minimalist and work a bit more reliably.
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1.2 Table of Contents Plus
Developer: Michael Tran
Price: Free
Table of Contents Plus is also one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs. It allows an automated or shortcode to display a table of contents in posts or on pages (similar to Wikipedia).
Tables make it easier for your readers to quickly jump to the content that they really care about. In addition, the jump labels are sometimes displayed in the meta description in Google search results, resulting in more clicks on your blog articles.
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1.3 Broken Link Checker
Price: Free
Links that go nowhere are not great for visitors or Google. That’s why every few weeks we run the Broken Link Checker on our blogs to make sure all outgoing and internal links point to the web pages they should point to. Best WordPress plugins
Since the Broken Link Checker can load your server resources while it’s running, we recommend that you only use it from time to time and leave it disabled otherwise.
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1.4 Redirection
Developer: John Godley
Price: Free
Redirection is a great plugin to quickly and easily create redirects in WordPress. This is very handy if you do not trust yourself to edit the .htaccess on your server or you do not have access to it.
Redirection also logs 404 errors, helping to find old or broken internal links (and create redirects for them directly).
For privacy reasons, it is recommended to turn off IP logging in the options (IP addresses are stored by default in the 404 and forwarding logs).
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2. Privacy & Security
The issue of data protection has become even more important. Here are some great plugins that can help make your WordPress site safer and more privacy-friendly.
2.1 BackWPup
Developer: Inpsyde GmbH
Price: Free
Above all, if you can not set up backup routines through your hosting provider, we advise you to use a backup plugin. Nothing is worse than a broken WordPress installation or a total system failure without having a backup of your database and files.
To protect you even better, we recommend you do not save backups on the server where your WordPress installation is located, but to send to a remote location, such. For example, another FTP server or in the cloud (eg Dropbox).
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2.2 Antispam Bee
Developer: plugin collective
Price: Free
Anti-Spam Bee is one of the best plugins for combating comment spam. We have been using it on many of my WordPress websites for years and we can recommend it unconditionally. It drastically reduces comment spam and can also delete it automatically. In contrast to the widely used plugin Akismet and many other antispam plugins.
If you take it very seriously with the privacy, you could also disable the following two settings. However, this is not absolutely necessary according to Simon from the plugin.
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3. Performance
Speed! Even more speed! For your WordPress website. With these 6 great performance plugins.
3.1 Clearfy
Developer: Webcraftic
Price: Free
Clearfy is a useful plugin for anyone who wants to free WordPress of all unnecessary baggage . It allows the deactivation of various features, such. Google Fonts, Maps, Embeds, Emoji Script, Gravatars or the comment function.
In addition, it provides some features to ease administration, clean up the dashboard and make WordPress more secure.
Attention: We recommend using Clearfy only if you know what you are doing. Because by deactivating some functions. For example, your design may be destroyed or plugins may not work.
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3.2 Autoptimize
Developer: Frank Goossens (futtta)
Price: Free
If you want to improve the loading time of your blog, you can not avoid Autoptimize . We use it on almost all my blogs.
The useful best WordPress plugins summarizes and compresses CSS and Javascript files, which not only reduces the number of files loaded on your website (server requests), but also the overall size. Autoptimize alone can reduce the load time by half for some WordPress blogs.
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3.3 EWWW Image Optimizer
Developer: Shane Bishop
Price: Free
Nobody likes a blog that loads slowly. A common reason for long loading times on WordPress blogs are uncompressed pictures.
The EWWW Image Optimizer helps with this, with the help of which each uploaded image is automatically optimized without any loss of quality. The optimization takes place on your own server, which means that there is nothing to be observed under data protection law.
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3.4 Cache Enabler
Developer: KeyCDN
Price: Free
Page caching is one of the most important measures to optimize your blog’s loading time.
My favorite plugin to do that is Cache Enabler . The plugin works reliably, delivers top loading times and is very easy to set up.
Alternatives: Alternatively, the WP Super Cache developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, offers the paid WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache . The latter is due to the many settings for beginners rather unsuitable.
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3.5 Regenerate thumbnails
Developer: Alex Mills
Price: Free
If you make changes to your theme or install a new theme, WordPress generated image sizes may no longer fit, which may either stretch them or be larger than they should be.
