20 Most Popular Plugins on WordPress Blogs

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One of the best things about the WordPress platform is the extensive list of WordPress plugins available to extend and add new functionality to your site. You can add almost any kind of new function you may think of, and this can be done without any coding knowledge at all! Let’s take a look at the 20 most popular plugins on WordPress blogs across the web, including those that provide additional features, to those that simply alleviate the simple tasks of running a blog.

Let’s take a look at the 20 most commonly used plugins on WordPress blogs across the web, including plugins that provide additional features and also ones that simply alleviate the simple tasks of running a blog. You will find useful WordPress plugins in this list, for simplifying the SEO process, adding security to your blog, helping you with creating the sitemaps, adding contact forms, integrating your site with social media, increase usability, and more.

Want more WordPress plugin recommendations? Check out these best WordPress plugins for freelancers and designers.

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack Plugins on WordPress Blogs

The All in One is a super handy plugin that instantly transforms your WordPress blog into a search engine friendly site. It offers support for XML Sitemaps, Google AMP support (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Google Analytics, SEO on Custom Post Types, advanced canonical URLs, redirection and more. It is probably one of most popular SEO WordPress plug-in used across the web, along with Yoast SEO plug-in.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps Plugins on WordPress Blogs

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin creates an auto-updating sitemap for the spiders to feast on, ensuring your latest contest is indexed by the search engines. Its purpose it to make it easier for the crawlers to see the structure of your site and retrieve it in an efficient manner so your site gets indexed faster. While WordPress pings your posts anyway without a sitemap, it is always a good idea to use a sitemap WP plug-in to make sure Google indexes all of your previous and new articles quickly.

Akismet

Akismet Plugins on WordPress Blogs

Akismet is the daddy of spam capturing, keeping thousands of blogs clean from unscrupulous robots and individuals aiming to tarnish your site with their comments and links. It automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam – but don’t worry, you will be able to see a status history for each comment so you can un-spam the ones you want. Akismet is quite reliable and extremely good at detecting spam over legitimate comments, however there are still plenty of creative spam comments that get through (judging from our own experience on the Line25 blog). But, if you ever choose to turn Akismet off and try to have a WordPress blog without an anti-spam plug-in – just see how much spam you will get without it (we’ve tried it, and it wasn’t pretty).

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 Plugins on WordPress Blogs

Contact Form 7 is a simple but flexible contact form solution for WordPress blogs, easy to install and set up, and includes Captcha and spam filtering features. Most common use of this WordPress plug-in is to insert it into your contact page so that visitors can contact you. However, Contact Form 7’s use isn’t limited to your contact page and can be used to create various other types of forms that you can use on your WordPress sites.

GD Star Rating

GD Rating System Plugins on WordPress Blogs

Give users powers to vote and rate the articles and content on your blog with the GD Star Rating plugin. Especially useful for your design gallery website. This plug-in has many uses if you run a WordPress blog where you want to enable your users to rate something.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

AddToAny Share Buttons Plugins on WordPress Blogs

With this WordPress plug-in, you can let your user share, bookmark and email your articles with their friends to increase traffic and gain higher visibility in the social media world. It includes networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and over 100 more sharing and social media sites & apps. There are quite a few social share plugins made for WordPress, and this is just one of them. You should give it a try and see if you prefer it over others. The one thing to keep in mind about WordPress social share plug-ins is how much they slow down your website. Make sure that the plug-in you choose isn’t “code-heavy” as its drawbacks can outweigh its benefits.

Jetpack

Jetpack by WordPress.com — WordPress Plugins

Jetpack is a WordPress plugin which will keep your site secure. Besides that, it can also help increase traffic with its automatic sharing and search optimization. It comes with multiple traffic and SEO tools, security tools, backup services, content creation tools, discussion and community features, and a great support team! It’s also a plug-in that can help you speed up your WordPress blog.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery Plugins on WordPress Blogs

Who doesn’t love lightbox galleries? Galleries are used in various types of WordPress blogs – either on the home page as a featured gallery or on dedicated gallery pages. They are also quite useful for WordPress sites that are portfolio websites for designers. The NextGEN Gallery allows easy insertion of fancy JavaScript image popups to WordPress through a single plugin. Create awesome image galleries it this easy to setup plugin!

