WordPress is the most popular CMS as well as the best blogging platform. Most of the famous bloggers use and recommend WordPress.

If you’ve chosen WordPress, congratulations! You have taken the right decision.

But having WordPress installed is half of the battle.

You need to take advantage of plugins and tools available for WordPress users to grow and manage your blog efficiently. There are thousands of WordPress plugins and tools out there.

It’s tough to choose the right plugins and tools for your blog when you have thousands of options. To make things easier, I’ve compiled a list of 20+ Essential WordPress Plugins & Tools For Bloggers In [current_date format=Y].

Let’s check the list first.

1. Akismet

If you have been blogging for a few days, you might have already noticed some irrelevant comments with ugly website links. Those are spam comments.

Akismet is the plugin that can help you to get rid of these spam comments. It filters out all the comments of your blog and blocks the spammers. This plugin is owned by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com.

Most of the time it comes up with the WordPress installation. That means you don’t have to install it separately. All you have to do is activate the plugin and enter the API key.

Read: How To Setup Akismet In WordPress For Free

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2. Jetpack

Jetpack is an all-in-one WordPress plugin which is also owned by Automattic.

From stats checking to backups taking, Jetpack offers almost everything you need to build and manage your WordPress blog efficiently. It’s one of the must-have plugins for your WordPress blog.

Let’s see the features of the Jetpack plugin.

• 100+ Free WordPress themes.
• Free CDN called Photon to make your images load faster.
• Lazy Loading Images for faster loading blog.
• Brute force attack protection.
• Monitoring downtime and send notifications via email.
• Stats for measuring site performance.
• Showing Related Posts to keep visitors engaged.
• Daily automated backups to keep your hard work safe.
• Automated spam filtering.
• Automated social media sharing of your blog posts.
• Automated malware scanning and security fixes.
• Accepting PayPal payments and many more.

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3. Ultimate Blocks

As a blogger, it’s your responsibility to make your content better and engaging. Ultimate Blocks is the plugin that can help you to do that. It’s a Gutenberg blocks plugin that has more than 15 custom blocks. And the great part is, all of these blocks are designed for bloggers and marketers.

If you are using the new block editor – Gutenberg, you should consider using this plugin. The plugin includes the following blocks and more in the pipeline.

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4. Rank Math

WordPress is the most SEO friendly blogging platform. But it’s not enough if you want to rank higher in Google and other search engines. You’ll have to install an SEO plugin.

When it comes to WordPress SEO Plugin, Rank Math is one of the best options out there. It is created by the team at MyThemeShop.

This one plugin is enough to make your blog SEO-Friendly. Here’s what it offers.

• Keyword Optimization & Readability Checker.
• Preview your link on search engines.
• Control breadcrumbs.
• Set Canonical URLs.
• Edit Robots.txt and .htaccess file.
• Generate XML Sitemaps.
• Verifying sites on Webmaster tools.
• Social profiles integration and many more.
• Redirecting old URLs to new ones.
• Internal linking suggestions.
• Preview your links on social media sites.
• Multiple focus keywords optimization.

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5. SEMrush

While Rank Math Plugin makes sure that your blog is optimized for SEO, SEMrush can help you with competitors’ analysis, keywords research, backlink checking, position tracking, and other SEO stuff.

It is an all-in-one SEO tool for bloggers and website owners. It offers everything you need to make your SEO efforts easier and better. Here are some essential SEMrush features for bloggers.

• Checking which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
• Keyword research to find the right keywords.
• Track your keywords’ positions on Google.
• Technical SEO Audit.
• Get On-Page SEO Optimization ideas.
• Monitoring brand reputation.
• Social Media tracking and posting.

SEMrush has a free version for very limited usage. To get the full benefits of SEMrush, you have to upgrade to a premium plan. You can try the Pro plan for free for 14 days by using our promo link.

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6. Google Analytics

Google Analytics tracks your visitors and tells you who is visiting your site, which pages are getting most views, traffic sources, the countries from where you are getting the traffic, and many more.

It’s a must-have tool for bloggers. There are some WordPress plugins like Analitify that allow you to check reports and stats from the WordPress dashboard.

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7. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is my favorite SEO tool. I check Google Search Console Data once in a week to see which keywords are driving traffic to my blog and if I could do any optimization to increase CTR. This tool also helps me to get new blog post ideas.

