39 amazing WordPress plugins for blogs

You Baby Me Mummy

9 years ago

Mac on a white desk with flowers, sunglasses and passport

WordPress plugins for blogs

Ooh I love a good plugin! I get a geeky buzz when someone gives me the heads up about a plugin I haven’t used before. Especially, when I know that it will either, save me time or make my life easier. THAT, I love!

I love WordPress, however the basic platform lacks some functionality and so we thankfully can add on a wide range of functionality by using WordPress plugins; some free and some premium.

First off, I need to say sorry to all those people who are on Blogger, this post will not please you, but you never know it might encourage you to move to WP!

This post will not be in order of preference, as I love them all and I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to pick a favourite child… well it’s the same for me… #saddo.

Without further ado, here goes, my 39 amazing WordPress plugins for blogs

EDITORIAL CALENDAR (*whispers, probably is my favourite WordPress plugin*) – I don’t know how I coped for so long without this. It’s amazing, giving you a rolling calendar which you drag and drop draft posts onto. You can move them around, click into edit and you can also have a draft section at the side for posts you haven’t allocated a date to yet. If you’re a visual planner get this now.

EVERGREEN POST TWEETER – This little beauty kindly tweets out your old posts for you. You can set it to only tweet certain categories, tags or a certain age of post. Then just adjust the frequency and forget about it. A great way to give your archive some love, with minimum effort.

DUPLICATE POST – If you do a series, a feature or join in with the same linky each week, then this will make your life so much easier. This plug in adds a ‘Copy to a new draft’ button in the section which allows you to schedule. So all you do is go into the published post you want to copy, click the button. Then go back to you calendar and you will see a duplicate post in drafts. Then you can drag this onto the calendar where you want it and use this post as the starting point of your new post.

AKISMET – The must-have spam filter, which has blocked so much spam from my site. Probably one of the most important WordPress Plugins for blogs.

JETPACK – This does so much. Stats, email subscribers, contact forms and lots more. Here is a full run down of all its features. If you move from WordPress to self hosted WP, Jetpack will make everything look the same as it was before! I mainly use it for daily stats, looking at referral sites and most popular posts. You can also activate as much or as little of the plugin as you like. So if you want to keep your own email service provider (which I would recommend!) then just deactivate that section of the plugin.

Already want to pin 39 amazing WordPress plugins for blogs – scroll down!

WP – DRAFTS FOR FRIENDS – This is so handy, it allows you to share a particular post as it will look on your blog before it is published. Great when a brand or PR wants to see a post before it goes live.

WHO STOLE THE JUSTIFY BUTTON! – Adds back into the editing panel the ability to block justify your text within posts.

WP ULTIMATE RECIPE – A fab plugin that enables you to produce a recipe card, which can be printed.

BETTER DELETE REVISION – Did you know that each time you hit ‘save draft’ your blog stores that file and even when you publish your post, all the previous versions are stored and will be clogging up your blog? This genius plugin deletes all the drafts of published posts.

SHAREAHOLIC – This plugin makes it easy for people to share your blog posts. It pops a block of network buttons under each post.

Need more WordPress plugins for blogs?

CYCLONE SLIDER – Allows you to create a sliding image based widget for your sidebar. You could use this for current competitions, blog categories, top posts, whatever you want to highlight.

UPDRAFT PLUS – A great, reliable way to back up your blog to various different destinations, including Dropbox.

WORDPRESS POPULAR POSTS – Gives you a widget that you can pop on your sidebar to display the posts getting most hits. This is really useful in making your blog sticky and showing social proof (people like to go with the crowd).

WP GOOGLE FONTS – The flexibility to use different fonts within your WordPress blog.

GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS – Even if you’ve done an amazing job of optimising all of your posts for SEO, you still might not rank. A sitemap can help. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin is one of the most popular for giving your site just what it needs. By creating an XML sitemap, your site is much easier for Google to crawl and read, helping your site rank higher.

YOAST SEO- A fab and super easy way to make sure your posts are SEO friendly!

PINTEREST WIDGETS – Enables you to create a board widget to pop in your side bar or into posts.