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts

There are plenty of related posts plugins out there, but this particular version is packed full of options and customization settings. It’s a great idea to use a WordPress plug-in on your website that shows other relevant content to users on the page which they’ve visited. This not only helps to improve your user satisfaction, but also helps to keep users longer on your WordPress site and to view more pages, thus decreasing your bounce rate. Many SEO professionals argue that time on website and your bounce rate are used by Google to determine your website’s rankings, although they are just some of the factors.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights

Easily insert your Analytics tracking code and keep an eye on stats from links, comments, and your blogroll. MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, having over 15 million downloads. Of course it’s possible to simply hard-code your Google Analytics code into your WordPress theme, however most people choose to simply enable a plug-in and insert the tracking ID from Google. This plug-in is a must have plug-in for any WordPress website owner.

BuddyPress

BuddyPress

BuddyPress is a fun and flexible plugin for creating online communities, teams, and groups. This is an open source social networking software, perfect for creating social networks, communities and forums on WordPress websites.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache protects your site from large traffic influxes by loading static files in place of the dynamic pages. It does this by generating static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. It also does miracles in speeding up your WordPress blog. There are several caching plug-in for WordPress that are very popular, and WP Super Cache is just one of them (there is also WP Fastest Cache and a few others that are quite popular). You absolute must have a caching plug-in on your WordPress blog if you want your pages to load quickly. Don’t forget that page speed is a Google ranking factor, so having your pages load fast via a WordPress caching plug-in will help you rank better and keep your users happier as your pages load faster. It will also decrease your bounce rate, because users will not wait too long for your pages to load if they load slowly – they will click the “back” button and go to the next search result.

Social Share Buttons by Supsystic

Use this WordPress plugin to add social share buttons to your website. It allows you to instantly add various buttons through one simple plugin file. This can significantly increase your website’s traffic. As we mentioned earlier, there are numerous social share plug-ins available for WordPress blog owners, so choose the one you like the most and the one that doesn’t slow your blog.

Social-Share-Buttons-by-Supsystic-—-WordPress-Plugins

Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker

The Broken Link Checker does exactly what it says on the tin, monitors your WordPress blog and informs of any links getting lost in cyberspace. After activation, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks, and other content and looking for links. If you blog has a lot of articles, be prepared to wait quite a long time for this WordPress plugin to check all of your links. You should also take its findings with a little grain of salt – it may not always detect all of your broken links. It’s always a good idea to check your old content once a while to make sure your WordPress blog doesn’t get out of date. Finally, make sure you don’t select settings that make this plug-in check links too quickly – this will put a heavy strain on your website server’s resources and may slow down your WordPress blog temporarily until the plug-in finishes checking. Use reasonable settings and be patient while this plug-in checks for your broken links.

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator is another super handy plugin providing instant analytics tracking. Additional features include admin dashboard with detailed stats. It has over 3.5+ million downloads.

WP e-Commerce

WP eCommerce

Transform your blog into an e-Commerce system with this great plugin. This plugin is complete with elegant and easy to use features typical of any full blown cart solution. It’s perfect for those of you who want to sell digital downloads, physical inventory, or subscriptions and memberships.

Smart Slider 3 WordPress Plugin

This is a very useful slider plugin that allows you to build responsive sliders that will automatically adapt to any screen dimensions. You can also use it to create YouTube and Vimeo slides and slides from your WordPress posts.

Smart-Slider-3-—-WordPress-Plugins

Free Tools to Automate Your Site Growth

-Free Tools to Automate Your Site Growth — WordPress Plugins

This plugin comes with all the tools you need to market your blog! It has a list builder, which makes it easy for you to build email subscriptions and can be integrated with all major email providers, a Share function, which adds social sharing buttons on your site, a Welcome Mat, which displays a full-screen call-to-action that shows when visitors land on your site, heat maps, to help you see where people are clicking, a scroll box, smart bar, highlighter and even an image sharer!

WP-PageNavi

WP-PageNavi

Easily add more page navigation functionality to your blog with the WP PageNavi plugin. Allows custom page numbering and wordings amongst more.

