WordPress is the best blogging platform used by millions of bloggers and developers for their websites. WordPress supports plugins that make WordPress more than a blogging platform. We can do a lot more tweaks with plugins. Plugins make it easy to use WordPress even if you do not know to code. You can do almost anything with plugins. Plugins are free and paid for both. But most of the tasks can be done by freely available plugins.

In this post, I am going to write some useful WordPress plugins which every blogger should try once. All these plugins are free and will surely enhance your WordPress experience. These plugins will help you to take your blog optimization to the next level.

These are some must-have plugins for every WordPress blogger:

1. WP super cache :

WP Super Cache is one of the best WordPress cache plugins that adds all useful caching and compression features. This plugin makes the website faster by caching all static elements of the website. And we also know that Google ranks fast websites better. So, you must install WP Super Cache and configure it to work properly.

Download WP Super Cache

2. Yoast SEO:

Yoast SEO is one of the best SEO plugins available for WordPress. This plugin is used by most bloggers including me. Yoast SEO provides all the features which include Meta tags, keyword density check, optimization, RSS footer by Yoast, XML sitemap, and much more. It also helps to remove duplicate content issues by adding noindex to the category, tag, and author pages.

This is the only plugin you should use for the SEO and it works fine. You can easily optimize the blog posts and fix most of the SEO-related issues your theme could have. This plugin also offers a sitemap option. So, you do not need to download a separate plugin for the sitemap.

Download Yoast SEO

3. BackWPup

BackWPup is a nice plugin that helps you in backing up your WordPress installation including the important content. You can set it to push the backup to services like Dropbox, S3, FTP, and many more. This plugin also offers database optimization, and an XML import option. Dropbox, S3, FTP, and much more.

Download BackWpup

4. Autoptimize

This is another good WordPress plugin to improve its load time and get better results on Google PageSpeed Insights. Autoptimize does a lot of jobs including minify and cache scripts and styles. It can also combine all CSS and JS into one file, optimize Google Fonts, remove WordPress core emoji cruft, defer scripts to the footer, minify HTML, and more. It can also optimize images and can add lazy-load. So, it helps in reducing the number of requests, can reduce the overall size of the web page, and helps in reducing the load time.

Download Autoptimize

5. WP-DBManager:

It is also an important plugin for WordPress. This plugin helps you to reduce the size of the database without affecting the data stored. Thus it helps in making database queries fast. It optimizes database tables and removes unnecessary comments and trash posts. It also helps to remove post revisions. You can also take the backup of the database of your blog with this plugin.

Download WP-DBManager

6. SEO Friendly Images:

It is also a nice plugin that helps you to optimize images for your blog for search engines. By optimizing your images for SEO, you can boost traffic from image search engines. It automatically adds an ALT tag based on the rule you had defined on the settings page. The good thing is that it doesn’t overrule the ALT or Title content you define. It just adds in images you forgot to add. We use keywords in the post title, so adding the post title in ALT will also add the keyword in image ALT automatically.

Download

7. Jetpack

Jetpack is an important plugin by the same company that works on the development of WordPress. This plugin can add a lot of features to your website but most useful features are paid. Still, the free version of the plugin can add a lot of features you shouldn’t miss. I use this plugin to enable brute force protection, speed up image load times by using WordPress CDN, and add sharing buttons to posts and pages. If you want, you can also enable the automatic share of posts to social networks if you connect your social media accounts.

Download Jetpack

8. Login reCAPTCHA

Login reCAPTCHA is now another important plugin to keep your website safe from brute force attacks. Even if you use a strong password, a brute force attack consumes the resources of your server and can make your website slow. For avoiding this, you can install the Login reCaptcha plugin.

Download Login reCAPTCHA

9. Akismet

Akismet is also one of the plugins developed by the company that manages WordPress. This is one of the default plugins of WordPress that comes with each fresh installation of WordPress. This plugin is an anti-spam plugin that filters spammy comments. This plugin automatically checks all the comments and automatically filters comments that the plugin thinks are spam. If you are using it personally on your blog, you can use it for free but you will have to buy premium plans for commercial sites.

Download Akismet

10. Smush

Smush is the image optimization plugin for WordPress. It is really important to optimize the images of your WordPress blog. High-quality images that are large in size take time to load and make your website slow. So, you need to take care of image optimization. Smush is a free plugin that optimizes and compresses images of your blog. The plugin supports lossless compression and compresses images without affecting image quality. The plugin also adds lazy-load to images to defer offscreen images.

Smush also supports bulk image optimization. You can compress and optimizes up to 50 images with one click.

Download Smush

This is not the end of useful plugins for WordPress. But these are some must-have plugins for WordPress blogs. There are many other plugins available for tweet management, database backup, and user management.

If you would like to suggest more WordPress plugins that must be on the list, do let us know via comment.