10+ Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers in 2024

If you’re starting your blogging journey with WordPress, you’re probably already exploring the best plugins to improve your site’s functionality and performance. With an extensive library of plugins, WordPress offers tools to optimize everything from SEO and loading speed to security and user engagement.

In this post, I’ll walk you through essential WordPress plugins that help new and experienced bloggers enhance their blogs’ performance, manage content, and improve user experience!

What are WordPress plugins?

WordPress plugins are optional software add-ons that extend the features of your website without any coding required. From improving SEO to securing your site against spam, plugins offer diverse functionality to make your blog more engaging and user-friendly.

WordPress allows other programmers to add custom code. The WordPress plugin API provides a wide range of hooks and filters, enabling developers to change or add to the functionality already present in WordPress.

On the Plugins > Add New page in the admin sidebar, you can find and install new plugins.

What kind of WordPress plugins do you need for a blog? 

When running a blog, here are some plugin types you should consider:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plugin: Optimize your content for better search engine visibility.
• Cache Plugin: Speed up loading times for a smoother user experience.
• Contact Form Plugin: Gather feedback and engage readers with easy-to-use forms.
• Security Plugin:Protect your blog from spam, malware, and other online threats.
• Analytics Plugin: Track your blog’s performance and see how your audience engages with your content.

Best 10+ WordPress plugins you cannot overlook in 2024

AAWP

AAWP, or Amazon Affiliate for WordPress, is a plugin that enables you to incorporate Amazon product data into your WordPress website. Utilise affiliate links to earn money by signing up for the Amazon Associate’s program. Links are generated dynamically and then cached, ensuring that you always show current information for your site visitors. This includes things like price, description, images, and so on.

With the help of this best WordPress plugin for Amazon affiliates, you can make straightforward text links to products, product boxes that include images and details, bestseller lists, and comparison charts. The shortcode system or the included widget can also be used to place the items.

Pros:

• Supports multiple Amazon countries through geo-targeting.
• There are many different ways to display affiliate links, including text, various lists, new releases, and others.
• It uses the Amazon API to retrieve the most recent details about the product, keeping your listing current and improving user experience.

Cons:

• No lifetime plan available.

Pricing:

• Personal plan for 1 site at €49.
• Plus plan for 3 sites at €129.
• Pro plan for 10 sites at €249.
• Ultimate plan for 25 sites at €399.

Advanced Ads

With the help of the lightweight plugin Advanced Ads, you can specify precisely which users and which pages will see which ads. The plugin Advanced Ads is a freemium one. The basic, free version already provides many ad targeting options, but you can increase your options with different add-ons for additional placements and special features.

With Advanced Ads, you can automatically embed ads at predetermined positions in your posts and assign them to specific placements. You could, for instance, place an advertisement in every third paragraph. Single ads may also be added to groups to implement ad rotations.

Pros:

• Compared to other ad management plugins, the plugin offers the most ad targeting, placement, and optimization options.
• With Advanced Ads, you can set up pre-selected ads to be shown only to desktop users or vice versa, only to mobile users.
• The plugin offers a dedicated integration of Google AdSense and Google Ad Manager.

Cons:

• No Lifetime plans are available.

Price:

• The plugin’s cost can go up to € 89 / year, while the basic version is free.

Akismet

Because blogs can be a prime target for spammers, you should use a tool like Akismet to secure your website. This plugin looks through all of your comments and removes any that appear to be spam.

Additionally, it screens every submission made through a contact form and stops your website from publishing malicious material. You can block recurring spam messages using its discard feature, which will help you save a tonne of disc space.

Pros:

• Easy to install and use
• It comes with a variety of options for customization.
• Easily customizable pages and URLs.
• Speeds up the site.
• Responsive to all themes.

Cons:

• Potential false positives
• Reliance on Internet connection.
• Compatibility on WordPress.

Pricing:

• For Personal: Free
• For Pro: €9.95 per month, billed yearly
• For Business: €47.95 per month, billed yearly

Antispam Bee

Antispam Bee efficiently and without captchas blocks spam comments and trackbacks. It adheres to European data privacy standards and is cost-free and ad-free. It is totally GDPR-compliant, free, and ad-free.  Antispam Bee provides a defense against spam pingbacks and comments. It works extremely well with WordPress comments and doesn’t require registration. Additionally, it offers monthly statistics and has a local database with information on spam and users’ IP addresses.

