Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers

This page lists the best WordPress Plugins for bloggers. This list of top WordPress plugins is routinely updated and will increase your success and efficiency as a blogger.

• Akismet – This plugin is currently and unanimously the best comment spam prevention tool for WordPress blogs.

• UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin – Backup and restoration made easy. Enables Complete backups; manual or scheduled (backup to S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email + others).
• BackUpWordPress – BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you.

Blog Security Plugins

• iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) – iThemes Security offers 30+ ways to lock down WordPress in an easy-to-use WordPress security plugin.
• All In One WP Security & Firewall – The All In One WordPress Security and Firewall is the ultimate security plugin that will take your WordPress site’s security to a whole new level.
• BulletProof Security – BulletProof security plugin offers website security protection against XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection.
• Wordfence Security – The Wordfence WordPress security plugin provides free enterprise-class WordPress security.

• Quick Adsense Quick Adsense offers a quicker & flexible way to insert Google Adsense or any Ads code into a blog post.
• AdSense Integration WP QUADS – Quick Adsense Reloaded! The quickest way to insert Google AdSense & other ads into your website. Google AdSense integration simplified!
• WP Simple Adsense Insertion – Easy to use WordPress plugin to insert Google Adsense to your posts, pages and sidebar.
• Simple Google Adsense insertion – Easy to use WordPress plugin to insert Google Adsense to your posts, pages and sidebar.
• Google Adsense Plugin – Google AdSense Plugin allows you to set parameters of the ads displaying, such as format (text ad, image, text with an image or link), size, color of the elements in the ad block, rounded corners and the ad block position on the website.
• Google Adsense – The official AdSense Plugin from Google enables you to easily use Google’s products – including Webmaster Tools – with your WordPress site.

Blog Analytics Plugins

• • Google Analytics Dashboard for WP – Displays Google Analytics reports in your WordPress Dashboard. Inserts the latest Google Analytics tracking code in your pages.
  • Google Analytics – Enables Google Analytics on all pages. This one seems to be simple and does the job.
  • Google Analyticator – Easily view your Google Analytics and real-time statistics inside WordPress! Makes it super simple to add your tracking code too.

• Google Analytics by MonsterInsights – Connect Google Analytics with WordPress by adding your Google Analytics tracking code. Get the stats that matter.
• WP Statistics – A comprehensive plugin for your WordPress visitor statistics (doesn’t use Google Analytics).

• FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
• Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader.

• Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
• Contact Form – The Contact Form plugin allows you to implement a feedback form to a web-page or a post in no time.
• Gravity Forms – Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building.

• Social Media and Share Icons – Social media plugin which adds social media icons to your website with tons of customization features
• Share This – This is a very useful plugin that allows your visitors to share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

• NextGen Gallery – The most popular WordPress photo gallery plugin.
• Simple Photo Gallery – If you are looking for an effective, reliable, yet simple to use photo gallery plugin, then check this gallery plugin out. I use it whenever I need a photo gallery plugin.

• WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart – is a very easy to use plugin that allows you to sell products or services online in one click from your WordPress blog. Very useful when you want to sell eBooks or digital products from various posts and pages and need a WordPress Shopping Cart solution.
• WP Easy Paypal Payment Accept – This is a very easy to use WordPress plugin to Accept donation or Paypal payment for a service or a product in one click. Handy when you are trying to put a customized payment widget on your site (you can add it to the sidebar or a page or a post of your blog).
• PayPal for Digital Goods – This plugin allows you to use the PayPal for Digital Goods gateway to accept payment for digital goods. Provides inline checkout of digital goods.
• Stripe Payments – A simple and lightweight plugin to accept payment on your site (for a product or service) via the Stripe payment gateway.

Also read best e-commerce WordPress plugins for SEO.

• Simple Membership Plugin – The simple membership plugin lets you protect your posts and pages so only your members (free or paid) can view the protected content.

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin –  This plugin gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
• Download Monitor – This plugin is very useful for managing and tracking your digital file downloads. You can track which file is being downloaded how many times and who is downloading them.
• Executable PHP Widget – Like the Text widget, but it will take PHP code as well. Very handy for inserting custom ‘php’, ‘html’, ‘javascript’ in the sidebar.
• Crayon Syntax Highlighter – A plugin to highlight any code in your posts or pages. very handy if you use example codes in your Blog.
• Mailpoet Newsletters – Send newsletters, post notifications or autoresponders from WordPress easily, and beautifully.
• WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. Allows you to easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.
• EWWW Image Optimizer – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically and losslessly optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.

This page will be regularly updated to keep the plugin list up to date and relevant.

Let us know if you are aware of any great WordPress plugin that should be added to this list.