Last Updated on December 12, 2020 by Nadim Alamuddin
As a new blogger, you would be experimenting with various plugins, reading up on them to see which would suit your blog better. Since I have started a few months ago, I’ve been in that position and I thought I’d help by giving you a list of what I found as amazing WordPress plugins. I have installed and activated all of the plugins I am writing about.
Before going any further, a WordPress plugin is a little software program add-on to WordPress that gives your blog some extra functionality. It complements your new blog whether in providing opt-in forms, analytics, social share buttons or tables.
If you haven’t created your blog yet, be sure to read “From Zero To Blog In 5 Steps.”
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Without further ado, here are some of my favorite plugins:
#1: Akismet Anti-Spam – A WordPress Default
This free plugin (there’s a discretionary donation that you can give), is absolutely sensational. It actually comes with WordPress, as a default plugin to activate. It works invisibly, yet does so much. As a blogger, we are always looking for our readers to engage with us, mostly through the comments box at the bottom of a post.
What this plugin does, is filter out any spam comments that you receive as a blogger, before it gets even to your WordPress dashboard. So, even if you’re monitoring your comments and have to approve them, you won’t even see the spam comments. If you do want to have an idea of what these look like, you can display them from your Comments dashboard.
#2: OptinMonster – A Paid Plugin that’s Worth It
OptinMonster is another one of my top 10 amazing WordPress plugins that provides you with a multitude of opt-in forms to capture your readers’ email addresses. Whether you want them to subscribe to your newsletter or download a free e-book, OptinMonster provides the best functionality I’ve tried. I must have tried 3-4 plugins for opt-ins before OptinMonster, but once I tried this product, I knew it’s a keeper.
For a more detailed look at OptinMonster, please read this blog post: “Stop Leaving Money On The Table: Here’s How.”
#3: Yoast SEO – The Go-To SEO Plugin
Another powerhouse of a plugin. Yoast SEO demystifies SEO for you. It has its own wizard that guides you through its setup. Once it’s done, Yoast SEO shows you where in your blog posts you need to optimize for SEO. For example, it suggests to you the best posts to internally link your post to. It highlights anything that is missing in your SEO strategy, such as how to write your SEO title, meta description to optimize it for SEO.
The Yoast SEO plugin is available as a free or paid product. With the free version, you can optimize for one keyword only, whereas the paid version lets you optimize for as many keywords as you please.
For more information on this amazing WordPress plugin, please read “Best 7 Strategies To Increase Organic Search Traffic.”
#4: Social Warfare – The Ultimate Social Plugin
As a new blogger, your aim should be to get more traffic to your blog. One way to do so is by sharing your posts to social media. There are lots of plugins that provide this functionality, more known as “Social Sharing”. “Social Warfare” is one of my most recommended WordPress plugins that not only gives you a slew of social sharing buttons, but also is a must for anyone who’s using Pinterest to drive traffic.
Social Warfare is available as a free or paid product.
For more information on this amazing WordPress plugin, please read “Revealed: Top 5 Reasons To Create A Top-Notch Blog.”
#5: Really Simple SSL – Securing Your Site
Simply put, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology to create an encrypted link between your browser and a web server. This ensures that data flowing from your browser to the web server is secure and cannot be tapped into. As of end of 2017, Google started flagging any site that is not secure within its Chrome browser.
To make your site secure (and ultimately turn your URL from an http to an https), you need to acquire an SSL certificate from your host provider. Once this is installed on your site, your website should theoretically be secure.
In practice, however, I found that my website had mixed content – some was secure and some was flagged as not secure. There were a few ways to fix it, but they were all technical, and I just didn’t want to go there.
In comes “Really Simple SSL” plugin, which was a breath of fresh air for me. Consider the job done. It’s a simple plugin to install, activate, setup and forget. Whatever mixed content I had, it fixed in the front end and I never had to check it again. Simply said, this is definitely one of the top 10 amazing plugins for bloggers on WordPress.