Pros:

• Antispam Bee is incredibly simple to set up, doesn’t require registration, and just works.
• Even for websites that are for profit, Antispam Bee is totally free.

Cons:

• Only WordPress native comments are compatible with Antispam Bee. Jetpack comments won’t be available to you.
• With the contact form you use, Antispam Bee might not function.

Price:

It is free of charge, ad-free, and 100% GDPR compliant.

All-In-One WordPress Security Plugin

The All-In-One WordPress Security plugin serves as a comprehensive security solution for your WordPress website. It safeguards your website by applying numerous security and firewall rules to protect against threats. The plugin checks your website for security vulnerabilities and implements corrective measures to secure your site.

In its Pro version, this plugin offers advanced features such as a security scanner, real-time file monitoring, and an automated .htaccess file backup and restore system. It also enables scheduled security scanning and email notifications of discovered security risks.

With the All-In-One WordPress Security Plugin, you can protect your administrative area from forceful attacks, blacklist specific IPs, impose strong password policies, and much more.

Pros:

• Comprehensive security solution – offers a multitude of security measures
• Performs security scans and provides real-time file monitoring in the Pro version
• User-friendly – designed for both novices and experienced users

Cons:

• Misconfigured settings can lock the admin out of the site

Price:

• Free version available with basic security features
• Single site: $ 49.99 per year
• Single site lifetime: $149.99

Asset CleanUp Page Speed Booster

Asset CleanUp scans your page and finds all of the loaded assets. Simply selecting the CSS/JS that does not need to load when editing a page or post will reduce the amount of bloat.

The plugin functions best when used in conjunction with a caching plugin (such as WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache, or W3 Total Cache), a web host that provides plans with server-level caching available (such as WP Engine, Kinsta), or a service like Cloudflare that has page caching enabled.

Pros:

• Faster and lighter WP Suite.
• Increased SEO ranking.
• More visitor retention.
• Fewer HTTP requests.

Cons:

• Limited features

Price:

It is a free tool.

Contact Form 7

Multiple contact forms can be managed by Contact Form 7, and you can easily mark up the forms and an email’s contents. The form includes features like CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and Ajax-powered submission. Since its release in 2009, Contact Form 7 has received over 5 million downloads. It is incredibly simple to use, well-maintained, well-documented, and has the support of the entire WordPress community. This is one of the plugins that I use the most when developing WordPress websites.

Pros:

• Easy to Use
• Easy to style (Front end)
• Easy to style (HTML Email Formats)     

Cons:

• Doesn’t support complex forms
• Doesn’t support eCommerce
• Doesn’t create records automatically without an extension.

Price:

It is a free tool.

Hummingbird Pro

The Hummingbird Pro plugin, developed by WPMU DEV, adjusts various WordPress site features to speed up site loading time. The plugin performs browser caching, file compression, minification of file load position, and content delivery network (CDN) sending of files. Additionally, the tool looks for and fixes files that make your site load slowly.

Pros:

• Improve your search engine rankings.
• Improving your site’s load times through CSS and JavaScript optimization.
• Reducing bounce rate.

Cons:

• The coherent interface can be problematic for inexperienced users.

Pricing:

The price of this plugin starts from $3/month. 

Image Source Control

Would you like to give credit where credit is due to photographers and illustrators by including image credits? By editing the copyright information directly in the Media Library list view, you can quickly complete the task of updating it. When it comes to handling images and illustrations with copyright restrictions, Image Source Control is the best WordPress plugin.

Pros:

• Handle images without file extensions
• Personal email support
• Bulk-edit image copyright information

Cons:

Some users have criticized the free version of this plugin for being somewhat constrained.

Price:

• For Personal: $ 59 per year
• For Business: $ 109 per year
• For Small Agency: $ 229 per year

ManageWP

This freemium tool gives you gain access to a single dashboard where you can manage and oversee all of your WordPress websites. Bulk updates (plugins, themes, translations, and WordPress core) can be carried out with just one click. You can also create cloud backups, remove spam, and validate comments. Thanks to ManageWP‘s dashboard, You can check on all your websites simultaneously. This plugin gathers data from all of your websites. Additionally, a click is all it takes to get a closer look at a specific website.

Pros:

• Provides a single dashboard from which you can easily update all of the website’s core files, themes, and plugins.
• It is reasonably priced and frequently takes care of things for me automatically.
• An intuitive and user-friendly interface

Cons

The reporting system needs to be significantly improved because it is difficult for end users to use and takes a long time to change.

