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Ready to optimize your blog?
The WordPress plugins listed here can help you build a superior website.
Using these plugins, you can add powerful new features to your site, such as:
- Editorial calendars
- Automated social media posting
- Email listing building forms
- Image optimization
- SEO tools
- and more
There’s not a lot of feature overlap between these plugins, so make sure to consider each one of them individually for your blog.
WordPress blog plugins
Normally, when I write a “Top 10” post, there’s just one plugin that will be best for your site.
But this list is different!
I would recommend you add a few or even all of these plugins to your site. They’re all professionally developed, so running multiple plugins you find here won’t slow down your site.
Here are my top picks for the best WordPress blog plugins.
1. Strive Content Calendar
Plugin Description
If you want to create a consistent publishing schedule for your blog, there’s no better plugin than Strive.
Strive adds a beautiful content calendar into your WordPress dashboard, where you can add, edit, and schedule posts with drag and drop. It makes planning your upcoming posts and sticking to a weekly schedule so much easier.
Strive also includes a handful of other valuable content creation tools. For instance, there are post checklists that let you document your step-by-step process for writing and editing posts. The checklist shows up in the editor’s sidebar, so you don’t have to leave your post to check off the steps.
Another cool feature included in Strive is the revision creator. Using revisions, you can create a private copy of any published post, so you can work on a major update of an old post. Then you can schedule the revision to go live just like a regular post.
Overall, it’s a must-have plugin for WordPress blogs. You can click the link below to learn more.
2. RankMath
Plugin Description
RankMath is the best WordPress blog SEO plugin.
For a long time, Yoast was my favorite SEO plugin, but RankMath has surpassed it by adding more features and creating a nicer interface. While I still use Yoast SEO on some of my existing sites, I install RankMath on every new blog I create.
The RankMath plugin takes care of all the technical aspects of SEO for you. It can add Schema data for rich snippets, include Open Graph tags for social media sites, generate a sitemap, and help you customize your title tags. It also includes on-page optimization tools that help you optimize each page on your site for a selected keyword.
The developers have organized this plugin into a handful of modules so that you can enable the ones you need and ignore the others. This helps the plugin run faster and makes it even easier to get started.
3. Social Auto Poster
Plugin Description
If you run a blog, you probably have a few social accounts too. With WordPress, you can schedule your posts, so you don’t have to be around to click “Publish.” Why not do the same with your social media posts?
Social Auto Poster is the best WordPress plugin for sharing blog posts. It lets you can connect your social profiles and automatically post when your article goes live. This is much easier than using a third-party social media scheduling app because your posts don’t have a live URL to share until they’re published. And, you don’t even have to leave your WP dashboard after you finish your post to write a Tweet and schedule it when the post goes live.
Social Auto Poster currently works with a wide number of social platforms including but not limited to:
- Tumblr
Since it connects with all of your accounts, you can also save a ton of time using the Quick Post feature, which lets you write a custom message and share it to all of your social profiles at once.
Overall, it’s one of the best plugins to automate social sharing and a top plugin to consider for your blog.
4. MailOptin
Plugin Description
One of the most important parts of running a blog is building an email list. MailOptin is a freemium plugin that helps you create beautiful email optin forms and display them on your site.
With MailOptin, you can connect your site with any of the popular email services, such as MailChimp or ConvertKit. Then, choose one of the optin form types and select a pre-made template. From there, you can customize the colors, text, and images used in the template. Once you’re done, you’ll get a shortcode to embed the form on your site, or if you’ve created a popup, you’ll just select which pages you want to display it on.
Using this plugin, you can easily add a free offer to your site and start collecting email addresses, whether you’re giving away an ebook or simply advertising blog post notifications. Plus, there’s even a basic newsletter tool that will monitor your blog feed and send out new post notifications.
5. MailPoet
Plugin Description
MailOptin is a great plugin for collecting email addresses, but if you want a plugin that can send your emails too, check out MailPoet.
With MailPoet, you don’t need an external email service like MailChimp. MailPoet is an all-in-one solution for email marketing and one of the best WordPress plugins for blog subscriptions.
In addition to creating and embedding signup forms on your site, MailPoet also allows you to create email newsletters and scheduled campaigns. While it can’t do some of the complex marketing automation that other email services can do, that type of functionality is overkill for most blogs anyways. You may find yourself much more comfortable sticking to your WP admin dashboard and managing your emails with MailPoet.
