I can’t believe it has been 8 years since I switched to self-hosted WordPress! One of the best (and most complicated/overwhelming, tbh) things about it is how customizable it is. That’s where plugins come in! Several years ago, I wrote a post where I shared all the different plugins that I use. It’s actually the post I’ve edited the most, as I’ve been periodically updating it over the years. But I figured it was probably time for me to share an updated version of what are (in my opinion) the best plugins for a blog in WordPress.
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Advanced Recent Posts
“Plugin that shows the recent posts with thumbnails in the widget and in other parts of the your blog or theme with shortcodes” (ARP). When you scroll to the bottom of this post and see suggested posts after the text of the post, that’s this plugin working.
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Akismet Anti-Spam
“Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from spam. Your site is fully configured and being protected, even while you sleep” (AAS). This is a great plugin! It has massively helped with spam comments.
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Blogger 301 Redirect
“Redirect from blogger to wordpress. Helps you keep your blog traffic and Pagerank after migration from Blogger to WordPress” (B301R). You may or may not remember that when I started blogging, I was on Blogger! I moved to WordPress in 2015, and wanted to make sure that when people clicked links to posts I wrote when on Blogger, they didn’t go to Blogger. That’s where this plugin comes into play.
Basically, when I bought my domain but was still on Blogger, my blog posts were automatically directed to katethealmostgreat.com/new-post-here . If I don’t have this plugin, clicking on that same post would send you to katethealmostgreat.blogger.com/new-post-here. So posts I wrote on Blogger that still bring me a lot of traffic keep bringing me traffic instead of sending people to a site that no longer exists.
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Broken Link Checker
“Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found” (BLC).
Here are a few reasons why getting this plugin was a great move:
One – Broken links tell search engines that your site isn’t reputable and/or isn’t updated recently, which makes it rank your site lower.
Two – Fixing broken links is an easy way to update older blog posts, which tells refreshes your page to search engines.
Three – A broken link is a missed opportunity to build or maintain your reputation, or to make money through affiliate links.
Four – When including facts, it’s very important to me that I cite them. So if a website moves a page, which breaks a link on my blog, I want to update it ASAP.
Five – I have so many blog posts, and it’s a real headache to review them to check for broken links. This plugin checks for me.
Six – If I cite the same site in multiple places and it breaks, this plugin makes it so I can update all of the links with one move.
I will say that this plugin is not great at figuring out in affiliate links are broken or not, but I can easily indicate a link as “not broken,” which removes the alert.
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Categories Images
“Categories Images Plugin allow you to add an image to category or any custom term” (CI).
This is a plugin that helps my blog look the way it does. The plugin specifically enables me to have my categories on my home page look like this:
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Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR / CCPA
“Cookie Notice allows you to elegantly inform users that your site uses cookies and to comply with the EU cookie law GDPR regulations” (CN).
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Custom Login URL
“Plugin allows to change: login, registration, lost password URLs to some custom URLs without modifying any files, simple and swift” (CLU).
This plugin helps me keep my site secure.
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Elementor
“The Elementor Website Builder has it all: drag and drop page builder, pixel perfect design, mobile responsive editing, and more. Get started now!”
Elementor in general is “the WordPress website builder that more than five million WordPress sites use to create content and designs with a visual, drag-and-drop editor” (x). I use the free version, although I’ve been able to get templates by buying courses that included free downloads.
Personally, I find Elementor overwhelming, which is one of the reasons I don’t use it a ton. That being said, these are some of the pages I’ve built using Elementor:
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Genesis Grid
“Use a Grid Loop for sections of your site” (GG).
My website theme is based on Genesis. As WP Engine says, “The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. Whether you’re a novice or advanced developer, Genesis provides the secure and search-engine-optimized foundation that takes WordPress to places you never thought it could go” (x).
Again, this is a plugin that helps my website look the way that it does.
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Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
“The best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. See how visitors find and use your website, so you can keep them coming back” (GAFWP). Essentially, this helps you to use Google Analytics through self-hosted WordPress.
Icegram Engage – Popups, Optins, CTAs & lot more
“All in one solution to inspire, convert and engage your audiences. Action bars, Popup windows, Messengers, Toast notifications and more. Awesome themes and powerful rules” (IE).
This is the plugin I use for my pop-up subscribe bar(s). I was using a different plugin for this, but one day it decided to mess up my website (it was down for a day or so while I figured it out) so I had to switch.
Jetpack
“Bring the power of the WordPress.com cloud to your self-hosted WordPress. Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users” (JP).
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jQuery Pin It Button for Images
“Highlights images on hover and adds a “Pin It” button over them for easy pinning” (jQPITFI). Pinterest is vital for every blogger, so you want to make it easy for your readers to pin from your posts. That’s where this plugin comes in!
Ko-fi Button
“A Ko-fi donate button for your website!” Last year, I moved my ebooks over to Ko-Fi. This plugin puts the Ko-Fi “Buy me a coffee” button on my sidebar.
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LuckyWP Table of Contents
“Creates a table of contents for your posts/pages. Works automatically or manually (via shortcode, Gutenberg block or widget)” (LTC).
I l-o-v-e this plugin, and I use it in most posts. (I do, after all, tend to write long posts.) It does a couple of things.
It helps to reduce my bounce rate. I mean, it decreased by 29%! That’s so much! I tried this because know that when I visit a long blog post I sometimes want to skip stuff that I don’t really care about. And I figured that’s probably true for some people visiting my blog.
The table of contents increases page views and decreases bounce rate while also enabling people to skip all the parts of a blog post they don’t want to read. I can’t tell you how frequently I’ve skipped whole parts of long posts just to read the one paragraph or one-quarter that I’m actually interested in!