Pricing:

The price range of the plugin starts from Free and goes up to $150/month.

Optimole

You might require a little extra assistance with speed optimization if your blog extensively uses images. The solution is Optimole. By compressing your media files, you can significantly improve the functionality of your website.

Besides bulk compressing your existing JPEG and PNG files, Optimole can also optimize new images. It also enables lazy loading and boosts the speed of your website using the CloudFront content delivery network (CDN).

Pros:

• The WordPress plugin Optimole takes care of all the challenging optimization for you.
• Can serve WebP images (including retina images) quickly without sacrificing quality.
• Automatically serves the best image size, quality, and format based on the browser and device being used by your visitor.
• Since all optimization is performed off-site, your local image library is left completely untouched.

Cons:

• Basic free features are constrained, and advanced features demand a paid plan.
• In some rare situations, there may be image degradation.
• Possibly not compatible with the current optimization plugin

Pricing:

The price of this plugin is $22.52 per month. For business, the price is $46. 12 per month.

Perfmatters

To speed up the loading of your website, Perfmatters is a WordPress plugin that disables all of these scripts and styles. You can choose to turn off these features for your entire platform or just certain categories of posts, depending on your preferences. To put it another way, Perfmatters is a paid extension that enables you to quickly and effectively implement web performance optimizations.

Pros: 

• Reduces HTTP requests, disables plugins, strips out code, and optimizes your database to make your site faster.
• The Plugin is user-friendly and fulfills its promises.

Cons

No lifetime license is available.

Pricing:

For a 1-Year site, the cost is $24.95 per year; for 3 Sites – Business, it will cost you $54.95 per year and $124.95 per year for unlimited sites. 

Rank Math

With the help of the free search engine optimization plugin Rank Math SEO, also known as “The Swiss Army Knife of WordPress SEO,” you can optimize your content for better search engine results.

It has over two million active installations and a 4.9-star rating on WordPress. The current functionality of Rank Math will remain available for free, but a pro version will be released this fall. A visually appealing interface is used by Rank Math, which improves the user experience as well as how it looks and feels contemporary.

Pros:

• Easy-to-use setup wizard.
• The user interface is extremely simple to use.
• Rich Snippet, Schema, Rank Tracker, Google Analytics, and many other features are already included.

Cons:

• Integrating AMP for WP isn’t seamless, and AMP SEO isn’t as comprehensive.
• Because it is so new, there are conflicts with other plugins.

Pricing:

The plugin costs $5.75 / month for bloggers and beginners, while for businesses and agencies, it will cost $19.08 / month and $45.75 / month for big agencies. 

Redirection

For WordPress, Redirection is the most well-liked redirect manager. With it, you can quickly manage 301 redirects, monitor 404 errors, and generally tuck away any loose ends on your website. This can lower errors and raise your website’s ranking.

Redirection can be used on websites with a few redirects up to websites with thousands of redirects. You can create redirect patterns to match any number of URLs thanks to the full support for regular expressions. As well as matching query parameters, you can pass them on to the target URL. The plugin can also be set up to automatically create a redirect to the new URL whenever the permalinks for a post or page are changed.

Pros:

• Supports full permalink structure migrations
• This plugin has over 2 million active installs

Cons:

• Users are not able to manage their roles.
• Delete any data imports from JSON files.

Pricing:

It’s free. There’s no premium version and no need to pay money to get access to features.

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

When you upload images, ShortPixel Image Optimizer will automatically send them to the optimization cloud in the background, where our potent algorithms will optimize and convert them before downloading and replacing them in your Media Library. Your pages will load more quickly, and your Core Web Vitals will increase because the optimized images, which are visually identical to the originals but are only a small fraction of the original byte size, will be served in place of the heavier ones.

Pros:

• Intuitive interface
• Affordable plugin
• Backup copy of the original images
• Suitable for photographers
• No file size limit
• It can be used on multiple websites with a single API key

Cons:

• In WebP and AVIF, an additional credit is used.
• For the optimization process to run in the background, your browser must have a tab open.

Pricing

For 1 domain, the price starts from $8.25 /month while for 5 domains, the price is $33.33 /month and $58.33 /month for 10 domains. 