It’s a free tool by Google that tracks your site performance in Google Search Results. It also shows who links to your site, your internal links, and manual actions by Google if there’s any.

You can remove a URL from Google Search Results from here and submit new URL to index. You can also add your sitemap here and test your robots.txt file.

There are so many other things you can do in Google Search Console. It’s a must-have SEO tool for every blogger.

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8. VaultPress

WordPress is a secure platform. Hundreds of developers are working to make it safer. But bad things can happen. That’s why WordPress itself introduced VaultPress.

VaultPress is a WordPress backup and security plugin by Automattic. It protects your site from spammers and hackers. And even on host failure.

It automatically creates backups and stores in an offsite digital vault. If anything terrible happens, a quick restore can be done without contacting the web host. It also detects viruses, malware, and other exploits and fixes those threats automatically.

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9. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is a WordPress caching plugin that speeds up your WordPress blog by caching pages and improves the SEO and user experience of your blog. You can also integrate CDN with W3 Total Cache.

It’s easy to set up. A lot of pro bloggers use this plugin to decrease the load time of their blogs. It’s a must-have plugin for any kind of WordPress site.

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10. GetResponse

Not building an email list is one of the common blogging mistakes. Most of the bloggers are guilty of it. I also took so much time to get started with email marketing.

When it comes to email marketing, the first thing you will need is a service provider. GetResponse is one of the best email marketing service providers for bloggers. It’s very easy to set up and use. It has everything you need to build your list efficiently.

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11. Thrive Leads

While GetResponse helps you to manage your lists, Thrive Leads can help you to build your list. Thrive Leads is considered as one of the best list building WordPress plugins.

It offers every type of opt-in form to build your list faster. And features like a/b testing, advanced targeting, exit intent, triggers, etc make it a complete list building solution.

It supports all the popular email marketing services like GetResponse, Constant Contact, Aweber, MailChimp, etc.

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12. Social Snap

Social Snap is one of the best social media sharing WordPress plugins. It has both a free and premium version. This social plugin adds beautiful and lightning-fast social share buttons to your WordPress blog. It’s straightforward to use.

This plugin makes sure that your blog is fully optimized for social sharing. And it will never let you lose your social counts, even if you move from http:// to https://.

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13. MissingLettr

Most of the time we share our posts on social media once and never bother to share it again. As a result, our old posts get lost in the archive and don’t get new traffic.

The best way to deal with it is, create social campaigns for your blog posts. This way your blog posts will be shared from time to time on social media sites.

MissingLettr is the tool that turns your blog posts into social media campaigns for 12 months. It has both free and premium plans.

The great thing about MissingLettr is, you don’t have to create social content. It will automatically generate social content and branded imagery. All you need to do is, review and approve the campaign.

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14. WPForms

Contact Page is one of the must-have pages for any blog. Your readers, advertisers, or anyone may want to contact you. Having a contact page makes it easier.

There are plenty of Contact Form WordPress plugins out there. With more the 3 million active installations, Contact Form 7 is considered as the best contact form WordPress plugin.

It’s straightforward to use. Just create the contact form and create a contact page, and then enter the shortcode on your contact page.

Read: How To Create A Contact Page For Your WordPress Blog

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15. Elementor

Elementor is the most popular page builder for WordPress. Now you can design your page the way you want it without having any coding skills.

Elementor helps you to build pixel perfect design in WordPress. You can use it to build home page, sales page, landing page, webinar page, etc.

It has some excellent elements like Heading, Button, Divider, Icon, Image Gallery, Tabs, Progress Bar, Countdown, Form, Flip Box, Reviews, and more.

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16. WP Table Builder

Having a table in the blog post makes things easier to find and understand. It can also increase the chance of getting featured on “Featured Snippet” area of Google Search. Tables are also helpful in generating more affiliate sales.

There are several free and premium WordPress table creator plugins available. WP Table Builder is the only table plugin that comes with a drag and drop interface.

You can create beautiful tables by using WP Table Builder without writing any code. Just select the number of rows and columns and then start entering your information. You can use HTML code on the table. The shortcode of the table allows you to display the tables on your posts, pages, and widgets.