VaultPress

VaultPress offers great solutions for backing up your information. You can also schedule automated security scans and get support at all times.

VaultPress-—-WordPress-Plugins

This completes are roundup of must-have and most popular plug-ins for WordPress blogs. If you have more WP plugins to add to this list, please feel free to give your input in comments. Please note that this plugins list is by no means exhaustive – there are many other useful WordPress plugins out there.

Author
Iggy
Iggy is a designer who loves experimenting with new web design techniques, collating creative website designs, and writing about the latest design trends, inspiration, design freebies, and more. You can follow him on Twitter

56 thoughts on “20 Most Popular Plugins on WordPress Blogs”

  1. Yes, there are great plugins. We have installed most of them for our clients as well.
    Thanks for putting all together.

    Reply
  2. Great article ,
    The problem with Jetpack plugin is that it take a lot of website space and that will slow very hard you website

    Reply
  3. Kudos to the author of this article. You just clued me into some top notch plugins that I was not aware of. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

    Reply
  4. Great list. I have a list of ten plugins that attract traffic on my blog that may help a few folk out.

    What plugin do you use to generate the “about the author” info? It looks great,

    Reply
  5. this is real awsome u are so freaking genius man thanks for the help i realy need this thank you i hope u will get what deserve i am sure if you are helping people u are succeed in your life

    Reply
  6. Chris Spooner is a designer who has a love for creativity and enjoys experimenting with various techniques in both print and web. Check out Chris’ design tutorials and articles at Blog.SpoonGraphics or follow his daily findings on Twitter.

    Reply
  7. Excellent post I use quite of a few of these.. but there are a few that I have never heard of before. Thanks for the time put into this list.

    Reply
  8. very much helping list you showing with description, i am using some of these listed and now getting more for further needs. thanks

    Reply
  9. Some great and not so great pliginns here. A few of them I find almost impossible to use and keep the site looking good. Could be the free themes I guess

    Reply
  10. Very nice list of plugins
    not to sure about 1 or 2 of them
    but most are of great use to every
    wordpress blogger out there..

    will be putting a list of plugins together
    that are the best of the best on my site soon.

    Reply
  11. i have 43 active plugins i didnt realise most people only have 5-6 i was lioke a kid in acandy store added all of teh above couldnt get the star ratings to fucntion – add to any is wicked but takes time to load
    i have a new site too just thought i’d mention : )

    Reply
  12. Very nice post!
    I´m already using almost all listed plugins in my blogs.
    So, probably your post title could not be better: “20 most commonly used plugins on WordPress blogs” – ; )
    Greetings from Brazil!

    Reply
  13. I am in the process of moving my static site, wordpress. These look like some very helpful plug-ins definitely going to take a look at a few of them.

    Reply
  14. much love chris, like a pannini sticker album I went through it saying “goddit” or “niddit” but wonderfully comprehensive and very,very well presented

    Reply
  15. I’ve had most of these installed for a while now, and have always wondered if there are better ones out there. I’m guessing these are the most popular for a reason.

    Tanks, Chris!

    Reply
  16. Nice article, very useful, think i will have to try out some more plugins from the wordpresssphere. Some of them are well know, others not. Thank you! =)

    Best regards

    Florian

    Reply
  17. Great list! A nice collection of plugins to reference when creating a new WordPress site.

    A quick not on the XML sitemap generator tool, this tool may not be the best way to create an XML sitemap. Yahoo actually banned it once because it was considering its updates as spamming the engine. A client of mine got banned for a few weeks cause of this plugin. Dynamic sitemap generators are few are far between and to find the right one is very hard.

    Reply
  18. I use or have used almost all of these, but I hadn’t heard of Twitter Tools and it is exactly what i was looking for! Thanks!

    Reply
  19. Thanks. Navigating the plug-in waters just got easier thanks to this post. Another plug in I would add to the list is the WP -> Twitter

    Thanks,

    R.W.

    Reply
  20. Thanks for this post. A few I am interested in. I often use plugins that allow a feed from one page to appear on the home page, like a news feed.

    Reply
  21. A plugin for backup is needed. I use “WordPress Database Backup” and it does a great job. https://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

    Reply

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