Social Media Share App (like Social Warfare)

It is a potent WordPress social sharing plugin that enables you to include social share buttons, social media metadata, and a tonne of other cool features on your website. Thanks to its extensive customization, you can choose how the buttons on your site will look. Be aware that it only functions on WordPress sites that are hosted. If you intend to use Social Warfare in place of some of the other free social sharing plugins, it is recommended that you upgrade to the Pro version to unlock all of the best features.

Pros:

• The button design is simple, contemporary, and appealing.
• Built with performance in mind, it loads quickly and won’t make your site slower.
• With over 5,000 possible button style combinations, it is completely customizable. (Pro)
• Awe-inspiring built-in features like “Click to Tweet” and “Frame Buster”.

Cons:

• Sometimes, it takes a long time for support to fix problems.
• If you choose to stop paying the yearly premium fee, premium support and updates stop. All right.

Pricing:

Social Warfare is a freemium plugin that comes with a free version as well as a premium version.

Sucuri Security

The Sucuri WordPress Security plugin is a set of security tools for malware detection, security hardening, and monitoring security integrity. The WordPress repository offers a free installation option for the Sucuri plugin. To keep your website secure, the security plugin has hardening features, malware scanning, core integrity checks, post-hack features, and email alerts. The PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and other core WordPress files and other files included with your original WordPress version can all be checked for integrity using the Sucuri WordPress plugin’s included tools.

Pros:

• High-quality security
• Easy to use 
• Affordable 
• Malware cleanup

Cons:

• Slow response time 
• Not very reliable monitoring tools 
• No customization

Pricing:

• For basic:$199.99/yr
• For Pro Platform: $299.99/yr
• For Business Platform: $499.99/yr

TablePress

With its widespread usage and positive reviews, TablePress is the most favored WordPress plugin for tables. It makes it possible to create visually appealing tables and seamlessly incorporate them into posts, pages, and other parts of your website.

To ensure smooth functionality, it requires WordPress 5.8 or later. With a user-friendly interface similar to other core WordPress UIs, anyone can create a table without prior coding experience. From and into Excel, HTML, CSV, and JSON files, tables can be imported and exported.

Pros:

• Compatible with various file formats
• Highly rated and widely used
• Tables can be embedded into posts, pages, or another site.

Cons:

• TablePress is a costly plugin
• TablePress does not offer any built-in data chart maker capabilities.

Price:

• Free: Basic TablePress features. The solid foundation for all table needs!
• Pro: $ 79/ year- Extra features for your visitors! Perfect for individuals and small sites.
• Max: $ 189/ year- Even better table management! Ideal for professionals and businesses!

WP Rocket

Did you know? If visitors must wait more than a few seconds for your website to load in their browser, you risk losing them as readers. WP Rocket is a caching plugin for WordPress that speeds up page loading to provide users with the best experience.

Although WP Rocket is merely referred to as a caching tool, it offers impressive advantages. As part of its PageSpeed rating system, Google measures how quickly your web pages load. Pages that load more quickly are given higher rankings, which increases traffic and expands the audience. WP Rocket installs quickly and doesn’t require any coding experience. It works with all WordPress themes and plugins.

Pros: 

• It can be accessed under settings where 80% of the most popular methods are already in place.
• A simple setup allows you to test it out.
• Excellent customer service and a tonne of documentation that is user-friendly.

Cons:

• Some settings can only be changed with a helper plugin.
• It is a premium-only plugin for caching.

Price:

The pricing of WP Rocket started from $59 per year to $299 per year. 

Yoast SEO Premium

Numerous people and organizations frequently use the WordPress SEO plugin Yoast to optimize their websites and increase their search engine visibility. Because it offers a thorough checklist for components like metadata, URLs, headers, and more, users have found Yoast to be especially helpful for on-page SEO optimization. The plugin’s red, yellow, and green light icon is a visual indicator of how well-optimized a page is, enabling users to keep track of their optimization efforts.

Pros:

• Seamless integration
• Real-time tips
• Best Plugin to add meta tags
• Training resources

Cons:

• Unhelpful customer support
• Confusing user interface

Price:

Though the free version is available, you can consider $99 USD / year (ex. VAT) if you want additional features.

Final thoughts about the best WordPress plugins

Thank you for reading about the best WordPress plugins for blogs; that’s all.

Blogging can be a satisfying experience when you are passionate about the subject matter. You can even build a business around it. Whether or not you plan to monetize your content, you’ll likely need a few WordPress plugins to maximize its effectiveness.

We advise that you set up each plugin individually and completely before installing the next. Soon enough, more people will visit your blog, join as members, and you’ll make more money!