10 Top WordPress Plugins for Blogs In 2021

WordPress is a fantastic platform for creating your own blog, portfolio, or e-commerce website. It’s full of tools to help you build a professional-looking website and monitor its performance. You can still fix this by installing a WordPress plugin to add new features. This article brings you some useful and top WordPress Plugins you must definitely use.

Importance of WordPress Plugins

Plugins are the building blocks of your WordPress site. They introduce essential functionality to your website, whether you need to add a contact form, improve search engine optimization, increase website speed, create an online store, or offer email permissions.

There are thousands of free and premium WordPress plugins to download and add. Some WordPress plugins are free while others are premium products.

How to Find The Essential WordPress Plugins

The WordPress.org directory search feature can help you narrow your search. However, you’ll have to scroll down frequently, and many of the results aren’t important at all.

The best way to search for plug-ins is to use google search or search the WPBeginner plug-in category.

While browsing plugins in the WordPress.org directory, you will see plugin statistics under each list. It shows the total number of active plug-in installations.

Higher installs mean that it has been tested and used by more websites. You will also see the average star for the rankings that were last updated and tested for information.

How to Upload Plugins

You can find free plugins in your own WordPress plugins directory, which you can access from your dashboard. Paid plug-ins can be uploaded using the Add New option from the plug-in menu.

You can only install third-party plugins if you host your site with the WordPress.org software. If your site is hosted on WordPress.com, you will not have the plugins menu.

Top WordPress Plugins for Blogs

1. MonsterInsights

In order to develop your website, it is important that you understand exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights is the best and most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. This plugin is used by more than 1.9 million websites.

MonsterInsights makes it very easy to connect your website to Google Analytics and offers extensive tracking functionality.

Although Google Analytics is designed to track nearly all user interactions on your website.  For example, submitting forms, e-commerce transactions, tracking downloads, etc., the default Google Analytics settings do not allow you to use the full potential of Google Analytics.

2. Smart Podcast Player

Smart Podcast Player makes it easy for more than 3.5 million users to design and integrate your podcast into their WordPress site. It is mobile-friendly, functional, and aesthetically pleasing, and which allows users to listen to episodes at different speeds.

The plugin also includes a dedicated prompt button that you can use to increase your email subscribers.

3. Symple Shortcodes

Symple Shortcode allows you to add elements to your website without learning to code. This plugin offers maximum expansion. For example, you can add Google maps anywhere on your website.

You can also place columns, testimonials, dividers, social icons, accordions, accents, and buttons wherever you want. This plugin is clean and perfect for beginners. You can use it to reload your posts, web pages, and other areas of your website.

4. Broken Link Checker

As your website ages, you will always come across broken links. Broken links are internal or external links that are no longer directing to any websites.

When you use broken link checker plugin, you can capture them automatically by scanning all your internal or external links. You can then easily update the broken links to give your visitors a great experience.

5.  ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel is a lightweight image optimization plug-in for your WordPress website. It allows you to improve the performance of your website by reducing the size of the images by up to 85% without sacrificing image quality.

This plugin is easy to set up and can compress all of your previous images and PDF documents with one click. Your images are automatically optimized in the background when you upload them. ShortPixel lets you optimize 100 images per month for free.

6. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet Anti-Spam is the must-have WordPress plugin that protects you from spam comments. And it’s used by millions of websites to filter and block an average of 75 million spam comments per hour.

How does Akismet work?

Every time a visitor posts a comment, Akismet compares it to its database compiled by all participating websites. If it is spam, it will be deleted automatically.

When the spam arrives and the user marks it as spam, it will be added to the database so that Akismet can filter similar spam in the future. The best part of Akismet is that it is free.

7. WordLift

WordLift is a plugin that will help you talk Googles local language by changing your content material into a layout. It does this automatically by using Natural Language Processing and AI.

WordLift provides schema.org markup and additionally allows you to put up information graphs effortlessly.

WordLift’s functions include:

• Automatic Schema Markup
• Content advice widgets
• Automatic summarization
• Image search engine optimization
• Custom Knowledge Graphs

8. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium caching and execution plugin that performs various optimizations to speed up your WordPress site.

Apart from page caching, WP Rocket can also help you to:

• Flatten your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
• Combine your CSS and JavaScript files
• Add a load delay for images and videos
• Optimize your database

9. Smash Balloon  

Smash Balloon is a social networking plugin for WordPress that allows you to display social media content on your website the way you want. With Smash Balloon, you can easily set up a social feed in just 30 seconds.

All you have to do is authorize the plugin, add a shortcode anywhere on your website, and view social media content immediately.

Smash Balloon offers 4 different plugins

• Custom Facebook feeds
• Instagram feeds
• Twitter feeds
• YouTube feeds

10. Login Lockdown

Apart from using a strong username and password combination, one of the best ways to keep your login page safe from harsh attacks is to limit the number of attempts a user can make.

Usually, if you enter wrong information when entering your online banking, you will be blocked after three incorrect attempts.

Login Lockdown allows you to add the same functionality to your WordPress site – and even control the exact criteria for how many attempts users make and for how long they are blocked.

End Notes

Good plugins can help you quickly grow your online business success. However, the WordPress plugins directory is full of over 55,000 plugins. This guide has listed down the top WordPress plugins for your website. So that you can achieve leads easily.