A remedy is the useful plugin Regenerate Thumbnails, which recreates all image sizes generated by WordPress in addition to the original.
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3.6 WP sweep
Developer: Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
Price: Free
Over time, a lot of garbage accumulates in the WordPress database, which eventually swells it to an ugly size.
With WP sweep you can use this garbage, such as. For example, revisions, spam comments, deleted posts, or transient options, just delete them from the database.
Attention: Please make sure to backup your database before use!
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4. Useful tools
Other useful plugins that save me a lot of work and that we do not want to miss.
4.1 Better Search Replace
Developer: Delicious Brains
Price: Free
With Better Search Replace, you can search your WordPress database for specific words or strings and replace all instances as needed. That has already saved me days or even weeks of work.
For example, if you change your domain, switch from HTTP to HTTPS, make changes to a single permalink or your entire permalink structure, or rename shortcodes and CSS classes.
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4.2 WP Add Custom CSS
Developer: Daniele De Santis
Price: Free
WP Add Custom CSS allows you to easily and quickly add your own CSS instructions to your blog to customize the design of your theme.
What we like: You can not only add CSS for the entire website, but also each post individually.
Alternative: If you only want to insert CSS globally and not individually for each post, you can safely do without the plugin and integrate your CSS via the customizer
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5. Affiliate Marketing
Best WordPress plugins that can help you to integrate your affiliate links easier and more beautiful.
5.1 AAWP (Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin)
With the Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin, short AAWP , you can include Amazon products including picture, price and ratings via shortcode in your blog articles. This significantly increases the conversion rate over standard Amazon or simple text links.
Products can be inserted in the form of product boxes as well as leaderboards or comparison tables. Prices and other product data will be updated automatically.
For privacy reasons, it is recommended to disable geotargeting in the settings and to activate the privacy proxy for Amazon images, which will load product images via the own server instead of via Amazon server.
Alternative: ASA 2 Pro, which works similar to AAWP, but with even more customization and customization options, as well as a repository that lets you see which products are still available and which are not.
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5.2 Pretty Links
Developer: Blair Williams
Price: Free
Affiliate links often do not look so pretty and are hard to remember. Help is provided by Pretty Link, which allows you to set up a redirect from your own URL to the affiliate link.
We really like Pretty Link because it makes it much easier to paste affiliate links into your own blog. You can simply insert the created affiliate links via a button in the editor and track the number of times links have been clicked thanks to the tracking function.
Note: By default, the IP addresses of all users who click on a link created with Pretty Link will be saved. However, this can be prevented by setting the tracking style to Simple Click Count Tracking in the options under Reporting.
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6. Social Plugins
Thousands of great sharing tools (not quite a thousand, but only three, but still!). Of course, data protection compliant.
6.1 Shariff Wrapper
Developer: Jan-Peter Lambeck & 3UU
Price: Free
There are many best WordPress plugins with which you can integrate social media buttons on your own blog. The plugin of my choice is the Shariff Wrapper.
The buttons have a nice design and load the loading time hardly, because not the original Teil buttons of Facebook, Twitter and Co. are displayed. In addition, the Shariff buttons are compliant with data protection due to their 2-click solution.
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6.2 Better Click to Tweet
Developer: Ben Meredith
Price: Free
Better Click to Tweet is a simple plugin that makes it easier for readers to broaden their content.
It can be a shortcode insert a quote, the reader with a single click then post via Twitter. And without a connection to Twitter being set up in the background (Twitter will not open until readers click on the link).
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6.3 Arqam
With Arqam Social Counter you can integrate links to social networks including follower numbers in the sidebar or via shortcode into your own website. You can choose between different display styles and customize the links in color.
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7. Other plugins
Here are some useful best WordPress plugins that do not fit into the other categories.
7.1 Statify
Developer: plugin collective
Price: Free
You just want to watch from time to time how many page views your website gets and where visitors come from?
Then Statify is right for you. It simply shows you the pageviews and referrers (the websites that brought readers to your site) in the WordPress dashboard.
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7.2 Boxzilla
Developer: ibericode
Price: Free
With Boxzilla you can easily and quickly create pop-ups. Use the editor to determine the design, enter text and then set the trigger. Finished!
Unlike many other pop-up plugins, Boxzilla is lightweight, does not load external resources, and barely affects loading time.
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