JQUERY PIN IT BUTTON FOR IMAGES – Gives you a grayed out picture when someone hovers over an image and a pin it button. You can customise the button with a different image if you wish.

ULTIMATE NOFOLLOW – The quick way to change your links to nofollow, just by clicking one button. No need to learn code.

Want some more? Here are more amazing WordPress plugins for blogs

GOOGLE ANALYTICS DASHBOARD FOR WP – All the power of Google Analytics right there on your dashboard.

ALL-IN-ONE SCHEMA.ORG RISH SNIPPETS – You’ve probably seen posts with Rich Snippets in the search results. They have extra information like prices or star rating, featured images etc. They increase the likelihood of a link getting clicked. This plugin makes it really easy to add this information.

WP SUPER CACHE – We all know sites need to be fast and reliable website. Caching a WordPress site is something that helps both of these, meaning pages load faster.

WORDFENCE – This security plugin adds an extra layer of protection by locking out people who try to hack their way into your blog. It even blocks IP addresses of bots trying to gain access. You can customise email alerts to be sent to you if anything suspicious is going on.

HEAD AND FOOTER SCRIPT INSERTER – Makes it super easy to install the header script code that you need to add for third parties such a Facebook and Pinterest.

WP OPTIMISE BY XTRAFFIC – Internal links help visitors travel through your site and consume more of your content. With WP Optimise you can associate certain keywords with specific blog posts. So, every time you use one of these keywords in your content, the plugin automatically builds an internal link to the relevant URL. Amazing!

MILOTREE POP UP – Mobile friendly pop up which you can customise to promote any platform or straight to your email list.

PRETTY LINK – “Shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look how you want using your own domain name!” This makes it so much easier the remember links to certain posts. You can also track the number of hits per link.

RAPIDOLOGY BY LEADPAGES – A handy free plugin that allows you to delivery content upgrades in numerous ways. Pop ups, locked pages, hello bars and lots of other options.

WP DASHBOARD NOTES – A Post-it-style plugin that lets you pin post ideas to the WordPress dashboard.

Are you loving these WordPress plugins for blogs?

SIMPLE 301 REDIRECTS – Redirect your visitors to other pages on your site. Great if you find another site linking to an incorrect url on your blog. Set a redirection from that missing URL to an existing one.

STEALTH PUBLISH – Allows you to publish a post which doesn’t appear on the top of your feed neither is it email out to your list.

WP SMUSH – The fastest, easiest and best-performing image compression plugin for WordPress.

NEXTSCRIPTS: SOCIAL NETWORKS AUTO-POSTER – SNAP publishes nicely formatted messages to your social networks accounts. You can reach the most audience and let all your friends, readers and followers about your new post automatically. Plugin works with profiles, business pages, community pages, groups, etc. It can even be used for sharing to StumbleUpon.

Q2w3 FiIXED WIDGET – Using the “Fixed widget” option allows your added widget to always be in sight when page is scrolled down or up. There’s no problem to “fix” or “stick” more than one widget even located in different sidebars. Which is super clever.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – Not all plugins were created equal and some can harm rather than help your site’s performance, slowing it down. The P3 plugin measures the load times of all plugins active on your site and reports it back to you, so you can fix the issue.

CLICK TO TWEET – This tool allows you to create “Click To Tweet” boxes anywhere in your blog post, making it simple for readers to share your content on social media.

MAX MEGA MENU – Great WordPress plugin for creating what’s called “mega menus” in WordPress. Basically, a mega menu is a large menu that features a custom layout and contains multiple different elements (not only links). Great for sites that offer their visitors a lot of content.

REGENERATE THUMBNAILS – When you change themes and all the standard image sizes change, it can mean your photos end up blurry and losing quality. Regenerate Thumbnails plugin will simply regenerate your media to the new required size without loss of quality.

ALL 404 REDIRECT TO HOMEPAGE – A simple WordPress plugin that redirects all your 404 pages to your homepage. For example, if you have deleted an old post or someone has typed in a wrong URL of your blog then they will be automatically redirected to your homepage.

Do you use any WordPress plugins for blogs that are not on this list? I would love to know which is your favourite WordPress plugin?