#6: Cookie Notice – Privacy Matters
I’m sure by now you’ve noticed that practically every site you visit, there’s a cookie notice at the bottom, notifying you about how your personal information may be used if you keep browsing the site.
This notice is due to a new legislation in Europe that was established in May 2018, called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Even if your website is in the US or outside Europe, if you deal with any business or individual in Europe, this law will apply to your website. So, to be safe, it’s best to install a plugin that allows you to display this Cookie Notice and configure it as you should.
The plugin “Cookie Notice” does just that. In its settings, you can edit whatever message you want the notice to say. You can also choose to display a link to your privacy policy. I am currently using the plugin but I disabled the link to the privacy policy, as it’s already on the footer menu of the blog.
#7: Pretty Links: Free or Premium Plugin
This is one of my favorite plugins. It’s a URL shortener with a twist. If you’re blogging about a product with a link to Amazon for example, the link can be very long and with scrambled characters. Instead of letting your readers see this ugly link, why not have something prettier?
Pretty Links turns your ugly link to a link that starts with your blog URL and then a “slug” of your choice. So, for example, let’s say you’re reviewing the all new Echo Dot on Amazon. With “Pretty Links”, you can shorten this horrible looking link (hover under Echo Dot above) into this link: https://blogandgetpaid.com/echo-dot. Pretty, right?
“Pretty Links” is available in a free or pro version. The pro version adds more functionality, such as replacing keywords throughout your website, doing split testing, etc. Yep, it’s another one of my top 10 amazing WordPress plugins to use.
#8: AutoOptimize – Site Performance Pays
As a blogger, you need to be very vigilant about your reader’s user experience on your website. Slow loading times, broken links, anything that affects website performance should be taken care of.
This is what the AutoOptimize plugin does very well. It also has a nifty button that deletes your cache. Here are a few things AutoOptimize does:
- It optimizes HTML, Java Script, CSS codes
- It optimizes Google Fonts, Images
It’s a light plugin that comes free or pro and should be one of your top 10 plugins.
#9: Smush – Shrink Your Images
Optimizing images before you upload them to your website is one thing, but optimizing them while you upload them is another. Smush does the latter. I use a site called Tinypng.com to optimize the images before uploading them, this way the blog is really operating at its optimum level when loading images.
Smush also can bulk optimize images already uploaded in your media on WordPress. It comes in free and paid versions. While there are a few plugins in this area, Smush still makes it in my top 10 amazing WordPress plugins.
#10: Sucuri Security – Don’t Get Hacked
Last but not least, you need to think about your website security. What are the chances of you getting hacked, what do you stand to lose? Sucuri constantly monitors the files as provided by WordPress.org against your website files on your hosting provider. If it notices any changes in the files, it flags them as a possible hack.
It’s a good monitoring tool and a simple plugin to configure. It runs in the background but will notify you in case of anything you need to action.
Its pro version provides a slew of additional security measures that I haven’t explored. As my blog grows, I will look into those.
Conclusion
There you have it, my list of the Top 10 Amazing WordPress Plugins for your new blog. Of course, there are so many more plugins that may be as good contenders to the ones I have reviewed here. But, at least these I’ve tested and most are currently installed on my blog.
One plugin I did not talk about here is the Classic Editor plugin. If you’re already on WordPress 5.0 and are not comfortable yet using the new block editor, Gutenberg, I would then recommend you install and activate this plugin to edit your posts in the old editor TinyMCE. For a much more in-depth post on this, don’t miss “How To Create Your First Epic Blog Post Using Gutenberg.”
Some recommended reading:
- From Zero To WordPress Dashboard: A Beginner’s Guide
- Best 3 Simple Ways To Monetize Your New Blog
- How To Optimize Images Without Losing Their Quality
Thank you so much for reading this post. I would like to ask you a favor. If you’re using other plugins for your blog that you would recommend or if you’ve had a bad experience with a plugin, this may be useful to other readers. Please leave your comments below.