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17. WP Coupons & Deals

The best way to generate quick affiliate sales is, publishing coupon codes and deals posts. These are one of the high affiliate sales generating blog posts. They convert like crazy if you can do it properly.

Most of the time bloggers share the coupon code or deal in a generic way. That doesn’t make the user click on the affiliate link before availing the discount. To get rid of this problem, you can use WP Coupons & Deals plugin.

It’s the best WordPress coupon plugin. It offers some fantastic features like hiding coupon code, click to copy the code, different coupon code templates, etc. This plugin is built to increase your affiliate sales.

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18. WP Review Pro

Writing review posts is another best way to get affiliate sales. But it’s not easy to make your review stand out from the crowd as many bloggers are reviewing the same product/service.

To stand out from the crowd, you need to make your review posts attractive and easy to digest. And WP Review Pro is the best choice for that.

This plugin is packed with so many amazing features. Here are some of them.

• 14 Types of Rich Snippets for Google Search.
• 16 Predesigned templates.
• Multiple rating systems (star, Point, Percentage, Circle, Thumbs)
• User Comment Rating System
• Google Places & Facebook Review Integration,
• Popup and Notification Bar
• Custom Widgets and many more.

If you are writing reviews on your blog, this is the must-have WordPress plugin for you.

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19. Thirsty Affiliates

Thirsty Affiliates is a must-have plugin for Affiliate Marketers. It’s an affiliate links management plugin that cloaks ugly affiliate links and makes it easy for you to add affiliate links in blog posts.

This plugin has some fantastic features like auto keywords linking, geo targetted links, affiliate links error checker, import and export affiliate links, Google Analytics events, etc.

It offers both a free and premium version.

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20. Viglink

Viglink is an affiliate aggregator service. It has thousands of affiliate programs under its hood. Once you add Viglinks on your blog, it identifies the commercial keywords and automatically adds affiliate links on those keywords.

It’s one of my favorite affiliate marketing tools. But I don’t use it just for generating sales. I use it for finding new affiliate programs that suit my audience. I also use it when I cannot join an in-house affiliate program.

Recently, my Amazon affiliate account has been suspended due to not generating enough sales in six month. So I started promoting Amazon products via Viglink. Viglink Anywhere is very helpful for that.

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21. ShareASale

ShareASale is one of the best affiliate networks for bloggers. It has affiliate programs for almost every niche. You don’t need to have a popular blog to get approved by ShareASale. But most of the affiliate programs of ShareASale approve their affiliates manually.

Though I prefer in-house affiliate programs mostly, it’s a good idea to join Affiliate Programs via ShareASale for less promoting products/services.

If you are not sure which products to promote on your blog, ShareASale is a good place to get started.

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22. Canva

Having beautiful images is crucial for your blog posts. But it’s not easy to design good images when you don’t have any designing skills. And it’s fine. Not every blogger is a designer.

If you are like me who doesn’t know how to use Photoshop, you can use Canva. Canva is a free graphic design tool that makes image creation insanely easier. It has hundreds of pre-designed templates.

You don’t need to have any designing skills to use this tool. All you have to do is, select a template and drag & drop elements. It’s that much simpler.

Also Read: 10 Best Alternatives To Canva

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23. Trello

Trello is a project management tool that helps you to keep track of everything. If you have multiple projects (blogs), it will help you manage all projects from a single dashboard. I’ve been using it for a while.

It’s very easy to use. Just create boards for your projects and add cards to it. You can add information on the cards. You can even add your team members on the Trello board.

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24. Todoist

Todoist is a task management tool that has apps for almost every platform. You can manage your to-do list from any device. It syncs in real-time. The great thing about Todoist is, it’s very simple and easy to use.

Before using Todoist, I’ve tried several task manager apps. But Todoist is only one tool that I can stick with. If you are looking for a tool to manage your tasks efficiently, use Todoist. You will love it.

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Conclusion

So these are the plugins and tools that I use and recommend to bloggers who are using WordPress.

Now the question is, do you have to use all of these plugins and tools?

The answer is NO. You don’t have to use all of them. It depends on which kind of blog you are running and how you manage your blog.

I hope this list will help you to manage and grow your blog more efficiently.

Now I’d like to hear from you? What’s your favorite WordPress plugins and tools?

Let us know via comment.