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INTRODUCTION

Plugins exit out that programming stuff that can help you accomplish different goals with your website.

You need not be a programmer to customize your site according to your business needs

Do you know that there are over more than 42,000 plugins in the official plugin directory

That’s a lot to choose from.

Here are 17 best WordPress Plugins which are mandatory for your Blog

1.W3 Total Cache (Freemium)

W3 Total Cache

The loading speed of your website is super important and crucial in many ways

Amazon did a study recently and found out that every second they delay their website loads, they lose 1% of their revenue

Google also announced that starting in July 2018, mobile site load time will be taken in its ranking algorithm.

So, that means you need your website to load super fast

In order to increase your website speed, I would recommend the W3 Total Cache Plugin

Basically, W3 Total cache helps to clear out your Page Cache, Browser Cache, Database Cache, Object Cache, CDN integration, etc

W3 Total Cache also helps you to serve compressed and cached files to the visitors.

By doing this, it will reduce the load on your server and ultimately your site becomes faster.

Even sites like Mashable, Smashingmagazine, Pearsonified, Matt Cutt’s blog, use W3 Total Cache too.

For me, Personally, W3 Total Cache is by far the best caching plugin that I have ever used and know of.

Related Post: How to Setup W3 Total Cache

Features:

CDN Support
Database & Browser caching
Object caching
Minifying, etc

Benefits of W3 Total Cache

10x total improvement in overall site performance.
Increase in conversion rates.
Improve your SERP rankings
Bandwith saving up to 80 percent

2.WP-Optimize (Freemium)

Sometimes your server database may clog up and slow down your site due to many factors

For example, whenever saved a new page or post, WordPress automatically creates a revision for that post or page.

Let’s say you edit the post 5 times, 5 copies of this post as revision maybe saved up on your database

Or thousands of spam or un-approved comments, White spaces in your website, etc

So, by Optimizing your Database, it can flush out those clogs and helps increase your site speed

That is where WP-Optimize comes in

You just have to simply install the plugin and activate it

best wordpress plugins

You can also set a schedule to automatically clean-up your database by removing all the unnecessary data from your website.

3.Yoast SEO (Freemium)

Yoast SEO is literally one of the most popular WordPress plugins in terms of SEO

It is an awesome plugin which guides you all the way to write a better content both for search engines as well as Users and to improve your ranking on search results by allowing to edit the title tag, meta description, etc

4.Sucuri

Sucuri makes your website secure and for the record, it’s application firewall is one of the best protection you can integrate for your site.

It is also super easy to set up and if there is any problem or need help, Sucuri customer support is at your disposal

Sucuri also monitors your the status of Uptime and Downtime of your site in the Uptime section

By having Sucuri, you will be Less vulnerable to attacks

5.Akismet (Freemium)

Basically, Akismet is a comment spam filtering service and filters out comment and contact form spam for you.

Without Akismet, chances are your blog will soon be overrun with spam comments.

You can check the of approved comments for each user, and also check the user URLs and can also remove them in case there are any suspicious links.

Akismet, however, comes pre-installed, but it is not activated by default.

So, You will have to do some steps to activate it.

6. Elementor Page Builder

Elementor is one of the most advanced frontend drag & drop WordPress page builder with over 1 Million active installs

It gives you the power to easily create your own page layouts using a simple user interface.

7. Contact Form 7 (Freemium)

Contact Form 7 is an easy-to-use plugin to create and add a contact form to your website

They also provide a whole bunch of elements such as text, number, date, drop-down menus, checkboxes, radio buttons, reCAPTCHA, and file uploads.

8. iThemes Security

Security of your site is of paramount importance, and no matter what the circumstances you should never ignore that.

iThemes Security gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site.

Here’s How iThemes Security make your Site Secure:

Ban the IP addresses of known attackers from logging in to your site
Lockout users after too many bad login attempts (similar to Login LockDown)
Scan your site to detect malware and other suspicious code
Monitor your files for any unauthorized changes
Email you in case any unauthorized action takes place on your site and much more.

9. BackupBuddy

Let’s say there has been a hardware failure or an attack on your host’s servers and your website is in some sort of trouble

As a webmaster or a business owner, you cannot afford to lose the data of your business and customer

That is where BaclupBuddy comes in

With BackupBuddy, you can automate backups of your site and store the backup files off-site on BackupBuddy Stash, Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc

10. 404PAGE (Freemium)

Instead of showing a plain 404 error page in your website, how about creating a customized 404 error page for your site

It has currently 70,000+ active installations and is one of the most used plugins to create a customized 404 error page for your WordPress site.

It works almost with every theme.

11. Google XML Sitemaps (Optional)

If you use Yoast, then there is really no need for this

What Google XML Sitemap plugin does is that it helps better index your site in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc with a special XML sitemap.

You just have to basically install and activate the plugin

That’s it, there is no rocket science involved here

12. WP Smush (Freemium)

Without the images your post or website will be dull and not be appealing at all, so you need them.

But on the other, images also take up a lot of storage space and basically slow down your website.

That is where WP Smush comes in

WP Smush is really one of the most popular and best image optimization plugin for WordPress

For me personally, I couldn’t recommend it more, I also use it on Neilhosting too

It will smush every single one of your images and cuts all the unnecessary data without slowing down your site

13. All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets ( Freemium)

One of the benefits schema markups is that it will induce a higher click-through rate

And not only that schema markup web pages tend to outrank others who are not using it, thus resulting Higher search ranking

14. Social Warfare

With Social Warfare plugin, you can easily display various popular social share buttons on your WordPress website

It has got both a free version and a pro version

In the free version, you can position your buttons:

Above/below content (or both)
Manually with a shortcode
Floating share buttons

It supports

Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Pinterest
LinkedIn
StumbleUpon

If you want to get some additional options then you have to pay for the pro one

But personally, I think the free version will do too.

15. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is one of the best WordPress Email Optin Plugin out there in the market.

It offers many stunning templates, and you can also customize the Popup colors, fonts, and sizes.

OptinMonster also offers a live preview too.

You can set the time to display the Popups

OptinMonster also comes with built-in analytics to track which pop-ups are actually converting and getting ROI

16. Monster Insights

Do you want to go to your Google analytics account everytime to your Metrics?

With Monster Insights, all your data is at a glance, right on the dashboard of your website

It will show all the insightful metrics such as your website traffic, bounce rate, and all those good stuff.

Making analytics easy is the whole concept with MonsterInsights.

In order to get more data, you need to upgrade to the Pro Version

17. Lazy Load

Lazy load images Plugin helps to improve your page load times.

It displays images and/or iframes on a page only when they are visible to the user.

It Uses jQuery.sonar to only load an image when it’s visible in the viewport.

CONCLUSION

There you go 16 best WordPress plugins which are crucial for your website

You need basically most of the WordPress Plugins mentioned above to run your site smoothly

These plugins will help you improve your site SEO, optimize your site speed, harden the security and get emails, social share and much more.

We hope this article helped you find the best and mandatory WordPress plugins for your website.