I decided to go with a table of contents plugin, which is what you see towards the beginning of this post. When you click on the link to go to a particular spot of the blog post, you are basically going to another page, which is why my page views increased and my bounce rate decreased. The plugin I use is called LuckyWP Table of Contents.
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Official MailerLite Sign Up Forms
“The Official MailerLite Sign Up Form plugin makes it easy to grow your newsletter subscriber list from your WordPress blog or website. The plugin automatically integrates your WordPress form with your MailerLite email marketing account […] Once you activate the plugin, you’ll be able to select and add any of the pre-built webforms from your MailerLite account or create a new form from scratch. You can place the form in the sidebar using a widget or use a shortcode to put it wherever you want.”
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Reduce Bounce Rate
“Get the real Bounce Rate and pageviews into Google Analytics” (RBR). Bounce rate is the percentage of people who go directly to your blog and then leave without going onto any other pages. I do a lot of things to help reduce this, and one of those things is this plugin. It’s really helpful!
Here are what my settings are:
Give this plugin a break! – Set to “no”.
Disable for Administrators only – Set to “yes”.
Tracking Code (Universal Analytics tracking code (analytics.js), Asynchronous Syntax (ga.js) or Google Analytics by MonsterInsights tracking code) – I have “if you are using the Google Analytics by MonsterInsights plugin AND Universal Tracking is enabled, choose this option” selected.
Code placement – Mine is in the footer.
Scroll on page – Set to “no”.
Scroll percentage of page – Set to “yes”
Intervals to send scrolling events to Google Analytics – I have 25 selected.
Fire an event – Set to “Every 5 seconds,” although you can also mark “I don’t want to use time events”.
Maximum Tracking Time – I actually marked the checkbox “I don’t want to set a maximum tracking time”.
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Revive Old Posts
“WordPress plugin that helps you to keeps your old posts alive by sharing them and driving more traffic to them from twitter/facebook or linkedin. It also helps you to promote your content. You can set time and no of posts to share to drive more traffic” (ROP). I especially love this plugin! I’ve published well over 1,000 posts and it can be hard to keep sharing them to keep them alive. This plugin helps with that.
This plugin promotes random posts. You can customize which social media networks to link to; what to write in those posts, such as {throwback post}, which I use to indicate that it’s not a new post; and when it should consider a post old enough to share.
Here’s an example of what those posts look like:
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SHE Media Infuse
“SHE Media Infuse simplifies running SHE Media advertising and related technologies on your site” (SMI). SHE Media is the company formerly known as BlogHer, and this plugin is used to display my ads with them.
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Simple Author Box
“Adds a responsive author box with social icons on any post.”
This is a plugin I use to show readers information about me at the end of the post, so therefore they don’t have to go back up top to learn more about me. If I ever decide to take on a regular contributor – hard “no” from me about this at the moment, FYI – this will also help them show themselves off.
Simple Social Icons
“A simple CSS and SVG driven social icons widget” (SSI). This is the plugin I use to display my social links in the sidebar to the right under my picture.
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Smart Custom 404 error page
“Custom 404 the easy way! Set any page as custom 404 error page. No coding needed. Works with (almost) every Theme” (404). The way this plugin works is that I made a page that I want to be my 404 page – aka the page you get when you type a url wrong or try to go to a deleted post and get a 404 error, aka what you’re looking for isn’t found – and I use this plugin to select that page as my 404 page.
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Smash Balloon Instagram Feed
“Display beautifully clean, customizable, and responsive Instagram feeds.”
This is the plugin that shows my Instagram feed in my sidebar and in my footer:
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“Easy to use and 100% FREE social media plugin which adds social media icons to your website with tons of customization features!” (SMSI)
This is another plugin that I had to add after a previous plugin (which did the work of at least 3 plugins in this post) stopped working on my blog. It’s the plugin that makes it easier to share!
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WordPress Popular Posts
“A highly customizable widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog” (WPPP). This is great because, the more you blog, the harder it is to manually display your popular posts. I have this plugin installed in my sidebar to the right.
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WP Slick Slider and Image Carousel
“Easy to add and display wp slick image slider and carousel. Also added Gutenberg block support.” This is another plugin that helps my blog look how it does.
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WP Super Cache
“Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.” (WPTC). I switched cache plugins to improve the speed on my site, and I’ve been impressed.
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WProofreader
“The WProofreader plugin automatically checks spelling and grammar in multiple languages on websites, built with WordPress 4.x, and the new WordPress 5.x. The plugin works in two comfortable modes: instant, underlining mistakes while you type, and dialog, proofreading all the text at once in a separate pop-up window.”
While I use Grammarly in general – including when I write my posts in Google Docs and then copy them over to WordPress – this is an extra way to reduce or prevent typos.
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Yoast SEO
“The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more” (YS). SEO, or search engine optimization, is necessary for any website. Basically, it’s setting up your site to show up in results of search engines. Yoast massively helps with that. It helps evaluate your pages and posts for their SEO success based on the focus keyword you choose, and it provides tips on how to better your post based on that keyword.
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Like this post? Share it! Then check out:
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Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
hey late this is really great list. As i am looking for some tools for improvement . And i get to know so many new tools that i was missing out like this. SHE Media Infuse. I definitely give it a try
Ooo this is a fab resource, very helpful! I use a few of these. Elementor is one I downloaded once and tried to use but just couldn’t figure out what the heck to do 😂 Maybe it didn’t work well with my paid-for theme, or maybe I was just utterly lost as to what I was looking at! It sounds like Genesis Grid is a bit similar, is that right? I might re-try Elementor and check out GG too. There’s a lot more customisation allowed with paid-for themes like what I have but I still can’t get it how I’d really like it. I had no idea about the Revive Old Posts plugin, that’s such a good idea!
Caz xx