The Best WordPress Plugins

WordPress Plugins evolve rapidly. This article was last updated on 19th January 2019.

One of the reasons WordPress is such a great blogging platform is the thousands of plugins available to add to its core functionality. There are so many available that it can be hard to choose which ones to use, and it took me years to evaluate the best plugins for providing the functionality I wanted. To save you having to do the same, here are my essential favourite WordPress plugins that I actually use on The Confident Man Project and my comedy site:

Site Structure And Appearance

Jetpack provides a bunch of cool features, including a mobile theme you can use if your chosen theme isn’t responsive.

WPtouch optimises the site for iPhone and other mobile visitors if you don’t have a responsive theme. If you’re serious about supporting mobile users, get WPtouch Pro.

Advanced Excerpt generates an excerpt of each post on my home page so visitors can browse recent posts to find what their interested in, and click the Continue Reading link if they want the whole thing.

Redirection allows me to rename articles and move them to different categories without generating 404 errors for my visitors by automatically creating redirects whenever the article slug or category changes. Beware that it’s not smart enough to detect and handle changes to your permalink structure automatically though.

Smart 404 redirects visitors to pages that don’t exist to the most likely candidate automatically based on keywords in the URL, instead of generating the usual 404 error.

Shockingly Simple Favicon generates the little favourites icon in the title bar of your browser.

WP Page Numbers improves the way links to pages of multi-page content are handled.

WP PageNavi generates fancy pagination links.

Periods in Titles helped me retain the periods in old URL’s from when a site was built in Joomla!. You don’t need this if you’re starting from scratch.

Search Engine Optimisation

Yoast SEO improves Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so your blog ranks well on search engines. I tried Yoast’s Meta Robots plugin, All-in-One SEO Pack and SEO Ultimate. before settling on it. If you’re new to SEO and don’t know why these things are important, I recommend Joost de Valk’s article on WordPress SEO.

Google XML Sitemaps provides a sitemap for search engines.

Google Analytics For WordPress by Monster Insights connects to Google Analytics to measure site visitors.

SEO Friendly Images helps deal with my neglect for important image tags.

Really Simple SSL activates secure access to your site which improves SEO.

Performance

W3 Total Cache speeds up access to the site, which is important on shared servers like BlueHost and HostGator and can affect your SEO ranking. I recommend enabling Page Cache, Minify, and Browser Cache. Leave the rest disabled unless you’re willing to experiment a lot, as they could well slow things down rather than speed them up.

WP Super Cache is an alternative I use when I find CSS not being served properly. It’s much simpler to configure than W3 Total Cache too.

Use Google Libraries loads common libraries from a Google server instead of my site. Not only is Google’s server faster, but chances are Google’s copy of these libraries is already cached in the user’s browser eliminating the need to load them altogether.

Content Management

Broken Link Checker is essential for making sure you don’t have broken links that will make your site look bad. I love this plugin! Every time I install it on an existing blog, I find broken links I didn’t even know about.

Classic Editor will save your sanity while they iron the bugs out of the block editor introduced in WordPress 5.0.

TinyMCE Advanced adds features to the classic editor, like support for tables.

Raw HTML plugin makes it possible to embed HTML code from other sites, like [intlink id=”621″ type=”post”]MailChimp signup forms[/intlink], without WordPress mangling it.

WP Hide Post makes it slightly easier to hide posts that you don’t want casual visitors to find easily. This is a half-baked solution though because other plugins don’t recognise it: You still need to make sure they don’t show up in other places like your sitemap, which is why WordPress really needs a “hidden” page visibility.

WP DB Manager is handy on the rare occasion that you need to hack, import or export the database.

Media Management

Quick Featured Images allows you to set featured images in posts directly from the Posts list, which is handy if you have lots of posts that need featured images added or updated.

Video Thumbnails automatically creates featured images from video thumbnails.

Comment Management

Akismet and Bad Behavior help keep my comment spam down to a manageable level.

Comment Email Reply helps keep visitors engaged by notifying them of replies to their comments.

