Essential WordPress Plugins That I Use

(Note: This article has been updated in February 2020)

Here’s a great question that one of my subscribers asked me recently…

“What WordPress plugins do you use on your blog?”

Below I’ve listed the essential WordPress plugins that I use on this blog and a brief description of what they do and why you would want them. The plugins are listed alphabetically, and not in order of importance.

Akismet (free)

This is a MUST have plugin for any WordPress blog. Akismet automatically filters out spam blog comments for you.

To give you an idea of just how bad an issue spam comments are, my blog currently gets over 50 spam comments every single day! It would be a huge time-waster having to delete all these spam comments manually.

Contact Form 7 (free)

The Contact page on this blog uses this simple plugin to create the form and set where the submissions get sent to. Very easy to use and also customizable.

Facebook Comments for WordPress (free)

This is such an important plugin. Facebook Comments for WordPress helps your blog posts to VIRAL.

There’s many times I’ve seen one of my Facebook friends will make a comment on or ‘like’ a blog post and I’ll go and read it myself. The more you can integrate your blog with Facebook, the more traffic you’ll get.

Facebook Like (free)

(see above)

Google Analytics for WordPress (free)

This plugin would be my number 2 of my most essential WordPress plugins.

Knowing where your visitors are coming from and what content is attracting them is super important.

Why? Because you can focus your time on creating the same type of content and/or getting more traffic from those sources.

Google Analytics for WordPress allows you to add your Google Analytics tracking code across your entire blog and any new content that is added. To make this work, you’ll first need to register for a free Google Analytics account.

Pretty Link Lite (free)

If you have large ugly affiliate links, or other long links, that you’d like to hide or shorten then this is a great plugin.

Pretty Link Lite easily creates customisable redirect links and also has tracking built-in.

Subscribe To Comments (free)

This plugin causes a checkbox to appear below the comments area of any page so that visitors can be notified of any follow up comments to that specific thread. This helps to encourage more comments on your blog.

TinyMCE Advanced (free)

Excellent toolbar that is added to your text editing area when setting up a new post or page. Allows you to easily add more advanced features to your content, e.g. tables.

Yoast SEO (free)

When it comes to essential WordPress plugins, this one take the no. 1 spot. If you were only allowed to have one plugin for your blog, this one would be it.

The Yoast SEO plugin helps you to optimize your blog for the search engines. What makes Yoast stand out head and shoulders above other WordPress SEO plugins is that it will tell you exactly what you need to do to optimize each article and your website in general.

Simply enter the keyword phrase you want to rank in Google for, and Yoast SEO will tell you if you need to update your page title, description, url, images, links, etc.

Yoast SEO will also create your Google XML sitemaps for you.

With the help of this plugin, you can rank higher in Google and get lots of free, targeted traffic.

Are there any essential WordPress plugins that you use on your website that are not listed here? Leave a comment below…

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