If your main goal with your email marketing is to let people follow your blog and send new post notifications, it doesn’t get any easier than MailPoet.
6. WordPress Popular Posts
Plugin Description
Getting new visitors is tough, so once you’ve got someone reading, get them to stick around and read more!
There’s no better way to entice your readers to stay on your site than putting your most popular content in front of them. And, there’s no easier way to do that than with WordPress Popular Posts, a blog list WordPress plugin.
This plugin gives you a customizable widget for displaying your most popular posts. You can use different criteria for sorting the posts, such as total views, average views per day, or the number of comments. You can choose the timeframe as well, making it easy to highlight your most popular posts this month or your all-time hits. You can even use it as a simple latest blog post plugin.
You can also include multiple variations of this widget on your site, so give it a try and see how it works for promoting posts on your site.
7. Optimole
Plugin Description
You probably know how much performance matters. If your website is slow, visitors will leave before your content even gets a chance.
While most people discuss caching and file optimization when it comes to performance optimization, for bloggers, the most important factor is image optimization.
As a blogger, each post you write may have 10 or more images. If even one of them isn’t optimized, it can slow the page down to a crawl, but with a plugin like Optimole, you can ensure every image is perfectly optimized.
Optimole optimizes your images in a number of ways. First, it lazy loads them so that the images only load as they get scrolled into view. Second, it compresses them leading to smaller file sizes without affecting the visual quality. And lastly, it auto-resizes the images so that they are sized perfectly for the visitor’s device.
And what makes it really impressive is the fact that it does all three of these things automatically. In other words, all you have to do is activate Optimole and your website will immediately load faster.
8. Relevanssi
Plugin Description
Relevanssi doesn’t get enough praise, in my opinion. Here’s why.
WordPress has built-in search, but it’s extremely basic. When someone searches for a keyword on your site, posts that contain the term in the title will show up first, followed by posts that contain the term in the body. This works okay, but it doesn’t search the post excerpts, comments, authors, or other fields. Not to mention, it doesn’t handle searches with multiple words very well.
The Relevanssi search plugin fixes all of that and it’s totally free to use. With Relevanssi, you can choose to consider more data, like comments, when visitors search, and you can weight each ranking criteria yourself. That means you can make matches in the post content or comments more important than title matches if you want. Relevanssi also improves search with some advanced techniques like “fuzzy matching.” But really, all you need to know is that once you activate this plugin, your search results are going to be much more useful for your readers.
9. Scriptless Social Sharing
Plugin Description
There are few social media plugins that I like, and Scriptless Social Sharing is one of them.
If you want a simple, fast-loading plugin to add social sharing buttons to your site, you can’t beat it. This plugin has an extremely small footprint, unlike many of its bloated competitors. It also includes simple customization options that only take a minute to configure. You can include the buttons above and/or below your posts, decide which networks you want to support, and choose between a few different styles.
If you want to make it load even faster, you can use your own inline CSS instead of loading the single stylesheet that comes with this plugin. Overall, it’s the best plugin for adding share buttons to your blog without slowing down your site.
10. wpDiscuz
Plugin Description
The comment system in WordPress works well, but it’s light on features. If you want a robust comment system with Likes, email subscriptions, and a full WYSIWYG editor, there’s no plugin better than wpDiscuz.
This WordPress blog comments plugin adds a tremendous number of features to the WP comment system, including a snazzy new design. It includes Google reCaptcha support, social logins, article and comment ratings, user labels and badges, and live comment notifications. When it comes to moderation, you’ll get a way more advanced dashboard for approving comments including statistics on your commenters and the number of comments.
Another benefit of using wpDiscuz to power comments on your site is the modern and stylish form. The colors of the form are completely customizable, but it looks pretty good from the moment you install it.
Which blog plugins are best for you?
As I mentioned in the intro, you’ll probably want to add more than one of these plugins to your blog.
If you want some final recommendations, here are the must-have plugins in my book.
Strive Content Calendar is going to help you organize your blog with its visual editorial calendar and content creation tools. Not to mention, it’s frequently updated with new and exciting features.
If you want to maximize your search engine traffic, download a copy of the RankMath plugin. It’s totally free to use, so try it out and see how it works for you.
Lastly, I have to give one more shout-out to the Optimole plugin. When it comes to performance optimization, it’s one of the most important plugins available for WordPress bloggers.
Thanks for checking out my collection of the best blog plugins for WordPress, and if it helped you out, use one of the buttons below to share it with your followers.