Gravatar Signup Encouragement encourages visitors to register an avatar image at gravatar.com when leaving a comment.

Tako Movable Comments allows me to move a comment to another post when a visitor comments on, or asks a question more relevant to, a different post.

Yoast Comment Hacks makes it easy to email people who leave comments.

Security

Sucuri Security and/or Wordfence Security helps me sleep at night by keeping my site protected from hackers. If you’re paranoid, use them both.

SiteLock can detect and remove malware from your site automatically. It’s not a plugin because it works independently to your site, but I highly recommend it.

Advanced Automatic Updates or Easy Updates Manager keep the site up to date.

Simple Login Lockdown helps protect the site from brute-force attacks.

Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore automates site backups and allows easy restoration.

Visitor Engagement

Contact Form 7 generates all the contact forms on my site, allowing me to craft different forms for different reasons to contact me, enhancing my ability to respond.

Really Simple CAPTCHA protects your contact forms from spam.

Social Networking and Bookmarking

Jetpack provides a bunch of cool features, including automatically publicising posts on your Facebook page, Twitter feed and LinkedIn profile. It also provides social bookmarking features.

Revive Old Posts periodically reposts links to old posts on Facebook, Twitter etc to help get more traffic to your site.

PuSHPress helps get your content out there faster.

Social Media Widget creates the “Connect with me” icons at the top of the sidebar.

Add-to-Any Subscribe generates the funky pop-up Subscribe widget in the sidebar if you want an alternative to JetPack.

SexyBookmarks generates the row of sexy bookmarking icons at the bottom of each post.

Newsletter Subscriptions

There are a few options for creating an automatic newsletter that visitors can subscribe to, depending on your needs. See the article [intlink id=”317″ type=”post”]comparing WordPress newsletter plugin options[/intlink] for details. I’d recommend choosing between:

• MailPoet 3 and Bounce Handler MailPoet 3 if you expect a small mailing list and want to send direct from your web server.
• MailChimp if you expect a small mailing list and want a third party to deliver the newletter.
• Aweber if you are a serious internet marketing type expecting a large list and budget.

Inter-Article Linking

SEO Smart Links Pro generates linking between articles automatically based on keywords and article titles which is good for SEO and for keeping visitors engaged. You may even get away with the free SEO Smart Links.

RB Internal Links helps create links manually in the rare cases where automatic linking doesn’t work. It saves the links so they work even if the article title slug or category changes.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin generates the Related Posts list at the end of each article.

Simple Tags helps me manage the tags that YARPP uses to help in its decision making.

No Self Pings turns off the annoying pingbacks between articles on the same site that WordPress generates by default for some insane reason.

WordPress Popular Posts generates the list of popular posts in the footer.

Semilogic’s Do Follow plugin bucks the trend of adding the nofollow attribute to outgoing links, so that the targets I recommend benefit and making me a better net citizen.

Advertising and Affiliate Links

Advertising Manager helps me embed Google Ads in my sidebar.

Amazon Product In a Post displays book and movie cover images from Amazon.com automatically, along with affiliate links for book and movie review postings. Amazon Reloaded is less slick, but more flexible.

Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer directs visitors to the relevant Amazon site for their international location.

SEO Smart Links Pro also generates my affiliate links automatically. I chose it after evaluating a number of [intlink id=”559″ type=”post”]automatic keyword affiliate link generator plugins[/intlink].

User Management

WP User Avatar allows me to add a local avatar image for guest bloggers who aren’t registered with gravatar.com.

HTML in Author Bio allows hyperlinks to guest author’s sites in their bios.

Members allows you to fine tune the permissions of your guest authors, like allowing contributors to set a featured image.

Attracting and Keeping Visitors

Open in New Window Plugin makes all offsite links open in a new window so I don’t lose visitors.

RSS Footer adds a line to my RSS feed reminding readers to visit the site, and linking back to me even if bad people scrape my content via RSS.

WP Polls is a fun way to add polls to a site, which helps engage visitors.

If you have a favourite plugin you think I should know about, leave me a comment to let me know about it.